Indeni Embeds Ansible to Automate Security Infrastructure Operations

Indeni, a platform focused on Security Infrastructure Automation, announced in September 2019 that it had integrated Ansible community capabilities directly into the Indeni Platform. The integration was designed to extend the platform’s existing Auto Detection capabilities into Auto Triage and Auto Remediation use cases, giving security and network operations teams a more complete automation workflow for managing critical security devices.

At the time of the announcement, the Indeni Platform included over 500 Automation Elements covering devices from leading security vendors including Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, Fortinet, and F5 Networks. By adding Ansible-powered triage and remediation on top of its existing detection logic, Indeni aimed to close the loop between identifying an issue and resolving it — without requiring manual intervention for routine operational tasks.

The Problem: Complexity Without Automation

Modern enterprise networks are increasingly multi-vendor environments. Security teams are responsible for maintaining firewall policies, VPN configurations, and device performance across dozens or hundreds of appliances from different manufacturers, each with its own CLI, API surface, and failure modes. Keeping up with best practices across all of these devices manually is not realistic at scale.

Two practical problems compound this challenge:

• Knowing what to automate: Not every operational task is a good candidate for automation. Teams need context about which issues are recurring, high-impact, and well-understood enough to remediate safely without human review.
• Acting on what is detected: Even platforms that detect configuration drift or performance degradation often stop short of triggering a remediation action. The gap between alert and fix still requires human time.

Indeni’s integration with Ansible was intended to address both gaps: its detection layer identifies valid issues using native device protocols, and Ansible playbooks then execute the appropriate remediation steps automatically.

How the Detect–Triage–Remediate Workflow Works

The Indeni Platform organizes its automation into three sequential stages:

1. Detect

Indeni uses native device protocols to continuously monitor security appliances. By communicating directly with devices the way those devices expect to be queried, the platform maintains high-confidence detection of potential issues — configuration drift, performance anomalies, certificate expiry, and similar conditions — before they escalate into outages.

2. Triage

Once an issue is detected, Ansible-powered Auto Triage Elements automatically trigger diagnostic tests to gather situational context. Instead of an engineer spending time collecting logs and running manual checks, the platform surfaces structured, actionable information so that the scope and cause of the issue are understood before any human looks at it. This compresses mean time to resolution by eliminating the data-gathering phase of incident response.

3. Remediate

Where a known best-practice fix exists for the detected issue, the platform can apply it automatically using Ansible playbooks. This is particularly valuable for recurring, well-understood operational tasks — pushing a configuration correction, restarting a service, or updating a device setting — that are error-prone when done manually under pressure.

Key Benefits for Security and Network Operations Teams

• Streamlined SecOps delivery: By automating routine detection and remediation cycles, security operations teams can allocate engineering time to higher-value work rather than repetitive maintenance tasks.
• Faster incident response: Automated data collection and enrichment during incidents reduces the time engineers spend gathering context, compressing the triage phase of incident management.
• Consistent configuration enforcement: Ansible-backed remediation applies fixes consistently across all managed devices, reducing the risk of configuration drift that can create security exposure or cause outages.
• Multi-vendor coverage: The Automation Elements library spans the major security vendors, meaning teams managing heterogeneous environments do not need to build separate automation workflows for each vendor platform.

Why Ansible as the Automation Layer?

Ansible is an agentless automation framework with broad support for network device modules, including those from Palo Alto Networks, Juniper, F5, and Fortinet. Its playbook model is human-readable YAML, which lowers the barrier for security engineers who may not have a software development background. Because Ansible already has an established community of network automation content, Indeni could leverage existing modules rather than building proprietary integrations from scratch for each vendor.

Embedding Ansible inside the Indeni Platform also means customers who already use Ansible elsewhere in their infrastructure can benefit from a consistent automation model, rather than introducing a separate tool for security device management.

Supporting Quotes from Indeni Leadership

“The role of Security Operations and Network Operations now includes the care and feeding of critical security devices. Without the expertise in house to detect, triage and resolve performance and configuration issues quickly, companies not only risk having an outage, but risk losing millions of dollars in missed revenue opportunities and repairing a damaged brand.”

