Enterprise Technology

Real Estate, Gold & Enterprise IT investments!

2012-01-24T22:54:00.000-08:00

Sounds like a Bollywood film title?. Well, it was not intentional.

Wanted to enlist the corporate IT trends for 2012 based on social-economic trends that we see in the market. Irrespective of the industry, the larger global trends have started to influence us quite a lot in the last few years. And I believe its going to remain the new normal in coming years as well.

From socio-economic trends perspective, What do we see out in the World?. What is so abundant that can influence our thoughts/behaviors? To name a few:

1. Geo-Political Risks
2. Economic Uncertainity
3. Indecisiveness
4. Neuro-Diversity of Global Population. Suddently, you see a surge of talent across the world, enabled by Technology.
5. Plenty of free Information
6. Cash (Yes. Contrary to the common belief, due to indecisiveness, lots of companies are sitting on huge cash)
7. Sky-rocketing Inflation
8. Increase in Consumables spending (against capital investments) - such as Mobile/Travel/Hospitality/Vacation - typically one-off expenses.
   (Live for the day, anyway nobody knows whats going to happen in the long-term attitude)

How do these factors influence our investments, in General?. What do we seek?. The more uncertainity pervails, the more demand for certainity and stable investments. Purely because of the reason that Certainity/Stability are scarce in the new normal. Based on Economics, Anything that is scarce and in demand is likely to appreciate. In the last few months, Gold as an investment instrument has reached record prices across the world. Real-Estate, atleast in Emerging Regions are reaching levels that were unheard of, in combination with Inflation.

What else is in more demand?. I can name a few that are in demand, but nacessarily the investment instruments per se.

1. Leadership with Vision/Courage/Decisiveness
2. Clarity, Rationale & Judgement - side-effect of Information overload
3. Capital Investments
4. Legal Infrastructure - what is right/wrong - neuro-diversity among people leads to ongoing conflicts/difficulty in consensus building
5. Entrepreneural culture
6. Top Talent that can take risks & deliver results
7. Communal harmony
8. Personal & Familiy Time

Contrary to vendor sales pitches that talk about 'Agility in Business' or 'Business Transformation', People in General seek stability/certainity when it comes to their investments. In my view, Instruments that have delivered good, guaranteed returns in the past, that can be liquidated faster, that appreciates, that is stable - will be more in demand.

Now, with this surplus and demand as the background, What kind of Technology investments that corporate IT would make in 2012 or next couple of years?

I would list the following

1. Managed VAS - mobile services
   Mobility is big time trend right now. It has influence on People's personal lives, professional lives and it would call for a significant leverage from Corporate IT. Corporate IT has so far hung up only on Mobile Applications. However, there is lot more mobility can deliver, in addition to applications.
   PwC has recently forecasted that by 2015, Mobile VAS market in India is going to grow to INR 55, 000 Crores, that is USD 10+ billions.
2. Vendors turning to Partners
   Lack of capital investments coupled with indecisivenss would delay signing contracts worth millions of dollars. If the investment is too big, the purchase cycle just gets longer and longer.
   If its too small, Companies are going to ask the vendor to sponsor for free. That's the fact!. Its happening across the value chain!. Why dont u do this for free?. This requires, the product/service vendors to figure out a new business model that would be profitable in the long-run.

3. Business/Go-to-Market Technology offerings
   Demand for Entrepreneurship and New Business Models/Products/Services will encourage a few to invest in new product initiatives. Here, the companies would expect a credible partner who can share risks/profits together in the respective vertical. This could be Corporate IT as well.

4. Security/Legal/VPN Technologies
   Demand for security, legal technologies that would help in managing Governance, Risk and Compliance would sky rocket like never before. The reason being that Corporates wants to be play defensive.

5. Investments in Hiring Technologies
   Rather than investing in solutions that promise improving employee engagement that is hard to achieve, companies would invest smartly in Talent Sourcing/Leveraging new technologies in this space.

6. Investments in Digital Marketing / Market Research
   Individuals/Companies would need to make themselves heard all the time using various channels that are available.    Especially, if they are serving in B2C space or services industry. Demand for innovative technology deployments in this space will continue to grow

7. Data processing Technologies delivered as Services/in Cloud
   Big Data definitely has a huge potential considering the current trend. But, Investing in Big Infrastructure may not be a good idea, atleast to start with. If someone delivers Data Services / Data Analytics from the Cloud, it's a hit!.

8. Technologies/Startups in Travel/Hospitality & Inter-personal Communication will take-off big time.

9. Consumer Technologies - Gaming/Mobile/Social Media/ Infotainment/NUI - again a no-brainer.
   Companies will also pilot some of these technologies in their enterprise products/services.

10. Technologies that can visibily save costs - Virtualization, Platform Upgrade & Private/Public Clouds

Comments/Inputs most welcome!

Klout Computing!

2011-11-25T00:48:00.001-08:00

Yes. This is not about Cloud Computing. Post the viral adoption of social networks, analytics has picked up big time in recent months. The end result - plethora of online services available to perform analytics on social network data.

I tried Klout and Mirror Me!. Would suggest not to try those without reading further!.

While people in real world aspire for coveted titles and powerful positions, in the virtual world, the same people aspire for 'Influence'. Influence is about a person's ability to drive action in others (without power). The influential ability is called 'Clout' and Gaining this Clout is gaining lot more prominence in virtual world these days!.

A decade ago, Google tried to rank 'pages' based on their popularity. But today,the algorithms are
trying to rank the actual 'people' to assess their popularity and influence.

Klout is one such company that connects to all social network sites to evaluate your activity and come out with your Klout metric.It reports the metric in the scale of 1-100. If you are measured in the range of 70s or so, You are really really influential in the online world.

This leads to several interesting, but controversial questions:

1. Am afraid we are moving towards a celebrity culture than an inclusive one. People are literally going to compete to score and maintain a higher Klout to achieve their goals in "real" lives.

2. People who are really busy and adding value to their stakeholders may not find time to tweet/talk or network in virtual world. This doesn't mean that those people do not have enough Klout. Klout is all about Online Clout and nothing more.

3. This trend also implicitly expects that people in online world to be expressive, a post here, a tweet there, a post now, a photo later, etc. This again can not be expected from broad range of people, especially people who are conservative/introverts. This doesn't mean they do not have Clout.

4. Most of the content floating around in social networks are trivia. What is the significant business value one can get by analyzing this data?

5. No Doubt, its a competitive arsenal for Marketing. Gaining insights on current trends & influencing the influencers will greatly enhance the marketability of a product/service. Am amazed by the capabilities of one such tool - Data Sift. I was discussing with my ex-Colleague Paramesh that next US President election could be largely influenced by DataSift kind of tools.

6. Privacy - To compute your Klout score, the site will ask you the permission to scan your online activities even when you have not logged on. And this applies to a number of sites that you are associated with. While giving permission is a click away, revoking them may not be straightforward/easy.

7. Algorithms - What is the basis for computing the Klout? There could be various ways of measuring Clout depending on the weightage given to the nature of activities online.

8. People's persona cannot be measured only by their social network activities. Social Network is a public place where people are expected to follow certain etiquette. And People behave according to the implicit rules/norms to get associated with the larger group. However, this behavior generally arises out of their aspiration or the need for 'Personal Branding' and may not be based on what they truly are. Measuring a person's Clout purely based on their social network activity may be skewed.

9. Quantity scores more than Quality. If you have more connections in the network, you have higher chances of gaining more Clout than others.

So ,Beware of 'Klout Computing'!

Seven Billionth Baby and Corporate Dashboards!

2011-11-08T09:28:00.000-08:00

Few days ago, Oct 31st to be precise, the news of seven billionth baby was creating lot of buzz in the media.

While I was not keen to understand the census, I was really curious to know the math behind this count. I checked with my ex-colleague and Datawarehousing/Business Intelligence Specialist Paramesh on how this could have been possible? There is every possibility that this number could be inaccuarate because of the sheer size of the canvas. In this case, the canvas is the whole world.

We all know the practical challenges in aggregating data within a company?. And How do they do it across the globe?

Thanks to Paramesh, Today he reverted with an exact article that talks about the same challenge. It was a surprising coincidence! The article talks about - How did they count? How did they comeup with that number - 7 Billion - on that specific day?

The fact of the matter is United Nations don't know. The announcement was meant to be symbolic than to be precise. UN has confirmed there is no way it can predict at which minute of the day - 31st Oct - the 7 billionth baby was born in the world.

Howere, it is not a random number dropped just out of the hat. There is a process/method that U.N. has followed to comeup with that projection. United Nations collect country wise population data every five years and based on the system generated models, the date has been picked up at Oct 31. There is a 2% margin of error expected in the global tally, which in this case, could be huge in terms of census and the time period!

I see the corporate dashboards(BI/Reports) that take data from individual line-of-businesses within a company can take a lesson or two from this news. I have tried to list few of them:

1. There is a process and system in which the sub-system (countries) provide data to the main system (United Nations). So, Its not just about technology. We will need a process and method to coordinate the data aggregation. The systems/applications and runtime infrastructure have to implement the processes and contracts to ensure aggregation.
2. People are aware of the percentage of error and at peace with Good Enough BI. In lighter vein, What you sow is what you reap!. :-) Awareness on Data Quality and Incremental expectations are the key to successful BI implementations!
3. The focus is more on the ways in which data can be leveraged for analysis/insights and less on the precision. Often People debate about the trees that they forget to see the forests!. I have seen executive dashboards often spark controversies around numbers that the real issues get pushed to back seat!.
4. There is a model in place to predict the growth. Yes, finally BI solutions should not endup as concrete/one-off implementations. The definition of formal models that abstract the concepts in respective verticals hold the key for extensibility of the solutions.

Finally, As any BI implementation would invite disputes, Here is somebody in Asia pacific disputing that the whole seven billionth baby announcement from UN was stage managed!. :-). Again, its not just about numbers and technology! :-)

Surface takes precedence over Structure!

2011-11-08T03:24:00.000-08:00

One of the prominent consequences of Apple iPhone phenomenon is the shift in technology buyers' focus towards Industrial Design and User Experience. This trend has caught up with every aspect of Technology - be it Consumer Technology or Enterprise Technology.

Whatsoever be the application of Technology, Consumers have started to ask - Does it activate my senses beyond just being passive and functional? - Evokes positive / Feel good emotions when you use the product, Its simple and doesn't make you think, It is asthetically designed in every little detail that I feel proud about it and talk to my social/professional circle about the technology?. Aesthatics/Meticulous design also implicitly states that the supplier has taken every effort to produce a great product.

Last but not the least, Apple also demonstrated outstanding marketing when it launched all its new generation devices. Remember, Palm has been the innovative company both in touch phones and App ecosystem long ago. Despite that fact, people queued up in hours to buy iPhones.

How does this factor influence the Architecture practice - especially Enterprise Architecture.

I should say quite a lot. It has generated a significant inequality in terms of IT investments. Earlier, the mandate to enterprise architecture was 'Show me the money'. We filled the gap with Business cases.Today, its not just 'Show me the money' but 'Show me how cool it is/Show me how it works in when it comes alive'. If a strategic initiative doesn't meet either of the criterion, its doomed for failure.

Traditionally, be it Software Architecture or Enterprise IT Architecture focused all their energies toward setting standards/specifications towards the structure of the system. The structure usually signify the skeletal framework of the system (be it a single application or the entire Enterprise IT) that defines the internal organization of the components and their evolution.

Software/Enterprise IT Architecture has it roots from Software Engineering and hence it focused more on Technology and its Quality of Service. Structure of the systems are implicit characteristics and they can be only measured by overt mechanisms like Human X-Rays.

I do want to mention the fact that these X-Ray are gaining prominence in the Software Architecture space in the last couple of years.I have personally used tools like Sonar Technical Debt that can scan the software codebase and report the health of internal structure. Result - its not just developers, the management stakeholders were able to appreciate the metrics.

The implicit structures don't manifest themselves upfront and it requires a lot of effort to understand and appreciate the Architecture. And that becomes a biggest challenge for Architecture adoption in this time-starved generation.

The challenge facing practising Enterprise Architects is - How do we make Enterprise Architecture visibly manifest its great qualities?

We have all banked upon Architecture Tools, Excels, PowerPoints Visios and Analytics/Metrics to backup. Going forward, all these tools are definitely required. However, We need a new breed of tools/techniques that takes lessons from Industrial Design and User Experience and make Enterprise Architect successful and much more productive!

The new Tools/Techniques could include - Visual Models for industry verticals, Simulations, Animated Models & Gamification. All these are interactive techniques that could help in powerful storyboarding of the strategic initiatives.

The point is - What you see on the surface makes the first impression and sometimes it takes the precedence over the internal structure of the system. The challenge is to keep the balance between both and not compromising either of the aspect. While too much of focus on surface will end up in a frothy/weak product,too much of structural focus will end up having no takers.

Have been reading 'Experience Economy' and its quite interesting though the book was written few years ago, the paradigm is more relevant in today's times than ever.

The takeaway from this book resonates with this post - Every business is turning to be an experience/show business. Hence ability to put up a good show in orchestrating various themes/elements is the key towards creating highly profitable/growing businesses.

In my view, this message applies to corporate workforce as well - Every profesison within the corporate workforce need to not only deliver but innovatively market its offerings to its stakeholders to survive and grow!

Just Enough Business Intelligence!

2011-10-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

This post is a culmination of several aspects that I have been either reading/observing such as:

1. The book titled "The Two second advantage" - a Book by Vivek Ranadive and Kevin Maney
2. Another reputed book "Flow" - by Psychologist Mihaly. Interestingly, the Flow concepts are referred in the first book - The Two Second Advantage as well.
3. An interesting, but offensive post titled "Kill Your Datawarehouse" by Splunk. I evaluated Splunk in my previous organization and I should say its a radical departure from traditional data storage Architectures.
4. Big Data and its implications on the Enterprise.

Traditionally, DW/BI systems have been expensive, untimely and far from realizing business benefits!. In the traditional RDBMS world of DW/BI architectures, Predictive Analytics is being touted as the next big thing!. But, the reality in Enterprise IT has been the reverse. Have blogged about this state of BI in Enterprise IT few months ago.

Coupled with Big Data, Information Overload is becoming the biggest challenge being faced by Enterprises today. No amount of computational advances in the form of Cloud/Grid is going to help solve the information overload issue. It is not the question of computation, but the ability to "qualify" and "condense" the big data to formulate high-level abstract models that can be processed quickly is the key. The Two Second Advantage book calls this process as "Chunking". It further adds that chunking is the method that Human Brain uses to absorb information, learns and make the knowledge as instrinsic part of the consciousness so that it becomes a natural activity for repeated applications. (e.g. Car Driving). Learned in this way, Human brain becomes specialized, learns the ability to be reflexive/adaptive and gains the ability to predict the next few steps. And that's the key!. Only few steps not too far!

The book tries to create a link between computational science and Neuro science. It claims the next generation of Business Intelligence does not lie in long predictive analytics, but predicting just-enough, next set of actions.

For example:

1. Who is the next best talent that we can hire from market?
2. What is the in-houst best talent that is subject to attrition risks?
3. Who are the customers/partners that could default in payments?
4. Who are the promising prospects that would convert to customers?
5. What would the customer buy next?

These new business requirements call for new capabilities such as ability to to scan data from multiple sources - structured/unstructured, Internal/External, ability to condense large amount of data into abstract models, drill-down to details on demand, ability to query and navigate the data networks in quick cycles, and finally the ability to predict just enough next few actions.

This doesn't mean we will dump our traditional DW/BI systems. But, We need to be certainly prepared for hybrid new architectures that would blend the conventional data stores with new age data formats!

Would like to conclude this post with another correlation that I recently read - a poem by former Prime Minster of India VP Singh. He is a versatile personality and one of his skills is in poetry. In his poem on Astrology, the Astrologer talks about Singh's fortunes and challenges in the future, VP singh politely asks the astrologer "What is the dream that I would get in tonight's sleep?". Needless to say Astrologer goes speechless! :-)

Any predictions - What is the next topic that I would blog about?

I know it! :-). If you can predict, I promise to compliment you in my next post.

Writing Apps is Wrong!

2011-09-27T04:27:00.000-07:00

Yes, this is what ZDNet Blogger Brian Sommer says!. In the post, Brian argues that 'Applications' are wrong perspective to have in todays' times. He adds businesses today don't want apps. Instead they need 'capabilities' to serve different kinds of information to a variety of users in different kind of devices.

Do I agree?. Partly, Yes - to the point that we need a different paradigm to deliver business capabilities.

Let's deep dive a little from this viewpoint.

Adding to Brian's message, my thoughts on Apps follow:

- Applications are old school of thinking.

They are good for accounting/transactional systems but not suitable for unstructured /

dynamic business scenarios.
- They are highly introverted & technical!. [No offense to Introversion! :-) ]
It simply means Apps think about themselves, their structure & data exchange rather than

connectivity to end users and their context.

- Applications are fragmented. Users need to hop-on and hop-off between applications to

accomplish tasks/processes. This gives a disjointed experience in terms of security,

profiling, etc.

- Applications are limited in their orientations - either processes or data.
[Today, we have lot more dimensions to express - social, multi-media, visual, spatial]

Despite new ages capabilities brought by mobile internet devices, We still keep developing applications and deliver in old ways. In fact, We are facing the problem of plenty where there are hundreds/thousands of apps. And We need another new range of apps called 'Helpers' which can assist in navigating the apps market place. (Guided Search).

What is the alternative?

Brian suggests delivering context-specific, Role-based, "smart" information to mobile internet devices through a common UI. He claims such a delivery would empower the end-users by enhancing their "business capabilities". Sounds convincing?. While I agree to the perspective that Apps are old-school, I dont quite agree 'Capabilities' are the way ahead. IMHO, Applications have always been capability enhancers to end users. Its just that they were not smart.

Where do I differ?

In some way, Brian's suggestion of - context-specific, role-based, common UI - reminds me another old school paradigm called 'Portals'. We all had portals in in the past, in the Web world. We have incarnations, in the mobile world as well. And there are quite a few Mobile Portal offerings that aggregate and provide context-specific, role based access to Apps. Yes, You would still have apps. But they would run behind the scenes - behind a Portal facade. And Portals came up with Single Sign-On, Context-Switching, Inter-connectivity, etc.

So, Do Portals solve the Fragementation Problem?. To certain extent, Yes. The flip side was Portals were heavy, resource-intensive and required wiring of applications. Portals were actually "Mega" Apps!.

So, What would be the new paradigm?

In my opinion, Apps and services are inevitable. They will continue to exist in near future as well, from technical implementation perspective. They are the modular units/building blocks of end user capabilities. They can be made "smart" by adding some intelligence to those applications. It is in the hands of the designers/developers to make it smart.

What we need today are - "Coherent Experiences".

For example, any user would have few limited profiles - Family, Work, Leisure, Travel, Learning. Users when login to those respective profiles, they should be able to accomplish their respective tasks/processes with much more ease - because the system proactively understands the context and prepares itself to serve smart information by leveraging the new technical capabilities such as social/video/spatial, etc. They would be inherently capable to provide a coherent experience by interoperating with various apps/services behind the scenes.

I am imagining such a solution would look wonderful on a tablet device or a Microsoft Surface kind of a device that can orchestrate various hardware/software components. Remember - You may still write apps. But the focus is more on orchestration and experience and not on 'creating' or 'building' applications.

I would like to ask - What experience are you trying to orchestrate for your customers?

Are you ready for "Grand-Renewal"?

2011-09-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

Its interesting to hear the need for 'Grand Renewals' constantly from the Tech industry. Few years ago, it was Web 2.0, Enterprise SOA. Today, it's about Cloud, Mobility/Tablets and Analytics.

Wanted to highlight two of the "Grand Rewneal" stories that are worth watching...Will add more on the same lines in coming days.

1. SAP

One of my colleagues made a recent comment that SAP's marketing team has been working overtime to promote HANA, its latest offering - a high-performance analytic appliance that runs in-memory. In the recently concluded SAP SAPPHIRE event, its CTO Vishal Shikka made a flamboyant pitch for HANA, that makes you to believe as if HANA is the next big thing not just for SAP, but for the entire business applications & analytics space!.

It is touted as the non-intrusive platform that can boost the performance problems of existing business intelligence/analytics solutions protecting customers' existing investments. In fact, in long run, SAP even wants to migrate the SAP R3 ERP suite to HANA. In a nutshell, HANA is a new generation platform where the business applications and analytics solutions can offload their transaction processing workload for faster performance. [It reminds me old transaction monitor softwares suchas Tuxedo :-)]

In its maximum capacity, HANA has been tested with a processor of 1000 cores (yes, you read it right!!), 16 Terrabytes of RAM. SAP is also working on a cloud version of HANA.

Now, coming to the core question - What kind of problems can be solved by HANA?. Simply - Big Problems. If you have business problems that need scale - scale in data volume, scale in complex processing, Demanding expectations on high-performance and Real-Time - then HANA may be right for you. SAP's key customers have already started to experiment with HANA in their respective businesses. For example, Infosys, an IT services company having employees close to hundred thousand people has experimented with HANA to track the project-level profitability or margins. Considering the size of Infosys, Am sure it will have thousands of projects at any point of time.

The keynotes by Vishal Shikka has been interesting in the last couple of years. Unlike other CTOs, Vishal gives a philosophical/conceptual approach for SAP's Technology/Product directions. He has earlier talked about some of the key concepts like Timeless software, Pace-Layered Architecture. In the recent keynote, giving an example of paper books moving to eBooks, Vishal mentions the "content" of the book has been liberated to take advantage of the "container". In this case, the container being transitioned is the hard-bound paper medium to an electronic device. And the liberation leads to new possibilities/new experiences. Having mentioned, he further makes the case for the "content" in business applications - the actual business information - be liberated to new "containers". In SAP case, the new container is "HANA".

2. SalesForce.com

SalesForce's annual event Dreamforce recently concluded. In the keynote given by company's CEO Marc Benioff articulates the vision of Social Enterprise. Social Enterprise is all about democratizing the business processes, eliminating barriers for employees, customers, suppliers to collaborate and share information/ideas and thereby increasing the opportunities for high performance of the enterprise. SalesForce has been making significant investments in the past by introducing offerings such as Chatter that are aligned to Social Enterprise vision. Some of the companies have started exerimenting with Chatter to be deployed as the collaboration platform between the Service representatives and Customers.

While the vision of Social Enterprise may sound like brand new and relevant these days, I see it as the re-incarnation of Web 2.0 concepts that we saw few years ago. Again, Social Enterprise is not a pure-play technology solution. Becoming a Social Enterprise would require companies to fundamentally re-think their organizational culture, processes, Employees & Reward mechanisms. In that sense, it can also be qualifed as a 'Business Technology solution', when collaboration happens not just between people. In addition, with across enterprise information systems.

There is a similar interesting observation on Cap Gemini blog quoting SalesForce.com becoming the new Front Office of enterprises. While SalesForce.com positions itself as a Front Office, SAP HANA positions itself as the solid engine for Transaction Processing and Business Analytics. It would be interesting to see how other players respond these positions!.

The key takeaway is that the key technology players want you to fundamentally re-think the way business are run / think about brand new opportunities that your business can advantage of, using their innovative new technologies. They don't position their offering as 'Technology infrastructure'. In fact, SAP positions its HANA as a business-technology platform when comparing Oracle's Exadata as a Technology infrastructure.

How do you see your profession changing?

2011-09-08T04:24:00.000-07:00

Am referring to your profession not your job.

To set the context, Am going to talk only about functions only within Enterprise IT (CIO organization).

You may be a Project Manager, Architect, Vice-President - Operations, Compliance Officer, Quality Assurance Provider, Accountant, HR, Developer - There are chances that your stakeholders might have added new expectations to your function without your notice!.

Let me quote few examples.

1. There is no dearth of discussion around the topic of Enterprise Architecture & Enterprise Architects. People across networks keep debating about the pros and cons of this Role all the time. Recently, there was an article published from Zapthink on some of those provocative topics - What will it take for enterprise architecture to become a profession?. And Why nobody is doing enterprise architecture?.

2. Forrester has been publishing some very interesting research on Why do some Strategic Roles fail?. The roles include Enterprise Architects, PMO, Planning, Relationship Management, Vendor Management etc.

3. TechTarget predicting the future roles of Enterprise IT with the advent of Software-as-a-Service. It predicts Enterprise IT would dwindle and become a Service Broker rather than a Solution Constructor. With this change, it claims coding/development functions will become less important and eventually transition to IT Service companies/Product Companies.

4. The emergence of new roles such as Data Scientists may be a threat for some and opportunity for others.

If Strategic functions have these challenges, one may get an impression that Operational functions are safe haven! Not Really! :-)

5. Rakesh Khurana of Princeton University argues whether management itself can be considered as a profession. That's startling!. Of course, the context of this perspective is not specific to Enterprise IT. It applies to General management across industries.

What do we mean by Profession? Making a function as a Profession requires codifying the practices and enforcing the code of conduct for practitioners. (e.g. Medicine, Law). A Job provides a channel to deliver the standard functions of a Profession.

Why is this issue important for Enterprise IT? Because, its the only unit within the organization that gets continuously disrupted both with emerging technologies and changing business needs!. Enterprise IT needs to balance the expectations of being a rock-solid infrastructure provider to business enabler and innovative technology solution partner.

In progressive organizations, the disruptions in the demand/supply chains of Enterprise IT (be it business stakeholders on the demand side or IT service providers/technology vendors on the supply side) will call for profound changes in individual functions within the unit!.

Let's face it!. Functions in Enterprise IT are moving targets!. The solution is to continuously deliver "value" in current function and stay alert!. To stay alert, it is required to understand the movements/disruptions a lot more better in terms of its direction, velocity & impact and respond appropriately and timely!.

Next-Generation Wal-Mart = Amazon.com?

2011-08-22T03:26:00.000-07:00

This morning, I happened to read some of the technology developments happening at Wal-mart. Yes, you read it right!. Walmart has roped-in experts from Silicon valley to explore the technology improvements that can be incorporated at Walmart. Walmart's response to eCommerce has been lukewarm over the past decade or so. It has always marketed itself around stores, low-prices, communities and people. So, Investing in an online B2C experience could cannibalize its very own strengths and core business model!. That doesn't mean that Walmart has shunned itself away from Technology. In fact, it has been a great adapter of technologies in the space of supply chain integration, logistics and distribution as those technologies help the company to become lot more cost-efficient and productive!.

