Ajay Marathe is probably the only CIO of a Fortune 500 company who sits away from headquarters, in India. He will be in Bangalore for the next two years or so, during which time he will keep shuttling between India and the US.

Marathe is in a unique position at AMD, having moved around practically in all functions, excepting finance. As a person who dons several hats, he spoke about the challenges he successfully met as the CIO of AMD, in an exclusive with VOICE&DATA. He also shared some of his views on the opportunity that lies ahead for India, among other things. Excerpts:

Given that AMD's facilities, development centers, etc. are spread across the world, how critical do connectivity/networking solutions become for various business processes?
The connectivity and network solutions are critical to the business processes of AMD. The engineering and manufacturing of AMD's products are highly dependent on a global supply chain that is enabled by AMD's global network. Since our design and manufacturing steps happen at different locations around the world, our parts cannot be designed, manufactured, tested, or sold without reliable networks.

What are your key investments in technologies like network storage, structured cabling, LAN switches, routers, etc. that made a difference to business processes at AMD?

We have standardized on Cisco for the WAN aspects, wireless, manufacturing and Campus backbone, for their reliability, service and support. For the design area LAN, we have standardized on Nortel for their high port densities in Gig Ethernet and low maintenance cost.

What role did such decisions play in AMD's turnaround in the past and in the ongoing success binge thereafter? In particular, could you touch upon certain differences made to the development of Athelon 64 and Personal Internet Communicator (PIC)?
The network plays a supporting role in the engineering, manufacturing, and business processes and was required for developments like the Athelon 64
and PIC.

The line between IT and networking technologies is blurring in an increasingly converged scenario. How difficult or easy does this make your task?
Networking is clearly a key enabler of the global enterprise. Recent advancements in capacity, performance, and convergence provide a significant number of options to align the appropriate technologies to the business opportunities.

You have recently completed a large-scale implementation of SAP across the company. Which networking technologies complemented/supplemented this IT implementation?
The networks (WAN and LAN) were analyzed for available bandwidth and latency requirements, across the world. And where found lacking, things were improved with solutions from Cisco, Nortel, AT&T, and MCI.

How do compare your network infrastructure in India vis-à-vis AMD's other facilities worldwide?
The LAN is the same architecture and bill of materials as we use in our primary US design facilities. The same standards and policies apply and are administered centrally from the US.

What are your annual networking and IT spends, respectively?
Our WAN budget, with AT&T and MCI is approximately $9 million per annum. The India-US circuits are approximately $25,000 per month.

What initiatives did you take at AMD to use IT and networking technologies for business benefits?
We wanted to change the model of IT at AMD and make things process driven rather than trying to find solutions for a technology that we already had. So we sat down and asked ourselves: what are the business problems, what will make AMD a real-time enterprise? How can information flow quickly between our partners, customers, or channel partners or even suppliers? What are the bottlenecks and which are the technologies that will solve those?

So we became an SAP house, starting 2001. We selected SAP as the backbone and we said we would expand it to other areas in steps. We implemented the financial and the material module.

Which were the bottlenecks that you identified at that moment?
At that point of time, we had homegrown legacy systems everywhere. Those were age-old systems, not connectable to anything. So there were islands of automation everywhere, which of course had served a purpose till then. In 2004, we implemented our sales and distribution module, which is the biggest module in terms of customer touching. The biggest bottleneck was in understanding customers' requirements in a more connected fashion, so that the entire supply chain could be driven from that.

So you used technology to bring customer-orientation into all the processes at AMD....
Yes, that's right. Not that it wasn't there but it was done in an ad hoc manner and not in a very systematic way. For example, our planning cycle use to be three months long. So by the time we finished a planning cycle, it was already time to work on the next one. As a result, we were continuously in the planning mode and just couldn't shrink that.

In our chip-manufacturing business, the raw cycle time is more than two months. So shrinking the planning cycle was extremely important. The order management, the new engine that SAP released last year, was extremely critical for us and at the same time quite risky too, as only two or three other installations had been done by then.

Who is your integration partner and what kind of relationship do you have with it?
HCL Technologies is our worldwide integration partner. All our infrastructure management and applications are from HCL Technologies.

How do you see India as a player on the global scale, in the years to come?
In another 15 years, India is going to have 800 million people in the working category, between the ages of 18 and 35. Also, India and China are the only two countries that are going to continuously post GDP growths of seven percent or above. Beyond a timeframe, India may become the only country to keep on posting that growth, because China will be saturated.

Deepak Kumar