— Michel Maeso, Chief Revenue Officer, Indeni

“The Indeni Platform utilizing Ansible brings together the best in IT Automation and Security Infrastructure Automation. Together, we can help reduce the risk and chaos inherent in today’s complex security infrastructure, taking error prone and time consuming tasks off our customers’ plate.”

— Yoni Leitersdorf, CEO, Indeni

“Indeni complements existing Ansible deployments by helping to ensure best practices are followed, device configurations are up-to-date, and device performance is within guidelines even as a customer environment changes. By using Indeni with Ansible inside, customers gain the speed and automation of DevOps, with workflows that simplify security infrastructure operations.”

— Ulrica de-Fort Menares, VP of Products and Strategy, Indeni

Takeaway for DevOps and SecOps Engineers

The Indeni–Ansible integration illustrates a broader trend: security infrastructure management is converging with the automation-first practices that DevOps teams have applied to application infrastructure. Treating security devices as managed infrastructure — with continuous validation, automated triage, and codified remediation — reduces operational risk and frees skilled engineers from repetitive maintenance work. For teams managing multi-vendor security environments at scale, purpose-built platforms that layer detection intelligence on top of general-purpose automation frameworks like Ansible represent a practical middle ground between building everything from scratch and relying solely on manual processes.

The Cloud Hiring Boom in India

As of late 2018, cloud computing was reshaping hiring priorities across Indian IT. A report by executive ed-tech platform Great Learning projected that more than one million new cloud computing jobs would be created in India by 2022, driven by accelerating enterprise adoption across both large and small organisations.

The same report noted that at that time approximately 1.7 million cloud roles worldwide remained unfilled, as technical recruiters struggled to find qualified candidates—a structural skills gap that made cloud expertise particularly valuable.

India’s Cloud Market Size and Growth

The Indian cloud computing market was valued at approximately $2.2 billion in 2018, with projections targeting $4 billion by 2020—an annual growth rate exceeding 30 percent. This growth was attributed to several converging factors:

• Rapid expansion of cloud-native services and managed offerings
• Growing enterprise confidence in the security of public and hybrid cloud environments
• Cost pressures pushing organisations away from on-premises data centres
• Demand for greater flexibility, scalability, and deployment speed

IT companies in India were increasingly building new solutions on cloud infrastructure rather than physical hardware, reflecting a broader global shift in how IT capacity is provisioned and consumed.

Cloud Spending Versus Traditional IT

According to the Great Learning report, companies in 2018 were investing at 4.5 times the rate of traditional IT spending when it came to cloud infrastructure, with that gap expected to widen further toward 2020. The report also noted a structural shift on the horizon: virtually all future IT expenditure was expected to target private, public, or hybrid cloud environments—making cloud literacy a baseline requirement for most IT roles, not just specialist ones.

Global Cloud Job Market

Globally, the report cited approximately 18 million cloud computing jobs at the time of publication, with the global median salary for cloud professionals exceeding $100,000 per year. Experienced specialists at the top of the market—cloud architects and senior engineers—commanded salaries as high as $280,000 per year in some markets.

More than two-thirds of global enterprises were reported to be planning, actively implementing, or already using cloud computing, and over half of businesses identified cloud as a high strategic priority.

Cloud Salaries in India (2018 Benchmarks)

The report provided a salary breakdown for cloud professionals in India at the time, illustrating the premium that cloud skills commanded over traditional IT roles:

For context, a traditional IT engineer with comparable entry-level experience was earning approximately ₹3–5 lakh per year at the same time—making cloud-specialised roles noticeably more lucrative from the start of a career.

The Cloud Skills Gap

One of the report’s key findings was that the skills gap in cloud is qualitatively different from historical IT talent shortages. Cloud computing demands a combination of skills that had not previously existed as a coherent discipline: distributed systems design, infrastructure-as-code, identity and access management, cost optimisation, and cloud-native security—capabilities that traditional IT training pipelines were not producing at scale.

