'MSF is CA's unique approach to help customers adopt an automated approach'

Tanuj Vohra, Senior Vice President and Head, India Technology Centre, CA Technologies shares with VARINDIA the findings of its MSF survey while also talking about the emerging trends and its impact on businesses in 2018

How has the year 2017 been regarding business? Can you educate us with “Modern Software Factory” concept, your views?

2017 saw us make great strides in helping our customers overcome their toughest challenges. As measured through our NPS survey, customer sentiment increased Year-over-Year for product ease-of-use, product functionality and product quality. In FY18, we introduced a new NPS question around CA’s mission – and 81 percent of our customers agree and 36 percent of our customers strongly agree that CA removes barriers for their business. As we look to 2018, we should expect that the pace of change in the industry will continue to increase, and IT management and improvements will be top of mind in the competitive landscape. Now is the time for us to make sure that we are continuing to meet the needs of our customers through the ongoing development of our products. DevSecOps, Blockchain, and Cloud will be key focus areas within the industry.

Modern Software Factory is a blueprint that customers can follow to put software at the center of their business. It is CA's unique approach to helping customers establish and broadly adopt an automated and agile approach to software ideation and development. A modern software factory is agile, built to change and able to adapt to market disruption and customer demand. Automation is essential. It saves time, money, and reduces errors, so you can deliver app experiences customers love. Insights fuel the factory, you need smart analytics that make the app experiences you deliver better. Strong security from the start protects your most valuable assets and builds users trust without getting in the way. The MSF message is resonating extremely well with our customers as they strike to make their software development processes secure, agile and more predictable.

What are India results of MSF research?

As per the Modern Software Factory survey, Indian businesses recognize software as the defining competitive advantage that will enable them to create new, disruptive businesses or to re-shape their existing business landscape. In fact, 91% of the respondents highlighted software as key to their digital transformation journey.

According to the Modern Software Factory research titled “Don't Let an Outdated Software Strategy Hold You Back”, an overwhelming 97% of respondents from India cited software as being key to driving growth and expansion. 92% of them stated that software is key for them to create new products or services to enter new markets.

As firms in India become cognizant of the decisive role that software plays in facilitating key business priorities, the survey also found that there is a corresponding emphasis in software-related priorities. 99% of respondents highlighted that it is essential or important to have better prioritization of software development in line with business goals. Although this is seen as the most important priority in India, less than half of them (47%) said their IT teams are very effective in realizing it.

What opportunities do you see in the Indian market basis MSF research’s results?

We are seeing good traction in areas such as DevSecOps, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, and Payment Security – and I expect that to continue and accelerate.

Last year, we have seen a noise about AI and its strengths, what are your plans this year?

AI is increasingly becoming more mainstream across the industry. As such, we are looking to exploit these technologies in numerous ways across the organization, both internally within our IT organization, as well as in our various products. We have embraced Natural Language Processing (NLP) – and have a team partnering with IIIT Hyderabad to take cutting edge research in this area and incorporate it into our products. We already have a handful of products today that exploit machine learning (ML) to provide intelligence to the end customer. Those data models will continue to evolve, and we keep identifying new scenarios where we can use this data. This is especially true in areas where we have a large amount of historical data, and we can use it to train/tune the model to make better predictions. There are a few examples -

* CA’s Payment Security Suite leverages advanced, real-time, predictive models that leverage neural network techniques to evaluate the likelihood an e-Commerce transaction is fraudulent.

* CA’s Payment Security Suite platform delivers industry-leading fraud prevention for e-Commerce by virtue of its support for the 3-D Secure protocol, which delivers richer metadata than usually exists for an e-commerce transaction in order to allow especially effective predictive models to be deployed.

* Our mainframe portfolio uses Machine learning within Mainframe Operational Intelligence to detect abnormal patterns of operation, trigger automatic dynamic and reliable problem remediation, isolate root cause faster, and recommend the  next best course of action for future events.

* A key part of our strategy for 2018 and 2019 is to leverage our predictive analytics expertise across other digital channels and experiences; for example, online banking, non-card payments, new product applications etc.: all attract fraud attacks. Real-time predictive analytics are central to preventing those attacks. A global consortium of data and the associated network effects are essential to provide the best possible real-time fraud prevention capabilities.

What are the three emerging trends that you see in 2018?

Blockchain, a game changing technology that facilitates secure exchange of value, showed tremendous adoption progress in 2017. In 2018, it will become far more mainstream, going well beyond Bitcoin and the Financial Services industry. There has been over $1.5B venture capital Investment in Blockchain start-ups to date, and it will only accelerate in 2018, with use cases ranging from insurance to identity fraud prevention to health records to cross border trade and payments, to other digital transformation efforts across enterprises. The technology will also have to mature in enterprises with challenges related to Data Security, Governance, Scalability and Performance.

Security will remain top of mind for customers. Security breaches will get more and more serious – and organizations will likely experience the first successful “ransom-app” attack; instead of ransoming data, cyber criminals will create malware that exploits a weakness within a commercial application, and hold it for ransom. That means DevSecOps will become a more relevant buzz word. Put simply, DevSecOps means integrating security into every step of the software development lifecycle – from the earliest stages, through testing and deployment – so that it’s baked in from the get-go.

Investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Predictive Analytics (PA) will continue to grow exponentially. It’s not just about autonomous cars, computers that beat humans at Chess, or TV game shows. With so much data being generated, AI will be critical to derive actionable insights, and to identify patterns and noise - be it around detecting fraud or anomalies in systems, finding the most optimal way to manage your sales force.