Chibisov Vladimir

Chibisov Vladimir

Biography

2011: CNews Interview

Vladimir Chibisov is the CIO of Eurochem, Russia's largest producer of mineral fertilizers. In its work, the company daily faces the need for centralized processing of large amounts of data coming from numerous Russian and foreign divisions. The BI system developed at the company allowed to collect data from various sources and present them in visual form, which allowed Eurochem to become a finalist of the Gartner BI Excellence Award in March 2010. Today Eurochem sees cloud computing as a promising environment for the development of its own BI and ERP systems. Next year, Eurochem plans to consider the option of abandoning its own computing power and renting it from its service provider IaaS. (Interview with CNews)

CNews: There is a perception that cloud computing will revolutionize business intelligence in the near future, giving even small companies the ability to process massive amounts of data. How much do you agree with that?

Vladimir Chibisov: I agree completely. I believe that in the near future, technology will really move in this direction, and this will be a winning movement.

For example, in our company, the use of cloud computing in the creation of BI systems is fully supported by management, including the CEO, who has gone all the way: from rejection and doubt to full support. Thus, real business representatives, who, in fact, act as the main customer for corporate BI and ERP systems, already share our ideas. Of course, I made a lot of efforts to convince the business leadership, but they are difficult to move on adventures, and in many ways their position is based on independent calculations and reflections.

All analytics came to us from the "cloud." The platform itself is organized according to the service model. In addition, we use modern hardware solutions: part of the data is stored on solid-state memory, part - on traditional disk arrays. It is very likely that we will remove our own servers from operation, and in the future we will lease capacity from third-party suppliers. Now our servers are already 6 years old, and although their capacity is still enough, in the near future they will have to be removed from operation. We have already held several meetings with Oracle on this topic.

CNews: Describe in a nutshell the functionality of the systems you developed.

Vladimir Chibisov: We have created a single source of truth. All the data that we use in our company comes from this system, which, in fact, is already not even an ERP or a BI system, but an entire electronic corporation. In it, people note all the source data that they have, which is necessary for transactions and production - and the end users participating in the processes receive the same data. Separate Excel files are a thing of the past - we have a single "Excel" with the functionality of the database, from where everyone gets information. And it does not matter where this data is located, since the system allows all calculations where it is needed to use this data in a single way.

In addition, there is data that is extracted from Oracle E-Business Suite, as well as from other supported systems. The data has its own URL, and data close in meaning is located next door. The system stores data not only as a table, but also as points of a single addressable data space. In fact, we have created our own WWW data web, where data addressing is associated with its significance, security characteristics. Basically, we created a "cloud."

It turns out a big benefit: you do not need to write requests, contact the database when you need to consolidate. The data already has specific indexing, they are instantly summed up in the right directions - in fact, they are initially adapted to analytics.

CNews: How is this data presented to users?

Vladimir Chibisov: The collected data are presented in a visual way in thematic storefronts: there are treasury, production, personnel, administrative and financial storefronts. The data comes from robotic programs that find, systematize and place the data in the system with different frequencies: some do it once a day, others six times a day. We have a window designer, as well as an automatic designer of tags, indexes, which is used when addressing data and consolidating it.

As a result, we can quickly analyze, for example, what is the cost of a specific batch of products and what raw materials were used in the manufacture of this batch. It is not so easy to disassemble all this without an analytical system.

CNews: How interesting is the cloud systems of the PaaS segment for your company?

Vladimir Chibisov: If we talk about public cloud services in general, then we still make a similar own service, since we already have a good platform with our own API for application development. We studied the Google App Engine and got acquainted with the Amazon EC2 and S3 offers, but in the end we decided that we would create our own service. In fact, we are creating a private "cloud" of the PaaS class, because we decided that we could take more advantage of our own solution.

CNews: How ready is your company to host your own applications on third-party cloud vendor sites? And what conditions should a cloud vendor meet?

Vladimir Chibisov: Speaking bluntly, for us, in general, the most important thing is technological capabilities. If there are no restrictions on technological capabilities and we can feel a sense of confidence, then we are ready to post data on someone else's site. We do not make a fetish out of security issues, as we imagine the security methods that are being applied now and can be applied in the "cloud." That is, some specific problems are associated with cloud computing, but there are advantages that justify their implementation. The price of cloud systems is understandable - and it will not be extortionate. The level of security is clear - and there is no reason to intimidate yourself. The decisive criteria are the quality of services and their volume. Next year, we will seriously consider the proposals of public cloud infrastructure providers and will probably base our decision on these factors.