This mismatch between enterprise demand and available talent was creating significant recruiting friction, with 1.7 million roles unfilled globally at the time of the report.

Context and Takeaways for DevOps Professionals

While this report was published in 2018 and its specific projections now refer to a period that has passed, the underlying dynamics it described have continued to play out. Cloud adoption has accelerated further, particularly following the 2020 shift to remote work, and the demand for engineers who understand cloud platforms, DevOps tooling, and infrastructure automation remains strong.

For engineers looking to position themselves for this market, the priorities identified in the report remain relevant: develop platform-specific expertise (AWS, Azure, GCP), invest in infrastructure-as-code skills (Terraform, Pulumi), and understand cloud-native security and cost governance.

Source: The Hindu BusinessLine, reporting on a Great Learning industry report, November 2018.

The Business Case for Agile Transformation

To maintain a competitive edge in today’s evolving marketplace, businesses must refocus their strategies around the customer—more efficiently prioritising work and continuously delivering value. This requires more than a process tweak. It demands a new operating model: one that empowers networks of small, cross-functional teams to collaborate, iterates rapidly on customer feedback, and gives leaders the clarity of vision to align an entire organisation around shared goals.

This kind of whole-business transformation is not optional. Customers expect products that get continuously better. They expect near-instant response times. They can—and do—switch to a competitor at the first sign of friction. Millennial customers, in particular, demand a seamless, integrated experience regardless of channel (Accenture, “Who Are the Millennial Shoppers? And What Do They Really Want?”). With product development cycles accelerating and new markets emerging faster than ever, old operating models simply cannot keep pace.

Agile is not a simple process change, nor a mere development methodology. Implemented correctly, it changes the very core of how a company thinks, acts, and collaborates.

Agile and DevOps Are Better Together

Expanded collaboration can begin close to the point where products are delivered to customers—specifically, when a company brings together Agile development and DevOps practices. Historically, engineering teams developed a product in isolation while operations teams deployed it in a separate silo. Code was thrown back and forth with little meaningful collaboration, slowing delivery and degrading quality.

Pairing Agile and DevOps removes that unnecessary barrier. DevOps reinforces Agile’s effectiveness through stronger teamwork and communication; Agile, in turn, gives DevOps the iterative structure it needs to consistently deliver on promises of speed and quality. Synchronising these teams enables easier communication, faster feedback loops, and ultimately better products delivered more quickly.

The business case for combining these practices is compelling. A global survey conducted by Coleman Parkes on behalf of CA Technologies found that 81% of senior business and IT executives agree that Agile practices and DevOps are critical to successful digital transformation (“Accelerating Velocity and Customer Value with Agile and DevOps”, CA Technologies). The same survey found that 88% and 87% of companies, respectively, have integrated Agile practices and DevOps into at least one area of their business—yet only 30% have scaled Agile beyond development, and only 34% have broadly implemented DevOps across IT.

According to the same CA Technologies research, organisations working with Agile and DevOps in tandem reported the ability to:

• Increase new business growth by 63%
• Increase operational efficiency by 41%
• Decrease IT-related costs by 65%, compared to Agile-only environments

The implication is clear: neither practice reaches its full potential in isolation. The real competitive advantage lies in combining them—and then scaling that combination beyond IT.

To Scale Agile, It Must Be a Culture Transformer

A growing number of businesses are moving beyond Agile as a purely technical practice and spreading its principles across marketing, finance, human resources, and even executive teams. An Agile organisation is one that can rapidly focus on its most important priorities and either get ahead of market shifts or respond to them before competitors do.

But this requires a genuine cultural evolution—and culture starts at the top. When Agile implementations stall or fail, it is often because developers have embraced Agile methods while those in leadership positions have not adjusted to the new mindset. Leaders who default to command-and-control management actively undermine Agile’s core premise: that the people closest to the customer are best positioned to sense change and respond to it.

