CDO is often asked to enhance digital revenue: CR Srinivasan

Tata Communications Chief Digital Officer CR Srinivasan is responsible for the overall digital and security strategy and execution for the company. As a technologist and business leader, he also heads the company’s global business for cloud and security, enabling digital transformation initiatives for customers. He is also responsible for creating industry standards in cloud computing solutions for customers and solidifying the internal digital processes and delivering technical solutions to enhance business growth and productivity. In an interaction with Thomas George, he talked about emerging technology trends, different aspects of digital transformation, and the emerging role of a CDO. Excerpts from the interview.

CR Srinivasan, Chief Digital Officer, Tata Communications

V&D: What are the key emerging trends and insights for 2020?

CR Srinivasan: From a broad context of where the industry is going, we can say that cloud adoption will continue to grow. The enterprises will move a lot more workloads to the cloud. Most enterprises have begun this journey in some form or another and the context of cloud migration has changed—from I have to migrate and should I migrate, to when I can migrate. Security is another thing that has gained importance. It is, however, not a concern for migration to the cloud because users know that there are ways to mitigate it.

The third thing is the overall cybersecurity posture of an organization. Customers are very worried about it because of the likes of high-profile incidents like Equifax. The danger of data leak is a top of the mind issue for most companies. Hence, from a cybersecurity risk management standpoint, there is a definite move towards a software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN). Customers are willing to invest in SD-WAN and leverage the internet more for business-critical functions. Customers are also keen to understand what benefits they can accrue from emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). This is an area where they are constantly seeking help and guidance because the technology is changing faster than one could imagine.

These are early-stage technologies and customers definitely want to do IoT. In fact, there are specific areas where we are already using IoT, but the focus is digital transformation and how they can actually move the workloads to the cloud.  Multi-cloud, cybersecurity, level of security operations, and network operations are other big concerns. Organizations want to know whether they should run it on their own and up to what level they can outsource. These are the priority areas and emerging trends from an enterprise standpoint, and that's what Tata Communications is trying to address.

Lastly, organizations are definitely working to address skill shortages. All these emerging technologies have raised the expectations and for enterprise CIOs to manage these expectations, skill is an important factor. Enterprises may have some skills, but not all enterprises have all of these skills that are required for managing business expectations. So skill development at the enterprise level is another trend to watch out for.

V&D: What's your take on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment? Is it really happening?

CR Srinivasan: Hybrid cloud is a reality. But there are a lot of ways to look at it and it depends upon how you define the hybrid cloud. People have created some kind of virtualized cloud infrastructure, and then there is a public cloud option that they're leveraging because they don't want to invest in capex. Customers are also realizing that probably certain clouds are best suited for certain kinds of workloads. For example, if you go to a particular public cloud there may be better tools and capabilities available for you to leverage AI, ML, and other similar technologies, or probably there may be a particular cloud where there are more tools for the retail environment or a data analytics environment. Hence, workloads have to move not just to one cloud, but to multiple environments. Migration and management of a multi-cloud environment becomes a task, and enterprises are looking for multi-cloud management skills to manage this complexity.

V&D: What is your emerging tech play? Do you have initiatives and offerings in the IoT space?

CR Srinivasan: From an IoT standpoint, we have two initiatives: one, our transformational module MOVE that provides comprehensive global mobility coverage with seamless onboarding, through a programmable interface and self-service portal for ease of use. We have some use cases of connected cars, where every vehicle should come with connectivity to the network. The embedded system connects to the network and can be used for providing telemetry in our data from the car or can be used for providing entertainment services. We are building other use cases as well.

Then we have an IoT network— LoRa network—a low cost, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), solely dedicated to smart city IoT applications, which provided LoRa powered devices and application development assistance to provide an end to end smart city solution. We have worked with the device ecosystem from an IoT standpoint for several use cases. It can be smart speed lighting or safe devices for industrial workers, it may be a watch that they wear which gives information on health conditions. So, there are several smart solutions that we have been working on to take over the management of infrastructure and also for industrial safety. We want to be in that space. In India, it has both connectivity plus a device play.