CNews: When they talk about the use of cloud computing in Russia, they often complain about low bandwidth of Internet channels and a poor legislative environment. How tangible are these obstacles to your business?

Vladimir Chibisov: There really are problems here. When the bandwidth of the Internet channel becomes high, encryption issues become more acute. We try as soon as we can fit into the bandwidth of the channels and try to use those protections that are not prohibited. That is, there are still some opportunities for using technologies, although, of course, the restrictions are serious.

So, at first we used channels with a bandwidth of 2 Mbps, then we needed to switch to 10 Mbps. And then there was a problem - how to close these channels? We use some technologies that have silent permission. Thank God that so far there is such a permission, but tomorrow it may not be, and then we will simply spread our hands helpless, because we will not know how to encrypt our traffic. Creating tools that manage to encrypt such flows is very problematic. There are no domestic funds, and imported ones can be banned at any time, and then it will not be clear what to do. And here all economic feasibility is tied to the fact that there will be such interaction. Therefore, we are monitoring the situation with tension - we are interested in it, and we would like technologies not to suffer.

CNews: What is the reason for your need for such a high speed?

Vladimir Chibisov: Our servers are located in Moscow, while enterprises from all regions of Russia are connected to them: from the Murmansk and Leningrad regions to the Stavropol and Krasnodar territories. In addition, units are connected in Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Switzerland, Cyprus, Greece and Holland. In total, we process 700 thousand nomenclature items, 150 thousand contracts every day. These are very large volumes, we have completely moved to the virtual space and completely centralized access to data. Now these data are processed in Moscow, but, in fact, the system no longer matters where they are physically. We need a connection at a speed of 10 Mbps with each of the facilities, because the facilities are huge enterprises of 5-6 thousand people with complex processes in the field of production, logistics and sales. In addition, new facilities are being built: mining and processing plants are being created, and project information is transmitted via Internet channels. And when meetings are held, large amounts of visual information are transmitted through the same channels in real time.

When it is necessary to organize delivery, several manufacturers combine goods, jointly transport them in railway trains, and load them into ports. In parallel with this there are tenders, our traders work in Switzerland and in America. The company already lives in a big world, and we are not able to abandon the processing of large amounts of data.

In this case, we have nothing to hide from the regulator: from the point of view of information security, we solve only typical problems, but we cannot leave the information unclosed. But some technical obstacles can still be quite difficult for us to overcome, and the existing restrictive measures - they largely slow down business. We cannot sacrifice the technology that we have all the processes tied to, and we need the freedom to make decisions.

CNews: How important is it for your company to replace capital costs with operating expenses in the transition to cloud computing?

Vladimir Chibisov: For us, in general, not so much economic aspects are important as the opportunity to get a technological platform suitable for launching many solutions. For example, now we have to solve tasks that require high performance on one platform, and tasks that require long-term storage on another. We would like not to organize the platform, but to get a platform that would solve our problems itself. We would like to achieve technological advantages so that someone takes care of our calculations, and so that we do not have to do this ourselves. When professionals provide us with a specialized platform on which computing goes 10 times faster - this is a completely different result.

CNews: And how significant are the savings for you on personnel who are busy solving non-core IT problems?

Vladimir Chibisov: Of course, it would be possible to reduce non-core specialists who will not be needed, but for us this is not so relevant, since they will find their application in other tasks, and you will not save a lot here. For us, the main thing is a professional solution that allows you to squeeze everything you can out of systems. We have to solve a lot of difficult and technically interesting problems, and we perceive someone else's experience with interest: for example, how Twitter is implemented, how data is organized on Facebook. We want to transfer many solutions of modern Internet companies to the business area. We have the same problems that Google and Twitter are facing: a lot of data, frame-like storage, and so on. We have not just a bare system with several database tables, but a full information life. And to lead this life, we need full-fledged search engines, parallel calculations, huge databases, information that is structured and provided to the user in the right form.

CNews: Which companies might be most interested in cloud computing today, do you think?

Vladimir Chibisov: Cloud computing will be needed by such companies that are in need of modern technologies. If everything is in a closed perimeter, then such technologies are not needed. And when you imagine that the same thing happens in corporate resources as on the Internet, when resources are distributed by country and object, then corporate computing becomes cloud, and in this case you do not want to tie to specific servers. For us, cloud computing is a step towards large-network technologies needed at this stage of the company's informatization. These technologies allow us to have complete freedom: in data - so that they fall into our information space from everywhere, in hardware, and in the platform.

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