A company will not change if its leaders are not flexible—and it will not sustain change if employees lack the mechanisms and psychological safety to change their behaviours. To drive genuine Agile adoption, leaders need to shift their role from directive authority to enabling coach. Practically, this means three things:

1. Be Transparent

In many command-and-control organisations, information is hoarded because knowledge is power. This directly conflicts with the Agile mentality. Agile leaders share context openly, trusting employees with the information they need to make good decisions. Transparency is not a cultural nicety—it is a prerequisite for effective self-organising teams.

2. Deepen Collaboration

Leaders must become facilitators of Agile transformation, actively connecting employees across teams and building collaborative culture. This means more than delegating tasks and stepping away. Leaders need to familiarise themselves with Agile tools, practices, and terminology—well enough to organise and nurture teamwork that drives shared objectives and reduces work in progress (WIP).

3. Identify Agile Ambassadors

Every organisation scaling Agile needs internal evangelists—people who teach, model, and encourage Agile behaviours and processes. Where internal expertise does not yet exist, Agile consultants and coaches can fill the gap. These ambassadors help create shared standards and best practices, focusing limited resources on the highest-value activities and giving teams a common language for improvement.

Agile Beyond IT: The Wider Business Opportunity

Originally developed in manufacturing and then adopted widely in software development, Agile methodology is now being applied to knowledge work across the enterprise. The core mechanism—visualising workflow, limiting work in progress, and continuously improving—applies to any consistent and repeatable process. Business functions that stand to benefit from Agile principles include:

• Human Resources: Iterative hiring cycles, continuous performance feedback instead of annual reviews, and rapid onboarding adjustments based on new-hire experience.
• Finance: Rolling forecasts and adaptive budgeting that respond to real business conditions rather than locking teams into annual plans.
• Marketing: Sprint-based campaign planning that allows rapid testing, measurement, and course-correction based on customer response data.

When employees are empowered to adapt and take calculated risks within an Agile framework, the benefits extend beyond productivity metrics. Engaged employees who own their work contribute more, better meet customer needs, and help their organisations stay ahead of the competition. The organisations that thrive in the next decade will be those that treat Agile not as an IT initiative, but as the operating system for the entire business.

Key Takeaways

• Agile is a whole-business transformation, not just a software development methodology.
• Combining Agile with DevOps produces measurably better outcomes than either practice alone, according to CA Technologies research.
• Scaling Agile requires cultural change, led from the top—leaders must model transparency, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Agile principles apply equally well to HR, finance, and marketing as they do to engineering teams.
• Agile ambassadors—internal or external—are essential to sustain cultural change at scale.

Change is a good thing in the long run, but change can really suck while you’re experiencing it.  Right now, six (6) macro phenomena are changing the practice of Information Technology.  These changes provide both opportunities for new solutions to enter the marketplace, but also threaten the status quo – and the leaders therein.  Whether you are responsible for the success of new technologies that offer revolutionary new capabilities or are tasked with positioning your existing technology in an evolving technology landscape, these six (6) macro changes are ones that every marketer should understand today.  Those six are:

1. Bi-Modal IT
2. Device Change
3. Smarter Software
4. Cloud
5. Asia
6. Business

#1 Macro Disruptor: Bi-Modal IT

What is Bi-Modal IT? –  Bi Modal IT occurs when a company’s IT team is supporting traditional client / server application development and deployment (mode 1)  while simultaneously embracing newer, faster approaches to application development and deployment like agile and DevOps and A/B testing on production applications.

What are the impacts of Bi-Modal IT?