Of late, the company is also extending its value chain acquiring dollar stores to sell products at even more lower prices! And started a company-wide initiative called Project Impact that would redesign their stores to make them much more efficient and customer friendly!. The company CEO has also unveiled the strategy for Next Generation Walmart. Interestingly, the strategy puts more emphasis on culture, society, people/communities, stores & prices and less on Technology. The strategy to some extent talks about eCommerce, but only treated as a strategic necessity than a competitive advantage.

The WalmartLbas has been experimenting with Social Networks, Mobility, Mobile Payments and Online-Store integration. One of the interesting aspects that I observe in their experiments is to use Technology to influence the Stores' inventory so that it can serve better to its own community. (For example, Fishing may be active in one community whereas certain kind of music may be a buzz in another community. The stores can stock up those items whose demand may rise based on the trends). This way, Technology is used to predict what can sell in future based on current trends than on the past data. And I find this idea counter-intuitive as technology gets quite frequenly applied at influencing the buyer than the seller.

Considering its core strengths, Walmart may never attempt to become a No.1 Online sales mart, but it would continue to improve the online experience so that it has strong synergies with its brick-and-mortar stores.

On the contrary, Amazon.com has been steadily diversifying itself from a media store (books, audio, video and apps) to a General store. It has extended its merchandise to electronics, consumer goods, toys and others. In that sense, Amazon.com is pretty much becoming the Wal-mart on the Web. The company also positions itself as a Technology provider by offering cloud computing services and ecommerce services.

Now, the question is, Would Amazon.com challenge Walmart in future, in terms of overall business?. It is already challenging quite a lot from Online Sales perspective. With the current rate of growth, a firm even claims that Amazon.com could potentially overtake entire Walmart (not just Walmart.com) in next 10 years. While in short term, this may sound naive, but the long term possiblity cannot be over-ruled!. And remember Amazon's history shows that it was not afraid of re-inventing itself by coming up with new business models fueled by Technology and Creativity!.

What can we learn from Google Takeout?

2011-07-29T06:21:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest pain points of Enterprise IT is the timely access to quality data. Data is typically spread across multiple systems, organizational units, diversified platforms and technologies/products. Now, if someone needs to have a unified view of such distributed data, its going to cost them a lot!.

And Enterprise IT world typically addresses these problems with heavy-duty solutions - Enterprise Information Models / Canonical Data Models, Data Governance/Standards, Master Data Management, Service-oriented Architecture, Application Integration, Business Intelligence solutions/ETL - Feeling Tired? :-)

End users are not that patient enough to wait for these heavy-duty solutions to pay off in multi-year transformational programs. The reasons being cost is too high and time-to-value is too short. If those programs deliver late in the cycle, the data itself could become irrelvant during those times!.

So, What would be the potential solution for these problems? Consumerization solutions have a lesson to teach to Enterprise IT products. And, this time its none other than Google.

On the day when Google launched Google+, its beta social networking site, it also launched 'Google Takeout', an initiative by Data Liberation Front within Google. The objective of this initiative is to enable the user to export his personal data from a variety of Google sites, whenever he/she wants.

To test the service, I tried exporting my personal data using my Google Id and downloaded the zip file. I would encourage you as well to do so!. You will be in for a surprise!. :-). Right now, Google takeout supports exporting from a variety of Google sites, including the newly launched Google+. Google claims its a big advantage over Facebook!.

Now, the question is, Why can't we have such a simple solutions to Enterprise Information Needs?. Pls note, Google Takeout supports exporting data not just from one app, but a variety of Google applications!

The second example I would like to quote is the integration of Google Maps with SAP BI solutions where SAP's BI data can be plotted in Google Maps!. This is a clear example of consumerization!. Enterprise BI solutions can no longer afford to boast about the computing capabilities or structural complexities!. The business/IT users are no longer in interesting in those stories anymore!. Deeply influenced by consumer-intensive IT solutions, the futurstic BI solutions need to demonstrate value in terms of novelty in simple/effective user experiences!.

Bring Your Own Robots?

2011-07-29T05:25:00.000-07:00

In next few years, the issue of 'Bring Your Own Device' in Enterprise IT could also include 'Bringing your own Robots' to the company. :-). You may not be carrying a smartphone. You may be having a mini-robot which could assist in your work!. Does it sound like a sci-fi movie?. Not really!. It could be a reality soon!. And Corporate IT would be challenged to identify the security threats attached to those scenarios! :-)

Recently, Microsoft has released the Kinect Services for Robotics. This means that one can use Kinect SDK to develop robotics applications. And like any other technology, Robotics is also being consumerized. With Kinect having entered the Guinness book of world records for becoming the World's fastest selling electronic gadget & the release of Kinect SDK early this year opened up new explorations such as - 'what does this mean for end consumers?. What does it mean for Enterprises? What kind of business/consumer applications one can develop using Kinect?'

By releasing the SDK for Robotics, Microsoft has paved the way for using Gesture-based Computing/Sensor Technologies to be applied in robotics domain. The trend would not have got enough coverage, had it been released by a non-IT company. Microsoft, being an Enterprise IT & Consumer Technology company, it has generated lots of interests!

The next few years could be the defining years for transformation from industrial robots to consumer robots. The consumer robots can assist humans by offering a variety of services such as Elderly Care, Health Care, Home Automation/Management, Training, Tourism.

With Microsoft's cash cows being Windows & Office/Business Applications, its trying to apply kinect in Collaboration scenarios. It would be interesting to see the emerging app ecosystem around Kinect & Robotics!.

Incidentally, I also happened to read a IEEE article on Robotics which talks about Robotics & its impact on overall economy [Courtesy HP Blog]. The biggest question that gets discussed was - Will Robots take away jobs?. In the interview, the Industrial robotics company Adept Technology CEO talks in detail about Robotics, its impact on overall economy and international government policies. The interesting takeway from the interview is that Robots may take away jobs in the near term, but it could lead to generation of more jobs with company expanding to new markets/services.

Are you Game for Gamification?

2011-07-26T03:56:00.000-07:00

Received a newsletter from MEGA, an enterprise architecture tools product company, today. The newsletter emphasized a lot on Gamification. Gamification means applying the mechanics of game to nongame activities to change people's behavior. Of late, its turning to be a powerful strategy for influencing and motivating groups of people. Analyst firm Gartner has been publishing a lots of positive views on this trend. It predicts that by 2016, nearly 70% of Global 2000 organizations will have at least one gamified application. By 2016, $2.8 billion will be spent on “gamification” development in the enterprise. MEGA predicts that introducing Gaming concepts in Enterprise Architecture activities can lead to quality content contribution from the entire company.

One of the biggest influencers of Enterprise Applications in the last decade has been the collaboration features. Look at any of the multinational corporations, you will have minimum hundreds of Microsoft Sharepoint Websites, if not Thousands. Next to Outlook/Microsoft Office, Employees are used to lists, discussion forums, document repositories, and quite bit of Web 2.0 flavors -participation/commenting/rating/reviews. These collaboration features have also made inroads into business applications in scenarios such as B2C, B2B, B2E Portal solutions.

Its not just the technical ease at which these Sharepoint sites can be rolled-out alone contributes to massive proliferation, the fact that most of the business processes today are built around unstructured processes and unstructured artifacts also contributes to the adoption.

I believe the next biggest opportunity for Horizontal Portal products is to provide out-of-the-box support to introduce Gaming Mechanics and Dynamics to Collaboration Features. Similar to the way we incorporate workflow features to stitch diversified set of tasks and people to a common process, it should be possible in future to add gaming mechanics to any business process / workflows. Gaming mechanics are the various actions, behaviors and control mechanisms that are used to "gamify" an activity to create an engaging user experience. Gaming Dynamics are the desires and motivations that contribute to the mechanics. The mechanics include Points, levels, Challenges, Virtual Goods (e.g. virtual currencies). The dynamics include Rewards, status, Competition, etc.

While the idea of 'Gamification' is exciting, the use cases for applying Gamification concepts within enterprise applications should be carefully selected. The unstructured processes (like Innovation/ Ideation/ Brainstorming processes in a new product/service creation lifecycle) could be great candidates. In addition, the 'semi-boredom' activities within the company where people are not really motivated to do a good job since the nature of the job is so routine, can also be considered for Gamification.

Here is an interesting case study 'Idea Street' - Gaming mechnics applied to idea generation/development process - from UK Government.

Selecting the right use case, applying the right Gaming mechanics, Incorporating rich user interfaces - all in tandem can contribute to compelling & engaging user experiences. Engaged & Participating stakeholders in an enterprise's ecosystem can help to achieve a variety of business goals.

Telecom 2.0 & Communication Enabled Business Processes

2011-07-05T11:22:00.000-07:00

When Amazon Cloud player was launched, I posted a note saying it doesn't make sense to store my personal music on the cloud and listen to the list by streaming over the network. I wrote, with the idea of applying cloud computing models all around the place, the biggest beneficiary is not going to be the user - but the Telecom operators!.

All new solutions target for a bigger and bigger network pipe - be it unified communications, Internet 2.0 coined by Cisco for multimedia content, real-time web, activity streaming, Audio/Video Uploads and Downloads. No doubt there is a value behind these new offerings. But, I believe 'bigger' doesn't necessarily mean 'smarter' solutions.

Its time that we demand 'smarter' pipes from our Telecom operators. We transact so much with Internet from PCs and Mobile Phones, that there is enough scope to offer 'smarter/intelligent' services over the Internet Pipe. Mobile Web is gaining lots of traction with the advent of smartphones and their PC-like capacities. Mobile Carriers have a larger role to play in rolling-out those value added services on top of their network.

When I had a chance to work with SalesForce.com, I also realized the fact that granularity of service invocations would have an impact on your costs both from your SaaS provider and the Internet Service operator. More calls you make to the SaaS provider, the more you may end up paying on data charges!.

I had this question for a long time - Is this an Optimal design to do everything over Cloud?. If Cloud is inevitable, what more I could do leveraging the power of the underlying network?

I learned that industry is thinking on similar lines and started working on something called 'Telecom 2.0'. As part of the next generation carrier services, some of the operators have started providing APIs over their networks. So, People can develop innovative applications that can operate on their networks, as if they are interacting with application platforms. What could they do using those APIs? - For example, they can limit or expand the bandwidth availability to an application on-demand at runtime by interacting with carriers, they can communicate about their current location, they can convert voice communications to text, they can process SMS/MMS as intermediary between source and destination, they can in fact optimize the network communications (e.g. Caching the interactions with Cloud - This is my wishlist :-)).

Recently, world's third largest telecom operator Telefonica introduced network APIs called BlueVia that enables these new generation of applications.

For example, Some of the pilot applications written over those APIs include - SugarCRM customer representative receiving incoming voice mails in the form of text messages / return those calls from the application itself / another app called 'Caller ID 2.0' - providing the details of the user who calls you on your VoIP phone. That sound's really interesting!.

These apps fit in the category called 'Communication Enabled Business Processes'. I strongly believe this is going to be next biggest disruptor in business application space. Microsoft Lync and other unified communication solutions, if bundled the rightway, could become the next killer application & ubiquitous use case.

To top it all, the most interesting use case is - TaxiStop - a taxi booking and fleet management application that uses a Network APIs called BlueVia from Telefonica Corporation. The mobile application is available for Android, iPhone and Windows Phones and the core service sits in Microsoft Azure Cloud. The Cloud based service mediates the booking between the passenger and the driver in real-time and in the course of the transaction, it uses network APIs to send and receive SMS/MMS. Please note neither the passenger, nor the Taxi management company is managing the booking application. The services are all brokered via an intermediary which sits in the network. This is a classic example of multi-tenancy and innovative business model!. Apps like TaxiStop truly signal the arrival of a new paradigm - 'Network is the Platform, Network is the Data Center'. Its a significant mind shift change to rethink our business models and IT architectures!.

Who has your Social Graph?

2011-07-04T10:53:00.000-07:00

This post is not really a mainstream topic of interest to Enterprise IT. Nevertheless, it could be of interest to observers of Social Networking tools/platforms.

Internet is abuzz with the launch of Google+. The site already started receiving lots of positive reviews from several critics. One of the key differentiators of Google+ from Facebook is said as the ability to create groups and manage the privacy within the groups. The groups in LinkedIn are pretty much public and anybody can subscribe to it provided the group moderator allows the registration. However, in Google+, as I understand, one can create groups that are specific & visible only to his profile and send messages that are visible only to certain groups. I was wondering, such a simple feature difference is a big deal?. I don't know. We'll have to wait and watch the success of Google+.

Here is another story that records an observation that users' activity in the Web is shrinking and most of the time is spent in Facebook. While the main story itself is not so noteworthy, the comments to the story are!. One of the commentor has rightly said Facebook is an American phenomenon and to succeed in emerging markets like India, Facebook needs to understand the local culture!. He also adds that Facebook must become a platform provider that would enable new players to launch value added social networking enabled services on top of the platform. I couldn't agree more!

This post is on the Indian culture and Social Networking!

Meanwhile, Yesterday I had a chance to attend a family function in my relative circle. During the occasion, I also had the opportunity to talk to several people whom I have not been in touch with, for a long time. I interacted with People of various age groups ranging from reasonably old (60+) to young (30). Certainly, it was a pleasure to talk to known people after a long time!.

One of the interesting aspect that I observed while talking to Seniors are - they are amazingly good in their memory, especially old memories. [Incidentally, this reminds me Nick Carr's comment Google makes us Stupid?]. When I enquired about someone who had joined the occasion, one of the Senior Gentlemen was able to articulate the entire "Social Graph" connecting himself and the other person. He was also able to give a "Social Graph" version connecting me and the visiting person. Remember, the Graph was like a linked list and it can be traversed from both the directions. While the Senior was able to seamlessly able to articulate the graph in few seconds, I was struggling to grasp and recall the social graph and interpret what it means to me!. A point to be noted, the Senior was highly educated and a Doctorate in one of the core sciences.

That's the Indian Culture!.

People in India, especially the previous generation who are in their 60+, educated or uneducated do not use technology for the sake of it. In their view of the world, using technology to capture certain interactions or transactions is less trustworthy!. Yes, if the trust factor is less, they need to record it!. Otherwise, if there is an interaction/transaction between two people from close networks, they would prefer the 'tacit/verbal agreement' way and that is deemed 'trustworthy' as well. That is because, People in close networks trust each other and using those networks, lots of things happen in people's lives - be it career counselling, arranged marriages, business relationships, conducting events. That was the power of the network. And all these happened without the use of technology (may be they used telephones/mobiles to certain extent)

And they accurately remember the 'social graph' of those family networks. My father used to simply surprise me by describing someone's identify in 5-6 levels of indirection in between :-). He didn't use technology!. And am sure People from India can relate to this experience quite well!.

This is just an example!. Similar to this, every country would have its own way of managing relationships and interacting them in their cultural ecosystem!. That needs to be truly understood if someone wants to build a truly social network that is valuable!.

A person's identity is not just a set of metadata!. Just because a person creates a new account in Facebook, doesn't mean that he needs to start from scratch to build his relationships!. He/She has a history behind him/her and that history holds much more powerful network than what he/she would create in his/her new account. The problem with Facebook, Google+ kind of networks assume that they need to be "told" about their relationships!. Maybe, this will appeal to 20+ who are just starting to use those social networks as hangout places to discuss movies/trivia. But, Networks are much much more powerful. They can help you accomplish a lot more in life if you know how to invest/harvest in the right way!.

Now switching to Enterprise IT...

The communication lines and information flow are restricted to lines in the Org. Chart within the company. And sometimes, the messages that flow between those lines are also based on certain org. protocols :-). And those flow lines eventually generate sparsely populated social graphs for individuals. Organizations having those cultures would have a tough task of realizing the social enterprise objectives. The Org. ecosystem should enable/support creating new information flow lines that would be productive to the individual and the overal l company.

Similar to the Indian culture, a person who works in an organization is much more than a collection of metadata. He/She has a history of experience/background/networks which could be lot more valuable to the organization if derived and codified in the right way among the corprate social networks!.

Well, then what is the right way?. Maybe, we'll need a Google ++ :-)

Sailing in Data Tsunami - Part II

2011-06-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

There was an interesting article on Open Source business models in ReadWriteWeb the had the following observation. Don't misss the presentation that discusses the topic in great detail. The article summarizes the different generations of computing and dives into detail on current generation.

"First Generation (IBM) "The money is in the hardware, not the software"
Second Generation (MSFT) "Actually, the money is in the software"
Third Generation (GOOG) "The money is not in the software, but it is differentiating"
Fourth Generation (Facebook/Twitter) "Software is not even differentiating, the value is the data" "

As we discussed in the last post, the age of Data is upon us. And competitive advantage would be gained by those who can extract unique value out of Big Data!.

One of the biggest advantages of Web 2.0/Free/Open Source Software is that it encourages end users to experiment with an open mind. When people approach with an open mind, it leads to generation of data - be it blogs, wikis, discussion forums, bookmarks. And then waves of data starts to wade through the shores of Internet all over!. People who have the skills to swim, sail through, fish around and find Pearls in the Ocean of Data are the Winners!. We saw some fine examples in the previous post. Am sure there are tons of other companies who are experimenting with Big Data Analytics in various sectors.

There are different companies taking different routes to gain the maximum advantage!. For example, while Google takes the keyword search approach for data analytics, Facebook approaches via User-Centric/Social Networking. Its interesting to see stories doing rounds on Google Vs Facebook on various sites. To me, the best is yet to happen in Targeted Advertising Technology. I firmly believe Facebook has the key and it has just not cracked it yet. And that's the biggest boon and bane for Google right now. Unless Google comes up with a breakthrough service that would outdo Facebook in near future in targeted advertising, Google would be under threat.

That's on the Open World. In the corporate world, the challenge is to generate and ensure continuous data flow that would be of value to various stakeholders. And that still remains a huge challenge and a great opportunity considering security/risk/data quality/cultural concerns within the corporate firewalls. Synonymous to Internet world, Corporates who succeed in generating useful data and extract insightful information from them would be creators of new business models in future!.

Sailing in Data Tsunami - Part I

2011-06-07T11:01:00.000-07:00

It was interesting to watch developments at Google in the last couple of weeks. Recently, Google released an offering that is exclusively targeted for Small and Medium Enterprises in India called - Google Global MarketFinder. The tool is designed to help those indian businesses reach Global markets. When I read this statement - I said 'Wow!' what a valuable initiative by Google!. I was also curious to understand how exactly Google implements this service to its audience.

Google basically achieves the purpose by matching the demand from Global markets to Supply from Indian Small/Medium Businesses. During the course of mediating the connections, it also helps to overcome the complexities in International markets (e.g. currencies/languages). Google does all of these by connecting the 'keywords' that are being offered by the Indian businesses to 'keywords' that are being searched by overseas markets. I myself tried using the tool for certain products like coffee, Google's response was almost immediate with list of countries that has the maximum demand and offer price as well.

Its amazing to see how a simple keyword search can be a biggest influencer in International business. When this service gets traction among the businesses, what is going to happen?. Google is going to accumulate more and more data, in terms of what products/services are being imported/exported in which countries. And Google for sure can perform analytics on top of those data. It doesn't matter how Google would use those analytic insights in their future offerings. But, it would certainly influence their Ad Sense business to fine tune and optimize their advertisements for targeted segments. Google can also price the most wanted keywords in suitable regions/countries at a premium price. I see that's the power of Data!.

In the second offering, it sounds casual - not as serious as the first one!. Google Correlate - It aims to find search queries that has similar patterns over a time series. For example, if we search for 'Swine flu' keyword in correlate, it can get correlated with other keywords such as 'Sore Throat'. In this example, it indicates, Sore Throat has been associated with Swine Flu and both searches have occured in the same time series. This tool can generate interesting perspectives to different data sets. Don't forget to check out the comic book in the website that explains the tool.

I strongly believe the core competence of next generation enterprises is going to be the ability to manage and generate useful insights out of large amount of data sets!. The market developments confirm this inference to a large extent. Today, Google has acquired the social analytics company called PostRank - that has the capability to perform analytics on blogs/wikis/RSS/forums, etc.

Toyota & Technology Transformation!

2011-05-23T23:25:00.000-07:00

If you believe BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance industry) is the early adopter of emerging technologies, and Manufacturing industry is typically a laggard in those aspects, think again!. I have some very interesting and promising updates that could change this perception.

Toyota has recently signed up partnerships with two Technology companies. One with Microsoft and another with Salesforce. And that's not all - The partnership with Microsoft will leverage Microsoft Azure/Cloud Computing and SalesForce alliance will leverage its Chatter.

Along with Microsoft, Toyota is attempting to build Next Generation Telematics Platform for Cars using Windows Azure. Telematics is fusing of telecommunications and information technologies in vehicles. Telematics services helps to transmit critical vehicle information via GPS/GPRS/Communication technologies to a centralized data center where the information can be aggregated/analyzed and reported for optimization actions. Information that gets transmitted include car's health information, energy/fuel consumption data, on-call/emergency service requests. General Motors was the pioneer in this offering with its OnStar service in North America.

As automotive industry is moving towards alternate energy sources, role of Telematics is going to be critical in providing centralized energy management services.

The promising aspect is both Microsoft and Toyota are investing close to $12million in a new venture - Toyota Media Services - that would provide IT services to Toyota Automative Group of companies.

In the second update, Toyota has signed up with SalesForce to build a private Network called 'Toyota Friend'. This network will be built on SalesForce Chatter platform. Using this service, Toyota's customers will be able to connect with their own cars, the automative service company and Dealers. This private network will be integrated with the Telematics platform that Microsoft is building for Toyota. Interestingly, using Toyota friend, you car will be able to tweet to you on maintenance schedules, fuel updates, tips for driving, etc.

These two initiatives would certainly change the image of Toyota that it's no more a conservative player when it comes ot adopting emerging Technologies in their automative products/services. And from technologies perspective, Cloud Computing/Social Computing are making inroads to some of the conventional industries such a Manufacturing.

Making of Tech Bubble 2.0?

2011-05-23T05:14:00.001-07:00

Are you ready for another Tech Bubble like the one that you experienced in late 90's and early 2000's?

Facebook valued at $76 billion [more than the value of Boeing and Ford]
LinkedIn valued at more than $3 billion [potential market valued at $30 billion, more than the value of entire beer industry in US. Remeber the biggest revenue streams for LinkedIn are thru recruitment services/advertisements]
Microsoft buys skype for $8 billion [10 times the value of skype's sales last year]
Groupon valued at $25 billion [Groupon's underlying technology is good old 'E-Mail']
Twitter valued at $7 billion

Some of the interesting questions these valuations rise:

1. Are these companies really worth the $value or Are we entering a fresh phase of a new Tech Bubble?
2. If so, Is this new bubble different from the one that we experienced during last decade?
3. What kind of impact this bubble could create globally, in case it pops?

And there are several industry observations across Economist, BusinessWeek and Wharton such as:

1. Most of these startups or start performers are consumer-centric, technology-based utility companies than creating something foundational / core technology advancing companies [e.g. Clean Tech/Life Sciences]. Simply because the VCs or Investors are not ready to fund those non-populist business proposals. So, in a way, Silicon Valley is morphing like a Hollywood business.
2. The number of startups have increased due to affordable access to computing infrastructure - Cloud Computing (Infrastructure, platform, apps) and Wannabe startups follow the easy route of social networking, recruiting and Advertising.
3. There is a tremendous uncertainty around the revenue stream of these companies. People are willing to place bets on their upside revenue potential in future.
4. These ludicrous valuations could set precedence for unrealistic valuations of startups elsewhere in the globe - be it china or India or Europe. [E.g. Finland's Rovio - Maker of angry birds game - aspires to be next Walt Disney :-) ]
5. These companies typically work around advertising / other services. Hence they dont create many jobs. Certainly, there is a loss of manufacturing or design knowhow in services, as they are built on existing platforms/technologies.
6. Investments on very few companies mean we are not diversifying our risks and we dont have options to fall back.

So, What is the Conclusion?

As Economist says - Wait and watch with caution and Have the Wisdom to sell the stocks before its gets too late! :-) - and start to Invest in companies that create 'Thick Value'. [Value that is meaningful, created authentically and sustainable]

Also for my fellow Enterprise IT colleagues, if you are investing in any of the new age solutions such as enterprise social computing/activity stream or unified communications, make sure you have identified the opportunity/need in your company. And you are not investing just because you are inspired by the stupendous success of these above mentioned web 2.0 companies.

If Techbubble 1.0 promised that dotcoms will replace brick-and-mortar enterprises, Techbubble 2.0 claims that there is goldmine behind people who lead virtual lives in online social habitats.

Mind-blowing Marketing Technologies!

2011-05-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

When SaaS took center stage, one of the main concerns that was raised in many forums was - Is it the end of IT?. Some even argued that businesses would source line-of-business applications directly from SaaS vendors, thus making IT irrelevant. In practice, I agree this happens in pockets. In few companies, some of the complex business applications, not necessarily SaaS solutions, are directly sourced, impelemented and managed by business. But, In majority of other companies, IT still has a significant role to play.

I came across couple of interesting developments happening in Marketing Technologies space, which made me to believe that IT is nowhere near extinction.Let me elaborate what I read on Marketing Technologies space. One of the biggest trends happening in B2C companies these days is to understand their end customers like never before, listen to them for their needs and concerns, act on those feedbacks to improve the customer satisfaction. Why is it happening now?. For the simple reason being that Customers are empowered with more information. With access to relevant, timely and sometimes authentic information, Customers are empowered and they demand high-quality services from the companies. If companies need to service such demanding customers, they need to get empowered as well, in terms of access to market and customer intelligence and customer service technologies.

From customers perpsective, they have access to all public content, blogs, wikis, social networking sites/forums where they voice their opinions or read about product reviews, discuss and debate before making a purchasing decision. From companies' perspective, there are multiple dimensions in which market and customer intelligence need to be performed. There are a variety of solutions such as web analytics, click stream analysis, social media/collective intelligence based analysis, sentiment analysis/opinion mining, multi-channel analysis, Surveys, etc. Some of these solutions are available as SaaS offerings. Some of them are on-premise packages bundled with a company's existing ecommerce suites. Now, How does one apply a suitable technology solution based on the business problem at hand?. There are tons of vendors chasing this marketing technology space. How do we demistify the complexities and make some sense out of it?. Marketing is no more a calendarized activity that works on offline/past data. With customers having access to 24X7 channels like Twitter, marketing is becoming Real-Time and Companies need to deal with those emerging paradigms.

