Tag Archives: SDI Adoption

Piyush Saxena – AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice, HCL

A conversation with Piyush Saxena – AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice at HCL.

Piyush Saxena

Piyush has more than a decade of experience helping HCL customers design contemporary data centers. His current focus is to design and implement SDI-driven Data Centers for Enterprises looking to support their digital initiatives.

Join Piyush Saxena on 27th September for a webinar entitled Accelerate SDI Adoption to Power Digital Transformation  at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.

What do you hope the audience will learn from this webinar?

IT infrastructure is quickly moving from monolithic blocks to software defined spaces. Customer conversations nowadays are focused on everything as a service i.e. towards logical construct of infrastructure and not on asset ownership – that is where SDI becomes crucial. As we speak, the SDI market spend is projected to reach $54 billion by 2019. In the webinar, we will elucidate how SDI can be used to architect the future of enterprise IT. The webinar will help you understand challenges faced by an enterprise while adopting SDI. How HCL, via its end-to end SDI offering, is enabling enterprises take the software defined approach to modernize their infrastructure and build digital backbone.  The audience will understand the steps and HCL accelerators used to build SDI.

What discussions do you look forward to having with the audience?

As with any new and evolving technology – without a mature, well-considered and tool-based approach, SDI initiatives can become complex and expensive, and not generate the promised ROI if not approached correctly. Customers need to decide between a build vs buy approach when it comes to SDI.

This will be the focus of my discussion in the webinar. How organizations should approach SDI adoption, how they should mitigate the risks associated with implementation, and how they should plan investment in SDI. Enterprises should look to adopt a certified blueprint based approach to SDI which can help them to drive IT agility, dramatically reduce deployment & operations risks, and increase efficiency.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I am currently responsible for identifying and evangelizing all new technology based solutions for our customers. With the plethora of technology solutions available in the market it’s a daunting task to evaluate and recommend the best and most optimal solutions to our customers and ensure successful implementation of the same. It gives me immense satisfaction to see successful implementation of our recommendations to our customers. We end up making wrong choices at times, but addressing these choices and providing alternate solutions as required is a challenge we take head-on.

How did you get into the industry?

I was always interested in technology solutions that can be practically implemented to deliver business solutions to customers. I was extremely inspired by the technology boom in early 2000’s which brought Indian IT firms to the global mainstage. To pursue my interests in this areas and also contribute to the Indian IT success story I decided to pursue a career in this industry. It has been a fulfilling roller-coaster ride till date.

Where is your favorite place in the world and why?

I hail from a small town in India named Bhopal. With a large number of lakes and hills and a moderate climate, this is one of the most scenic places I have been in my life. With the extensive travel that comes as part of my job, I cherish every day I can get back to my home town and spend time with my parents and friends, tracking or boating.

Join Piyush Saxena on 27th September for a webinar entitled Accelerate SDI Adoption to Power Digital Transformation  at 1PM ET / 10AM PT.

Register Here!

3 Steps Toward Powering Digital Transformation through Software Defined Infrastructure

Written by Piyush Saxena, AVP & Head, Next Gen Datacenter Practice, HCL

Over the past 12-18 months, we have seen enterprise IT leaders turning to Software Defined Infrastructure (SDI) to enable a resilient and scalable IT architecture that can keep pace with digital initiatives at the business level. SDI is fast becoming a required necessity for enterprises that are not just grappling with customer-centric digital requirements, but executing enterprise-wide transformations that are fundamentally shifting the foundation of IT from “run IT” to “change IT.” To ensure IT infrastructure is keeping pace, what is needed is a highly-configurable and programmable infrastructure that delivers policy driven automation, agile operations and proper service orientation—all while enhancing the customer experience—which is where SDI uniquely steps up to the challenge.

Based my experience enabling SDI for global clients as head of HCL’s Next Gen Datacenter Practice, here are three ways you can power digital transformation through SDI:

  1.  Integrate Infrastructure Architecture

Creating the best modern data center requires standardization and integration across cloud and on-premise architecture. While this is a daunting task, one way IT leaders are approaching the task is by essentially imitating characteristics of public cloud in their on-prem infrastructure in order to maintain agility and scalability while optimizing workloads and managing legacy environments. By leveraging automation as the efficiency driver, enterprises are deploying “cloud enabled” on-prem infrastructure that is highly scalable (even for IaaS and PaaS components), while also reducing manual intervention along the way.

  1.  Align People, Process and Technology

SDI is a cultural shift as much as a technical shift, which means an in-depth understanding of the underlying people and process is a necessity. This is especially evident when IT tasks are automated, altering the previously-defined process for employees. Understanding the processes, changes must be understood in detail which requires new skill sets and a shift in culture for people to work together with infrastructure. That infrastructure is also going through a modernization exercise, and must be aligned to the people and processes which support this modernization.

  1.  Follow a certified blueprint based approach

The steps above are extremely difficult, and could endanger the enterprise if not done correctly. One of the ways we help our clients reduce risk is by guiding them through a certified blueprint based framework, which we call VelocITy. As the name suggests, the framework quickly and thoroughly streamlines SDI adoption, minimizes implementation challenges and risks and reduces time-to-market to deliver optimal ROI for the enterprise. The VelocITy framework itself also follows a phased approach, ensuring that skillsets are assessed, architectures are planned and the migration, deployment and operations are executed with confidence.

To learn more about this phased approach and to adopt SDI with confidence, register for my September 27th webinar with VMware, where I will cover these steps in greater detail.

Register Here!