Bi-Modal’s impact on IT is two-fold.  Mode 1 IT is what IT teams have been perfecting since Windows NT arrived on the scene – managing for high availability, uptime, reliability and compliance.  Mode 1 IT, however, is seen as inflexible, regimented and sometimes out of alignment with changing business needs.  The apex of Mode 1 thinking is ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) which sought to document and codify absolutely every IT process to such a degree that any person, stumbling upon the ITIL documentation could recreate the process from scratch.  This works great unless you want to do something that’s never been done before.  There’s a word for that – it’s called innovation – and it’s something that IT’s business counterparts really gravitate toward.  Innovation under mode 1 has a long planning horizon, a long delivery cycle, a long refresh cycle and represents much of what frustrates business users (especially those that went around IT and started using SaaS and personal mobile devices outside of the purview of IT who would have surely shut them down) when dealing with IT.  Mode 1’s infrastructure is designed for long, uninterrupted processing – with relatively few, well-documented and well-tested changes to production applications.

Mode 2 upsets the status quo of Mode 1 (extra credit to the marketer that can come up with names better than Mode 1 and Mode 2 for these IT organizational styles) by introducing the concepts of agile development – breaking large development projects into smaller, bite-sized pieces that can be delivered into production rapidly.  This rapid change dynamic – publishing application upgrades and modifications continuously, is not what the mode 1 data center infrastructure nor processes were designed for.  Mode 2 breaks Mode 1 infrastructures and processes because it demands rapid changes to product applications and flexibility.

Areas that suffer when Mode 2 enters the organization;

Gartner suggests that a high percentage of CIOs are not going to be able to adjust processes and infrastructure to accommodate mode 2 style IT need for agility.   There will be culture clashes when mode 2 teams meet mode 1 infrastructure constraints.  Indeed, much of the early adoption of ‘rogue’ infrastructure as a service (IaaS) was mode 2’s solution to being saddled with mode 1, inflexible or unavailable infrastructure.

For IT vendors, Bi-Modal IT is an opportunity.  For cloud providers and on-premise cloud management software vendors, Bi-Modal IT is an entry point of sale.  Organizations that are wrestling with Bi-Modal IT have a need to change their infrastructures to deliver more flexibility and agility to their customers.  Cloud is an obvious, but difficult way to address the changing requirements.  Indeed for 2015, we’ve seen an uptick in Platform as a Service (PaaS) adoption – a type of cloud computing that enables agile development and DevOps methodologies for the commercial development team.

Advice for Marketing

Stay relevant.  If you’re mode 1, go Bi-Modal.  Discuss and present your product in the context of an agile infrastructure and how you’re able to exist in that environment.  Understand that organizations on the journey to Bi-Modal IT are going to be re-evaluating their infrastructures.  You, as the incumbent, want to be a part of that discussion.  The key words for organizations that are embracing Mode 2 IT are DevOps, Agile, Flexible, ssrScrum and cloud (on or off premise).  Use these keywords to attract the attention of Mode 2 buyers.

If you’re mode 2, showing how (not telling) your product or service fits into and addresses compliance concerns may open up opportunities – especially at firms with more than 500 employees that are very often subject to compliance obligation.

#2 Macro Disruptor: Device Change

We are talking about the shift from fixed PCs to pervasive, wireless mobile computing using laptops, mobile phones, tablets, and wearables.   The evidence of this change is everywhere.  In our current IT Priorities survey, we found that organizations are as likely to have a mobile device management (MDM or EMM) project for 2015 as they were to have a windows desktop migration planned – to any version of windows 7, 8, or 10!  So, it’s safe to conclude that mobile devices have arrived and are mainstream to corporate IT.

In this case, it is TechTarget who has done the changing, and here is what we’ve done:

Relaunched searchmobilecomputing.com  to provide the latest news, analysis and how-to information about enterprise mobility management, mobile operating systems and application delivery. SearchMobileComputing.com  also expands its coverage into backend infrastructure and application development — increasingly important markets as mobility entrenches itself in the enterprise.

Advice to Marketing

“Consumerization” as a concept is dead and BYOD is no longer exceptional, but mainstream, so if your messaging platform is built upon these, you may want to re-think your strategy.  Think of both of these passed areas as ‘harbingers of change’ rather than actual change.  Organizations are now focusing on delivering applications to these platforms and integrating mobility into workflows to provide greater efficiencies.