Traditionally, Marketing department has been spending their money on episodic deployments throughout the year based on the budget availability/business priorities. However, deployment of multiple/independent marketing technology solutions will not help in producing a cohesive view of customer/customer group needs. It would take good amount of integration to knit the pieces together to produce an actionable information on the company's unified brand experience. This requires IT skills such as technology planning and enterprise architecture, technology/solution architecture to knit the different silos together.

Similarly, in the SaaS space, there is a need to customize the out-of-the-box offering to suit the company's business requirements. Majority of the business requirements fall into this category and companies like SalesForce.com also promote configurability/flexibility over standardization of business processes/business data. This trend will also re-inforce the requirement of IT skills such as System Integration, Configuration and Project Management.

While the availability of SaaS solutions certainly accelerates the adoption of business solutions, traditional IT skills are still required to deliver a complete solution!.

Enterprise IT lessons from Cisco's Earnings!

2011-05-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

I have been following Cisco for couple of reasons - its business interests around architectures and IT services. Though the core competency of Cisco is around network equipments serving corporate/government customers, it recently ventured into direct-consumer-centric businesses such as IT services and home-networking/retail products.

In the last two years, Cisco's Leadership often talked about company's ambitions to make it big in the new businesses. Indeed it was promising and raised lots of expectations in the market!. Cisco was making audacious attempt to transform itself from being a product-in-a-box provider to end-to-end solution provider. The company launched quite a few campaigns such as smart+connected communities that would put network-centric platforms as the core to deliver new, innovative services for urban communities!. Clearly, Cisco was trying diversify beyond its core competencies!. And that was the challenge.

Have written about Cisco in my blog earlier here and here!

The challenge showed up in Cisco's earnings in the last couple of quarters and they were below market expectations!. Cisco was not delivering upto shareholder demands and its own benchmarks. Consequently, Cisco's Chairman John Chambers recently wrote an internal memo to all its employees explaining the challenges the company is facing and its future directions. The company has already initiated the organization restructuring process to bring back the focus to its core portfolios.

Couple of interesting observations - Cisco is selling its recently acquired retail video camera business (Flip) and plans to stay out of services business, especially in emerging markets. The second one was interesting. The company has said it doesn't want to compete head-on with other IT service companies like IBM/Wipro, etc. Instead it wants to partner with them to deliver the services to the market. With the new plan, it would tie up some strategic partnership with some of the system integrators/service providers and would help in delivering the core platform and together they would come up with goto-market strategies. That's a significant development!. Cisco is on back foot from directly selling to its customers especially in IT services/solutions business. There are couple of reasons behind this movement:

1. Cisco's margins in traditional network equipment businesses is challenged as it faces fierce competition from vendors like Juniper.

2. Cisco's recent interests in new services/retail products diverted its attention from focusing on its core competencies.

3. The services business / retail business is typically low margin compared to its traditional network instruments' business margins. If services has to make business sense, Cisco need to pump up the volume of those services. This could again change the portfolio mix of its core businesses.

Ok, Why are we discussing this issue in this blog?. How does it impact Enterprise IT shops?. How is this issue relevant to CIOs?

One of the emerging trends that we have been discussing in this blog as well as in the industry is that CIOs need to be business partners. They shouldn't just deliver value in contributing to the bottomline of the company but also to the topline of the company, by delivering IT-intensive services. Isn't this exactly the same Cisco tried to deliver?. Am not sure how much of Cisco's IT organization / CIO's office was involved in delivering its new consumer-direct, IT services/solutions business. But, IT has a role to play!.

There are good amount of lessons to be learnt in Cisco's journey. Cisco's Chairman himself agrees that there is nothing wrong in company's strategy or vision. Its just the execution that has failed. So, for companies that want to venture into transforming themselves from product businesses to services businesses, IT certainly can be a partner. But, delivering on the transformation doesn't look like an easy task!.

As an additional note, IBM has recently acquired a building management software company to accelerate its Smarter Planet initiative!. Would be interesting to watch the developments.

Social Media reaching a Trough of Disillusionment?

2011-04-19T09:50:00.000-07:00

This morning my colleague shared an interesting link from Forrester that highlights some interesting insights on Social Media trends. Forrester has actually categorized the type of users who participate in social media and tracks the quantitative growth in each category. According to the report, the startling fact is that many groups in US has reached plateau, especially the Creator Group. The Creator Group is at the top of ladder who actively contributes content to the network in terms of blog posts, videos, articles, etc. At the end of the latter is the passive Group who are Inactive/Spectators.

While the number of people who join the network is increasing year-on-year, they don’t really move up in the ladder. And the number of users who are already in the top is not rising. And this observation is only applicable to US, while the Asia-Pacific continues to report growth in most of the groups.

Forrester concludes that the initial wave of social media has actually halted in US and there needs to be conscious effort in place to bring more people past early adapters.
Am glad that Forrester has reported something counter-intuitive / counter to the market hype. The hype is so much that every product vendor talks, eats and breathes social media in every other forum. I have always felt that industry has been giving undue attention to the Social media paradigm.

My perception is that online social media becomes much more powerful its complimented with offline action. In a nutshell, web 2.0 plays a vital role in maximizing choices for the participant. The increased choices influence the open markets. Maybe, the current market place is saturated or commoditized that everybody talks and sells the same thing and no new products/services to be exchanged. Once we get past Cloud and SaaS cycles, we may see new wave of creative activity.

In Enterprise 2.0, the scenario is little different. The network exists, collaboration happens – but it happens at much more tactical sense and the social network influences choices in micro issues. The reason being that macro choices are governed by the organization structure and decision framework. Here again, the online exchange needs to be complimented with offline action within the enterprise.

I don’t think the social media trend is going to saturate anytime soon. At the sametime, if we want to see some dramatic results, there needs to be lot of reinforcement on the past success and creative new content!

Open Compute & Emerging Roles for Enterprise IT

2011-04-19T03:12:00.000-07:00

Thanks my colleague, I happened to learn about Facebook’s recent open computing initiative. It definitely caught lot of industry attention in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know what motivates Facebook to contribute to the Open World. Neverthess, it’s commendable! Rather than looking at this announcement as a specific event, I wanted to explore and see if there are any broader implications.

Like how we saw the application development platforms market got disrupted by the open source application frameworks and servers, Is Open Computing going to disrupt the infrastructure space? For the first time, am seeing someone contributing the actual architecture and design models to the open world. If you browse thru Open Computing website, you can actually download the CAD models for the data center. This is something totally new and never happened in the past! It is going to disrupt the infrastructure consulting and solution space in near future.

With this trend, I beginning to think that more and more ‘Know-How’ being open sourced and commoditized. By Know-How, I mean the actual architecture, design, application frameworks, applications, software/hardware platforms. If we segment the traditional IT into Plan, Build and Run – Run/Operations is typically outsourced, Build/Development is Hybrid with lots of contributions from Open source, Plan is typically In-House+Strategic Consulting/Architecting.

Initiatives such as Open Computing would contribute a lot to Plan function. Beyond that, if most of the functions of Enterprise IT are outsourced or Cloud enabled, what is left with the Organization? Just Plan and Govern? With some amount of Architecting? That may not be exciting! So, what else could fillip Enterprise IT? What would be future competency of IT that could enable and transform future businesses? I would vote for ‘Design’.

Yes, the ability to ‘design’ new innovative/business services to enterprise stakeholders would become one of the core competencies of Enterprise IT. I got more convinced when I read this news coverage from Technology Review magazine. It talks about a new business startup that provides simplified banking services to end customers via mobile as the only channel. The startup is only a tech-enabled white-label service company that acts like a ‘wrapper’ over a traditional bank that provides core banking services. Sounds interesting? I got excited when I read about this story, purely for the fact that this new company’s core competency is only to ‘design’ creative ways in which some of the traditional banking services can be packaged and sold to end customers. And more, Technology is one of its core competencies. I believe we would see more such innovative startups in near future. Am sure it is one of the new models where Enterprise IT could operate and add value to core business. Yeah, I said ‘one’ of the models. There is couple of other viable models as well – like being a technology broker, vendor manager, solution broker & Planner.

Amazon Cloud Player!

2011-03-29T04:22:00.000-07:00

Amazon has introduced Cloud Player stating the complexities in personal media management. You have to download, synchronize, backup and all that with your traditional devices, PCs and the media provider. Amazon says, You don't have to do all that. Amazon itself provides a million songs to download - sorry - to listen. And you can personally add to your account and listen to those songs wherever you are and whichever device that you use. All the media files are managed from Amazon cloud. Doesn't it sound so simple?.

The emerging architecture trend is that you just need to have a net-enabled device that connects to cloud. That's it!. You would have universal access to products/services!. Amazon says that its not just media, you can pretty much manage any digital content like documents, photos, etc.

The biggest problem that I see is that, why would I need to manage my personal music on a Cloud and consume it from a Cloud. I need to unnecessarily payout the data charges to my Internet Service Provider [Unless amazon is providing Internet for free! :-) ]. Yes, I do manage my emails on cloud, because email is an inherently network-intensive application.And there were good amount of reasons for managing emails on the cloud during good old days where people didn't have access to PCs or SmartPhones.

We are dealing with a powerful dichotomy here...The Smartphone are getting better and better and more powerful competing with PCs. Cloud is becoming more mainstream and competes with mainframes in capacity. So, the kind of applications that we would want, should have an architecture that would leverage the best of both worlds. Not just one dimension!. I see amazon Cloud Player just leverages the Cloud and not the devices!. In the era of Smartphones, people would like to have immersive experiences that would take full advantage of the device's capacity, not a dumb client.

If we design our applications to be cloud intensive or rather chatty, customers are going to pay for it big time to Telcos!. I think the conversations with the cloud needs to be moderated by the application architecture!.

Warren Buffet - Technology, Business and Life!

2011-03-25T11:07:00.001-07:00

Its Warren Buffet Week in India!. Every other newspaper in Bangalore was carrying the complete coverage of Warren Buffet's maiden visit to India and his first stop at Bangalore. Though I am not trade savvy, I happened to read Buffet's interview in almost all major dailies!. Interesting observations!.

No market jargons!. His interviews were filled with simple wisdom!.

While our Enterprise IT software product marketing constantly makes noises around the need for business agility, urgency in change, flexibility of business systems, etc - The third richest man in the world bats for long term sustainability and growth of the business that he invests in.

Look at this - He says "I don't understand technology or semiconductor business. Give me a Chewing Gum or Coca Cola business anyday. I want to invest in a business which i am familiar with so that I know it will stay stable for 10-20 years. I dont really want to be part of changing industry. In such a scenario, there is more room for failures".

"We don't look for growth sectors. We love growth when we find it but we are perfectly willing to buy businesses that are relatively slow growth. Growth does not drive our investment decisions. Competitive advantage, good management, honest management, a sensible price and the ability to see where the company will be in five or ten or twenty years, that's what drives our investment decisions. I do not rank industries by their growth potential. I am willing to go into businesses that are not growing at all if they are good, solid, fundamental businesses."

That sounds fundamental to me and a big relief that someone in the World is really talking sense and Ok with going slow and steady.

He also admits - "If you put me in charge of this plant (that he has invested in), I wouldn't know how to run it. But I do know whom to put in charge. The real skill of mine is to sorround myself with smartest people". And that's a big management lesson - The ability to have smartest people work for you.

Some more fundamental comments from him - "I just keep doing what I have been doing all my life. It's nice to have a lot of investors come to Berkshire Hathaway. I am just painting the same painting I have been doing for over 60 years and it does not change my life. I go to work at the same time, I am eating the same food, wearing the same clothes. I have a privileged life, but it's an unchanged life. I work with people I love, they make my life easy. I just have nothing to complain about. I would like to find something to complain about but I just don't know what it would be."

“I have never missed a meal in my life, never a movie. My family and I have never missed a vacation either. It is simply that I have more money than I need and which would greatly help a lot of other people if given to them".

After reading those interviews, it left me wondering - Why don't we take our business and life in such simple terms?. Pls don't get me wrong. I am not against uncertainties, discontinuities and its opportunities. But Am definitely against that becoming the way of life and dictating terms to you in business and life!

Be it Enterprise IT or the Stock Market, there is a general hysteria around Growth. Everybody wants to grow in double digits and if those ambitions result in single digits, they get upset!.Look at this article, Wipro's Growth numbers are dwindling quarter-on-quarter, and rumours doing rounds that Wipro is planning to layoff the non-billable resources!. Not just Wipro, I think the entire IT services industry is missing something!. We are in the constant pursuit of short-term gains that we almost forget there is a horizon called long-term. And everybody needs to sustain, eat the same food, drive the same car and live almost the same life.

Smart Cards & Smart Government

2011-03-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

Its been quite sometime that I blogged. But, I was active on Twitter and LinkedIn for the past couple of months and busy preparing for Open Group India conference Chennai. It got over yesterday and I presented a topic that compares Enterprise Architecture Vs Project Portfolio Management. The session was received very well and invited good amount of questions. I wish I had more time to discuss and debate those questions.

In this post, I wanted to blog about a recent announcement that was made in Indian Budget. So far, Indian Government has been giving subsidiaries for food grains and offers them at lowest prices to people below poverty line thru public distribution systems. Now, the delivery mechanisms - Public Distribution Systems - are not that effective to pass on those benefits to poor. They are lost in transit or quality food grains are not offered to Poor due to various reasons. So, the Plan was perfect, but the execution was bad.

To solve this issue, Indian Government in the recent budget has made an announcement. In this new system, the Government would pass on cash transfers to poor people instead of provisioning subsidised food grains. so, people would be able to buy food materials at market prices (because of cash transfers). Its a change in delivery mechanism, instead of sell side, the subsidiaries are passed onto the buy-side.

Ok, Where is technology coming to picture here?

Now, the question is, How do the Government make sure that cash transfers are made to the right people/people who deserve?. It's by means of two mechanisms - one a unique identification number (UID) that Indian Government has started allocating to its citizens and second a Smart Card. A smart card would be associated with UID and the cash transfers would be made not in the form of physical cash, but in the Smart Card format. Hence, people who deserve only can make use of the scheme.

Now, the Smart Card would get used atleast two places - one at the time of credit, by the Government. And second, at the time of debit, by the retail stores/public distribution system - pretty much like a credit/debit card. And the citizens can't buy whatever they want using the virtual money. To start with, they can buy only kerosene and LPG Gas. Food Grains to follow soon...

Its interesting to see Technology is making inroads into the Social Fabric of the society. And soon, the same Smart Card could carry quite a lot of other information as well like health information, patient records, utility bills, etc. Its just the beginning!

What's new in Microsoft ERP Architecture?

2011-01-30T00:35:00.000-08:00

One of the news that caught my attention in the last couple of weeks is Microsoft Dynamics AX Technical Conference. As many of you know,Dynamics is the ERP & CRM suite from Microsoft. Though Microsoft is not having a significant pie in the ERP market, it is still pumping money in R&D and subsequent product releases.The next version of the product is due to release in 2012 and claims to have a Generational shift in ERP architecture. And that is what I was interested to know more..

One of the key features of the next version is touted as layered, model-based architecture. We discussed about Pace-Layering of SAP Architecture sometime ago. And it looks like Microsoft Dynamics follows the similar concept. Some of the key challenges in the ERP sector are:

1. How do we customize the modules without sabotaging the standard, out-of-the-box functionality?. In case, the customer wants to revert to the standard/default functionality, would it be possible to do it seamlessly?

2. In case of ERP, How do we bridge the gap between functional and technical consultants?

3. How do we manage the unused modules in a ERP suite?

4. How can we have an ERP that would enable an organization to anticpate and embrace change?
Looks like, Microsoft has tried to answer most of these challenges in tne new ERP architecture. By adopting a layered approach, the standard/default features are clearly isolated from multi-level customizations (Country level, Business Unit level, or even at Person level customizations) and the customizations are stored separately.

The key feature that got my attention was the model-based approach. Using this approach, the functional consultants would be able to model the customizations (without requiring significant coding or technical plumbing) and the models can be translated to Tech specifications/implementations.

This is a significant improvement in ERP architecture. I don't think SAP ERP follows a similar approach for functional consultants. All I know is they develop functional blueprints before the implementation. And someone needs to bridge the gap between those blueprints to tech specs. Microsoft made significant investments towards modeling when it announced Oslo initiative in 2007. But later dropped the same and pursued SQL Server based modeling repository. I believe the same has been integrated with the new ERP architecture. I do think if this model based repository is provisioned as a platform/service, it would open up to wide array of opportunities for custom development of new business applications.

HCL Technologies - Vision 2015

2011-01-20T03:02:00.000-08:00

Few weeks ago, I had criticized in this blog about HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar's comment on Cloud Computing...

Now, its time to give a Bouquet!. In India, its Quarterly Financial Results season for the companies. And IT services companies' results are making headlines in Indian newspapers. Some are encouraging, Some are upsetting, Some are optimistic!. Overall, the Growth Story of Indian IT services companies are in good shape and continue to progress..

Ok, the reason for Bouqet is this - In an interview, Vineet has articulated the Vision for his company, HCL, in 2015. The vision for the company is to transform itself from being a services company to a utility company, that is backed by good amount of Intellectual Property. Vineet is banking big time on Cloud Computing to accomplish his vision of becoming a Utility Company!.

For the first time, I am coming across a CEO who is able to articulate a visionary statement rather than mincing words like - becoming a world class company, becoming a first class supplier of IT services, high-end value chain, outcome based services, etc...All these are mechanics or means, not the end. In Vineet's case, He is clearly able to articulate a Future State for the company. Thats'a big deal!.

When I heard the utility company lingo, it reminds me similar companies that I am aware of - my telephone service, electricity service or even water service. I often interact with Telephone / Broadband service provider and often get a compliant number to track. Usually, the services are always-on, always available, and service person turns up promptly on request. The requirements of a Utility company in my perspectives are - a Good Product, Good Customer Care/Exceptional Service, Great Tariffs/Inexpensive Rate Plans, Solid/Reliable Service Delivery Platform/Accessibility. Can we expect a similar business model from IT services company in future?

Now, some of the hard-pressed questions:

1. How much of the investments HCL is making in R&D towards achieving its vision?
2. Utility Computing, Means, Transfer of Ownership of Systems and Platforms, Not just Transfer of People (outsourcing). Utility Computing is a captial-intensive business, where the service provider is expected to own and manage the actual productized service. Is HCL ready for it?
3. What is the positive/negative impact of becoming a utility company to its stakeholders (including employees)?

Next Generation Mobile Advertising!

2011-01-05T00:55:00.000-08:00

This particular post may not be very relevant to Enterprise IT. But I wanted to cover it more from the mobile technology perspective especially in the areas of marketing, customer analytics.

If your IT unit is working with Marketing to design Tech-enabled marketing solutions, this post is a must-read.

For the past couple of weeks, i have been watching the new ad from an Indian Telecom Service Provider AirCel on its new service offering - Blyk. Blyk is a youth-centric mobile service that brings exciting MMS and SMS on events/updates, offers, trivia and opionion polls from their favorite brands. Now, doesn't sound like a mobile advertising campaign?. Yes, it is. But, the difference is in the delivery model.

First, the service is a permission based marketing. Users need to subscribe to the service to receive the ads. Ok, Why would anyone want to receive ads on their mobile phones?. The claim is you will receive highly personalized targeted offers which will be useful to you. Ok, How would you deliver personalized messages to someone?. Know them in detail to serve them better. At the time of subscribing to the service, you will be asked for interests, like, dislikes, brands, etc. which will enable the service provider to serve targeted messages. Ok, What is the bottomline?...You will get paid to receive the ads.

Now, doesn't that sound interesting?. Yes, the operator would give bonus talk times or free text messaging service to receive ads on your phones. Blyk is also positioned in the social context. You can refer friends and get bonus talk times, etc.

In the current mobility boom in India, I strongly believe this service could catchup big time among young adults, in the age group of 16-24.

Ok, This is all about the service. What is so techie about this idea?

When Google entered into mobile business, lots of people were speculating that Google is entering only to monetize their advertising business in mobile media. But, they are proved wrong as Google is mainly focusing on Operating System, Applications, In-App Advertising, and even Mobile Phone devices (with Nexus One and Nexus S Series).

With these developments, I dont think Google is leading the mobile advertising technology.

I have an android phone and I don't think the In-app advertisements that I receive are relevant. Most of the times I get to see ads that push me to buy Galaxy Tablet, which I dont like it anyway.

Some of the interesting aspects that I observed in Blyk are:

- Permission & Profile based Marketing. The concept has evolved from getting the permission of the customer to understanding his preferences. This will eventually help build a persona or profile with the service provider so that future communication between the two will be much more useful. Unlike Print/TV media, Mobile per se is a personalized channel and understanding the preferences will make the service much more exclusive.
- Engagement based Marketing. It is not just spam. It is about co-creation, engaging with the customer segment that is interactive and responsive. Customer can answer queries, participate in polls, influence the compaigns and eventually empowers the customer.
- Mobile Advertising Analytics. Now the icing on the cake. With the profiling, targeted messaging and two-way communication, the analytics on top of these campaigns would truly reflect the customer's interests, key trends that would influence the market. This would enable creating new services/products.

Of course, there is whole lots of other issues like Data privacy that needs to be resolved on the way of next generation marketing.

Marketing is getting redefined with the advent of mobile technologies. In future, the marketing channels could evolve from being mere information providers to highly personalized service assistants for individual customers. These service assistants could either help you get things done or achieve your aspirations or be more efficient.

BPO - Next Generation!

2010-12-28T03:28:00.000-08:00

Last week, I visited the Passport facilitation centre, that is recently launched in Bangalore. I had availed the Passport office's service couple of years ago as well. But, there is a sea change in the service experience from then and now.

The reason, the new service is being offered by a Service Provider and not by the Government directly. It is one of the largest projects under the E-Government Initiative launched by Government of India. It is a project that is first-of-its kind launched in public-private partnership model.

Some of the interesting things that caught my attention during the service experience are - process flow chart that guides the citizens thru the process, new swanky interiors, LCD display that updates the service desk assignments for applicants, Online application Forms, Document Scanning/Uploding, PC Cameras, Biometrics/Finger Printing, Bar Code Tracking for application Acknowledgements/receipts, Photocopiers to make additional copies of documents, if requried. The Service representative has a dual monitor that shows the contents of the passport application form that is being processed. And above all, the Service rep politely asked if I wanted to make any corrections in any of the particulars before committing the changes. That's wonderful!.

In this new project, the entire application processing flow is handled by a third-party, in this case, the Service Provider is Tata Consultancy Services. TCS is not only the System Integrator for the entire solution (Application/Infrastructure) but also the Operations Owner for Front-Office functions (IT and Non-IT Operations).

TCS Management owns and operates the entire physical facility where the service is being offered. The Enquiry Desk, The Service Representatives, Process Flow Coordinators are all provided and managed by TCS.

Here you see a truly 'Integrated Technology & Operations' Service in action. The typical IT services provider - TCS - not only provides the IT solution and walks away but manages the entire business process of application processing and interacts with the customer face-to-face (in this case the citizen).

While the Front office functions are managed by TCS, the back-office functions like verification, granting/dispatching all done by Government Staff. And they work in the new facility in collaboration with TCS Staff.

TCS got this contract couple of years ago to execute in Build-Operate-Transfer model and the project cost range in terms of Indian Rupees 1000 crores (close to quarter billion dollars). The solution is built on Java/J2EE technologies leveraging open source web application frameworks and hosted on IBM Websphere Portal / Application Server Stack.

I must say this is a huge feat by an IT Service Provider in India and the efforts are truly commendable!. Of course, the project had some glitches and TCS had to pay penalty for the project delays and bugs.

But, neverthess, a project of this scale that gets rolled out to the entire country would have some teething issues and am sure that would be ironed out sooner!.

In this new service model, TCS takes more risks, more responsibility, invests heavily (because of front office infra requirements) and reaches out to its customer's customers. In this case, the Citizens, the customers of Government.

Could this be the new model for Business Process Outsourcing?.

Indian R&D : (Long) Way to Go!

2010-12-27T23:44:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Economics Times, a Business Daily from India published a very interesting perspective on R&D spending of Indian companies sector wise.

I was curious to know the R&D spending by IT companies and the results were startling and stands evidence to my earlier post on Why we dont see a Blue Ocean in Indian IT service companies.

Here are some interesting findings:

1. No.1 Indian IT services company - Tata Consultancy Services spends a miniscule 0.3% of its total revenues in R&D.
2. Infosys - Another leading Indian IT services company leads the industry - Spends close to 1.9% of total revenues in R&D. I have worked in Infosys in the past. In my experience, Infosys is one of the very few companies that is committed to Research and Education/Learning. That is indeed commendable!
3. There is no mention of other Top 10 Indian IT service companies or product companies.
Other key sector such as Pharma/Motor R&D investments are largely driven by their MNC parents in US/other countries and there is a huge royalty payback that happens between the Indian arms and the Western Parent/Partner Firms.

The article states that though the corporate spending on R&D has increased in the past years, it is not sufficient to lead in the industry. Very True!

While the Western ecomonies focus on sustainability and recovery from recession, they look up to the East / Developing Ecomonies to lead in Research & Development and Innovation. The R&D and Innovation are important in the context of Developing economies because to drive growth in emerging regions, it is required to develop region-specific, technology-enabled new products and services.

China has realized this golden opportunity way ahead of India. In the recent past, China has revamped their entire Intellectual Property related Government Policies and started giving huge incentives for companies investing in R&D. The new policy aims to encourage Indigenous innovation that woud position the country in a Leadership position to protect its local markets and lead in global markets. The Multinational companies who were thriving on IP so far are puzzled with these new policies and redesigning their strategies for fresh investments in China. This article in Harvard Business review is a must read if someone wants to understand China's Strategy in High-Tech Industries

While many may be wondering why China is not competing in the game of IT services, my observersation is - China may be rewriting the rules of the high-tech industry game itself in next few years!.

As mentioned in ET, "As customers become more demanding, and the business environment more competitive, companies will have no choice but to rely more on R&D".

