A teacher with a passion for IT

Mandar Marulkar, Head - Technical Infrastructure Management Services and Chief Information Security Officer, KPIT Cummins Infosystems Ltd., feels that his career has been exciting and that it has helped him learn and grow. By Manjari Juneja

Mandar Marulkar

Marulkar began his career as a lecturer in VIT college of engineering, an affiliate to the Pune University, for two years from 1994-96. During this time, he was able to overcome his fear of public speaking—the reason why he began teaching in the first place. Although teaching was a great learning experience, he realized that the syllabus taught was not in sync with the industry’s needs and that in order for him to stay up-to-date with the changes in the technology industry, he had to get involved with the industry.

In 1997, he had the opportunity to become a part of the IT or engineering industry and further his learning as an entry-level engineer at the then Tata Honeywell, where for three years he worked in the areas of system administration, training on Honeywell products and on the development of an Intranet for HR, administration and training operations. During his stint there he worked on creating new applications in his free time and an opportunity presented itself when he showed his work to the Training and HR Head. It was a Web enabled certification system for in-house use. There was no certification process at that time at Tata Honeywell. The HR Head was impressed by this application and suggested that he start its implementation. This was a major breakthrough in his career and helped him grow rapidly at Tata Honeywell. After three successful years, he left the company in 2000.

He was offered an opportunity at Tata Home Finance, as the Manager of Automation. Through his proactive approach towards creating new technology applications and establishing new IT frameworks he grew rapidly at Tata Home Finance and soon became the National Manager for IT. However, he had to put in considerable effort in order to understand the Finance domain, as he was inexperienced in that area. He overcame this challenge, by speaking to several people from multiple functions to understand their requirements as well as the business itself, which led him and his team to setup the entire corporate IT system and infrastructure and extend it to 18 branches across India in less than two years.

In 2004, after completing four years at Tata Home Finance (currently known as IDBI Homefinance), he moved to KPIT Cummins.

“I have been in the IT industry for over 10 years now. I believe that, at each level, I have been able to learn a lot. I have been fortunate in having supportive colleagues and bosses who have helped me enhance my career and my personal growth. I learnt from my managers about the importance of developing relationships and focusing on people development. I came from an engineering background and began as a teacher. I continue to be a teacher by sharing my knowledge with my colleagues and I remain a student, always eager to learn and understand new things. I think my enthusiasm and hunger for knowledge has helped me throughout my career,” said Marulkar.

“My career path has been a combination of chance, design and my hunger for learning. I was a teacher and I opted to further my understanding of software and hardware and the IT industry in general, as I began working in the industry. Over the years, I have been fortunate to have received many opportunities that at times came knocking at my door. Today I am enjoying my career and enhancing my understanding and learning in the field of IT implementations customized to the requirements of an Engineering Services, IT consulting and KPO services provider at KPIT Cummins. I have been given multiple opportunities and responsibilities at KPIT Cummins such as leading the information systems group, becoming the Chief Information Security Officer, implementing information security and business continuity systems and processes to now heading the IT infrastructure for the company,” he added.

Current job profile

Currently, at KPIT Cummins, he heads the Technology Infrastructure department, which includes overseeing the IT infrastructure globally for the company including its corporate data centers and networks; providing IT facility management to all employees; and working closely with the delivery team in providing support to the company’s offshore development centers.

He said, “Since 2004, when I started at KPIT, I feel that every contribution that I have been able to make along with my team has been an achievement. I have taken on challenges and have been able to effectively implement information security processes across the organization in addition to getting certifications such as BS7799/ISO27001. We are among the first few companies in the world to get certified on BS25999 (an international standard for business continuity management).”

Another prominent achievement has been to decrease IT costs per employee by over 45% in the last two years by deploying new technologies and optimizing existing IT assets.