#3 Macro Disruptor: Smarter Software

Times were that software ran atop hardware, and they were managed separately.  Today, software is getting smarter along two axes.  The first axis, smarter applications, can manage the hardware and software upon which they run.  In the case of Hadoop, the software is able to configure itself to manage clustering and failure recovery – two tasks that were the exclusive domain of hardware operations and performance management teams.   The second, and more dramatic axis is software defined hardware – like software defined networking (SDN) and software designed storage (SDS) – logical extensions of server virtualization that promise:

• Greater efficiency and flexibility in infrastructure architecture
• Ability to respond rapidly and automatically to changes in service demand

One other effect of software defined infrastructure is a diminishment in the importance of features and capabilities as a means of differentiating hardware products.  In a nutshell, smarter software allows for dumber, more commoditized hardware.

Advice to Marketing

Right now, 16% of the TechTarget audience has firm plans for software defined networking and 13% for software defined storage.  That means that these markets are not yet mainstream, but that they are set to “cross the chasm” in the next 12 to 18 months.  What this means for marketers is that when talking about software defined infrastructures, the vast majority of those conversations are going to be introductory / awareness focused.  Your content model should reflect that.

#4 Macro Disruptor: Cloud Computing – Compute Resources Available Over the Internet On-Demand and At Scale

Few topics have lived up to the hype quite so well as cloud computing.  You are living through this one.

Cloud computing changes the way that applications are written, tested, and deployed.  The net effect is to dampen demand for privately owned compute infrastructure, increase the demand for services related to implementation, and to introduce competition to a previously cloistered IT team. Now they are fighting for resources against external options.

Software as a Service is now the most popular way to acquire and deploy new technology – displacing on premise installations for the first time in 2015.

#5 Macro Disruptor: Asia

When it comes to embrace of new technology, the appetite in Asia is stronger than what we see in other regions of the world.  There are 10 topics that Asia is much more likely to be investing in than the rest of the world.  These include:

1. Platform as a service (cloud)
2. Cloud application development
3. Integrate cellular and wireless LAN
4. Implement a bring your own device program for smartphones or tablets
5. Mobile applications
6. Network management and monitoring
7. Internet of things
8. Cloud  backup
9. Software-defined networking
10. Big data

You can see that some of the most important strategic initiatives are much more likely to be happening in Asia right now than elsewhere in the world.  If you consider your technology ‘cutting edge’ or if it is a ‘first purchase in a new category’ (new capabilities, not a replacement for old technology) as many on this list are  – consider investing heavily in the Asian marketplace as your results will likely pay off earlier than they would with a North American or EMEA based approach.

#6 Macro Disruptor: Business

Business is not new, but the sentiment that business is more involved in IT is new.   Is this valid?

Here is what is true:

Business buyers can promote change / go around when IT is resistant.  We saw this in the early days of SaaS cloud computing and mobility in the form of BYOD.  Business professionals are most involved in IT decisions that are:

1. The first purchase in a category
2. Technology they use directly – end user facing applications.
3. SaaS for a business function (marketing & sales, mostly) that doesn’t need to integrate into the existing infrastructure
4. In organizations that have lower concerns regarding compliance

Business people are almost always at the forefront of new technology. One measure of the technology hype cycle is whether business people are talking about it….  If they’re talking about it, it’s still in hype. This phenomenon has been well documented by Gartner and others. The true utility and value of a new technology is after the business people have gone through the trough of disillusionment and technical teams are implementing and extracting business value from the technology.

The takeaway here is that you will get early hits and interest in new technology from business people.  To turn those early hits into purchase reality and long term customer retention – an essential metric for the SaaS licensing model – you must also market to, sell to and service the IT team that is actually responsible for the successful implementation, integration, and management of the products that their teams use every day.

Navigating Transformation

We are living through yet another transformation –  cloud, mobile, smarter software, Bi-Modal IT, Asia’s rise are all factors.  To my recollection change at this scale and across many axes is unprecedented.  Many dominant firms from the last generation will not make it to the next generation.  Be on the lookout for new challengers and stay flexible.  While your business is changing, so is ours – specifically to meet the needs of today’s marketer.  By taking leadership as an industry data provider, and with adjustments to our websites and overall footprint, TechTarget is staying ahead of the curve to do the hard work of delivering  the right buying audience at the right time to our clients. And we can help you too.

