Scalability: The Ability To Handle Pulsating Loads?

Chakrapani Perangur, CIO, Tata Sky Ltd., in conversation with Biztech2.0, explains a method for overcoming the challenges posed by pulsating loads and the role of IT as a revenue enhancer.

What are the challenges posed by emerging markets?

In emerging markets like India and China, a major problem any CIO will face is trying to cope with massive volumes. Particularly in the context of Tata Sky, this volume is not linear. Most CIOs in emerging markets scale an application or a service for 5 to10 million subscribers, which is a common number in India. With scaling for such a number, the million dollar question is how many of those subscribers can be brought on board in a short period of time.

For example, most businesses would expect to add 5 million subscribers over a couple of years. However, in the festive season, you may need to add about 500,000 subscribers within a week, and undergo a lean period after that. Thus, the key challenge in an emerging market is the ability to handle pulsating loads.

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When you look at your enterprise’s infrastructure, you might think that it is capable of handling a large scale-up, but it might fail you at a critical junction due to the dynamics introduced by pulsating loads. Thus it is important to take this factor into consideration when designing the system.
How did you overcome this problem at Tata Sky?

Agility is the answer to overcoming the problems posed by pulsating loads. The best way is to have technology to dynamically balance loads, which can be achieved both through software and hardware load balancing.

For example, if you have unutilised computing power on a backend system like an ERP, it can be diverted or load balanced to a customer facing system like a CRM. This is what we at Tata Sky have done to solve the issue posed by pulsating loads.

We have continuously looked to do two things. First is managing the resources that are available, in terms of load balancing. Second is trying to enhance the right resources at the right time.

In more technology specific way, the right nodes need to be enhanced as well. In the example above, the question would be whether to balance the CRM oriented system or ERP oriented system first. This question usually has different answers for each enterprise.

These are some of the steps a CIO would need to take to overcome this challenge.

How does IT act as a revenue enhancer?

As an organisation matures, a key challenges that CIOs face is to make IT be looked at as a revenue enhancer rather than a backend function. IT should contribute to the enterprise’s revenue in addition to continuously helping the organisation to identify opportunities to reduce cost.

For example, if I encourage subscribers to subscribe to a service through our portal, rather that walking into a counter, IT is looked upon as a revenue enhancer for that transaction.

Thus the basic challenge is to make top management view IT as a revenue enhancer. Typically, a few years ago, management looked at IT as purely a backend process that took care of processes such as billing and collections. In today’s environment this has changed radically and we are working continuously to make IT a revenue enhancer to the organisation.