While the Indian IT Service companies are busy in fighting the war for talent to sustain their existing service lines, it remains to be seen how they would respond to these emerging challenges. They largely see People as their products or channels for service delivery and invests heavily on Leadership / People Development Courses. These courses will prepare oneself to become a business-savvy consultant who not only knows business or technology but also has the capability to sell / communicate / convince the clients. And some other companies are doing reverse-acquisition. They are sitting on a huge pile of cash that they go ahead and acquire technology from a US startup / product company. While there is certainly nothing wrong with these approaches, lot needs to be done to create a sustainable and organic innovation ecosystem.

End of Powerpoints? - Follow-up

2010-12-22T01:30:00.000-08:00

Few weeks ago, I had blogged about Gaming as one of viable alternatives for Powerpoint presentations. In the post, I had summarized, in future, management consultants may start using Gaming for simulating the business scenarios rather than presenting their thoughts in canned presentations. Similar views were reflected in Gartner blogs as well.

Today I came across a real story from a management consulting company. An US based consulting company called Aveus, has renewed its marketing initiatives by demonstrating short-simulated stories/case studies replacing Powerpoint presentations. And in the interview, the consulting partner explains the results are encouraging and generates more sales leads than before.

Social eCommerce Ramping up...!

2010-12-21T00:38:00.000-08:00

Looks like Facebook is fast becoming the Second Home for most people in the world...:-).

Here is a news on how Facebook is ramping up its E-Commerce Drive. It is stated that Facebook is talking to lots of big/small vendors to introduce new eCommerce services in the social networking site. Though Facebook has a tiny market compared to Amazon or eBay in eCommerce, the future looks promising when looking at the possibilities of the platform.

Some of the interesting ideas that we could see in Facebook around eCommerce - recommendations of products by friends, more personalized recommendations based on individual's preferences, feedback on people's walls on the products that are bought/sold from specific vendors - All these can complement a conventional online puchasing experience. And I believe this emerging paradigm will shift the focus from product to the person (buyer) and his preferences.

One of the latest innovation that caught my attention is the GroupGift idea by eBay. It lets people pool in their money to buy a collective Gift, like people usually do in real life.

Pace Layering and SAP On-Demand Architecture!

2010-12-20T02:41:00.001-08:00

I have been following SAP new generation architecture for quite sometime now. In addition to business reasons, I was following SAP on my personal interest as well purely because of SAP's architectural approach in their product roadmaps. After Vishal Sikka joined as the CTO of SAP, the technology strategies of several products have been articulated much more clearly than before.

SAP has acquired quite a lot of companies in the last few years. And in the process, it has also acquired handful of technologies and frameworks in its product lines. If you are an SAP customer leveraging their products in several portfolios, am sure you would be wondering what their technology strategy is!. They have ABAP, Microsoft .NET, Java, Business Objects, Sybase Mobile Technologies, NetWeaver Mobile, etc. Using these bunch of technologies, they were also trying to come up with their home-grown mult-tenant architecture to host their on-demand offerings. Now, if someone wants to integrate any of their edge (e.g. mobile) applications with their core ERP, they need to be really aware of the multitude of choices and make a suitable decision.

Sometime back, Vishal Sikka had mentioned that SAP is following a Pace Layering approach to their architecture. What is meant by Pace Layering?. Here is an excellent explanation by James Governor of Redmonk. If you are an IT architect, you don't want to miss this one. According to SAP, SAP will abstract its software into multiple horizontal layers, which will allow for the evolution of each layer at its own pace, while at the same time preserving consistency.

Of course, Customers wouldn't like to leave behind emerging technologies when it comes to 'edge' applications. At the same time, they wouldn't want their systems to be constantly disrupted to adapt to the accelerating pace of changes. So, the challenge is - How do they preserve consistency and adopt to new technologies?. And that's where SAP's Architecture comes in.

In the recently held, SAP summit, SAP has unvield the architecture strategy for their On-Demand solutions. According to the strategy, "SAP's OnDemand architecture will be standardized on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering that includes "Next Generation Core," based on the Business ByDesign architecture, and "Next Generation Edge," a lightweight platform that merges SAP's lighter weight SaaS technologies". And all these would get deployed on SAP's next generation application server SAP NetWeaver 8.0. And the picture depicted in the above mentioned SAP article is worth a mention. It portrays the division of responsibilities across the on-demand stack. Sure, SAP has a long way to go in delivering this architecture. But, I believe the vision would streamline the architecture and help in delivering superior products.

Am still trying to figure out what has changed from last year to this year, to incorporate Multi-tenant capability in new SAP's On-Demand offering. Has SAP acquired new companies/new products or home-grown capability that is on par with SalesForce.com's multi-tenant architecture?. Will keep you posted, if I find it something interesting. My last impression on SalesForce.com multi-tenant architecture was that it is highly Database centric and good for lightweight applications. I don't believe the same approach can be scaled to complex transactional applications.

iPad Application of the Year 2010

2010-12-15T23:17:00.001-08:00

How do u create a compelling mobile application or to be precise a tablet application?. You can learn a tip or two from FlipBoard, that has been chosen as the best iPad application of the year, by none other than Apple itself.

Flipboard helps someone to create a personalized news magazine from leveraging his/her social network. The user interface almost looks like Windows Mobile 7 Tiles interface. It grabs images from various sources such as Twitter/Facebook, etc. Whatever the user follows in various social networking sites, that would be presented in a nicely organized magazine format.

That sounds cool!. Actually, I have been using Netvibes for quite sometime now and I found it definitely useful as it serves the single, integrated dashboard for my news needs in a day. I have not integrated social feeds though. Flipboard does the other way around - Its largely social, and recently started to integrate with generic RSS feeds from Google Reader. If that happens, then it would become a highly personalized magazine. It would be a magazine created by me, for me, one stop shop for social / general information needs.

What makes Flipboard impressive?. My observations - Flipboard has the following characteristics - highly visual, interactive, social, personalized, customizable, quick to install, stays up-to-date/current, serves information. And these are the characteristics are embraced by large number of users in the market and they are sure to demand those characteristics from Enterprise applications as well in coming years. It could just be the beginning of change in the way the applications are conceptualized and delivered to end customers within the enterprises.

Collaboration to Collective Action!

2010-12-15T04:26:00.000-08:00

Are you of the opinion that Social networking within Enterprise is a huge waste of time?. Even I thought so until I heard about SAP's new offering 'StreamWork'.

I have been a member of LinkedIn for long and member of several Enterprise Architecture and Technology Groups within the site. I have had the opportunity to connect with some great individuals in the Architecture/Technology Space. However, I should admit that most of the groups are inactive or the discussions are very shallow, fighting over the semantics of the actual thread itself. I had initiated few conversations in those groups last year and contributed to many. But, generally the activity was lacklustre. I have not personally experienced any Collective Consciousness or Collective Intelligence in those networking sites!. May be I am not a network freak!. :-)

Having said that, I felt there must be a genuine issue when I heard similar opinions from my fellow colleagues/users of such networking sites.

It looks like SAP has figured out a solution. They have come up with a new offering for Enterprise Social Networking called 'StreamWork'. It is a Web based application offered as a Service to end users. People can signup to the basic version for free and start inviting friends into the network. Ok, How does this new solution brings novelty?. As an SAP executive rightly puts it, most of these enterprise networking conversations are screaming for context. Yes, Screaming! :-). And in the social setup (like LinkedIn/Facebook), the context setting and moderation becomes an issue as everybody screams and it takes significant amount of time for an accepted protocol to emerge from conversations from unknown people.

In the new solution, SAP takes collaboration to the next level which is Decision Making. I signed up for the free service today and played around with the options. In addition to all the basic networking features like profile, following others, etc, One can create 'Activities' and invite relevant people into the activities for collectively making some decisions. And once they have decided, they can lock the conversations, close the decision and archive the entire conversations for later perusal. In the corporate world, BlackBerry device has become extremely important purely because of the fact that 'Email' is being used as the conversation and collective decision making tool. Isn't it?. But, Truly speaking, Email was not designed or meant to be a collective decision making tool. And that was exactly solved by StreamWork.

Above all, SAP scores by providing activity templates for structuring the conversations. One can create as many activities as required. And the solution also has typical bells and whistles - conenctivity to blackberry, integration with enterprise security, connectivity to other feeds, integration with BO/SAP/Enterprise Systems. Now, that sounds really enterprisy!. And innovative!.

Am not sure whether StreamWork is available as an installable format so that someone can have it in their private cloud. If that is possible, nothing like it!. Am sure most of the SAP customers would love to embrace it in 2011!.

For other non-SAP customers, the brand 'SAP' may not strike the right chord with this truly innovative small new piece of solution!. We need to wait and watch the developments!.

Bring Your Own Device to the Enterprise!

2010-12-13T00:33:00.000-08:00

One of the pertinent challenges of the CIO has been to respond to emerging technologies and associated opportunities. And the recent one has been Smart Phones.

The question that employees have started asking is - I have a high-end Smart Phone having Android or Windows OS. Can I access corporate emails in those devices? If not, why not?

For CIOs, this scenario brings improved capability to the enterprise enhancing the productivity of the employees, with little additional cost.

This is a perfect example of consumerization of IT, where consumer technologies try to enter into the Enterprise with major force. These technologies certainly blur the boundaries of personal and work life. Its a boon and a bane!.

Now, How do we achieve a blended experience in an optimized technical solution?. My observation with Smart Phones has been that they are becoming on par with Laptops in terms of capabilities. If we can do something on Laptops/Desktops, it should be possible in SmartPhones sooner or later.

Here is a suitable example - VMWare to virtualize Android SmartPhones for Business Users. In India, Dual Sim enabled Phones are very popular. One of my friends who is a Doctor carries a phone with Dual Sim cards, clearly assigning one for his patients/clients and another for social/friends network. Am sure many of other professionals would also like to have Dual Sim Cards. Me, being in IT world, though may not need to have dual sim card, would like to have a partitioned Smartphone where the business content is clearly separated and manageable from personal content like photos, videos, etc. And that is exactly what VMWare promises to offer using this solution. Like Desktop virtualization, one can virtualize and install two different operating systems in the same device.

Users who would like to switch between business and personal profiles can simply do so, as easy as tapping an icon for opening an application. This is certainly innovative and just the beginning of untapping the potential of smart phones.

As mentioned in the article, one of the interesting challenge that still remains to be solved is to virtualize the telephony in addition to the OS/content. For example, putting an official/personal call on hold while the other sim is currently being active!.

Cloud Computing 2.0

2010-12-10T02:59:00.000-08:00

Interesting things happening at SalesForce.com. I believe the recent events at SalesForce.com could influence the progress of Cloud Computing industry in a big way.

1. Database.com
Its a Cloud database offering from SFDC. Using this DB, developers can write applications in any language of their choice, host it on the platform of their choice and connect to this cloud DB, as if they are connecting to on-premise database. There are news that some of the vendors are even developing database drivers (like JDBC) for database.com, so that development community can connect to the Cloud DB with ease. In fact, if those drivers become available, it will require very few changes for legacy apps to be able to talk to Cloud DB.

2. SalesForce.com acquire Heroku.com
Heroku.com is a Rails Cloud Provider. Anyone can write a Rails application and host it on Heroku cloud. With this acquisition, SFDC would have the capability to support Rails PaaS in addition to Java like Force.com platform. This would increase the choice of platforms available to end users for developing custom applications.

3. Cloud 2 Vision
In the DreamForce conference, SFDC CEO has unveiled its next version of Cloud Computing Strategy. And He goes on to say that SFDC architecture has been reworked to support mobile, cloud and social capablities. And now Enterprise business applications can acquire the capabilities of cloud/mobile and social, all three in one offering by partnering with SFDC. Sounds promising?. Its interesting to note that newly launched Database.com comes with native support for modeling social applications (such as integrating with profiles/connections) and connecting to mobile based applications. In a way, SFDC strategy is already demonstrated in databse.com offering.

It is good to see lots of traction on Cloud Computing and increased number of options becoming available to Cloud Development Community. With the rate of progression, I hope to see developers would using most of their standards languages and tool sets to work with Cloud with minimal or no changes to their existing skill sets. This will accelerate the adoption of cloud in the development community and subsequently the same community will influence the adoption within their respective organizations as well.

But, What bothers me is that - SFDC primarily is a business service provider to line of business users. But do you see the change in their course, now morphing themselves to become a platform vendor. And that transformation will only appeal to Enterprise IT and not the line of business users. No doubt, platforms are required to give rise to creation of new applications. But, I would personally like to see lots of innovative business applications served on SaaS from SFDC and others competing vendors and not just the infrastructure.

Another disturbing phenomenon is the disintegration of various layers in Cloud Computing. Now, if someone wants to develop a vanilla enterprise application from scratch, he/she can assemble various layers of the application from various clouds - application layer, database layer, [Am not sure someone provides UI layer/presentation frameworks alone on Cloud]. Now, just imagine, running a single transaction that spans across multiple networks, multiple data centers in different geographies. Am sure that would increase complexity of Enterprise Apps to multifold. And We would need a new set of tools to manage the complexity. I wouldn't be surprised if someone provides those tools also on the cloud..:-)

HCL CEO Vineet Nayar does a Larry Ellison on Cloud Computing!

2010-12-08T09:17:00.000-08:00

Few weeks ago, I had raised a concern that many of the Indian IT services CxOs dont talk about Technology and merely interested in topline/bottom line issues. And few weeks later, I had also highlighted the Technology leadership displayed by Steve Jobs in Apple's earnings call.

And this week, Here is Vineet Nayar talking about Cloud in HCL Analyst conference. Its heartening to see an Indian IT services CEO talking about technology. And not only for this instance, Vineet has been articulate and attracting media attention for quite sometime now, due to HCL's tremendous growth in recent years, renewed marketing and Vineet himself talking about company's strategy convincingly.

Now coming to the main issue of 'What' exactly Vineet talked about Cloud. And that where it gets interesting. In the interview, Vineet explains why he is not so excited about cloud. And He states the fact that there is no disruptive technology behind cloud and its just a business model that is packed in a new format. [Oracle CEO Larry Ellison ranted on Cloud few years ago on similar grounds]

Very True!. In fact, I had mentioned this very same issue in 2008 stating that Cloud is indeed a rocket science and there is no magic pill that would enable someone to become a cloud provider from day one. Pls note, anyone can become a cloud consumer instantly. But becoming a Cloud provider is not so easy!. And there are genuine technical challenges in being a authentic cloud provider.

The industry is still in early stages in discussing/debating and defining what an 'authentic' cloud means in 'technical' terms.

Leaving the semantic definitions behind, Cloud indeed brings visible economic benefits to Enterprise IT. And if Vineet, as a CEO of an IT services company, is concerned about his customers (most of them being Enterprise IT), why don't his company take the leadership and pass on the cloud benefits to them?. If Cloud is an opportunity to create a new value for Customers, why dont we adopt it? Why should he wait for a disruptive technology to arrive to create a new value?.

Vineet disputes the value proposition of Cloud, because it fundamentally conflicts with his traditional business model. And the traditional IT services business model is threatened. Period.

In his new book, Vineet reveals HCL's new strategy - Employees First. Isn't it obvious?. In a people-intensive business model, your employees have to be first!. But, then, there are umpteen number of challenges in sustaining this strategy such as Growing wages and increased attrition,etc.

Time has come to revist the linear, people-intensive IT services business model to a non-linear, technology-intensive business model. Only then, IT services can reduce the cost of existing services and introduce new value added new services. And that exactly What Cloud offers!. It provides a non-linear business services platform for end customers with no or less strings attached.

I strongly believe that Indian IT services firms can come up with service innovation backed by Technology. For example, some of the IT service companies are providing platform based BPO services or few of the companies provide business products.

Am glad that Vineet talks about 'Employee First'. But, it would be much more meaningful if Technology also takes a slot in the Strategy.

Google Chrome Web Store

2010-12-08T03:16:00.000-08:00

Today Google has opened Google Chrome Web Store - a marketplace for installable web apps. Web Applications that are installable?. Sounds confusing?. Yes, it is. But, its interesting!.

These applications are native extensions of Chrome browser and installable as shortcuts (like you store URLs as Favorites in your browser). These applications also have the advantage of using Chrome's underlying presentation/JavaScript technologies to render a rich user experience, which otherwise wouldn't be available for traditional web applications in other browsers. And some of these web applications have the capability to work in offline mode as well (when there is no internet connectivity available). Remember, Google Chrome has built-in support for Google Gears.

Like Apple Appstore, Web apps are available for free and for a fee. You can find applications categorized in several segments, so that users can discover, install and use the applications seamlessly.

Not long ago, Google's CEO complained that Apple is not an Open System, stating that one needs to have Apple's own set of tools/standards to develop applications for iPhone ecosystem. And Here he comes in Chrome Webstore replicating exactly what Apple does!.

In the Internet world, everyone wants to be an advocate of 'Free' market where every other product/solution should follow open standards or given away for free. But, the challenge is 'Free' market doen't lead to a sustainable business model. And that's where everything starts breaking and companies start to differentiate themselves to make some money. This phenomenon applies to open source software as well. Few years ago, It was all rage and Enterprise IT departments were all geared up to use open sorce software in every possible opportunity. Now, the scenario has changed. Today, bitten by support issues/lack of rich management tools, Enterprise IT shops are wary of adopting free/open source software within their companies and prefer commercial support model/licenses. And I don't see an issue in being a so called closed business model, as long as it provides value for the money that is spent.

Ok, coming back to web app store, I was interested in finding whether Google docs is part of the app store. But, I couldn't find it. If I could, I thought I would start using it to see if could replace MS-Office Desktop experience.

It would also be interesting to see how Microsoft IE or Adobe AIR would respond to this idea from Google. With the ability to leverage local resources in the context of browser, I definitely hope to see some interesting killer apps to arrive in coming months leveraging this idea.

Wikileaks & Web 2.0 Complexity

2010-12-03T02:36:00.000-08:00

News Media on the Net has been quite active for the past few weeks especially with Wikileaks globally and Tape leak Controversy in India.

The evolving events in Web 2.0 world shows just how unprepared we are in dealing with new issues or taking advantage of emerging opportunities.

For example, Here is a UK retailer who has started a company called InternetEyes. The company provides a service to small business owners where the CCTV security streames can be watched in real-time and the business owners can be alerted for suspicious activities for a monthly fee. The interesting fact is that the company provides this service by Crowdsourcing. Yes, the people on Internet can signup to watch the CCTV stream during their free time and alert the business owners on suspicious events. Now, this sounds like a cool idea, isn't it?. But,there are several quesions that remain to be answered - Is this legal to outsource the legal enforcement activity itself to common citizens?. Does it breach the privacy of people who visit the store?. Is it ethical or do we need to inform those visitors?

Second, Whatever Wikileaks has been doing, Is it legal? just because it is someone that uploads the leaked documents and Wikileaks do not hold any responsibility. Or whatever gets reported out of Wikileaks, is it true and authentic?. Whatz the guarantee that those uploads are not edited? Very recently, Amazon has opted to drop the Wikileaks service fearing legal issues.

And Third, the Tape controversy in India. The news broke out only in Internet and the traditional print/TV media chose to remain silent on the issue for varous reasons. Hence, large number of people remained unaware of the issue and its consequences. This proves that in a country like India, Internet as a Media, is still a minority compared to its population and the reach of traditional print/TV media. How do we distill the multitude of opinions pouring from various avenues claiming who is right and who is wrong?. How do we know the right source of truth?. How do we cut the noise and synthesize the substance?

I see these phenonmenon as evolution of Web 2.0. As the phenomenon grows and people start to contribute in unconventional/unusual ways, it starts to generate new insights, leads to new possiblities and of course, new challenges and new threats in social/legal avenues.

And that's going to be quite a lot of work for netizens. As an Individual, it is going to be expensive for someone to distill and make sense out of proliferation of information and associated opinions on various events. In user-generated content world, given the fact that published content itself could have undergone intentional, biased manipulation, the problem only could get worse. I believe we are going thru the times of information authoring and discovery and we are in need of new tools and technologies that can help us to filter/synthesize / assit in navigating the amazon of information and make suitable choices. It will all the more good, if those tools are highly personalized and understand individual needs better. "Googling" for information is just not enough..Its just the beginning and we have to find ways to move beyond Google.

In this aspect, I would like to quote 'LG App Advisor' application in the newly launched LG Android Phone - LG Optimus One. I do have a HTC Android phone and I love it. And I have downloaded quite a bit of android applications from the market place and wish to 'fish' some more suitable apps that aligns to my interests. Now, if I go to the android marketplace and do a search, I get plenty of results and that is frustrating to me to filter and shortlist the best apps that are interesting to me. Now, LG App Advisor is one that claims to assist in this area. This app can help in suggesting suitable apps accoring to our interests, mediating between us and the android marketplace. The idea is interesting and it is definitely useful. Am yet to see this app advisor demo on Youtube and the feedback. But, this is the kind of example I was talking about - There would be new breed of mediator tools/technologies/apps we will see in near future to navigate the Internet better.

Did you think Enterprise Architecture a joke?

2010-10-20T22:26:00.000-07:00

Think again!

Its heartening to see InfoWorld and Forrester identifying some of the best Enterprise Architecture initiatives happening in the IT organizations for 2010 and enlisting how those organizations are benefitting from those initiatives. I would recommend this article to anyone who is interested in the concept of Enterprise Architecture.

Interestingly, most of the companies that are listed in the article are Financial Services companies.

More than anything else, what I would like to highlight is the following piece that is the opening line in the article - "In large enterprises, the barrier to increased efficiency and business agility is almost never technological. It's organizational". I would say this statement is the holy grail of Enterprise Architecture. Beyond a point, technology alone will not solve organizational / business problems. You will need different set of tools and skills to achieve improved efficiency and effectiveness. An Enterprise Architect, if not skillful, atleast needs to be aware of those dimensions to deliver his duty.

Technical Leadership - Steve Jobs shows the way!

2010-10-19T05:16:00.000-07:00

This morning, one of my colleages commented that Google is talking to some of the low-cost mobile phone manufacturers in India to make Android available for sub 150$ phones. This would eventually result in proliferation of android and its increased market share. He in fact quoted a nytimes article that believes Apple iPhone's market share may shrink like the way Mac Desktops' market share was eaten away by Ubiquitous Microsoft Windows. Indeed the argument was persuasive!. And anyone who reads both the articles would believe that Apple is under threat!.

In the afternoon, this perception is completely rebutted by none other than Steve Jobs himself in Apple's Quarterly earning call. He goes onto say that Apple's integrated architectural approach would be much more valuable to end users compared tofragemented Android Approach. It was a fitting response!. As Steve Jobs himself has stated, its pretty unusual that he joins the earnings call after couple of years.

But, Am not going to talk about iPhone Vs Android in this post. That's pretty much self-evident in those respective news articles.

What impressed me what the level of technical leadership displayed by Steve Jobs in the call, the number of technical 'decisions' that have been 'consciously' taken by Apple,the 'metrics & dimensions' of those decisions, the 'impact' those decisions can make to end users. It was phenomenal for a chief executive to talk about the nuts and bolts of technology behind the company's products.

Few weeks ago, I had raised a concern that none of the indian IT service company executives talk in terms of technology solutions behind their services in their quarterly reports. And today's Steve Job's presence in Apple's earnings call just demonstrates the Technical Leadership, I was referring to.

Some of the key technical aspects that are discussed:
- Decisions on 7" Tablets Vs 10" Tablets and Technical reasons behind the same
- Twitter client - Twitter Deck - Tested on 100 different versions of Android
- Use of Tablets in Eductation industry

Steve jobs concludes by saying - "Make the best product in every industry that we compete in and to drive down the cost, while constantly making the products at the same time".

Am inspired!

End of Powerpoints?

2010-10-06T07:01:00.000-07:00

Do you hate Powerpoints?

One of the CIOs whom I had worked with, doesn't like Powerpoints. He just doesn't believe in Powerpoint based presentations. Neither he uses one when he makes a Townhall meeting.

Am aware of many such people who just dont like canned thinking. Those people are typically spontenous, experimental, shape the goal as they go, discover new opportunities as they explore new avenues. Of couse, this approach could be extremely uncomfortable to top-down/plan-oriented thinkers. But, We are not going to discuss the pros and cons of people in this camp or the other.

Instead, this post will focus on - Are there any real good alternatives to Powerpoints?

When the whole world, especially IT, gives very little room for top-down planning/strategy/enterprise architecture, Powerpoints don't make any sense. Because thoughts and deliberations don't shape actions. Actions-first approach takes the lead here. Those Actions eventually shape the thoughts and evolves the destiny.

If not powerpoints, what other media could be used to communicate issues/options/solutions?

And the alternative is - Games!

Yes, Serious Games.

IBM has announced Serious Games to promote its Smarter Planet Theme. The Game helps the City planners to understand and solve some of the complex issues like water/energy management. While gaming, the participants will also have the opportunity to identify suitable technologies that can be leveraged to solve those issues. [Of course, in this case, IBM products] IBM believes its a unique way to solve complicated problems. And Here people learn by "doing" it not by passive listening to canned presentations. And that's the difference! Simulations and Participation would stimulate the thought process of participants and help them to learn quicker.

There are tons of possibilities during the simulation such as introducing real-world constraints, multi-dimensional decision making, gaming rules and goal setting.

And it looks like most of the other companies such as Cisco, Google, Microsoft and GE are also experimenting with Serious Games.

And here is an analyst who is imagining Gaming could be used in Enterprise IT in the context of Business Intelligence and Collaboration.

I wouldn't be surprised if future management consultants package their reports in Games rather than Powerpoints.

Are we ready yet?. May not be. But I believe the time is arriving soon, since Generation Y is joining the workforce.

SalesForce.com Chatter Mobile - What does it offer?

2010-09-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Here is yet another diversification...

SalesForce.com announces the arrival of a mobile application called 'Chatter' for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android Mobile phones. What does the application do?. It is a Enterprise Social Networking application (like yammer) and it also delivers notifications from Enterprise applications within the organization.

Now, wait a minute, SalesForce.com is a CRM company. Why is it talking about Enterprise Social Networking and Enterprise Application Notification and that too on mobile devices?