A Structural Shift in IT Hiring

India’s information technology (IT) services industry was undergoing one of its most significant hiring transformations in nearly a decade. Rather than recruiting engineers for traditional application development and maintenance work, firms were actively seeking candidates with expertise in cloud computing, analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT)—the areas where enterprise clients were increasingly directing their budgets.

The shift reflects a broader industry reality: clients that once signed multi-million dollar, multi-year contracts for bespoke software builds are now favoring iterative, smaller-scale digital engagements. That means IT vendors need engineers who can advise and co-create alongside clients rather than simply execute against a fixed specification—a fundamentally different working model.

Hiring Numbers and Industry Expectations

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) projected that the Indian IT sector would hire approximately 150,000 people in 2017. Among the major players:

• Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) announced plans to recruit more than 20,000 engineers.
• Infosys similarly indicated it would bring on more than 20,000 new hires.
• Wipro, HCL Technologies, and Tech Mahindra did not publicly disclose specific hiring targets at the time.

An Infosys spokesperson summarized the changing philosophy succinctly: “The IT industry is surely witnessing a change in hiring patterns with unconventional, high-value graduates with differential skills likely to be more attractive.”

Reskilling at Scale: The Bigger Challenge

New hiring alone cannot close the skills gap. The Indian IT industry employed approximately 3.9 million people at the time, and firms recognized that reskilling close to half of that workforce in emerging technologies was just as important as recruiting fresh graduates.

Nasscom partnered with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on a structured program designed to reskill between 1.5 and 2 million employees across the sector over five years. The joint initiative analyzed job postings to identify eight emerging technology domains and 55 distinct job profiles linked to those domains—providing a concrete framework for curriculum development and talent planning.

Nasscom Senior Vice-President Sangeeta Gupta described the next phase of the program: “We will enable our member companies to reskill more people and curate courses depending on the member company’s demand. We will play the role of curated aggregator and identify courses on digital technologies from global institutions such as Udacity, Stanford University, etc.”

Why Traditional Colleges Are Not Enough

Industry analysts pointed out a critical bottleneck: academic institutions had not yet updated their curricula or lab infrastructure to match enterprise demand for cloud-native development, robotic process automation (RPA), or AI engineering.

Rajesh Gupta, Partner at ISG (a technology research and advisory firm), explained the dependency: “Colleges do not have the right training facilities as of now. Companies have to skill their employees in cloud computing or robotic process automation scripting. Once the platforms being created by IT firms on these new technologies are mature, they can help in reskilling in a big way.”

Nasscom President R. Chandrasekhar echoed the urgency: “While reskilling is imperative, there is a clear shortage of talent in skills, both in India and globally. But it is hard to give a number.”

How Firms Are Sourcing Specialized Talent

Companies are experimenting with non-traditional recruitment channels to identify candidates with niche technical skills before they graduate. TCS launched a platform called Campus Commune, which engages engineering and science students through technical challenges and contests. Roughly one-tenth of TCS’s specialized campus recruitment for niche skills flowed through this platform. Competitions hosted on Campus Commune included:

• CodeVita – a programming contest
• TESTimony – a testing-focused challenge
• Enginx – an engineering problem-solving event
• Hackquest – a hackathon-style competition

These contest-based pipelines allow firms to assess practical engineering ability rather than relying solely on academic credentials—an important distinction when the required skills are too new to appear on any standard university transcript.

