Cloud burst to embrace one and all to spread knoledge

Cloud computing can counter illiteracy

She may not like the description, but she is the first lady of Indian IT. In an industry where the proportion of women is relatively high-almost half of fresh recruits in recent years have been women very few have risen to senior management positions. Hardly any has become the head of a significant company. 

Neelam Dhawan's accomplishment, therefore, is extraordinary. She was the managing director of Microsoft India between 2005 and 2008. And since then, she's been the managing director of Hewlett-Packard (HP) India, a company which according to some estimates is the fourth largest IT company in the country, after TCS, Infosys and Wipro , with close to $5 billion in revenues. 

Yet, many reading this would have barely heard of her. The Delhi-bred economics graduate from St Stephen's College, who did her MBA from Faculty of Management Studies in Delhi University, does not appear in these pages often, and neither in other media. We think that is partly because she chooses not to flash her credentials and accomplishments. 

She, however, offers a more modest explanation: "Indian companies get the first spot, and rightly so. Their chairmen are here, their CEOs are here, their global decisions are made here, and that's why it is big news. 

But if you look at HP or any other American firm, our global leaders are in the US. And you have enough announcements coming from there. We focus on how to do well in India with the strategy our company has. That's why any MNC would keep a much lower profile in the Indian media. And that's why most of us keep a low profile." 

But given that India is such an important destination for outsourcing, and now also a rapidly growing market for IT, aren't important decisions taken here? Dhawan says the decisions taken here are "not earth shattering", not something that will change the way the organization works. But she says India's extraordinary growth has impacted the way decisions are taken. "I must say this, the India market changes every quarter. 

The first of January what you think is going to happen, by March that's not true. It's that dynamic. So we need to keep adapting." At one stage it looked like manufacturing would move rapidly towards automation and HP started investing towards that; and then it found that it was power and utilities that was doing it more. 

Banking was all about core banking solutions till recently, and now it's all about mobile banking and financial inclusion. Dhawan says what the government wants to do also transforms from quarter to quarter. 

"So India is a very exciting, demanding economy. And we need to keep pace with it, think differently." Can a huge company like HP be nimble enough to manage these changes? Dhawan says that's done by combining quarterly plans with yearly ones. "We begin every year saying these are the big things we should work on; we align with our corporate strategy and what we think will fit here. This year the big thing we think is cloud computing. 

So we have a whole strategy on cloud and we are now very focused on it." But every quarter, HP India identifies emerging developments. Financial inclusion became big towards the end of last year. "So I have to think through how core banking and financial inclusion can get linked, and should cloud be part of that strategy. It is necessary to think strategy every quarter. Strategy is always a work in progress in India." 

Banking, telecom, and more recently government are areas that are moving the most rapidly for HP. Utilities, particularly power, infrastructure, transport and airport modernization are other big IT opportunities that Dhawan sees. Indian Railways has been a big HP customer for many years. "Now even road transport is looking at adopting IT," she says. 

HP's success in India has been a result of innovative adaptation of its solutions to the requirements here. The banking sector's financial inclusion initiatives will not turn profitable for many years. And Dhawan is acutely aware of that. So she's determined to create solutions that "ensure our customers remain competitive". 

For government schools, the company has just launched what it calls a lab-in-the-box. HP took a shipment container, painted it, made windows on it, installed a DG set, provided for cooling, provided a VSAT connection, and set up 13-14 student desks and one teacher desk with computers, all inside the container . NCERT courses can be obtained online. 

"Since schools don't have space to have a computer lab, we created this compact lab for NCERT as a pilot. They are using it for teacher training. But if a school says it needs a lab, NCERT can just ship one," says Dhawan. 

We point out that several technology companies are doing such pilots but most are yet to prove themselves to be scalable. But Dhawan is convinced that India's problems of vast illiteracy and low levels of education will get solved with cloud computing. 

"Take CBSE, you can have the courseware and the books on the cloud. You could have an NCERT cloud or an ICSE cloud. Students can download the courseware from wherever they are. We can have videos of the best teachers teaching the courses on the cloud. And any school can simply view these videos." 

She says if students need books, they can simply print it from the cloud. With cloud, everybody will have to pay far less, since it is shared by millions of students. "These experiments have to work; otherwise we will never get a society that has uniform access to education."