My observations:

1. SalesForce.com is diversifying into solutions that can compliment its traditional CRM solution

2. SalesForce.com is positioning itself as 'Platform-as-a-Service' vendor than a 'CRM Software-as-a-Service' vendor.

3. SalesForce.com gets into a promising, but still emerging area - Enterprise Social Networking. Like BlackBerry marketed its Enterprise products to IT administrators, SalesForce.com can convince the Enterprise IT that Enterprise social networking can be provisioned within its SaaS security framework.

4. Now, my next curious hypothesis is - Can this chatter mobile incorporate corporate emails as well?. If SalesForce.com or its partners can provide 'Email Server as a Service' on the Cloud and the 'Chatter' mobile application can integrate with it in a secure manner, Why would anyone need a separate corporate email client?

Google's Business Strategy!

2010-09-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

Have you ever wondered what is the business strategy of Google?

Though its core businesses are Search & Advertisements, Why is it getting into anything and everything in digital media? You can notice Google's presence even in unconventional areas such as Healthcare and Energy where IT hardly had a role to play in the past.

I have certainly wondered in the past...What kind of a diversification strategy is this?. Is this a concentric diversification that is aligned to its core competencies?

First of all, Can you define Google's Core competencies?

I have seen business articles that appreciated Google that it beats traditional core competency theory and breaking new grounds in business strategy.

But it looks like the strategy is not a mystery anymore, when I read this recent perspective on CIO.com titled Is Google Killing Economy?. The first interesting perspective is that its written by a Lawyer and second it throws some significant light on Google's world-size ambitions.

The hint I could get from this perspective is that Google would get into anything and everything that has the scale of Internet.And you know the scale of the Internet. Its worldwide!.

The lawyer has raised some serious concerns on Google's motives and claims Google is trying to monopolize the Internet, like someone else tried to monopolize the Desktop industry.

End of Hardware!

2010-08-13T09:42:00.000-07:00

Too much hyped up a title for this post?? I dont think so...

In fact, I got this title from one of the amazon books that I came across recently. Sometime back, I had written about the evolution of hardware devices such as analog devices in recent times like how they are morphing themselves into smart, internet-enabled digital devices. But, if you notice, those devices are actually relinquishing their physical forms...

For example, we were using analog alarm clocks a decade ago. Do we buy them at all today?
I dont see many of the today's smartphones have keypads. KeyPads are disappearing and converged into touch-panels within the mobile devices. Today, I came across this mobile app from General Motors that plans to have embed your car key functions within an application. Here, your physical car key disappears. One more example - recently California Administration recently came up with an innovative idea of turning car name plates to digital sign boards that can display advertisements.

Maybe, Ten years from now, we will use less physical devices compared to today's scenario. As the book states, we may not see huge physical machines such as Cars, Utility machines going away.They would be still around. But, what I see is that most of the information-emitting or information-requiring special devices will go away. They would all converge to a new digital experiences.

Yes, the new digitial experience that is gaining momemtum these days is 'Augmented Reality'.

Augmented Reality is a term for live direct or indirect view of physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery. Its basically an enhanced view of reality mediated by technology.

One of my colleagues introduced me to Layar, an augmented reality browser for Android platform. It is available in most of the smartphones today. Using the browser, the user can view enhanced / additional or hidden information by focusing the mobile on a real-world object / location. This is enabled by GPS technology & Internet feeds with exclusive additional information about the real-life objects. For example, using this app on your mobile, you can search for health care facilities or even jobs around your location or a Service person can view the hidden mechanical parts information within an automobile.

One could explore the other possibilities of this technology by looking at the examples quoted in Wikipedia.

I personally believe this technology has lot of utility value and could explode in useful business/consumer applications in future.

More than that, It could also be the beginning of the end of Hardware devices.

Future of Portals

2010-08-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

What is the site that you frequent quite often in the last six months?. Has it changed?

Here is my experience..

I used to visit my personal dashboard on Netvibes.com atleast once a week. But, Of late, I am seeing myself visiting LinkedIn very often compared to Netvibes.com. Am visiting LinkedIn to keep up with my contacts, find old/lost contacts, participate in group queries/discussions. If you are not visiting Netvibes, you should be visiting Facebook. Yes, the focus is clearly shifting from Portals to Professional/Social Networking sites.

I believe the reason why networking sites are such a big hit are - its about "me", interacting with people is fun than interacting with plain information,its real-time/lively, the information flow is bi-directional, it can bring new opportunities.

I dont know what LinkedIn is thinking about its roadmap. But, I firmly believe the personal home pages of these networking pages can become "the universal web desktops" and gobble the personal portal solutions like netvibes.

This Web Desktop can provision access to whole lot of services including networking. Yes, the networking would become "one of the services" provided.Many other services could be knowledge portal, bookmark sharing, access to social/enterprise applications and gaming.

And more importantly, the users would expect those sites to learn about themselves instead of users teaching the site about their preferences. I have been using Netvibes for more than three years now. What kind of knowledge it has acquired to provide me better services?

In the context of emergence of these networking sites, where do the personal portal sites stand? More importantly, in the Enterprise IT context, do you still need those expensive Portal servers?

Portal servers are expensive, complex and attempts to provide one-stop solution for everything whereas lightweight portal alternatives and new user behaviors are emerging in recent years.

Time has come for Enterprise IT to evaluate their portal investments and take decisive actions. Interestingly, this article also shares the same views about the future of Netvibes.

When do we see a Blue Ocean in Indian IT services industry?

2010-07-15T10:36:00.001-07:00

Its the end of first quarter in Indian financial year 2010-11. And the season of IT service companies announcing their quarterly performance results. And ofcourse, the associated market reactions.

We have also been seeing number of press conferences by CEOs of Indian IT service companies.

If you have been observing those press events of those CEOs, the typical issues that would get discussed are - billing rate corrections, hiring numbers, profitability, geo-political risks, growth/profitability numbers, dollar-rupee currency fluctuations.

But, Why aren't we seeing light on some of the toughest customer problems that are solved by these companies, in that quarter?. Why aren't we hearing anything about some of the impressive technology solutions that they provided? Why don't we learn anything on their future technology seed planting activities?

Indian IT services industry has achieved the dominant status in offshoring nearly a decade ago. And all these years, we have been hearing only the general management talk from the leadership than the customer value management enabled by information technologies.

Have you ever seen a CTO or a equivalent role from a Indian IT services company talked to the press in detail about the company's technology perspectives or its vision for the future? The answer is resounding 'NO'.

On the contrary, I was reading the interview of Cisco India Globalization Officer in a leading newspaper in Bangalore. In the interview, the EvP talks about some of the real problems faced by urbanization and how Cisco's technologies can help solving them. He goes on talking about some of the projects that Cisco is driving. Of course, he touches upon General management aspects as well.

But, if you read the interviews/blogs of Indian CEOs (from IT services companies), you will learn only about general management innovation/outsourcing offshoring trends among customers.

Clearly, this was required a decade ago when the whole offshoring concept was new and emerging across the globe. But, not today. Today - Globalization is at its peak. And the speed of technology change/Innovation is rapid. The potential to create new value based on Technology is tremendous. The needs of the customer, the needs of the industry, the needs of the society are constantly changing. And the indian industry should lead from the front than getting stuck in the past.

Agreed, Cisco is a Technology/Products company and Indian IT services companies are 'IT-intensive Customer Services' companies. But, that shouldn't stop them from leading the global outsourcing/offshoring industry on technology front.

In fact, Indian IT service companies have a stronger advantage that they work with numerous clients across the globe to solve some of their pressing problems using technology.

Its time the industry flip its orientation from shareholders' interests to customers' interests!.

Why Boeing acquires Cyber Security capability?

2010-07-08T22:48:00.001-07:00

Today morning, Over a cup of coffee, when I was reading the business section of Times of India, I came across this interesting acquisition - Boeing acquiring a Cyber Security Technology firm.

I understand there is quite a lot of activity happening in cyber security space, given the fact that number of threats are increasing every day. But, I was thinking - why would a traditional OEM / aerospace manufacturer get into the business of cyber security?

Apart from aeroplane manufacturing, the other key business of Boeing is Defense, Space and Security Systems. There are couple of areas where Boeing is planning to use the technology.

- as a capability that can enable secure networking of ground, air and space products
- as a defense for Boeing's network
- as a capability that can be deployed across its business units
- The acquired company can open new markets to Boeing

Pls note that its not seen as an IT capability. It is a compelling business capability. Going forward, I would say companies would build/promote cyber security as an integrated business capability like legal, HR and physical security.

Boeing has been supporting Military/Defense space for decades. With the ever-increasing influence of Internet, the defense strategies are shifting from traditional 'hardware' weapons/equipments to 'emerging' 'software/IT' enabled solutions. That's a significant paradigm shift!

I have talked about this transition in my earlier blog post as well.

With more and more businesses evaluating ET-based solutions and Internet getting embedded into pervasive devices, the need for cyber security solutions is only going to explode!.

Why Mobile Innovation Is Blowing Away PCs

2010-06-29T10:12:00.000-07:00

Though our Laptops were mobile for quite sometime, We never had the luxury of add-on devices such as GPS, Accelerometer, Integrated Camera. Until a couple of years before, even having a bluetooth enabled Laptop was a rare scenario.

Have you ever thought why?....

I was of the opinion that Mobile applications are picking up because of consumerism, mobile devices proliferation, increased competition across vendors, accelerated innovation, etc...
But, that's not true...

This is an interesting article from Techcrunch that clealry highlights there are fundamental reasons behind this Mobile Innovation!. And some of the reaons the article claims are that increased participation of small vendors across the globe, and tremendous competition from them to outdo each other in terms of product innovation, increased flexibility in accomodating structural changes in terms of hardware/chipset, platforms, software and systems integration.

The article also states that we simply dont have them in PC/Laptops because that ecosystem does not exist in that space. That's quite a revelation!.

At this rate of innovation, I wouldn't be surprised if the mobile ecosystem comes out with an innovation that would introduce structural changes in Enterprise IT platforms, especially software applications.

Like the way, Agile concepts disrupted the application development methodologies/processes, I guess something like a rapid development model would disrupt Enterprise IT application development and system integration as well...And that innovation could come from Mobile space.

IT is becoming ET! [Enterprise Technology]

2010-06-16T08:52:00.000-07:00

Excellent Perspective from CIO.com!

I remember the IT department used to be called as 'EDP' in my school days - Electronic Data Processing Department. In some companies, it used ot be called as 'MIS' - Management Information Systems Department. The Job of the department would be centrally digitize and manage the backoffice functions such as accounting/payroll in a central organizational unit.

The CIO.com article states that, with the advent of PCs and networks, MIS department was decentralized and that led to the evolution of IT. Pretty interesting to observe that how a technology innovation leads to organizational / management structure within the company [The arrival of LAN within the company].

Now, IT is hugely populated with COTS products and Of late, with Software-as-a-Service solutions. Is that all?. No, it looks like its going to change again and its called 'Enterprise Technology'.

When MIS was limited to only computer-savvy professionals, IT expanded the role of technology to larger set of people within the organization such as engineers, business people using spreadsheets/office/collaboration software. Now, with advent of ET, the technology would be made available to larger set of population outside the organization, beyond its own employees, to even those customers who have not traditionally used any devices or phones.

It falls on the idea of 'Internet of Things' where technology is going to get embedded in every possible device that the end customer interacts with. And this paradigm is going to amoss large amounts of data to the Enterprise. And the Enterprise would be challenged to make intelligence out of this vast amount of data to add value to the end customers and their environment. And the key difference from IT and ET is that ET would be wired to the physical world - physically touching the customers' lives.

Now the question is, Is the traditional IT department geared up to face this challenging trend?. I dont think so.

The key challenge would be the ability to envision, conceptualize, architect, build and operate solutions that call for 'Inter-disciplinary' competencies. When I say inter-disciplinary, the future Enterprise Technology solutions would require amalgamation of multiple competencies such as hardware, software and embedded technologies. While the traditional Enterprise IT shops are used to architect/operate software-only / software-intensive solutions.

Are you game for this new IT?

Why iPhone apps are such a big hit?

2010-06-16T08:13:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered why iPhone is able to make its apps so famous?

1 Billion Downloads in just over nine months. Stunning numbers, isn't it?

I have a Palm PDA that I bought few years ago. I do love the device and its user interface and applications. There are thousands of applications available for Palm platform. But, if i have to look for the most attractive or useful application for Palm, I need to visit umpteen number of sites. One way, its good there are quite a few options. The other way, it makes life cumbersome. I dont really get to see the most used or rated application in one place. And that's exactly the problem iPhone solves.

When I was evaluting the application architecture for iPhone, I was thinking there should be a rapid programming model that shrinks the time-to-market of these applications. But, it was not the case. Some of the iPhone application frameworks are still talking about Model-view-controller or multi-layer architecture. The applications may have a magical user interface. But, there is no silver bullet in terms of its application architecture!.

So, the crux of the famous equation is the 'Management Innovation' combined with 'Technology Innovation' - The economics that gives 70% cut to the developer community, Apple's Certification mechanism for applications, Application Store - the single storefront to search, purchase and download the application onto the device in one go and integrated withit the snappy UI - All this leads to the success formulae. Here is a perspective from IT consultant - Yourdon.

Once Steve Jobs was asked about the secret of success, he said 'its the chemistry'. Yes its the chemistry of the hardware, OS and the applications. He also added - You can't expect that chemistry between a Dell Hardware and Microsoft Windows OS'. How true?

Next Peter Drucker!

2010-06-16T07:29:00.001-07:00

Is Vineet Nayar, CEO of HCL Technologies, an IT Services firm based out of India.

This is what Tom Peters claims!.

One of the key challenges facing the organization these days is not just to make their IT systems agile, but to make their Organization Structure and Culture more agile and adaptive to the ever changing market needs. This is very much applicable to knowledge industries, like IT services.

When the same talent who used to work for one company can be easily poached by any other company by offering more compensation or designation/role, the only thing that could differentiate the incumbent company and increase its influence over the individual is its organization structure and culture. In the longer term, its the org. structure and culture that defines the DNA of the company and it would persist for a longer time, while the projects can come and go.

Having said that, the traditional 'command-and-control' model of organization structure is being challenged. The companies that adopt these hierarchial model are not able to be innovative or leading the industry in specific areas. And in a Knowledge industry like IT services, as Management Guru Peter Drucker says, the employees are well informed and knowledgeable than their bosses. This makes the problem much more complicated.

Now, what would be alternative? - Vineet Nayar has come out with a new book called - Employee First, Customer Second. The title of the book can be counter-intuitive to our traditional management philosophies. But, some of the principles what Vineet articulates are just radical and challenges the status-quo.

Some of the interesting thoughts from his book, as quoted here

Its time to switch from the traditional pyramid model to 'Inverted' Pyramid model of organization. In a company that is over hundreds of employees, the top management will not really have a clue on the ground realities and hence the company could be dis-oriented or driving in the wrong direction. Hence, its time to retire the centralized, command-control model to decentralized, collaborative model, where each network node is self-empowered. The leadership will only be guardians of corporate principles, adovates and encouragers

Making enabling functions like Quality / General Management to be accountable for the employees, not the other way round. This would improve the effectiveness of the organization. [I still need to get into the details of this point. Am curious to know more on his thoughts on the enabling functions.]

By renewing the Organization structure and culture, we would be unleashing the power, passion and talent of 'value-zone' employees. This would lead to the Growth of the company.

Am not sure whether HCL Technologies practices what Vineet has talked about in the Book. Neverthess, its a timely thought!. And any company that wants to be leading and growing needs to consider these thoughts.

Coming Soon: Apps for your car!

2010-05-25T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is interesting!.

If you look at the trends where the technology is progressing, it looks like the following. The devices which were once analog or mechanical are transforming to Intelligent machines.

analog-> digital -> Internet Enabled -> Information enabled -> Collaborative -> Smart -> Intelligent/Learning systems.

Joining the trend now is - Cars. In this newsclip, the car manufacturing company audi announces that future version of its cars will have computer-style dashboards that will have the capability to download apps from the Internet.

Its not just a technology innovation. Audi is also contemplating a business model, where the customers will be able to selectively download and pay to activate modular features in the car.
This will enable deep personalization of the products through Internet-enabled services.

On top of it, Audi also claims that its cars will behave like 'learning machines' that will be able to leverage the information and predict/recommend the driver's behavior.

Avatar 3D and ERP - What is so Common?

2010-05-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

Does the above combination sound strange?...

May be...

But, that is the coincidence that came to my mind when I read Why I hate 3-D and (You Should Too) by Roger Ebert in Newsweek. In this article, Roger says that he is not opposed to 3D as an option. But he opposes 3D as the future, a way of life for movies going forward.

I didn't watch Avatar 3D version. But, recently I watched DreamWorks 'How to Train Your Dragon' in 3D version. I should say that was one of the best entertaining movies that I had watched in recent times. I felt that the script of the movie was so interesting that I would have watched it, even if it didn't have 3D features. In fact, I would have loved to watch it in 2D version. The 3D version was distracting and it didn't add any enhance the movie watching experience in any way.

I am disappointed that next Dreamworks summer release Shrek 4 is also going to be released in 3D soon.

The 3D technology is hyped up so much that its already making inroads to Home entertainment. Samsung has introdcued 3D technology in LED TVs in India. And thats not all, there is a whole bunch of movies waiting to be released in 3D. Does it worth the hype?. I dont think so. I agree with all the reasons that Roger has mentioned in the Newsweek article.

Ok, So What?. How is it related to IT? or ERP?

Will come to that observation in few mins...

In the article, Roger concludes - Whenever Hollywood is threatened, it turns to Technology like sound, color, Dolby, DTS, and 3D. This is the observation that made me to think of the correlation to ERP...

Now..cut to ERP technology...

I recently upgraded my car stereo to Pioneer music system. And One of the reasons for doing that is to listen to Audio Books. The first Audio book that I rented was 'Beyond Goal' from Dr.Goldratt. I listened to this book couple of times, purely because there so many messages in that. I could write several other blog posts just on the thought-provoking speech by Dr. Goldratt.

If anyone has read Goal/or read Dr.Goldratt's articles, one could understand that Dr.Goldratt takes a hard stand on ERP. And He clearly outlines why it is so hard to derive benefits from ERP these days... Trust me, not just ERP, any significant IT investments that a company want to make, must listen to Dr.Goldratt to understand the process of yielding benefits from it.

And he goes on to say that, Whenever ERP fails to provide any new ROI/new benefits to the company, it simply turns to ....Technology...How true is that?

If you are watching the ERP industry, you dont need a evidence to prove this statement. We are only hearing about technology "innovations" namely SOA, BPM, Composite Apps, etc. We dont hear anything at all about Business Process Innovations/New Business Solutions. And Whenever the ERP vendors are cornered for innovations, we get the answer of new technology upgrades. And you know that, People just don't buy those!.

Now lets come back to 3D technology...

Isn't it a nice correlation to say that whenever we run out of ideas to provide real value to the end customers, we turn to technology based ideas?. And We use that as the reason to "charge the customers more" because the customers get a 'seemingly premium' experience. And if you look at it, that new technology opens up a whole new market around it. In case of 3D, its the glasses, TV, projectors, etc. In case of ERP new technology - new middlewares, new visual modeling tools, new monitoring tools, etc.

And thats one of the reasons that I am not intrigued to blog so much these days...all the time we hear about smartphones, social networking, graphics and games. I dont deny that they are true innovations. But, I dont accept that they are the way of life...We are told by the media to believe that thats the only innovation happening in the industry...

And, we as consumers, when we start to focus on real issues, we will also start to see real innovations...

(Don't) Go Green!

2010-04-25T07:55:00.000-07:00

Will explain the title in few moments...

Yesterday, I attended CyberSecurity Conference organized by CII (Confederation of Indian Industries, Southern Region). I must say it was one of the useful conferences that I attended in the recent past. The reason is that the conference was not organized just for techies/IT companies but for the complete ecosystem of corporates, industries and Government representatives. Its pretty interesting to see that these conferences throw some light on real-life problems that are currently faced by the Government, Corporates and Individuals in using Internet services [and not typical sales pitches or IT solutions looking for problems].

My Technical white paper on the title "Cloud Security" was published as part of the conference proceedings to the participants. Dear Readers - Please contact me in Linkedin with a message for your copy of the paper. I would be happy to share!.

I wanted to post my takeaways from the conference. I have a long list but I will try to capture few important points.

Tamil Nadu Government is collecting close to Rs.1400 crores on commercial taxes via online. Indian Railways is hugely popular in recent days because of online booking facility. Income Tax Return filing is enabled via web. And more and more Government departments are going online in the coming months for not just information sharing but to host applications/transactional services.

The Generation X and Y may not be able to imagine banking without online banking facility. Lots of people that I know don't even visit Banks to perform their transactions. So does insurance companies - Premium collection, Insurance Renewal, Investment updates - all getting done from the convenience of armchair.

More and more - Internet is becoming a public infrastructure like railways, road and electricity/water - on which wide variety of personal, commercial, social services are being offered. When I equate Internet to electricity/water, People are increasingly becoming dependent on the Internet infrastructure for their day-to-day personal and business operations. Do you see the significance now?

And the next generation of apps that we foresee in the Internet are - Internet Services (SaaS) that are connected to Hardware devices/controls - take for example - Internet services that are connected to Home energy meters and Security controls.

Now, We are talking something serious. The usage of Internet usage is moving from convenient/comfort zone to Highly critical/safety and security zone. With the significance of Internet and its services increasing day-by-day, Can anybody afford to overlook the security risk implications?. They better dare not...

And this whole conference is centered around this very theme.

Now, coming back to the title of this post - Don't Go Green. Someone in the conference mentioned that - As the Go Green campaign gets momentum across the world, people and their ecosystem are moving from physical/transactional ecosystem to offline/web-oriented ecosystem. This is good because it will save energy from various perspectives. But, at the sametime, going green should not be seen just as one-dimensional. It has serious implications..and sometimes even dangerous on other dimensions.

The conference had some eminent personalities from Government like Senior Leadership from Tamil Nadu Police and Indian Military. And one of the speakers went on to say - The next war will not be based on bombs and bullets but on Bytes...!. May sound little fictional or unrealistic to believe!. But, its undeniably true..And We already have several indicators in the World that affirms this direction.

We have enough evidences on cybercrimes happening in Banking/Corporate world and at Individual level.

The question is - Are we prepared?

Big Fat Truth Behind Business Intelligence!

2010-02-18T07:43:00.000-08:00

This was a revelation!

Can you guess the adoption of BI solutions among Non-IT users such as Sales and Marketing roles for their day-to-day informational needs during their operations?

Your Answer - 50%?

A BIG NO!

Here is what Forrester analyst Boris Evelson's has to say:

"I recently talked to a few dozen non-IT professionals (specifically in front office roles, such as sales and marketing) across multiple industries, regions and company sizes. Guess how many of them fully or partially relied on IT for their day to day operational and strategic information needs? BIG FAT ZERO!!! This finding was a huge surprise to me – yes, I did expect to find something like less then 50% reliance on IT, but I surely did not expect to find 0%.

It is truly amazing that after 30 or so years of BI software, services and solutions vendors and internal IT organizations making a strong push and a case for BI, they are still not even making a dent in the front offices"

This finding may not be music to the ears of BI Professionals. But, this looks like the brutal truth behind the history of BI solutions.

So, What are the reasons? Of course, the Forrester blog post talks about BI on SaaS as one of the options that could drive adoption.

But I would like to draw my observations on multiple dimensions:

1. The 'Velocity' in which IT could turn around BI solutions to Business. Traditionally, IT is perceived as slow especially in implementing new BI solutions because of significant lead times in Business understanding, Ensuring Data Integrity, etc. You might have heard of Agile Application
Development. Ever heard of proven case studies in Agile BI or Agile Dimensional Modeling?. The solution lies in radical changes in the way the BI solutions are constructed - not just the IT service provider, but the technology/product vendor and the process organizations.

2. Every business has now hooked onto 'High-Velocity' working environment. By High-Velocity, I mean, the decision making cannot depend on past data or metrics sheerly because of the reason that the data/metrics must have become irrelevant with respect to time. So, Most of the decisions are driven purely by intuition rather than metrics. What could the solution? - Applying 'right-velocity' principles...and not just rushing decision making across the board.

3. BI helps only when somebody 'wants' to optimize something, and not 'have to' optimize. This is a cultural change and its very hard to achieve. The solution lies in radical transformation in the organization structure, incentives/rewards and day-to-day operational business processes.

4. Last but not the least, Data Quality. Siloed application architecture will not lead to actionable Intelligence. Without proper Data Stewardship in place within the organization, it would just be a Garbage-In-Garbage-Out.

Enterprise Architecture Discussions @ LinkedIn

2010-01-13T01:44:00.000-08:00

I have been discussing about some of the pressing issues of Enterprise Architecture within the organization with fellow professionals in LinkedIn Enterprise Architecture Network. They can be found here (This discussion is about the relevancy of EA practice in a diversified business model) and here (This thread is focused on the value proposition of EA). I think its a great opportunity to connect with professionals across the world and share some of the common problems being faced in the industry. Thanks to LinkedIn!.

Cisco's Innovation in Emerging Markets

2010-01-12T21:23:00.000-08:00

Top Multi-national organizations are getting serious about Emerging Markets. In a move towards gaining market share in these markets, those MNCs are indigenously designing products/services that are exclusively tailored for those specific market needs. This is a paradigm shift. And the examples are GE and Cisco. GE recently designed low-cost Electronic Cardiogram devices for rural India and it has become a major hit. Now, the same product has started creating significant demand in developed markets like Europe.

The other innovation which I wanted to blog in this post is about Cisco's latest innovation in alliance with a Commercial Vehicle Manufacturer in India - Ashok Leyland. The company Ashok Leyland has recently demonstrated an intelligent vehicle (bus) with Wireless connectivity to a remote control centre that can be used initially in the context of emergency healthcare. Cisco has designed the entire communication system for this intelligent vehicle.

The interesting part is that the platform can be enhanced to be used not just in healthcare, but in other contexts such as education, defense, banking and security as well. Cisco also claims that if the business demands more such applications, they can be deployed on the vehicle platform.