Key Technology Areas Driving Demand

According to Nasscom’s analysis at the time, the technology domains generating the strongest hiring and reskilling demand included:

• Cloud computing – migrating workloads from on-premise infrastructure to public, private, or hybrid cloud environments
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning – building predictive models and automating decision-making
• Big data and analytics – processing and deriving insight from large, varied datasets
• Internet of Things (IoT) – connecting and managing distributed physical devices
• Digital experience / UX engineering – designing applications optimized for mobile and web interfaces
• Robotic process automation (RPA) – scripting bots to handle repetitive business processes

What This Means for Engineers Today

While this reporting dates from 2017, the underlying dynamics it describes have only accelerated. The emphasis on cloud-native skills, AI/ML engineering, and data analytics has grown considerably in the years since. Engineers working in or entering the IT services industry should treat continuous learning in these domains as a professional baseline, not a differentiator.

For organizations, the lesson from this period is equally durable: hiring alone cannot sustain a skills transformation at the scale the industry requires. Structured internal reskilling programs, partnerships with online learning platforms, and contest-based talent identification are all components of a sustainable talent strategy.

VMware updates NSX

VMware has updated its NSX network virtualization platform with two new releases, VMware NSX for vSphere 6.3 and VMware NSX-T 1.1. NSX for vSphere features enhanced security, extension of a unified virtual network to remote datacentres, and better support for vCloud Director. NSX-T adds support for VMware Photon Platform, an enterprise cloud-native infrastructure platform, expanded support for KVM distributions from Canonical and Red Hat, updated support for OpenStack Newton and Mikata, and access to a beta program in container networking and security for applications frameworks supporting the Container Network Interface (CNI) project. Both are available now.

Oracle updates cloud pricing

The Register reports that Oracle’s updated cloud licensing effectively doubles the price of the product on Amazon Web Services (AWS). It notes, “Oracle’s new cloud licensing policy says an AWS vCPU is now treated as a full core if hyperthreading is not enabled. A user renting two AWS vCPUS therefore needs to pay full freight for both, effectively doubling the number of Oracle licences required to run it inside AWS. And therefore doubling the cost as well. The new policy also says: ‘When counting Oracle Processor license requirements in Authorized Cloud Environments, the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table is not applicable.’ That table says Xeon cores count as half a licence. Making the table inapplicable to the cloud again doubles the licence count required.” The Register says Oracle has not yet stated whether existing customers will be grandfathered, or how their agreements will be affected.

Solaris shifts to continuous delivery

In the wake of concerns that Oracle was killing its Solaris operating system after it removed Solaris 12 from its roadmap, the company has published a blog explaining its new strategy. It said that it is now using a continuous delivery model with more frequent updates to deliver patches and new features, rather than producing major releases. It has also extended the Oracle Solaris 11 and Oracle Solaris Cluster 4 Premier and Extended Support lifespans to January 2031 and January 2034, respectively. The company said, “By moving to a continuous delivery model based on Oracle Solaris 11, customers will have a seamless update experience to better fit their move to agile deployment models.”

Salesforce acquires Sequence

Salesforce has acquired 11 year old user experience design firm Sequence, whose customers include companies like Best Buy, Chipotle, and Apple. Sequence offers a range of services, including strategy, research, brand communication, design, development, and user interface design, prototyping, and usability testing. The Sequence blog announcing the acquisition says that team will “enhance Salesforce’s experience design capabilities, helping companies use the power of design to better connect with their customers in entirely new ways.” The deal closed on February 1, and financial terms were not disclosed.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise acquires Niara

HPE has announced that it has acquired user and entity behavioural analytics (UEBA) firm Niara. Niara’s technology will be used within HPE Aruba to enhance its ClearPass network security portfolio for wired and wireless networks. Niara’s software automates detection of attacks and anomalous behaviours, and integrates with the ClearPass network security platform so offending devices can be quickly dealt with. Terms of the deal were not announced.

Google announces additional Microsoft support on Cloud Platform

Google has announced that it is now providing pre-configured images for Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise and Windows Server Core on its Google Cloud Platform, as well as offering support for SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups and persistent disk snapshots integrated with Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows Server. Customers can choose to launch Compute Engine VMs with SQL Server Enterprise Edition and Windows Server pre-installed and pay by the minute for the licenses, or bring their own SQL Server licenses.