CIO&Leader_July 2017 (1)

Mandar Marulkar, KPIT Technologies
Interview
‘‘With the pace at which
digitization is taking place, it
is important to ensure all your
employees are enabled - both
from a cultural and skill-set
point of view’’
–Mandar Marulkar
CIO & CDO, KPIT Technologies
According to you, what are some
of the scenarios that are likely to
impact your industry by 2020?
Companies are upgrading their IT infrastructure
to support IoT in the future. When we
talk about 20 billion devices in 2020, they will
generate a huge amount of data and that’s where
professional services will be expected to churn
out data and come up with relevant business
use cases. In such a scenario, creating a platform
that will enable interactions between producers
and consumers and monetizing the data will be
extremely important.
What are some of your key priorities
for 2020?
From an automation perspective, embedding
programmability into the infrastructure and
integrating the software-defined with your core
IT infrastructure will give birth to a true DevOps
culture. The next priority will be moving on
from the monolithic application stack and the
waterfall methodology to application development.
It is also important to understand the next
generation threats and build the overall holistic
cyber security platform, not only to protect your
business applications and typical IT stack but
to secure the OT infrastructure, especially as
billions of devices now generate data from an
OT perspective and that needs to be integrated
with IT. The other area will be to build a digital
culture in your organization. With the pace at
which digitization is taking place, it is important
to ensure all your employees are enabled -both
from a cultural and skill-set point of view - in
order to grab the challenge of 2020 and provide
innovative solutions to the industry.
How will the rapid evolution of
technology impact your industry
in the year 2020?
It is very difficult for any organization to cope
up with the rapid pace of innovation happening
around the world. Lot of disruption is
taking place in start-ups and companies you
didn't know about or didn't exist until today.
So we need to ensure that workload migration
from on-premise to public cloud is secure and
cost-effective.
What are your personal goals for
the year 2020?
I’m getting into a new role of a Chief Digital
Officer (CDO) and I’m expected to showcase
our internal innovations to customers. Also, I
want to create a digital culture in our organization,
for the leadership as well as millennials,
who join the company.
July 2017 | CIO&LEADER
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