I would like to draw some interesting observations here:
1. Ashok Leyland - traditionally a manufacturing company - is incorporating Technology to introduce its new generation of its product line. This shows that slowly but steadily Technology is making inroads into traditional businesses such as manufacturing. The fusion of business & technology is going to define the future product lines of several other industries as well. Its very similar to GM's Onstar network services but here the idea is applicable to larger audience (since its targeted at commercial vehicle segment)

2. Cisco, being a multinational, has started looking emerging market business seriously. It is already planning to shift the base location of several of their top leaders to India. This move demonstrates the company's commitment to the emerging markets and it would enable new growth initiatives get accelerated faster than before.

3. The core idea behind this offering is the ability to deploy new business applications on top of a Telematics enabled IT platform. As Ashok leyland articulates, the company shifts its gears from being a vehicle manufacturer (product) to intelligent mobility solutions (services). (Reminds you of iPhone's platform based apps?)

Teleportation

2009-12-20T23:50:00.000-08:00

Some time back, I was introduced to the word 'Teleportation' in the context of IBM. IBM research has been working on the concept of Teleportation that aims of disintegrate an object at one place and reappear intact in another place (with out physical movement of the object). Can you believe?

If that research becomes successful, can physical objects be sent from one place to another (without physically transfering them)?. I think the logistics/courier companies would go bankrupt, I guess. :-)

I happened to see the same word in a different context few days before. Very similar - Sun's new virtualization software has introduced a new feature - called "Teleportation". Using this feature, end users would be able to migrate "live" and "running" virtual machines from one host to another. The source and target hosts can run on different processors and different operating systems. Still, the the VMs can be migrated seamlessly from one host to another. They call this feature as 'Teleportation'. VMWare offers this feature in the name of 'Vmotion'.

Using this feature, downtime of servers can nearly be eliminated, especially when servers have to be rebooted or during scheduled maintenance/upgrades.

Next Multi-Billion Dollar Opportunity for IT!

2009-12-20T23:32:00.000-08:00

Has anyone seen this opportunity?. It looks like Google and Microsoft have been preparing themselves for quite sometime.

Will talk about what they are doing in just a little while..

First, the news is that US Government is planning to spend multi-billion dollar in Healthcare IT. Most of the spending is going to be centered around Electronic Patient Health Records related Solutions. If this stimulus plan gets approved, it is going to openup Healthcare IT market like never before. It will bring tremendous opportunities for Electronic Health Record technology/product vendors, HealthCare IT solution providers / Hospital systems.

Check out this newsbriefing to know more about this plans in detail.

Now, what does this newsbit has to do with Google or Microsoft?

Google and Microsoft have been incubating similar HealthCare IT solutions for the last few years. Maybe on a low key - Google is providing 'Google Health' whereas Microsoft calls it as 'Microsoft Health Vault'.

Both the solutions let the patient key-in and manage their Electronic Health Records and online and selectively share that data with the partner ecosystem. The partner ecosystem would be Health Care providers, Pharmacists, Insurance companies, etc.

Now, with this kind of platforms and solutions in place, the patients can expect to experience the following set of services in near future:
- Health Predictions based on your current medical records
- Video Conferencing with Doctors with (Doctors having access to your medical history)
- Recommendations/Targeted advertisements/medicines that are highly personalized
- Upload infomation from their Healthcare devices directly to the platforms (e.g. glucose meters, bood pressure cuffs, etc. from various vendors)

Both Google and Microsoft are offering these services for Free to Patients. While both the solutions look identical, there are major differences. First, Only Microsoft provides support for uploading data directly from Medical devices. And it supports a variety of devices from various vendors when compared to Google. Second, Microsoft is investing significant amount of money in Health Care IT related solutions, while Google grows the platform organically.

There are competitors as well like Dossia, who provide similar EHR platforms to corporates. But, Google/Microsoft have the muscle power to outperform the competitors and has the ability to build a wider ecosystem around its platforms.

Both the platforms are not subject to HIPAA regulations yet. But, eventually they will need to comply with government regulations, if they want to address the privacy and security concerns of patients.

Top 10 Trends for Enterprise IT in 2010

2009-12-20T22:25:00.000-08:00

This is the season of the year to talk about the Enterprise IT Trends for the upcoming year 2010. As usual, I am not going to talk about Technology Trends. Being part of Enterprise IT, I would like to write about the forecasts for Enterprise IT shops (especially the bigger ones).

This recession has structurally impacted the IT organizations to seriously re-look at the opportunities for cost optimizations - be it organization structure changes, new process introductions, new way of partnerships with their vendors to get more value for the money.

From my perspective, the new year will see the following 10 developments.
1. Get ready for the long tail. The age of million dollar projects, billion dollar outsourcing contracts are gone. IT investments are scrutinized at various levels and only the critical projects are cleared from the annual budgeting process. To combat the bureaucracy of convincing the top management on high-cost projects, IT managers have started to fragment those projects into smaller bites that would be less scrutinized. This could be a tactical change in terms of defining the projects and funding them. But, it has its own consequences. The immediate result is that this approach leads to proliferation of long-list of micro/mini projects that requires the attention of both IT shops as well as vendors (not in terms of complexity. But, in terms of numbers).
2. Need for new Governance Models The proliferation of micro/mini projects leads to new forms of IT Governance. Especially, when this long-tail is being managed by multiple vendors and requires hand-offs between the participants, greater level of attention is required to ensure successful accomplishments. The Governance functions like Project Management Office, Operational Excellence Groups will get into the mainstream management operation system of Enterprise IT. New Tools, New Processes and methods would come into existence as part of the Governance.
3. Total IT outsourcing - Year-on-Year, IT is forced cut costs but deliver more value to Business. Now, that can only go little distance. Beyond a point, the Enterprise IT organizations would have to compeltely depends on their vendors if they have to radically deliver on their cost pressures. One of the solution is to completely hand-off the entire risks to one or two IT vendors who will directly manage a portion of IT relieving Internal IT staff. Its upto the IT outsourcing vendor to manage their own staff and infrastructure and deliver on cost expectations.
4. Business and IT - Alignment getting more wider - Relating to point no.1, if there are more and more number of 'parts', that is small projects, there is no 'whole'. That leaves a 'hole' in Business-IT alignment. Few years before, in a consulting assignment, one of the senior leaders of IT in a huge manufacturing company in US said - 'Our organization strategy is to build silos' - of course, pun intended. But, that is the reality. Any intra-organizational efforts to integrate the systems are seen as 'boiling the ocean'. And hence, the alignment is going to be a continuous challenge.
5. SaaS apps for new business verticals - Customers, Business/IT - would be demanding more and more SaaS applications from the vendors. CRM is only the beginning. Though there are concerns towards security, the cost equations are so compelling to resist for the IT leaders. This would lead to emergence of SaaS applications in new vertical functions.
6. Vertical-oriented, Platform-based BPOs - BPOs are getting smarter. Not just plain/mundane, back-office functions, Customers are getting improved options. For example, some of the vendors are offering complete 'channel business anlaytics' on their own platform/technology stack relieving the business/IT shops from capital investments and offering
high-value solutions 'on-the-tap'.
7. Flexible perimeter security - If a company has to consume services outside the firewall or export data to a vendor, the traditional perimeter methods are going to be challenged. The scenarios will get complicated if there are composite applications that are developed that has a mix of both internal services plus external systems. Lots of work are happening in this area by cloud vendors as well as Chief Security Officers. Some of those solutions will get into mainstream in the coming year.
8. Reporting/Data aggregation tools becoming a key capability - With proliferation of projects & information and increased need for compliance/Governance and scrutinity, there will be too much of reporting and data floating all around the company. And if a company needs to systematically view and manage the data, reporting tools and technologies would become a key requirement both for IT as well as Business. Analytics - is still seen as an 'exotic' food for Business/IT. It may take few more years to see real analytic solutions that solves compelling business problems.
9. Software Compliance Management Solutions - With increased transition to Open Source, Companies are also being vulnerable to underlying license infringements. There is a clear need for education in terms of the range of licenses, their limitations and usage options. New breed of solutions such as Software Compliance Management solutions (e.g. Black Duck) are gaining momentum in the market. IT shops/vendors will put themselves at greater risks if they ignore these considerations.
10. Innovation in packets - As the economy showing early signs of recovery, some of the high-performing departments in IT would look for inexpensive innovative experiements with latest technologies (e.g. Android/Mobile based applications). This would be a tactical arrangement to test the waters and not a sustainable organization model. However, this could be a good business opportunity for IT service companies if they can carve out a meaningful offering that suits multiple clients.

Promising Acquisition - III

2009-10-07T11:06:00.000-07:00

This is third in the series of Promising Acquisitions.

MindTree, an Indian Software Services company,recently acquired the Indian subsidiary of Kyocera Wireless. The Indian unit is engaged in wireless product development, software engineering and product testing for its global parent.

I have always admired MindTree for two reasons - Mindtree lives by its values. It clearly articulates what it stands for in the software services market and it also clearly articulates its path towards growth. It has aimed to achieve $1 billion dollars by 2014. To achieve this vision, Mindtree has been actively working on identifying several growth engines that could propel the company towards its vision. And the recent acquisition is one such initiative. According to Asok Soota, the chairman of MindTree, the businesses that has the ability to contribute over 10% of revenue have been identified as growth engines.

This is not the interesting news...The news which I want to highlight is the capability that has been acquired by Mindtree due to this transaction and what are the new offerings that we can expect from Mindtree because of the new capabilities?

Yesterday, Mindtree has announced that it would enter in 3G Mobile Handset business. Yes, in the Phone Manufacturing business...Can u believe a software services company getting into the product business?. I just cant. I truly believe that companies are not just making inorganic moves just to make topline look good...but also making creating endeavors to establish their mark in the industry.

According to the press release, the new business will offer feature-rich, white-labeled mobile handsets to telecom service providers or original equipment manufacturers. The Kyocera team, acquired by Mindtree, has earlier delivered 45 million wireless phones and has extensive experience in 4G technologies like WiMax. It also has experience in getting the product manufactured by contracting partner ecosystem. MindTree has also emphasised that it is going to invest on generating IP in this new business.

Incentives to Change!

2009-10-01T08:03:00.000-07:00

I have insisted in the past that IT shops being run as a Business with General Management Principles. This approach would not necessarily cultivate creativity and collaboration in the organization. There is tremendous amount of scope for innovation in reforming IT organization structure, incentive mechanisms and roles/responsibilities. Hardly very few companies have experimented with those kinds of ideas.

I wanted to highlight some of other interesting ideas that got my attention in the recent past. US Federal Government has recently announced (and ended) a program called 'Cash for Clunkers'. This program encourages the car owners to trade in their old cars with new/used cars with financial incentives. The objective of the program was to promote energy efficiency and get rid of old cars. This initiative was also aimed to trigger some demand in the automobile industry.

Now, How do we relate this idea to IT?. Here is a perspective from CIO.com. This blog post in the CIO website proposes an idea - Cash for IT Clunkers. Can we promote a program where users can trade-in their legacy hardware/software assets with new/cutting-edge technologies which would result in end-user productivity & efficiency and obviously some financial benefits as well.

My thought process is that these kind of mechanisms need to be experimented in the CIO shops / Internal IT organization itself. These mechanisms will give an opportunity to rejuvanate the IT landscape with creativity and get rid of older and expensive systems.

I also wanted to highlight some of the similar ideas happening in other industries...(especially in India)

1.Levis (Jean Trouser Brand) recently introduced a campaign where people can buy a Jean on EMI (Equated Monthly installments). For example, if a Jean costs Rs. 1500, and an ordinary consumer (who is used to pay only Rs.500 for his Jean) would be able to avail the benefit and pay only Rs.500 for 3 months. Thats creative!. Through this program, Levis tries to capture the market share of middle-class consumers who are not their regular customers, but always aspire to purchase high-value items. Would we see such ideas in procuring new product/tool licenses in IT industry?. We'll have to wait and see.

2. Recently, there is a company called BagSutra floated a business where people can rent expensive/designer bags on daily rents. The benefit to the customer is that they dont need to buy those luxurious bags for themselves. At the same time, they would get to change the bags very ofen by becoming a member of this program. I dont see any direct relationships with IT industry per se. But I think SaaS gives this flexibility.

In summary, creative pricing & marketing ideas would certainly accelerate the adoption of new solutions.

Social Media coming of Age!

2009-09-29T00:31:00.000-07:00

Except LinkedIn, I am not an avid user of other social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter. But, it looks like I may have to adopt sooner.

Here is the case - Recently I was planning to go for the new movie release - Disney Pixar's UP in Bangalore [Planning to write about Pixar's Technology Excellence soon]. The movie is Disney's one of the first 3D ventures. And I was trying to check if 3D feature is enabled in Bangalore theatres. To my surprise, I found the same query raised by a viewer in Facebook and one of the Bangalore multiplex theatre chains has promptly responded to the query. Wow!, this was something we have never seen before. Of late, Companies are recognizing the importance of Social Media tools. They not only create an identity for themselves in those tools, but they are also becoming active in interacting with their audience and contributing to the overall experience. That is commendable!.

Second case - I am frequent reader of a personal investment magazine Outlook Money. In their recent issue, I found that the magazine has established an identity in facebook & Twitter to facilitate expert investment advises, theme based discussion forums, Twitter based current advises. I am sure any customer who is financially savvy and active in personal investment planning/execution would greatly benefit from these initatives. And it could also potentially add tremendous amount of new readership to the magazine. I am planning to signup soon!

The takeway is that Social Media is becoming a serious Business!.

Promising Acquisition - II

2009-09-29T00:09:00.000-07:00

In the last post, we talked about Dell-Perot - A product company acquiring a Service entity to expand its reach. In this post, I wanted to highlight another interesting combination - An IT Service company investing in a hardware product company. Curious to know more?. Read on..

Accenture invests in a product company called Bug Labs. Yes, the company is teaming up with a tiny hardware product manufacturing company called Bug Labs. It is a move away from Accenture's conventional business model.

In a nutshell, Bug Labs provides a base [open-source] hardware module that can be enhanced to build a whole new device by adding other hardware add-ons such as accelerometer, GPS and GPRS connector and so on. Reminds me of another similar open source hardware company called Chumby, that I read about couple of years ago.

Once you have your own custom built hardware device, you can deploy your own business applications on top of the device in as little as two days. The advantage is that the device can be completely tailor-made for a target company and can be a great value add in rapid prototyping of new products/services.

Accenture is also planning to charge its customers based on pay-per-use of its underlying software services instead of selling the product. Do visit the BugLabs site, you will see a new ecosystems of devices and applications emerging.

Promising Acquisition - I

2009-09-28T23:47:00.000-07:00

In the recent past, I have had the opportunities to deal with application rationalizations, replacements/migrations and had the chance to recommend suitable SaaS solutions in replacement for on-premise solutions. What do you think the response might have been?. Well, the customers are definitely interested in the solution, but they are not bold enough to take that first critical step due to various reasons such as requirement of new contracts/agreements, data security, provisioning, user management, switching/transition costs.

My point of view - the ideal & easiest situation for the end customers to adopt SaaS would be - the current application custodians becoming the actual Application owners. Yes, the IT service companies who currently manage the applications, to transform themselves as SaaS provisioning companies in the respective business domains. The Service companies that provide the seamless switch to their end customers from being an owner to consumer will add great amount of value.

If that happens, it could open the door for a brave new world where IT service companies start to create their own SaaS ecosystem to serve each other and their respective clients.

Of late, we are witnessing quite a few acquisitions in the market that could lead the way to the new ecosystem - HP-EDS in the past and Dell acquiring Perot Systems last week. Will Dell-Perot combination give HP-EDS a run for its money?. Not necessarily.

The question to be asked is - what is the new value that could be brought by these acquisitions to the end consumer?.

The IT infrastructure products & services market is clearly being disrupted by various factors such as virtualization, cloud computing/SaaS, etc. And companies are rapidly responding to the disruptions by complimenting their capabilities by suitable acquisitions.

As I mentioned earlier in this post, would these new IT infrastructure + Services combo deliver those new value Options or spend the next couple of years in just restructuring companies to increase more revenues?. We'll have to wait and see!

Beginning of In-Sourcing?

2009-08-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

There are several news clips that instigated me to write about this topic.

First, there was an interesting post in HP-EDS blog saying Offshoring is becoming irrelevant!. And Offshoring is typically meant to solve yesterday's problems. Obviously, as anyone would, I was also infected with the curiosity to get into the details and got some information in this blog.

Second, there was a blog post from the reputed sourcing advisory firm TPI. This post claims several emerging trends in the Enterprise IT sourcing units. During heydays, the Enterprise IT sourcing units would hire the consultants from the advisory firms like TPI to enable them to take informed decisions in outsourcing/offshoring. This blog post states that this trend is drastically declining and the days of large deals are almost over.

Couple of other interesting trends..
- Large Deal sizes in the range of several millions spanning across multiple years are clearly declining
- Companies have started to experiment with multisourcing models / sourcing from best-of-the-breed combination of vendors
- Offshore contracts are evaluated like never before for due diligence and continuous improvements
- Companies are expecting the vendors to collaborate to create new/additional value for them- Bespoke / Custom application development projects are declining
- Procurement slowly but surely migrates from services to Online Productized Services (SaaS) & Business Process Oriented vertical solutions that would solve a distinct problem
- Large companies wanting to regain or rebuild a control mechanism over the vendor ecosystem

Now, What does this mean for Enterprise IT units?
- The emerging patterns stress the need for continuous cost savings and service delivery innovation from the vendors
- In-sourcing / In-housing of some of the key IT competencies are clearly emerging
- As stated above, if sourcing needs to be smarter in terms of business processes, new technologies and architecture alignment, it needs to be staffed with cross-functional teams. The teams typically need to have business analyts, sourcing managers, and Technical/Enterprise Architects
- Techniques like Agile also requires more client participation leading to staffing in Internal IT- These newly organized IT teams try to demonstrate IT's value to business by attempting new standards/mechanisms

How does this unfold for Outsourcing / Offshoring companies?
- End-to-End service offerings no longer going to yield interested audience from Enterprise IT- Companies need to find ways in which they can compliment and synergize with a prevailing vendor ecosystem within a company, rather than trying to pitch its own siloed sales story
- Continuous improvements and Innovation in Service Delivery will become order of the day
- As the emerging patterns create the need for 'smarter/leaner' staffing in Enterprise Internal IT, the vendors will also be expected to match with equally smarter staff on their end. No more labor arbitrage!.

Net-Net, Offshore vendors will need to work harder and smarter to retain and grow their existing ADM businesses!.

Strategic Short-Cuts!

2009-07-16T03:22:00.000-07:00

Thanks to my friend and fellow Architect, Naren for influencing me to write this blog post. I was so impressed with the concept that I felt I had to write this post.

Are you managing an IT shop that consistenly spends on Operate & Maintain Budget?
How much of your annual IT budget goes to 'sustain' your existing systems?
How much of it goes to 'extend' your existing landscape with new business capabilities?
If your spending is more inclined more towards 'sustain' mode, there are chances that you are carrying quite a lot of debts.

Yes, the subject of this blog post is about 'Technical Debts'. Here is a short article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debts. In this note, Martin defines Technical Debt as something that is accrued over quick and dirty ways of doing things.

In this note, as well as other articles that I read, Technical Debt is defined in the context of Application Development projects, where the Dev team is forced to pay the interest payments in the later phases of the release cycles. When I mention interest payments,it is the additional cost incurred in future development activities due to bad design/technical decisions that were made earlier in the cycle.

It was quite interesting to correlate this debt with Financial Debt! More than defining Technical Debts in a Project context, I was curious to understand how the idea is applicable in enterprise IT context, especially in the legacy application maintenance/support space. In typical IT spending, lions share of the budget goes for maintenance/support/operations and Technical Platform Refresh/Upgrade, etc. The question is - Does the lion's share goes to keep just the lights on? or extend those legacy apps with new capabilities?. Typically it goes for lights on operations and the organization depends largely on Heroes (be it people or IT Service Companies).If the company wants to get an insight on why the maintenance spending just stays flat on legacy apps or every single fix takes a huge amount of time, Its time to assess the Technical Debt that it carries. Once the company becomes aware of the Debt, it acquires the capability to manage it effectively.

The good thing that I liked about this idea is that it makes the bad decisions/short-cuts 'explicit' and 'quantifiable'. It is also an effective mechanism to communicate the risks to business/General management forum in non-technical language. I see a lot of relevance for this concept in the Architecture space, where I can defend the spending on Architecture/Design phase by stating the future costs on 'interest' payments.

In matured companies, you will not only report out how much of Technical Debts that you have created out of a project, You will also track and manage the Debt on a periodic basis. The companies can decide to payoff the debt once for all or pay it in increments, depending on the nature of the risk.

To thrive on this concept and make it actionable, the key pre-requisite that I see is the open culture. In a culture, where people will not get penalized for reporting the problems and there is an open atmosphere for discussing/debating the risks and mitigation options, those would be the places Technical Debts will fly.

Here is a plug-in from Codehaus for Technical Debt. The plug-in gives an indication on effort/cost required to reimburse the debt and the kind of debts detected in the code. (e.g. Code Duplication, Complexity, Violations)

Big Software Plans for Amazon Kindle?

2009-07-01T00:49:00.000-07:00

In february 2009, I wrote about Amazon's kindle evolving into an application platform.

Looks like its becoming true. This Businessweek's article confirms my speculation.

Some of the possible directions that the article indicates:
- New applications that run on Amazon's kindle e-Book reader
- An Online App store like iPhone/BlackBerry application store
- Kindle evolving into a delivery channel for content. example - Blog Publishing
Amazon already provisions selected internet blogs thru the device
What else could be delivered to the device directly?
- Email applications/Web Browsing.

Once Amazon provisions an SDK for application development, I am sure there would be interesting possibilities!.

Digitize Your Wallet!

2009-07-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

Citibank is introducing mobile based credit card payments in India. It is an integrated solution that Citibank is piloting along with other vendors such as Nokia (Handset provider), Vodafone (Telecom service provider), VivoTech (Technology provider) and Mastercard (Credit Card & Secure Payments Authority) and with selected merchants in the city.

Using this technology, the customers will be able to make contactless payments in the Point-of-Sale locations.

The customer downloads the credit card into the mobile application and protects the same with a password. When the customer makes a purchase in a retail store, he taps the mobile against a special reader device which performs the transaction. As I understand, a Java application installed on the mobile phone communicates with the card reader using Near-Field communications technology (elder brother of Bluetooth?) and communicates with the reader.

The reader & the application are from the technology company Vivotech. From technology perspective, Vivotech empowers the Bank to provision the credit card information securely to the mobile phone over the network provided by the Telecom Vendor. Vivotech also empowers the merchants with contactless readers.

It looks more convinient than pure-play mobile payments, where the mobile application sends an SMS or instructions to the bank directly to make payments. Here the idea looks more of digitizing your wallet and carrying it along the way. And there are no additional costs involved in data services consumption for payments as there is no need to send an SMS or connect to Internet.

The interesting perspective is that Citibank believes that it is not just a technology trial. But, a business model trail. Just imagine, if the mobile application can accept information from the card reader device at the merchant location - the possiblities are many - individualized discounts, gift vouchers/coupons download, personalized marketing. And all of these will result in additional revenue to the companies!.

We will have to wait and see how the technology picks momentum in Bangalore!.

I would be willing to sign-up but the catch is that I need to have a specific NFC-enabled Nokia handset.

Technology in Bathing Soap?

2009-06-30T06:11:00.000-07:00

This post is on a lighter note, but definitely has a technology perspective and caught my attention recently.

Hindustan Unilever, a reputed FMCG company recently conducted a market research in a village in India. The intent was to collect the usage patterns of their famous product - Lifebuoy - a bathing soap. As part of the study, a small microchip was planted inside the soap and they were distributed to selective set of participants who signed-up for the research. From technical perspective, the microchip was based on motion-sensor that captures the data when the soap essentially 'moves' when used by the customers. After the study, the chip would be shared with the company to assess the customer usage patterns. It was a brilliant idea!. This idea reminds me lots of interesting opportunities/ideas in Enterprise IT space. (for example - potential in remote infrastructure management?)

Now there ends the tech story. What would happen if the same soap falls into the hands of customers who are totally unaware of the presence of the chip and then they eventually find out the same?. - Panic :-). Yes, thatz what happened. When few customers found the presence of the chip, they mistook it for a hidden camera and that led to confusion. Later the company had to step in to clarify the actual situation. Innovation boomerangs! :-)

Mining Hidden Gems!

2009-06-30T06:05:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard of a non-human receiving a patent?. By Non-human, I mean a robot kind of application. Yes, thats true. HP's auto-innovation achieved the same. HP calls it as 'Genetic-Programming'. The idea is an application could analyze the 'genes' of earlier inventions and point to evolutionary advances. Thats interesting!.

In any organization, there are plenty of creative ideas, suggestions, initiatives always flow thru. only few of them sustain, rest of everything gets abandoned or goes unnoticed. If the organization does not have a formal way of capturing those ideas/suggestions, then there are chances that people are re-inventing the wheel again for persistent problems. The question is, Can the past knowledge help in determing or predicting the future?. Can a software application help mining those ideas and recommend suitable directions?. And HP claims to have an answer.

Am sure there are chances of looking at false positives!. But the brighter side is that it would help analyzing the existing data for useful patterns, relationships and understanding its impact in the future. For me, it looks to me its an application of Predictive analytics in the Innovation space. HP claims that it uses the concept to streamline their supply chain and come out with new ways of predicting future sales.

I believe the concept/idea is applicable across variety of domains within the enterprise, especially in the area of Idea/Innovation Management.

Innovation from Coca-Cola!

2009-06-10T04:45:00.000-07:00

This is outstanding!.

When I first time read this newsbit, I was thinking it sounded like a 'Telematics' solution.
The idea is simple. Coke is introducing a 'freestyle' wending machine this summer. Using this machine, the customer will be able to pick and choose the flavor/colories/water of his choice and make a beverage using a touch screen interface.

Ok, so, what is so Techie about it?. Here comes, the vending machine transmits the customer choices using a verizon uplink to Coke's data center and updates the choice information in SAP and Business Warehouse. The vast amount of choice information getting uploaded to the warehouse can give unique insights into Coke's next product of choice. That's innovation!.

The presss release says Coke has been designing this machine for the last four years. And some of the technology used are RFID (for flavor dispensors), Microsoft Windows, and SAP BW with Verizon Data services.

