Embracing the Software-defined World

Suresh A Shanmugam, Head -BITS, Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services

What does SDDC mean to you and what benefits it has brought for your business?

The concept of Software-defined datacenters has brought significant changes in our business as the provisioning and operation of the entire infrastructure is entirely automated by software and there is no human intervention. With this concept, the first benefit is that the dependency on people has reduced. In the previous set-up, the manpower employed was 10-12 people in the datacenter and now we have only 2-3 people for the same work. Another benefit is the simplified management of the datacenter as everything is on a single platform, right from servers to switches to storage. Thirdly, the downtime has reduced which consequently increases the speed of service delivery. The use of SDDC provides better control, greater agility, and efficiency. For instance, in the earlier set up, while launching any new service or product, the estimated time to market was almost a month but with the SDDC into operation, the time to launch a product has reduced significantly. We launched a few products last month where the estimated time to market was only 8 hours.

Do you think SDDC will alter the traditional IT approach and CIOs will look at it more closely to optimize their infrastructure?

In the last few years, the market dynamics have changed considerably. Now everything is on mobile and customers want everything on a touch of a button. The customers demand quality services at a much quicker and efficient way from us. To compete in such a scenario the organizations are relying heavily on technology to gain business benefits. SDDC is one of such technologies as it offers far more control than the traditional set up and there is significant reduction in manpower. The technology significantly reduces the time to market. But the concern is that since most of the technologies embraced are from western countries, there is a need for more local players who understand it and provide solutions as per business needs. Overall, there is a need for more localization in this.

What do you see as major challenges to implement SDDC?

Every CIO must get a proper study. It is a big change switching from a traditional datacenter to SDDC and involves changes not only in terms of software and hardware updates but also in terms of infrastructure. We at Mahindra & Mahindra Finance have implemented SDDC for the hardware and infrastructure but process is going on for the software too. The major challenge in implementing this approach is the dearth of good amount of vendors in the market which can offer competent SDDC services. Secondly, the channel as well the partner community is also not much well-versed with the complexities involved in the SDDC roadmap.

Anuj Bhalla, VP & Business Head, Global-System Integration & Maintenance Services & Products, GIS Wipro

What are the key considerations for an effective SDDC environment?

Datacenters have been ever evolving and innovating, it still provide siloes infrastructure services. With separate management for each component and human intervention required in different phases, service delivery has become sluggish. But with the advent of ‘softwaredefined concept’, datacenters now have the vision around which they can evolve to enable IT as a true business enabler. Enterprise adoption of SDDC would fulfil the need of evolving datacenters focused on agility, scalability, and security along with lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Abstraction of software from the hardware infrastructure layer will continue to be a key driver. Intelligent software controls the hardware configuration and will help integrate with, and transform the traditional data centers of enterprises, which typically were hardware and device driven.

How do you see SDDC impacting enterprise IT infrastructure and CIO decision making process?

SDDC architecture helps in providing a unified view and management of resources. SDDC adoption will impact all aspects of the organization. IT will be geared up and act as a nurturing bed for innovation and adopt technology and architectural changes non-disruptively. SDDC will act as a change platform making future technology evolutionary than revolutionary. CIOs too are very keen in looking at technology which is elastic and cost optimal. SDDC exactly incorporates the same in making the IT infrastructure future proof with architectural freedom while reducing time to market.

What is Wipro’s strategy on SDDC and its offerings?

Rapid technology innovations, growth of hundreds of start-ups and mid-size companies, and a large number of community supported open source projects in SDDC space changed the way datacenter products and solutions are imagined today! Large and established OEMs brought in further innovation and a slew of products. Wipro team assessed hundreds of products, built and tested end-to-end solutions and now offers its customers the future proof, modular, and flexible cloud stacks —available for ready deployment. All these sub offerings can be integrated with cloud layer to provide a private/ hybrid integrated cloud solution. Each of the sub-offering is available as an independent offering for deployment in both the green field and brown field datacenter requirements.

Considering the awareness level, how enthusiastic are technology leaders about SDDC?

It is no longer an option, we need to offer and deliver this to our customers as they are looking for cloud like flexibility in dedicated infrastructure. Enterprise customers are looking to SDDC to achieve higher agility, enormous elasticity, no vendor lock-in with reduced cost, similar to what Amazon and Google has done to web scale industry.