V&D: Where do you see Tata Communications heading beyond being a communication service provider?

CR Srinivasan: We see ourselves as a digital infrastructure services provider. So it is no longer just a connectivity play. We define our offerings to the market by saying that we offer network plus cloud, mobility plus security. That is the way we define our portfolio. The value-added services that we bring to the market are on top of the network. We want to provide our customers mobility and we have been innovative—we a product called MOVE, which is an IoT cross border connectivity solution. We also have a start-up called Net Foundry, which is software-defined networking. The growth services that we are looking at are: hosting cloud security, unified communications, and collaboration. On the network side, we are helping customers transform by moving to SD-WAN and providing them a roadmap on how they can modernize their network. We have a roadmap for the next three years on how enterprises can move and we can facilitate change for our customers.

We have been working on our own digital transformation program. We have a digital competency centre. We have software developers who are working on modernizing our own applications for ordering and other services. We are going through the app modernization process, and that is completely done by Tata Communications on resources because we have an understanding of the telecom domain, and we have the ability to write new software. This is enabling us to understand app modernization requirements of customers very effectively. Though we don't do application development for customers, we can actually guide them in the journey because we ourselves are in the middle of a digital transformation journey.

V&D: Since you have embarked on a digital transformation journey, are you planning to extend the consulting and professional service offering to enterprises?

CR Srinivasan: Yes, we do offer professional services to our customers when there is a requirement for us to step in and help them with that process. It is not as pronounced as we would like it to be, but over the years, we would like it to be more pronounced. Customers are looking at us as a guide and helping hand in the whole process. And for that, we would need to deeply pronounce our professional services capabilities.

V&D: Are digital strategy and its roll out a CDO or CEO play? What are the challenges for a CDO in a digital infrastructure service provider segment?

CR Srinivasan: From a digital transformation standpoint, there are a few things that are absolutely critical for a CDO to manage. One, data quality is extremely important as it determines the accuracy of the outcome. The second is the management of data. This is not a one-time effort. So, how do you build that into the company’s processes in a way that the data quality journey can be continued with data governance and all of that stuff? There has to be a structure to manage the data within the company. So that's CTO's responsibility. The second thing is driving business outcomes. This is no longer is a CEO's role when it comes to digital technologies like AI and ML. The technology is a means to a business outcome and, therefore, how do you drive business outcome becomes a challenge because one needs to cut across multiple organizational priorities. The third is based on whatever digital transformation do you do. How do you benchmark customer experience improvement? All the effort has to be quantified by a significant improvement in customer experience. That's another challenge for us. Then, you have to enable new newer business models. It's not enough to improve customer performance by certain percentage points. What matters is whether you are really enabling a newer business model based on digital capabilities that you're building over time. Are you enabling a new stream of revenue—the CDO is often asked to enhance the digital revenue of the company. So it's no longer just the technology role.

V&D: What is your view on data sovereignty and data privacy? How are organizations tackling it at present?

CR Srinivasan: If you look at it, data is the new currency, the new oil or the new gold. One thing that people have realized is that there is a lot of value in the data that you generate over time and thereby, there is a need to protect it. So it has made an asset category for itself. So from a cybersecurity standpoint, people are looking at how to encrypt data, how to make sure that data is not. Today data is getting generated a lot faster because of all the IT infrastructure sophistication and the ease at which you can buy more processing capacity, thereby generating different types of data. Not only have the enterprises realized the value of data, but countries are also looking at it as a national asset. Therefore, they have to be within the geographical boundaries of a particular country. And hence, there is a need for data residency. These restrictions have come in multiple places, and more so because there are implications for national security.

With the kind of GDPR controls, there are a plethora of laws that are coming across the world, which means that it is a complex problem for any business to deal with. We can facilitate that because being an infrastructure provider, we have data centre facilities in different geographies and thereby we can offer cloud solutions, which keeps the data locally. We also have data processes around certifications, around the infrastructure that enables customers to audit it.