This is an excellent case of work where the company tries to co-create its future product by working along with its own customers, not in isolation. Apart from giving insights to future product design, the data can also lead to other obvious benefits such as stock replenishment, regional preferences. It can also potentially make healthy recommendations and customized offers.

Google - Your Next Enterprise Portal?

2009-05-13T10:25:00.001-07:00

I was not a big fan of Google Apps until yesterday. But, this innovative offering from Cordys-Google partnership changed my perception. If you have been thinking Google Apps are a bunch of applications that can just manage unstructured content, think again!. Google Apps is slowly but surely emerging as an office business application platform.

Cordys delivers structured workflow capabilities to Google Apps suite. It provides a Hosted environment for building business process applications in the cloud. Sure! - There are hundreds of vendors providing Cloud-based BPM solutions. But,the Cordys solution has been exclusively designed to support Google Apps.

Don't miss to checkout the process demo!. I am impressed with the demo that shows the way in which workflow solutions can be designed, deployed and accessed from Google Portal. The Workflow solutions have been built around Google Apps tools such as Word, Excel documents.

The demo workflow not only integrates with unstructured content like Google Apps, but also with structured sources like SalesForce.com. The icing on the cake is that - like Google public portal, where users can drag and drop widgets into their personalized portal - the enterprise users would get the same experience as the public Internet Google portal. The Enterprise user can have a personalized dashboard that presents the Inbox [that lists the action items], Google Charts, Google Maps Widgets!.

If a user-friendly business process solution can be designed and deployed in a Portal-like environment at a rate of $50 per user per year, Would you still need those expensive Enterprise Portals?. Atleast, for those least-critical, simple workflows that were built, hosted and supported in expensive data centers?. I strongly believe the time has arrived to re-look at the entire IT landscape within a company and challenge their TCO.

In this offering, the kind of applications that can be built are situational, process-centric mashup applications like Budget Approval, Change Control. With this capability, organizations of any size can mix-and-match existing on-premise services with live services on the web to compose busienss process based solutions.

Would this be a starting point for considering Google Apps as an Enterprise Portal? Would this be the beginning of Google Apps emerging as the tough competitor for Microsoft Office's future vision - the vision of evolving Office as a Business Applications platform?.

Digital Body Language!

2009-05-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

This is impressive!. It's a new term that is floating in the Internet for quite sometime. One of my colleagues was recently discussing with me about eCommerce merchandising trends. And When I had to do little bit of research in that context, I came across this book.

Digital Body Language is defined as the art and science that revolves around detecting and understanding prospective buyer's signals and intentions to better communicate with them. Here, we are referring to buyers signals that are made online. But, wait a min - Aren't we used to this idea before?. Is it just an old idea just re-incarnated with new name?. How is it different from clickstream analysis, deep personalization, user profiling and segmentation?.

In the conventional sales cycle, the sales executive meets the prospect and tries to read his body language to derive insights on the need, timing, authority or any concerns. Now, with the DBD, these traditional techniques are not just adequate, for the simple reason being that buyer have become much more smarter. Buyer has access to information, intelligence and fellow customers' network like never before. Before venturing into a purchase, buyer performs a significant research online and forms a opinion about the product. Does the sales executive has enough clues on the prospect's signals?. Digital Body Language is the new set of concepts, tools/techniques to decipher the propspects interests and act accordingly.

For the first time, I am seeing somebody seeking to understand a customer's behavior far more deeper in a specific business context, correlating real-word experiences. The approach itself is so humane! And that's where it impresses!. The conventional techie approach - eCommerce COTS products/tools - typically address the marketing needs by providing pointed solutions. And that usually works only when those prospects visit "your" site, and not when they visit "other" sites.

In this case, the concept has been applied for Sales and Marketing. But, I see this as the beginning of period where the businesses try to understand and carve-out a 'Digital Persona' of a prospect. The very thought of understanding the 'persona'of an Internet user is exciting!. Here, the 'persona' is constructed as a synthesis of prospect's signals and intentions registered across a wide array of channels/websites.

In the case of sales/marketing, I look forward to see sophisticated internet tools that enable capturing and deciphering digital body language. In the long term, I strongly believe DBD has huge potential to be applied across business functions, not just sales/marketing.

Moments of Truth

2009-04-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

I was introduced to a new term called 'Moment of Truth' in BPM context. According to IBM, the Customer Service Processes - The business processes that directly interacts with the customer - are typically associated with Moments of Truth. It further defines that the moment of truth is a point during the process where the user is in a position to form an instant opinion about the service or process. These moments of truth are becoming extremely important as they play vital role in building customer loyalty, expanding market share, and remaking entire market places. It also enables the companies to closely watch the interaction points with the customer, generate insights from them, challenge them and innovate to make those interactions cheaper, simpler and better. Hence, Business processes which have moments of truth are becoming valuable assets to the company.

Now, there is another perspective. Yesterday I was introduced to another newstory by one of my colleagues, saying Twitter has launched a Search Engine. Now, using this Twitter search engine, one can do a search on vast amount of Tweet posts. Tweets are no more personal messages. As mentioned in this story, Tweet messages are increasingly becoming a platform to share customers' experiences with a product/services from a company. Some of my close friends are using Twitter in India and I have personally watched those Tweet posts. Handful of those messages will be 'feedback' messages. For example, they may post feedback about a restaurant or Telecom service provider. Now, there is a tremendous opportunity. It is an opportunity for both the consumers and the companies. Consumers can get tremendous insights as to what other people are talking about the products/services they are interested in. Companies can generate insights about new product/service ideas, gaps and feedback. I wouldn't be surprised if Twitter or any of its partners come up with a tailor-made analytics solution on top of its search. In a way, Twitter serves as the feedback point for Moments of Truth.

Now, with the combination of above two concepts - Moments of Truth in BPM and Twitter - You get a closed-loop system that would enable the companies to not only just collect the feedback but also to continuously improve the business process based on the customer's inputs. In fact, it can happen in near real-time. Am certain the concept & technology has got great potential to be deployed in the enterprises who are serious about their customer service, as it would play a significant role in increasing the customer's perceived value on a company's offerings and enable the companies to control, manage, and innovate on those customer-interactive processes.

Oracle-Sun Deal : Threat to SAP NetWeaver?

2009-04-26T06:26:00.000-07:00

This perspective from CIO site is interesting. It claims the biggest loser in Oracle-Sun deal is SAP.

I would say - yes and No. Yes, its a threat to SAP. But SAP has got Options to mitigate.

Considering the significant investment SAP is making in Java based NetWeaver suite to promote its eSOA offerings, nobody would have predicted that the future of Java would fall right into the hands of SAP's very own archrival - Oracle.

The CIO article finds that Oracle will have a huge competitive advantage over SAP having the control on shaping the future of Java platform. And consequently, using the Java platform to shape its Oracle Fusion and Business Applications suite in a competitive architecture.

Now, What would SAP do?.

There are two options - First, SAP may mitigate the risk by innovating a java-hybrid technology or a new standard or Intellectual Property in building the eSOA / Netweaver stack.
Second, SAP may mitigate the risk by not investing in Java. Startling?
Yes, Its true. I was doing little bit of research to find out what SAP could possibily do...And following is the observation..

Here is a prediction from another SAP analyst who confirms SAP is going to increase the investments in ABAP language compared to Java. The strategic positioning of the two different languages ABAB and Java would be something like this - ABAP would be used for building Core Business Suite Web Services while Java would be pushed to the 'Edge' where it's primarily leveraged for Mashups/Composite Apps/Front-ending apps. And SAP's new investments in ABAP language confirms the same.

So, ABAP is here to stay for a while...But would that give a competitive advantage to SAP when compared with Oracle?. - We'll have to wait and see.

There are game changing acquisitions happening in the industry.

And I believe there are quite a few consolditions still pending...As I observe in the industry, every other software vendor is becoming increasingly conscious of their strengths and weaknesses, and they are all out to pursue complimentary acquisitions.

Unlike in the past, these upcoming acquisitions are game changers and they are bound to create transformational impact on the Technology industry.

Business leads IT!

2009-04-03T00:33:00.000-07:00

This is an impressive story!. The story was featured in Indian daily - Economic Times, 2nd April, Bangalore Edition.

A group of companies in Garment exports industry in India have decided to setup an IT firm. The key objective behind this IT firm is to produce software for their business operations, so that they could save over Rs.1000 crores every year. About 10,000 business units are expected to benefit from this new venture.

This is a perfect example for Co-Opetition. The member companies may be competing in their respective market segments, since they are in the same industry. However, they have come together to solve a common problem. The proposed ERP-class solution will help them track export consignments in a real-time manner through IT solutions as well as mobile phones.

By investing in developing a new ERP software for their own needs, they can dramatically reduce/eliminate their individual investments in IT. Moreover, they also plan to go for a hosted solution where the individual exporter can pay around Rs. 4000 per month [approximately. 100$] apart from one-time license fee.

Currently, this group of companies spend close to Rs.200 crore [around $50 million] on IT every year & they are planning to develop the product with a seed money of around Rs.8 crore [around $2 million].

In addition to the bottomline savings, the association also aims to rise the topline by selling the IT solution to other similar industrial clusters in India. The association is talking to Microsoft and SAP to co-develop the software.

Some of my observations from this story:-
- New business models are emerging in ways and means we aren't familiar.
If a company needs to be competitive, it should not be just asking the question - Are we ready to adopt?. Instead, It should ask - Can We shape such trends?
- Business houses no longer shun themselves away from IT & Cutting edge Technologies. Instead, they are about to Lead others.
- Business Solutions at Compelling Price Tags is the way to go.

If a federated association can drive such inspiring initiatives that can improve bottomline & topline, is there anything Enterprise-IT can learn from those practices?

Disruptor in the Data Center

2009-03-17T08:19:00.000-07:00

In the last few years,I have had opportunity to work with with Enterprise Architects in Infrastructure Management Teams during the deployment of new systems/applications. The key observation was that we spent lot of time discussing the application sizing requirements, security requirements and network requirements to arrive at a suitable Solution Architecture [infrastructure] that would evenutally solve the problem at hand.

The actual 'System Integration' between the hardware resources like servers, storage, network/firewall typically needed to be hand-crafted and hence took significant time and effort. The scenario would be much more complicated if we were talking about Internet facing applications or the complexity of the application was high.

Coming from the Application/System Architecture background, I am thinking - Wouldn't be possible to come out with several design/architectural patterns in Solution Architectures [Deployment/Infrastructure architecture] as well. For example, Internet transactional system can have a pre-integrated topology and intranet system can have its own pre-defined / prescriptive topology and based on a standard model and the additional discussions can be had according to the very specific project requirements.

Am yet to talk to my Infra Architect counterparts to understand the viability of such a thought process.

But, It looks like Cisco has observed this very practical problem prevailing in the data center and come out with an 'Architectural approach' to solve this issue. Cisco's new offering 'Unified Computing System' is not centered towards a specific solution architecture. It is positioned as a holistic data center platform where many such 'Solution Architectures' can be crafted and deployed seamlessly.

In this new offering, the Platform is a hardware + software combination that has the 'inherent' capability to orchestrate server, storage and virtualization with high-speed network equipments. Yes, I said 'Inherent' capability with no 'plumbing'.

For the first time, Cisco is entering into the data center market, not as a network gear provider but the 'Server provider'. And Cisco has taken this daring move disrupting its own long-term partners such as IBM and HP.

By providing a 'Pre-integrated/Architected System', Cisco aims to eliminate the manual system integration that typically is the case in data center operations. Am personally excited with the 'Architecture approach' as it attempts to think out-of-the-box. [hardware box :-) ]

Cisco CTO claims that today's data centers are fragmented and innovations like virtualization are not enough. Applying those innovations would only increase the operating expenses, She states. I couldn't agree more!.

To support Enterprise data center requirements, Cisco has roped in several partners such as EMC and VMWare to work in a unified Environment. The UCS System will have the capability to seamlessly orchestrate various data center resources from its partners, thus resulting in a plug-n-play environment. With this approach, Cisco's UCS emerges as the 'Brain' in the Enterprise Nervous system [Infrastructure layer].

When I read the offering in detail, I draw strong similarities between Cisco's Unified Computing System and the SOA principles. The UCS effectively implements the SOA principles to seamlessly orchestrate different heterogenous resources using industry standard protocols.

This is clearly a disruptor to the data center/infrastructure industry. And Cisco actually in the path of realizing Sun Microsystem's Visionary statement - 'Network is the Computer'.

Net Neutrality and SaaS

2009-02-20T04:21:00.000-08:00

When Google offered to ‘co-locate’ their edge / cache servers along with ISP locations, there was a big uproar saying Google is trying to violate net neutrality. The doubts raised were - The deal between ISP & Google may potentially lead to provision of ‘faster lane’ to Google Sites compared to Other Web Sites, And the ISP will have the liberty to prioritize Google traffic over others leading to discrimination!

Google then clarified there is no exclusive agreement in place that could lead to discrimination of Internet Traffic. But, with the advent of proprietary and commercial network Services [SaaS], the Net Neutrality would be subject to debate again in the coming future.

Already, Amazon bundling its Wireless services with its Kindle device is receiving enough criticism for providing exclusive network access to its customers.

In case of Enterprise SaaS consumers such as users of Amazon Web Services or SalesForce.com, they would need to share the ‘Internet pipe’ along with other public users when it comes to consuming those services over the Internet. This would significantly impact the Quality-of-Service levels / SLAs of the respective SaaS providers.

Now, When SaaS goes mainstream and the adoption rate increases, the downtime and SLA violation may simply become unacceptable [because people would be paying for the SLAs] and that would force SaaS providers to adopt new strategies including a formal policy change in Net Neutrality and consequently the economics of SaaS consumption [who will pay for those prioritized pipe?. Amazon or Consumer? Will the policy be applicable to Global Customers and Global ISPs?]

WebServices killed EAI. Cloud Computing/SaaS kills what?

2009-02-19T01:44:00.000-08:00

Cloud computing/SaaS has the potential to virtually eliminate Internal IT completely from the enterprises. The widespread adoption of Salesforce.com confirms the fact that operational functions - such as HR, Sales/Marketing – today has the ability to bypass Internal IT departments and go ahead to procure the On-Demand applications of their choice. Is it a threat to Internal IT? Ok, that is a different point of discussion altogether.

But, today, I thought I would write about the role of Technologies in the context of Cloud Computing Space. The very fact that applications being pushed out of the firewall to an external service provider literally ‘masks’ or ‘virtualizes’ the complexity in the architecture and technology behind those applications. The simple/direct consumers of SalesForce.com do not need to know the complexities such as its architecture, technology, etc. They all need to know the consumption details of SalesForce.com services.

In fact, Cloud proponents wish that Business users having the ablility to deploy, consume and compose Cloud Services, without needing technical help. And that’s where the real power of Cloud is waiting to be unleashed!

Here is another story from CIO.com. In a recent survey, CEOs perceive that packaged applications are more reliable than Internal IT developed. And they don’t really care what platform/technology the apps are running on. All they need is business performance and SLAs.

In conclusion, Business desires for Solutions isolated from the complexities of Technology and Platforms. That leads to the need for more ‘abstraction’. Just like WebServices came few years ago and provided the much needed abstraction behind heterogenous platforms, Cloud Computing/SaaS is destined to make significant changes in the Technology industry.

In the context of Cloud computing and provisioning business services to end-consumers, Does the end-consumer really care whether it is serviced by Java or .NET platform?. Not really?. Do they care if it runs on Linux or Windows ? May not be. Would they be worried if it runs on Open Source or Commercial platforms?. Again, Not seriously. It’s the SLA and the integrity of Services that matter to the end-consumer.

This trend will influence the procurement/adoption/experimentation trends of Technologies and Open source frameworks within the walls of Enterprise IT. We may not see wide-spread forums / communication across Enterprise IT users in the long run, as it will get influenced and diffused by Service Providers.

It is the Service Providers who will majorly nurture and develop the platforms and Technologies and not necessarily Enterprise IT shops. That’s a significant shift in the ecosystem of Technology. We could expect umpteen number of small and medium service providers providing pointed solutions in niche industry segments. And it is the Service Providers who will contribute and shape the Technology / Infrastructure & Framework landscape. And Enterprise IT will be forced to provide more value towards real business solutions.

And I also foresee significant consolidation in the Platforms / Infrastructure space. Why do we need various kinds of application servers in the Cloud, while the end objective is driven by performance?

A new market is emerging where we will see hybrid tools and technologies that will enable Enterprise IT shops to manage their data centre operations as well as their Public Cloud operations together from a single window. Am sure IBM is working on such a ‘Hybrid Tivoli’ tools and systems. In fact, one of the interesting note that I read was IBM is working on some sort of ‘Cloudburst’ feature where the load from Internal data centre is dynamically distributed to public cloud and seamlessly serviced! Wow!.

As I wrote before, We are going to witness a highly decentralized, but centrally managed ecosystem for Enterprise IT.

Amazon Kindle: Next Application Platform?

2009-02-11T00:40:00.000-08:00

Am not going to write about Kindle 2, the recent upgrade from Amazon for its Wireless Reading Device. Of course, there are lots of interesting elements - The new version is unbelievably thin and packs lots of interesting features like Text-to-Speech translation.

But, I am interested in exploring how Kindle could evolve in future?

Couple of interesting directions:
- Kindle application could be made available in range of mobile devices including iPhone. Amazon is already talking about this move.
- Book Reading to go multi-channel. One could start a book in mobile, continue in computer and finish it in Kindle.
- What would happen if Kindle provides an app store like iPhone? What kind of new applications could emerge? It could lead to interesting applications that will make Book Reading experience all the more interactive. [I would like to annotate the book pages with a stylus, like we used to underline sections on paper books J]. Someone said they would even like to sync their enterprise document management system with Kindle!. Innovative!
- Kindle for Schools? There could be possibilities of offering personalized experience for Students to take their text books on Kindle and associated applications.
- The last thing that I would want to see in Kindle is to evolve into a multi-tasking PDA device.

Google tries to enter your House!

2009-02-10T23:00:00.000-08:00

Google has announced that it is developing a software utility called PowerMeter to track the energy usage at your home, right from your personalized iGoogle portal. The PowerMeter application can provide real-time, granular data on the energy usage. For example, some of the metrics that can be tracked could be - How much does it cost to leave your TV switched on all day? Which appliance in Home uses more power every month? How does your energy consumption compare to your neighbors?

I read from Wired that similar applications have been attempted in the past. But, the key difference is that Google has enough clout to work with the Hardware manufactures & the Government to make it happen. The Hardware manufacturers produce the ‘SmartMeter’ devices that can interact with Home appliances and wirelessly interact with Google data center. Government can help in standardizing those meter and data formats involved in communication. According to the US Government stimulus plan, 40 million homes are scheduled to get these SmartMeters over the next three years.

I see opportunities for Significant shifts in this initiative:

- This could be the beginning of ‘Internet of Things’ – a beginning where information is extracted from every single real-life object, transmitted and analyzed to produce actionable intelligence.
- This initiative is being implemented from Google.org. So, I am not sure about Google’s business intentions here. But, if they do have, this could be the door-opener for new market altogether – a convergence of Google’s Information Technologies with Automation and Control systems in the Real-world.
- I wish Enterprise IT shops take a lesson from here - If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it – I wish a CIO/IT management dashboard that provides real-time information on budget/value/quality of IT spending!

Future is all about Fusion!

2009-01-30T23:14:00.000-08:00

If you think we are not going to see anything innovative in 2009, you will be surprised!

Ford and Microsoft partners to deliver the most compelling In-car infotainment service. In the recent Consumer Electronics Event (CES 2009), Ford has demonstrated its future vision of its In-Car Infotainment Service - ‘SYNC’. Don’t miss to watch the video!

The Sync service has been in the market for quite sometime now and Ford plans to continuously improve the service in the new models coming in 2009 and 2010. The service was initially positioned as a competitor to GM’s OnStar. However, Sync Service has an edge over OnStar in terms of Technology partnership (Microsoft) and Voice-Reconition technology.

Ford-Microsoft partnership attempts to take the Human-Machine Interaction to the next level. One of the most interesting and geeky features which I liked in the vision is the feature of a ‘personal assistant’ avatar called ‘Eva’, who appears in the ‘cockpit’ of the car and converses with the Driver. Eva ‘understands’ your preferences and manages your address book/calendar and helps you to find news clips or restaurant bookings.

Apart from common mobile/media player functions, the service also provides Driver services like Vehicle health report/Diagnostics, Traffic/Directions and 911 Assistance.

Ford also partnering with Best Buy and its service arm Geek Squad to market and service the Sync compatible mobile phones / accessories.

Interestingly, the Sync service perfectly syncs with Microsoft Software+Services vision where an individual can seamlessly move between car, office and Home staying connected without interruptions.

Who is Growing despite Recession?

2009-01-29T23:17:00.000-08:00

It’s IBM. In the news article, IBM has found a formula for Growth – Even During Recession, the analyst writes that IBM has emerged as a resilient company with flawless execution and Strong Profits.

While the rival Tech companies such as SAP remain extremely cautious and conservative in their spending for this year, IBM has announced a strong outlook for the year 2009 financials.

Not to deny the fact that IBM also figures in the layoff bandwagon, I believe it’s relatively minimal when compared to its rivals’ numbers.

Some of the salient points that I like to draw from this story:
- IBM has built a Strong, highly diversified and integrated business model over the past years. This brings shared customers, positive impact of one business unit on the other / cross-selling & up-selling opportunities / tremendous amount of credibility built over long years / Continued Investment in Technology / Highest Patent Generator year-after-year.
- Significant investments into Emerging Markets to capture their local markets
- Focus on High-Value Chain Software/Service offerings that maintains huge profit margins
- Well-thought out acquisitions in the past like ILOG, Telelogic, Rational, Webify and the subsequent integration into IBM family of products.
- Fantastic Cash Flow of $7.9 billion, an invaluable defense in the time of recession
- Solid Roadmap for the core products. Interesting to see the outlook for the WAS products including the ‘Rainmaker’ technology.

So, Is it all hunky-dory? Not really. I have observed IBM being very slow in responding to new trends like web 2.0/Mashups / RIA or Cloud Computing. They do have offerings in those segments, but not necessarily leading the market in terms of innovation.

Tech Bits!

2009-01-15T22:44:00.000-08:00

Each of the following bits deserve a separate post. So, Pls treat them as preview to my future posts.
- SAP is Timeless Software – SAP’s CTO Vishal Sikka writes that the company believes in incremental innovation and its NetWeaver product suit just follows the same philosophy. It promises its customers a seamless, incremental migration to the new platform without needing a radical transformation of the existing infrastructure.
He also states that SaaS paradigm is suitable only for pointed solutions and not a broader, end-to-end encompassing ecosystem based solutions. Sounds believable?

- I have written about the viability of internal clouds within the company’s own data center. And here is a company doing just that. The company, Cassatt, provides Cloud computing software for Data Centers. The software promises to make the data center efficient, Green and Agile. Sounds very interesting!. Companies which are skeptical about engaging the Internet clouds for security/integrity/SLA reasons have the option to try out and experiment in their own data centers.
You know what – The Company says, it may take another 15 years for companies to fully migrate into a Cloud platform. They believe whatever cloud software that we see in the market is just 1.0 and there is more work to do. As I have written before, the Chief Engineer of Cassatt writes that its all about the Architecture and ilities when it comes to Cloud computing. Couldn’t agree more!

- IBM Smart SOA – Statistics indicate that about 60% of SOA implementations done by IBM are at maturity level 1. And IBM aims to shift the focus of SOA programs to demonstrate business value. This move by IBM clearly indicates the change in the industry’s perspective of SOA programs and the rising demand for demonstrating value.

- I received an email carrying the subject line ‘Future of IT’ and I was curious to find out more. The white paper goes on to say that automation of IT processes is the Future of IT. The perspective is that IT management processes should be automated around ITIL/CMDB practices and the management/resources should be relieved to connect and engage with Business. All this, boils down to the question – ‘Do we need an ERP for IT?’

I strongly believe an ERP for IT will shift the focus of IT from inward to outward and the most important aspect - aligning with business.

- Palm has released its new version of Smartphone 'Pre' and Operating system. As one analyst writes, every other smartphone that gets introduced to the market of late, tries to outdo ‘iPhone’ obviously. And it only adds some more credibility to iPhone, that its is seen as the benchmark to evaluate any new phones coming to the market. Instead of adding features and trying to outdo iPhone, it would be interesting to see if the companies demonstrate the real value brought by the new product. One more phone in the Enterprise Mobility space?. We will have to wait and see.

Don’t Waste the Crisis!

2009-01-15T22:05:00.000-08:00

Yes, Don’t Waste the Crisis. WhenI first heard this statement, I said 'Wow! What a perspective?'.

It is a question of whether we choose to participate in the recession or make the most of the recession. The one who sees this downturn as the opportunity will emerge stronger when the market starts to recover.

We had our CIO addressing the company yesterday. And this is the quote, he said, was given by a Wall Street Analyst in the Company’s Senior Leadership Meeting. Every company sees this recession as a litmus test for their management competency. The market is watching industry leaders on:

-How do you respond to this downturn?
-Are you able to sustain your growth rate despite the downturn?
-What is your strategy / approach to manage this recession?
-What are your core values?
-What are your strong competencies?
-How robust is your business model?

Remember, the market will have different set of questions during haydays.

What does it mean to IT?. IT is relieved to certain extent from the pressure of responding to growing market trends at least in medium term. Now, it’s the question of whether IT chooses to wait and watch and respond when the market picks up. Or, IT sees a tremendous opportunity in the period of least business events and makes an attempt to internal transformation.

For the past few weeks, I see lots and lots of people talking about Anne’s (Burton group analyst) comment on ‘SOA is Dead’. As someone said, these statements help to generate conversations and engage in a debate.

It’s like Wall Street Collapse. We went to the extent of calling the failure of Capitalism, forgetting that it’s the Failure of Capitalists. Sameway, I would say, it’s the failure of practitioners / Enterprise IT management folks to recognize the value of SOA and pilot it within the company and not the failure of SOA, the paradigm.

I have been participating in the forums of EA and SOA and people literally spend countless hours and efforts in Semantics and Definitions. What is EA and What is not EA?. Though am an Architect myself, I should admit that EAs are self-centered and more focused on roles/responsibilities and what they should do and What they should not do. I agree it is of paramount importance. It is important because we need to communicate to the stakeholders on what we do. However, I strongly feel we need to move beyond that.
We need to focus on ‘what problems do we solve?. How do we help?. Or more exactly – How can we be of immediate help to the company in these tough times?’ Again, We should be talking more about the practice and its and not just the practitioners.