“As the Head, IT infrastructure and CISO, I have been able to excel in my role, by putting processes and technologies in place through which we have been able to align IT infrastructure to business expectations. Along with the IT team here, I have been able to deploy technologies which have made the company technologically advanced and helped in improving productivity, enhancing information security and reducing costs,” he added.

Noteworthy deployments

Marulkar has rolled out initiatives for server consolidation and virtualization which helped free up 60% of the space in the existing data center and making the data center ‘green’. In this initiative, the IT team has virtualized existing underutilized servers and moved the old servers with performance issues on to virtual machines thereby reducing the energy, administration and maintenance cost and optimally utilizing the existing server capacity. This has also helped in drastically reducing the provisioning time and dynamically allocating the required computing resources.

KPIT Cummins has also deployed unified communications solutions which have helped them improve collaboration between teams across various geographies and reduce communication costs drastically. With the help of various technologies, processes and awareness initiatives, it has been able to reduce telecommunication expenses by over 40% in the past year. Also the company has introduced an internal network which is integrated with an IP-PBX, where employees use the internal network for all communications, be it from a computer to a phone, from phone to phone, phone to computer, computer to computer, etc. This has helped reduce costs and at the same time improve communications.

Marulkar said, “We also rolled out initiatives to optimize the usage of existing hardware and software assets. We have deployed various solutions to improve desktop utilization by 25%. We deployed technology solutions for monitoring the usage of software deployed and effectively utilizing the same. For example, if the users are not using a software application, we either uninstall it, or help increase efficiency by providing training on that application. We have also evaluated and effectively deployed various open source software applications. This has significantly helped in reducing the overall investments into software assets.

Evaluating technologies

KPIT Cummins has a technology roadmap for the IT function. This plan is reviewed every six months to ensure that the company has the most up-to-date technologies in line with its business plans.

Cloud computing has become tremendously popular today and Marulkar has closely studied this technology and realized that it has many advantages. Now that the technology has been proven, he has worked with partners in understanding their solutions, visited labs and also tested various technologies in their environments. KPIT Cummins is in the process of setting up a private cloud for internal requirements. This will provide a flexible and scalable infrastructure, help reduce the number of physical servers, decrease provisioning time and dynamically allocate computing resources helping achieve the goal of establishing a more resilient, green data center.

Another important technology currently being planned at KPIT Cummins is desktop virtualization, which enables users to use virtual desktops from anywhere giving flexibility. Marulkar’s team will also get a lot of flexibility in managing desktops, deploying applications and achieving a high level of security.

Under their Green initiatives, in addition to cloud computing and desktop virtualization, they are currently deploying desktop power management solutions.

Marulkar said, “We expect to save over 30% energy as a part of this initiative. We also have various initiatives to enable users working from home by providing seamless access to corporate and customer environments without compromising on security.”

IT vision

In this fast paced world, technology is an important factor in our lives. It becomes obsolete constantly hence we have to be up-to-date at all times.

Marulkar said that his priorities for IT at KPIT Cummins were to deploy technology solutions to give a competitive advantage to his business team and demonstrate technology leadership. KPIT is also committed to deploying green IT solutions in its domain.

He is focusing on increasing infrastructure optimization from various viewpoints, including doing more with less such as hardware/software asset optimization and moving from fixed expenses to variable expenses which can be linked to business growth.

“My vision is to align IT closely to our business, by providing world-class facilities to stakeholders such as employees and customers; provide infrastructure to the employees to ensure that they are able to work happily; secure infrastructure to create a safe environment for clients; and enhance the relationships with partners to provide faster and better technologies,” added Marulkar.

Message for fellow CIOs

Marulkar said, “Learning and being on top of your game are extremely important. I would tell aspiring leaders to always be knowledgeable, be open to learn and receive feedback. Keep yourself abreast of new innovations and technologies in the industry; be ready to accept changes and be an honest and sincere team player; all these qualities are always important to build a successful career in any industry.

manjari.juneja@expressindia.com