Africa CIOs can easily embarrass Indian CIOs. Really?

BANGALORE, INDIA: Travelling across the world and almost living out of a suitcase, makes Atul Saini, CTO at Fiorano miss Indian food and the country's amazing degrees of tolerance for many religions. But it seems there is one thing he would rather be happy without - the way he thinks Indian CIOs haggle and postpone tech-purchases, and more than that, the way CFOs here pull the front seat in IT musical chair games. As he himself encapsulates it crisply enough ‘It's stupid and it's crazy'. Let's find out his reasons in context to how he approaches, plans, consumes and strategises IT on the other side of the company's table.

Let's first talk of the space your company (as a vendor) caters to. Besides being an entrepreneur, you are also often quoted as one of the earliest technologists to have the vision of a "distributed world", who brought the Fiorano ESB Enterprise Service Bus and the REST-based Fiorano SOA Platform to market with an architecture tagged as ahead of its time and very different from incumbent solutions. How do you see phases like SOA or Federated IT and trends like Cloud, event-driven SOA and application portfolio complexity affecting the CIO side of the industry?

SOA has been and will stay as a key point. But a lot of other changes are happening at a technical level. Like understanding asynchronous systems is not too easy. Technical understanding of these new areas has to come from the CTO. But I am flabbergasted when I see CFOs in India elbowing others out as a technology expert. It's really stupid.

We will hold that thought for a minute. But can you first comment on how Cloud is affecting ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) space, thanks to the so-called multi-tenancy challenge for application-middleware and integration software?

I would say it is not such a massive factor. It is just a buzzword. It basically boils down to the provider. If you look at it from a customer's lens, it is all about network speeds, bandwidth quality and costs. Cloud too is not very different per se. You just pay for it differently. The problem is with bandwidth, specially in a country like India.

How do you compare India with other parts of the world in terms of approach and openness to technology?

It's sad that a country that exports so much IT and is home to so many smart brains, behaves with technology in an ironical and backward manner.

How?

There is no push for the good stuff, no team work sense, and no room for win-win situations. We are still caught in a win-lose play. The government is not half as bad as people here, whether you think of big economic issues or infrastructure. Indian industry is at times a joke in tech circles abroad. It is sad to see it still hinging on the baniya mentality, of over-loading the product beyond all levels. Too much emotional energy waste with little understanding of technology and a lot of unreasonable frugality spoils the scope here.

May be we watch sharply where we spend. Is that a bad habit?

See it this way. If business gets better, money-distribution gets better and a lot of other things automatically shape up and spruce up. We have great food. We have incredible tolerance. Only in a country like India, we can see a church, a temple, a mosque etc in the same neighbourhood. We have the sharpest brains. But too much money-consciousness and at the wrong tables hurts the business, and the nation in the long-run. Technology allows an enterprise to run business smoothly. Like our industry where supply and demand side is ironed out well with smart integration software. But so many businesses in India are skeptical about spending money. The attitude of bargaining and stretching a decision for long, should change. And I am not talking of China here in comparison. Look at how Africa is getting savvy and open about IT. Integration software is itself a slice of 30 to 40 per cent for most projects. Unless the CEO understands the value and the ROI of spend and see how lesser errors, less time wasted and more agile supply-demand equations can work wonders, it's tough. African enterprises are becoming way more open and quick to adopt right solutions than Indian ones. You can let capital sit idle in banks or you can let technology leapfrog after a certain level of usage. Leadership is a gap here, more so at the level of business. Our culture is about one-ness and in this land, which by the way is the only place that really understands concepts called peace and soul, we are still caught up in rituals. Ego can be a burden, is I can take a leaf out of spiritual books here.

How do you approach IT then?

We are a small company if you want to hear about scale. But as far as ‘the way we do it' goes, it is about identifying the right technology first, then the right vendors and then making objective decisions without any bureaucracy layers.

Objective decisions?

If we have a problem area we make all identified vendors undertake a proof-of-concept (PoC) and each gets a window of three to four days to understand the project well. We look at sample executions, have them build it in front of us and determine if the team would be able to use it down the road.

Does testing matter as a clincher externally as well?

Most of our external customers are fairly large ones. Like US Coast Guard that entails monitoring 6000 vessels and about 3000 message per second. For them, we do a PoC and at production point the mini-problem solution is visible. Big vendors like IBM do not do this. We do not go for sales pitches or power points but lean towards testing and pilots. But it's crazy to see how integration software sells today- illogical and not based on reality.