Gartner finds that in 2009, about 50% of the EA efforts will be stopped due to ineffective results of those programs. David Linthicum, the famous SOA evangelist, once said, if your EA efforts are not effective, Stop it! Don’t do something if you don’t pursue it whole-heartedly.

While many of the pundits want us to believe that recession is the best opportunity to invest in innovative, small projects that would bring long-term benefits, it is hard to implement it. Because, for the simple reason that money is tight!.

Instead, Gartner says, EA office should ‘Stop the Projects’ if they don’t result in near-term business value! It’s a different perspective altogether! One wouldn't get credit for stopping something usually!. But, this is the time! :-)

Cost optimization is the need of the hour! Whoever does that will be Hero in the Company!

Watch out for Yahoo's Net-Enabled TVs!

2008-12-29T07:35:00.000-08:00

This is really Cool!.
Its a news that re-affirms my viewpoint that Future of IT is all about Highly Personalized & Innovative User Experiences.
Yahoo and Intel are working together along with a whole list of partners to bring the Internet experience to TV.
Yahoo aims to transform the TV watching experience from a passive mode to much more active activity. It plans to bring its most-popular Widget Technology to the TV, that can be controlled from a remote control. The Widgets can be downloaded at real-time from a Widget Gallery. And Widgets themselves can connect to the Internet in real-time and download data such as Weather, Stock Quotes, etc. And All this experience comes at no cost of compromising the TV experience.
Yahoo has made significant progress in this area. Do check out the wonderful demo and the follow-up update. Yahoo believes that the technology will penetrate the mainstream market in 2009 and will be dominating the Consumer Electronics Market in 2010.
What does this mean to Business Technology/Enterprise IT? - You have got a new channel to deal with. :-) Especially for Media, Publishing and Entertainment verticals, its a revolutionary technology development that will take those industries to new markets.

Biz Development 2.0

2008-12-28T10:03:00.000-08:00

I don’t know if any company in the world has opened up its core business data as Open APIs for free consumption. Best Buy has done it recently with the help of Mashery. Mashery, the API management services company calls it as Business Development 2.0. Want to know Why?. Continue to read further.

Best Buy has taken all its product data such as product images, descriptions, user comments, pricing and make it available in the form of APIs. These APIs can potentially be used by bloggers, social applications, or Mobile Application Developers to develop new touch point applications for interacting with Best Buy.

While the results of this move are yet to be seen, the initiative itself is indeed adventurous and ground-breaking from business perspective. Am sure the Open APIs would certainly lead to proliferation of innovative applications/Widgets in innumerable delivery channels.

For example, an end-user can built a wish list out of the Best Buy products and place it as a Widget in iGoogle homepage. An expert blogger who constantly reviews digital cameras can embed a Point-of-Sale widget right next to the same blog post.

What does this all mean to its business? – More Touch-Points lead to Increased Traffic. And Increased Traffic would result in Enhanced Revenue. Another interesting claim that Mashery makes is that, by introducing these Free APIs, the business can acquire new Partners without depending much from IT. Isn't that threatening to Enterprise IT shops?. Its high-time that Enterprise IT wakes up.

Best Buy claims that this could lead to new Business Model Innovations.

I would go to the extent of categorizing this initiative under Open Innovation. It truly demonstrates the Openness characteristic of the Internet and holds the network effect of web 2.0. As mentioned in O’Reilly Technology Blog, these initiatives re-draw the boundaries of the traditional organization. Closed companies are going to find it more and more difficult to survive against Open companies. I couldn’t agree more!

Some of the other companies that follow this Open Path are – MTV Networks, World Bank and Reuters. World Bank has opened its Global data sources in the form of free programmable APIs. According to the bank, the data can be mapped, visualized and mashed in unlimited number of ways that will help develop a better understanding of trends and patterns around key development issues.

It looks like the trend is to essentially translate internal, once-proprietary corporate data into free-flowing rivers of information so that the Internet can consume it instantly & innovatively.

No Excuse for not having Enterprise Architecture

2008-12-23T05:30:00.000-08:00

If you are observing clearly in Enterprise IT shops, a new governance practice has gained significant ground over the last few years. And that is ‘Project Management Office’. The mission of the Project Management Office is to establish standard Project Management System of processes and Tools that ensures consistency in Project Management methods practiced across the organization. The key objective behind PMO office is to ensure sustained success in project execution by adhering to best practices.

The need for PMO must have arrived with the increase in the volumes of projects and top management needed new ways to manage the risks and ensure the predictability of those projects in terms of cost/schedule and resource parameters.

Now, take a look at this perspective. The PMO office, however small or large it may be, is a support function to the actual delivery. It performs Governance, Mentors, Audits, Tracks and Reports the Projects/Project Managers. It provides indirect benefits to the IT organization and not contributing to the project directly.

Now look at this, as mentioned in this blog, the value (of PMO) is not always measurable in the company’s financials. But the increase in predictability and control can be related to the bottom-line, with a proper governance structure and controls.

I also had a chat with PMO focal in my company. And He reconfirmed the fact that his office is often challenged / questioned to assert its value.

Now, If you are an architect, Does it sound like a déjà vu?. I see a strong similarity between the PMO functions/challenges with Enterprise Architecture office.

But, my observation is – the CIOs who are not sold on Enterprise Architecture Office and its value have invested significantly on PMO offices. Howz that possible? Do you see a interesting conflict here?

The fact is simple – Enterprise Architecture is not understood. Period.

If CIOs can unquestionably invest in PMO offices and depend on its services to ensure their success, why don’t they invest on EA office?. As a matter of fact, PMO’s value cannot be directly measured.

As my fellow architects, I did have suspicions on the EA practice and its value and read about various new thought processes EA 2.0, etc. But, Am completely convinced that EA can add significantly value to the IT organization irrespective of its position within the company (say cost centre, service centre, or strategic partner). Here, I refer EA as a IT management discipline (not necessarily business architecture)

In fact, as a starting point, for cost starved IT shops, EA elements can be included in the PMO office. Sounds like a Good Idea?

Now, Who has the responsibility to sell ‘Enterprise Architecture’ same way as PMO office?. Who else – We, the People – The Enterprise Architects.

1. We ourselves should be first convinced about EA and its value for the company
2. We should have the ability to communicate the value of EA to the CIO and Leadership in unambiguous terms with lot of conviction. A Lot!
3. We should Deliver Value and Live upto the promises!

The mission statement for EA Office can be as simple as - To enable the IT in implementing consistent, reliable, secure and useful IT solutions that are aligned (to strategic business goals), responsive (to changes in business/Technology) and cost-effective.

Who leads the RIA space?. Adobe or Microsoft?

2008-12-21T23:21:00.000-08:00

The battle for RIA market share is clearly intense between Adobe and Microsoft. Existing install base, browser/device support may indicate that Adobe is evidently leading the pack. However, Microsoft has its own advantages. I wouldn’t have thought in favor of Microsoft, had I not seen these wonderful Siverlight demos. It’s exciting and never before seen user experience in RIA space. I would love to see both of these companies to compete in the business applications market in addition to media/entertainment market.

In the recent Adobe MAX 2008 event, it has been announced that Adobe has plans to expand the collaboration with SAP. I see more advantage to SAP compared to Adobe in this deal. The key question to be asked is ‘How does Adobe leverage the experience of working with SAP to evolve its RIA product portfolio? Do they use that experience to nurture and mature the RIA platform, so that it becomes a preferred standard for developing RIA clients for critical business applications?

Apparently, Microsoft doesn’t need such a partnership because Microsoft itself is a provider in the Enterprise Business Applications/Infrastructure/Platform segment. (e.g. BizTalk, Microsoft Dynamics/Commerce Server & .NET framework)

The silver bullet that I see in Silverlight that has the potential to kill Adobe is the support for .NET framework. Building applications in Silverlight means that the developer can take advantage of the languages such as C#, VB, Python or Ruby, whereas Adobe has only one choice ActionScript. In the Silverlight 2, the Windows Presentation Framework has been fully integrated. Hence, the .NET developer base can take advantage of their existing skills to build new, powerful cross-browser Rich Internet applications or Windows applications using Silverlight. And remember, the .NET framework is built and time-tested to develop enterprise-class applications.

Adobe’s ActionScript is clearly evolving over the last few years to achieve the maturity required for building strong Enterprise client applications. I still remember the times in 2002 when I evaluated Macromedia Royale (the code name for Flex then) to transform a product’s user interface from its traditional HTML to RIA. Those days I believed RIA was a radical change. I still do, in the way web applications can be conceived and designed with RIA paradigm. But the difference is – We have more choices now in 2008, in addition to Flex.

Sure, Adobe has been aggressive. BBC has built its iPlayer using Adobe AIR. (AIR being an RIA & offline web app platform). Some of the Silverlight enabled Websites have migrated themselves to Adobe Flex. However, will it be sustainable to compete with Microsoft in the long run?

Live Mesh Possibilities!

2008-12-09T09:01:00.000-08:00

Couple of years ago, when I was designing a custom application over BlackBerry sync, I was facing some real technical challenges - like interfacing with Device driver libraries, handling character encoding between PC and BlackBerry device, etc.
Hopefully, Live Mesh would solve most of these issues for Windows based devices once it's released. The prime objective of the Live Mesh, as I understand, is to provide a developer friendly interface to the Mesh Platform so that useful applications can be seamlessly written. So I expect a much more user-friendly, coarse-grained services from Live Mesh platform that will relieve the developer from handling low-level issues.
On seeing NetFlix Taps Microsoft's Silverlight for Streaming movies, Blockbuster working on a Live Mesh app to deliver video on demand and seeing a whole set of Hosted services release from Microsoft, I am starting to believe that Microsoft is steering the industry in the new direction, as it claims 'Software+Services'.
To be specific, I was curious to understand the possibilities of LiveMesh, beyond File and App synchronization. Obviously, File sharing/Device syncrhonization alone cannot be the USP of LiveMesh. And I hoped there must be something more to that...And I was not wrong.
Got some interesting findings about Live Mesh possibilities..
- Live Mesh is not just a point solution for file sharing. It is a 'Platform' in the Cloud that is intended to provide synchronization services across various devices including SmartPhones and PCs.
- The main intention is to provide developer friendly platform & services so that useful applications can be built on top of the platform. Developers can sync not just folders/files. They can design custom objects and sync across devices/apps. Yes, I said 'apps' across devices.
- There are two aspects to Live Mesh. 1. Building Rich applications in the PCs that can synch/transmit data and settings across devices. 2. Ability to extend Websites to a world of devices (The second one is really interesting)
- What are the new capabilities a Live Mesh enabled Website will provide? Here are some scenarios.
- You will be able to export your transactional data from an online banking website into your personal device of choice. And you will be able to do this when you are online and logged into Online Banking website. We can expect to see lot more websites Mesh enabled, as it moves to Production ready status.
- If you are a frequent travel website user, the website can pickup your calender data from the Mesh (Your own personal Mesh, It could be from your PC or a SmartPhone) and recommend travel plans accordingly. Sounds cool! It may also mean that you will be able to perform a Single Sign-On from the Travel website to your Live mesh account?. May be :-)
- Now, add to this Live Mesh technology, some juice of data semantics and custom logic, you get a new range of 'highly personalized' applications that truly implements the software+services hybrid architecture.
But, We will have to wait and see how long its going to take to see these kind of apps in reality!

Fast Track to Enterprise Architecture!

2008-12-09T06:51:00.001-08:00

Microsoft may get criticized for their exclusive pro-Windows solutions. However, I have found their contributions in MSDN towards SOA, Design Patterns, Software Factories and Architectural Journal are significant and much more open. I have found some of their SOA literatures are technology-agnostic and architecture-centric.
Continuing on the Enterprise Architecture topic, I would like to bring the recent update from Microsoft on EA to my readers. Microsoft is coming with an Enterprise Architecture Toolkit, essentially a ‘Software Factory’ for Enterprise Architecture. Sounds very interesting!.
The EA toolkit is not released yet, as far as I know. However, in one of the msdn blogs, the toolkit’s offerings are listed. If someone is building a EA for their enterprise by preparing some of the EA artifacts and developing new processes, the good news is – You don’t need to start from scratch. All the templates that you will need, the processes that you will need to define are available in the Toolkit pack. All you need to do is leverage those base templates to customize for your Enterprise specific needs.
Typically, Software Factories are applied for Software Development requirements like Web Services or Smart Clients. For the first time, the concept of Solution Accelerator / Software Factory is applied to the Highest-level of Abstraction.
However, the catch here is that, the toolkit is based on Microsoft product set – Microsoft Visio, Word, etc. Not bad!. Most of the times, architects use those tools anyway to prepare EA artifacts. And the traditional EA tools are expensive!.
Some of the cool things which I liked are – Templates for ARB, Using Portal and Workflow features essentially bringing the collaboration aspects into the architecting process!.

Cloud Computing Consequences!

2008-12-05T10:09:00.001-08:00

What is the impact on Enterprise Architecture with the introduction of Cloud Computing and SaaS?
One word – ‘Serious’.
Here is my perspective.
- On the first look, it may seem like Enterprise Architecture is irrelevant in a company if your complete IT is running on Cloud Computing, SaaS and Outsourcing/Offshoring. In fact, I was of the same opinion last year. However, Its not the case. In fact, the complexity is going to get multiplied.
- We have moved from Monolithic systems to Client-Server to Tiered Architectures. With SOA comes the truly Distributed Architecture. And with Cloud Computing and SaaS, We are moving to “Globally Decentralized/Distributed Architecture”.
- With Global distribution, we will be able to compose business processes out of services from SalesForce.com, Services running on Azure/Amazon and host the resulting composite in another cloud platform. Does that sound too Cool and Flexible!. Of course. But, It is also exponentially complex to manage in the long-run!
- Some of the challenges - What are the failure modes in these Global composites? Can we optimize the attributes of those composites? How do we trace/troubleshoot, version control these composites? What are the foreseeable security threats in these Global platforms?
- Integration between these huge Clouds/SaaS platforms? - Welcome to the world of Software-Intensive, Massive System of Systems! :-)
- If the first generation EA guided us in dealing with System of Systems within an Enterprise, the next generation EA should help us in addressing ‘Massive System of Systems’.
- With this new complexity, not only Enterprise Architecture gets necessary, but becomes absolutely critical in the IT ecosystem.

Business Case for Enterprise Architecture

2008-12-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

This is my 100th Blog Post!. :-). Thanks to all the readers who frequent to my blog!.

Well, Contrary to this blog post title, am not going to talk about the finer details of preparing a business case for an Enterprise Architecture initiative. Rather, I am going to talk about ‘What makes the client to ask for a Business Case?”.
Here is a little background…
Statistics assert that only 5% of the companies practice Enterprise Architecture. And Most of them are successful leaders in their businesses, not just IT.
When I attended Zachman’s conference last year, I was surprised to see Zachman being cynical about the realization of EA in the industry. He, in fact, went on to add that it may take next 10-20 years to see EA truly alive in the companies.
I am also closely watching some of the Enterprise Architects’ blogs. I don’t see convictions by looking at their blog posts titled – ‘Enterprise is a Joke’. ‘Enterprise Architects do only powerpoint presentations’. ‘There are not enough skilled architects’, etc.
In the recent past, when I was evangelizing EA among the Top IT leadership, I often get questions on ‘short-term quick hits that can be achieved by EA’. That’s a tough one to answer!
Now the question is – ‘Why there is lack of faith in IT?’
And many of us know the answer – Because, the teams often fail to deliver, despite spending lot of cash, effort and energy. The harsh reality is that IT does not believe in itself that it can deliver something significant, valuable and comprehensive.
If IT doesn’t believe in itself, How can we expect Business to believe in us to treat us like partners and not as order takers?
Now, getting to metrics…I happened to read this revealing Datamonitor whitepaper on EDS site. Though the intent of the paper is to analyze the maintenance issues Vs adopting new innovations in existing applications, I found something very relevant and interesting to our topic of discussion here.
Some of the observations are:
- IT departments that are overwhelmed by application maintenance do not see the benefit of planning
- Datamonitor believes that skepticism of these overwhelmed decision makers can be largely attributed to a sense of ‘hopelessness’ or ‘burn out’ over formalized IT strategies. Such decision makers are operating in a state of survival rather than one of enthusiastic Optimism
- IT departments see the value of planning primarily in the ‘build’ phase and not in the ‘run’ phase. They don’t really care too much about the ‘lifecycle’ of those application in the ‘planning’ phase.
- And now, this compounds the maintenance complexity and inhibits the company from embarking into new initiatives – creating a vicious cycle.

What a resounding observation!

As someone said, adopting EA is like a lifestyle change – like following a fitness regime. And that cannot be realized without discipline and commitment to change!. The problem is not with EA. But, the way we look at it!

Software to Change Human Behaviors

2008-12-01T03:17:00.000-08:00

The title looks persuasive? Yes. It is!
When I looked at the list of new management gurus by CNN, one of the Gurus who generated curiosity was BJ Fogg, Founder and Director, Persuasive Technology Lab, Stanford University. As mentioned in CNN site, the Big idea of Fogg is that ‘Mobile technology will be the most powerful way to influence customers in the next 15 years’.
Well, I am not going to talk about Mobile technology in this blog post. And I am not going to talk about web 2.0 either. This topic has relevance but not much significance with Web 2.0.
But, my interest was, How Software applications in general, used in combination with specific media like Web/Mobile, can change the attitude and behaviors of humans. The pitfall in this approach is that it can impact the customers both in the right way and the wrong way!
And for all you know, sites like Amazon are already leveraging these concepts for quite a few years. The amazon’s reputed ‘Recommendation engine’ that suggests books based on the past like-minded buyer’s preferences/behaviors, is actually trying to influence you saying ‘Why don’t you buy that book as well?. It seems to be good (by displaying the rankings)’ Well, this may be called as Marketing, to be precise in the business context. But, It is actually ‘persuasion’ in a larger context. Same with, Amazon reader list application recently added in LinkedIn.
For the first time, I am hearing somebody deeply thinking about how technology can be linked to human attitude, their thoughts and behaviors. This perspective empowers the technology field like never before and I see a ‘Wow!’ factor!. As Software Developers/Designers, we might have done this persuation in the past unconsciously. Now, the same design theory is being approached in more formal and scientific manner.
Now, if Technology and Software applications has so much of power, the question is, what are we doing with that? Are we leveraging those technologies to write powerful applications that generate positive impact among people?.
Stanford is working on an interesting field named as ‘Captology’. Captology is defined as the design, research, and analysis of interactive computing products/technologies created for the purpose of changing people's attitudes or behaviors. In fact, Stanford has already published couple of books on the same topic and they are available on Sale in amazon.
I happen to read the excerpt in the book and the author talks about some of the interesting thoughts on how Captology can have a deeper impact to the level of user interface design of graphical applications.
It would be interesting to explore how these concepts and technologies can be applied towards ‘change management’ / ‘Organizational Design’ in the context of Enterprise 2.0.

Beyond Application Virtualization

2008-11-25T00:04:00.000-08:00

If one has observed, Microsoft has really been aggressive in terms of venturing into Cloud computing and Hosted Services offerings recently. One of the latest additions to its Hosted Services portfolio is the release of ‘Application Virtualization’ products. With Application virtualization, windows applications can be streamed to the Desktop from the Intranet/Web, cached locally and stored with end-user specific preferences. This solution will eliminate the installation requirements of thick client applications.
Ok. What does this mean to the Enterprises?
For me, it looked like another way of delivering services to the end-users (applications-as-services??). Users who are tired of click-and-walk HTML applications have already migrated to Rich-Internet-Applications. Large product vendors like SAP have embraced RIA significantly in their product roadmap. I am not surprised, given the limited choice available in the RIA technologies and the ‘cool’ effects bought by Adobe Flex/Java Fx. However, these RIAs are predominantly built on top of scripting technology platforms such as JavaScript and ActionScript. These technologies have their own strengths and weaknesses. But, in my view, they don’t come closer to traditional and mature programming platforms such as VC++, especially when considering aspects such as Security. RIA platforms themselves are maturing and they have a long way to go.
My intent is not to say ‘Streaming’ applications will replace ‘RIAs’ or vice versa. They will co-exist. But, I foresee Streaming applications will be much more powerful compared to RIA in terms of bringing enterprise features and rich user experience. Some of the considerations which I can think of when evaluating Streaming applications are:
- Intranet deployments, Native applications, Maximum usage of local processor, Feature/Functionality Rich, Composite applications (Intranet/Web), Binary streaming resulting in improved performance of apps
I also believe ‘Streaming’ applications can be the door-opener for developing ‘Composite applications’ over Services. I have always thought, like Services in SOA world, which are composable, reusable and discovered, we should have a way to find, compose and reuse ‘Service Client applications’. Do you agree? And ‘Application Virtualization’ & RIA together can serve this purpose.
Today, we have marketplaces for Web Services. We have app stores for Smart phones. But, Pls note these apps available for iPhones are tightly integrated to their back-end Services (Service Providers). So, you get to download the entire application as ‘one capsule’. But, Is it possible to download just the client module/service consumer and talk to different service providers?. And ‘app virtualization’ and ‘RIA’ can lead to that possibility.
In future, we may be able to all the following in the ‘Cloud’
- Find services
- Find Aggregators / Composite services
- Find ‘application clients’ of different types (virtualized, web, mobile)
- Find Infrastructure services for clients (security modules, preferences, caching)
- Compose all these diversified services and make a personalized cocktail out of it J
- And finally, install this composite app as a simple Shortcut in our desktop.
- And this combination can be dismantled and remixed based on the end-user preferences and business needs on an ongoing basis.
Read this interesting prediction on ‘Hardware virualization’. I was inspired by this story to think about the possibilities in ‘Software world’.
In this story, I am not just fascinated by the technology/platform’s technical strengths. But I am truly excited about the kind of choices and valuable features these technologies can bring to the end-users.
To start with, I would be interested to see ‘SAP’ client available as a virtualized client app!

Top 10 IT Trends for 2009

2008-11-17T04:44:00.000-08:00

While Gartner has published the Top 10 technologies for 2009, I wanted to take a closer look at the trends and identify what would be important from CIO office perspective. I give significant focus to CIO office because the spending from his office is going to have a ripple effect on the whole ecosystem of Enterprise IT – be it hardware vendors or software product vendors or outsourcing/offshoring vendors.
Given the current climate of economic conditions, if one would need to describe today’s state of CIO office, it would be ‘frugal’. Everyone in the industry will know this open secret. However, the dollars spent on these gloomy days are expected to generate more value when compared to spending on cheerful days!. The key challenge for the CIO would be ‘How to act creatively when being stingy? & How do I generate more value for the money?’.
I have always believed technologies that bring real&tangible economic value will outshine the technologies that are darlings of soft benefits/tall promises. I believe the following 10 Trends will help the CIO to find the answers:
1. Data Center Rationalization
Like the fragmented spaces in the computer memory gets compressed and made available for applications, the under-utilized data centers across regions will be rationalized / consolidated
2. Virtualization
Within the Data center, the under-utilized servers will again be consolidated and virtualized to save cost and space.
3. Open-Source Migration
The companies that have always endorsed licensed products will embark on the iniatives to evaluate everything from Open –source community – right from OS to application frameworks. Every COTS product in the company will be evaluated for their necessity and alternatives.
4. Custom applications rationalization
The application portfolio will be under manifying glass to see the alignment and value. Poor performing apps will be evaluated for layoff!
5. SaaS Adoption
The high-expensive on-premise software apps will be questioned and SaaS offerings will be tried out in pilot mode. This will be a perfect opportunity for SaaS vendors to prove and get their new clients!
6. IT Security
As the IT ecosystem welcomes new entrants like Virtualization, Open-Source and SaaS, there will be re-newed focus on existing IT security practices. However, this activity will not be a choice, but a mandatory activity!. If any enterprise chooses to skip this step are putting themselves into danger!. We may see new set of enterprise IT security products emerging in this area!.
In fact, these factors will also lead to re-look of licensing models of products within the enterprise!.
7. Innovation in Offshoring/Outsourcing contracts
OK, How do we get money to do all this?. Who is going to pay for it?. That’s where the innovation lies. No vendor will do it for free. Neither the CIO would wish to pay for it. Here comes the testing time for the relationship maturity of CIO office and IT outsourcing/offshoring vendors. There will be a call for new contracting models where the vendors will be required to innovate and come out with options for rolling out these cost-conserving initiatives in a multi-year roadmap. Whichever vendor gives a helping hand to the CIO will go a long way!.
8. Metrics based IT Management
CIO would question his own management on the way the IT is being managed for efficiency and effectiveness. New way of demonstrating the business value of IT needs to be in place to get funding for new development projects. Which means, get ready to be number-savvy!. This will have implications on PMO-centric organizations as well as Enterprise architecture centric organizations.
9. License negotiations
Product license newels/upgrades will be challenged and asked for alternatives. If a cost-effective alternative is feasible and can be developed, the IT will not hesitate to say good bye to those products!
10. Enterprise Architecture
Really smart CIOs will do serious introspection on their IT strategy and they may realize the need for an Enterprise Architecture! And certainly they will not implement all the above 9 steps in bits and piences but within the framework of their rejuvenated IT strategy!.

Beginning of the End of ATM cards?

2008-11-13T02:09:00.000-08:00

Can you draw money from ATM without using ATM card? Sounds innovative?. Our conventional thinking says thats not possible!. And thats where lies the potential for innovation. Business case - In US, there are 106 million people who do not have bank accounts. If there is no bank account, there is no card. But how do they transact?. Can banks ignore that customer segment?. In fact, the banks have to help them to transact.
And here is the solution - A new vendor - Privier has comeup with an innovative solution where an existing account holder can transfer funds to another person, who is in immediate need of cash and does not have a bank account. The fund transfer can happen from ATM to ATM, Web to ATM or Mobile to ATM. Note, the fund transfer doesnot happen from one account holder to another. Instead, it happens from one person to the bank. Along with the transfer, a 10 digit code is sent to the recipient. The recipient can then walk-in to an ATM, key-in the 10 digit code and withdraw the money.
Are we seeing the beginning of the end of Cards in Banking?