“OUR STRONG ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IS REFLECTED IN THE INDIA TECHNOLOGY CENTER”
In a conversation Tanuj Vohra, Senior Vice President and Head, India Technology Center at CA Technologies speaks on CA Functions and Innovations
What was the rationale behind CA launching the modern software factory? How is it reiterating the transformational message?
About 4-5 months back we launched a new campaign around the modern software factory. The four key pillars of the modern software factory revolve around agility, automation, insights, security. What we did at CA was to try and make sure that we took a lot of our point product offerings and
map them around these four key pillars. And that’s been transformational as far as how CA has been thinking about not just how we go to market with our products but also in terms of how we think about our products and how do we develop those products.
We have heard a lot about the India Technology Center. Can you elaborate on the functional USPs of this center?
We got a very strong organizational culture and that is reflected clearly in the Indian Technology Center as well. It’s about maintaining very high standards of ethics; it’s about making sure that we are hiring the best and the brightest in the industry. And then also making sure that there is a lot of focus on strong engineering fundamentals. We also have to ensure that our software processes are much matured. We are using Agile. We are using Safe which allows you to deploy Agile at scale. We are striving for innovation at various levels, top down as well as bottoms up. It is very interesting to see how mature the India Technology Center is in terms of how we are doing development which is not just sustenance of legacy products so to speak but also cutting edge development of network technologies.
What will be some of these cutting edge innovation work happening at the Center?
As I said innovation needs to be bottoms up as well. It cannot always be reinforced from the top. What we did fairly recently was to start this concept of garage; this was a unique lab that provided a very conceptual and hands on learning experience through experimenting and tinkering with technologies. We have got a hardware lab there where you can play around with IOT devices and Raspberry files which have very interesting prototypes. For example, this home automation solution using Alexa--voice with robotics. We often try to take some of these technologies into the respective products we are working on. That is a great example of organic innovation.
Was the CA Accelerator Program a manifestation of this organic innovation?
A great forum that we came up with to actually be able to start a top down effort was what we called the CA Accelerator Program. The Accelerator Program was for fostering organic innovation; it is all about taking existing great ideas that employees have and then turning them into great outcomes. So the way the accelerator works is literally like a link startup. You come up with an idea and we find a set of sponsors for you for that idea. We make sure that we provide you some level of funding. And then off you go and start working on that idea. And just in the past few months I have seen some interesting successes coming from that Accelerator Program. One great example was in the area of advanced analytics where we came up with a capability we call Jarvis internally.
How does CA map the pillars of the modern Software Factory to the dynamics of the industry and enterprise customers?
As far as I think about CA Technologies as well the India Technology Center, our goal is to first and foremost drive home the modern software factory message across the industry. Software is becoming ubiquitous and people are finding it really hard to build enterprise software at scale and do it right simultaneously. The fourth pillar that we talked about was making sure that our customers are successful. For example we talked about agility. It is not just agility in terms of having an agile methodology. It’s also about making sure that a customer is agile in terms of adapting to changing market dynamics and opportunities. It is how our products are able to make them more agile is what matters.
Automation is essential and is another core component of these dynamics. It is not just about saving time, money and the hats associated with it. But automation eliminates or rather it provides you with an opportunity to spend more time pursuing the innovative things that you value most, rather than doing them in a manual repeated manner in cycles.
We already talked about insights and how that’s just a competitive fuel that keeps this factory moving in the right direction. And so we need to make sure that we are constantly providing that insight to make sure that the experiences that are getting delivered for our customers are better.
And finally we cannot over-emphasize on security. It’s as our world and our economy moves more towards cloud, towards hosted applications, security has to be perceived not as an after-thought, but right from the word go. And it is making sure that we are protecting the most valuable assets, building the user trust and not compromising on capacity. So these are the four things just for making sure that as an organization the modern software factory experience is something that we live and breathe, that our customers understand it, and we can partner with them to make sure that we are helping them on the journey in getting towards the modern software factory.