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Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Singapore

I am a resident of Singapore for a little less than three years now and I had been to this region several times prior to that. Singapore easily counts to be amongst the best cities to live and its infrastructure is amazing and the efficiency levels seen in the city-state in almost all day-to-day activities are unmatchable anywhere else in the world .Singapore airlines & Changi airport are modern day icons.I keep telling friends and colleagues that Singapore by giving the best of comfort spoils people in the sense – you leave the city – you feel as if you have entered into a world so inefficient in all possible ways. No doubt Singapore has invested in growth long before others in the region and to that extent the business environment today is quite changed –with size as a barrier probably one ends up mostly addressing incremental opportunities. Obviously a very tough but a dynamic environment lay here – intermixed with its squeaky clean image singpore looks amazing any whichever way one looks at it. Singapore is just not known for what it has achieved but for its ability to continually keep moving –mostly pushed by the government, amongst the smartest one of its kind in the world. We just came back from sentosa – a place that am visiting aftet two years – my wife told me that everything therein looks changed.
Paul Greenberg appears completely bowled over by Singapore’s focus on service excellence. He finds that its not often you find an entire nation committed to the improvement of service that is clearly focused around the experience economy. It is an opportunity to see how entire nations can devote public services with a commitment from all its citizens to achieving what we've all been trying to do. Let's watch this one closely. We got a real chance here to help make something of something that is already being made. I earlier wrote about singaporetopping the global IT readiness index – Singapore amongst other things is seen as the best performer worldwide in a number of categories - quality of maths and science education, affordability of telephone connection charges, and government prioritization and procurement of ICT - and gets extremely high scores in other areas, such as affordability of Internet access. Singapore infocomm development authorities ten year IT plan is unarguably amongst the best of its kind. Singapore’s competitiveness and dynamism is undergoing a huge change – Lot of initiatives are being tried. The remaking Singapore report is a shining example of citizen involvement in shaping government policies.I can relate to most of what Paul writes – several of the institutions and some of the people referred in his article are known to me – I can only say that all these are correct impressions. Ofcourse like anywhere else there are different shades of colors that one could experience, but on balance, the city-state with a population of three million which has amassed a reserve in excess of hundred billion dollars is a real marvel – the beauty is it is trying to improve further.

Category :Singapore

Bill Gates : Cheap Smartphones As Computers

Engadget reports that both Gates and Microsoft CTO Craig J. Mundie talked up the idea of a specially designed smartphone that could be connected to a TV and keyboard, turning it into a full-fledged computer. Mundie highlighted that everyone is going to have a cellphone. Come to think of it, the cell phone is the platform as against the laptop – the no.of cellphones exceed the number of laptops,potentially at about two billion people with each other. Some concerns about the service provider knowing all the content indeed exists – but what would one do with so much of content.Google also seems to recognize the increasing importance of mobiles. Google talk is now available for mobiles. The key thing to note here is that both require that huge infrastructure like electricity , communication be setup prior to this happening. That’s another impetus for expediting setup of infrastructure in developing nations. This could direct question the model of the low cost PC's

We have covered numerous examples of mobile phone being used innovatively for routine usages: mobiles as tracking agents, mobile as the internet platform, mobile TV coming of age, mobile suica phones in Japanese railway, more emails sent through mobiles than PC’s in Japan.

Philip Greenspun was amongst the early proponents of the idea of making mobile phones as home computers. As he sees it, a mobile phone has substantially all of the computing capabilities desired by a large fraction of the public and he raises the question,why then would someone want to go to the trouble of installing and maintaining a personal computer (PC). Evidence this can work: Millions of Japanese consumers whose only home computing device is an iMode phone, providing them with text messaging, Web pages, and various social and commercial services. Pointing out that the combination of the phone and appliance is more powerful than a standard PC in some ways, typical uses could be things like : The physical phone plus a PIN number serves as a secure key identifying the customer and a means of billing the customer, as being tried in Japan and parts of Europe as a payment method in shops, for vending machines, and in dealing with government. Someone engaged in online shopping with the phone/Appliance combo should not need to enter credit card data, shipping address, etc. every time he or she buys something. Similarly subscription services can be added to and dropped from the customer's phone bill without the customer having to remember additional username/password combinations. I agree that the best way to push through this problem is to make the Appliances free or very low cost with a service agreement, the same way that carriers have managed to sell hundreds of thousands of expensive smart phones.

Category :Mobiles, Low Cost PC, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Rich Skrenta On Citizen Journalism

Topix.net’s Rich Skrenta writes on the right approach towards citizen journalism. As he sees it, the key to understanding what is working in "Citizen Journalism" is that they're first-person accounts. Journalists are professional observers and interpreters; they watch, and report back to the wider audience. But just like stockbrokers and travel agents, the Internet is again cutting out the intermediary.
The best examples of CJ, such as Jeremy Hermanns reporting on a cabin depressurization on Alaska Airlines or things similar to the ohmy news phenomenon.

Some points that he makes are excellent read : "The quality of journalistic output today is, for the most part really really good. In fact it's too good. The product costs a huge amount to bring to market, and what the Internet enables is a an alternative product built for zero, and providing a different value proposition. Citizen journalism is going to be more Citizens and less Journalism. "
and "Creating a local news page for every town in the US provided us with a set of local audiences for thousands of towns... towns where people who use AOL and have never heard of Web 2.0 live. These people want to tell their stories too. You don't need to know what a blog is to want to tell your story online, and you don't need a journalist to tell you how either, it turns out." Good read.

Category :Citizen Journalism, Emerging Trends

Monday, January 30, 2006

Is India Getting Expensive As A Devolopment Base

SAP opines "India is slowly getting expensive" ,and that SAP has decided to hire a certain number there, and then start looking at other locations. Reportedly Kagermann pointed to India's relatively high staff turnover, which is fueling personnel costs & SAP is likely to expand in China and Eastern Europe.
Some called me to know my view how service companies tend to look at this.(Like all other posts, I speak for myself like all other posts here and is not anyway related my employer's views). I had recently written China Resource Scaleup Disappoints India Headquartered Companies!! Recently we covered China no big force in software services and covered the Mckinsey perspective on china's software sector, it will be many years before china poses a threat to its continental rival.We also covered the point of view that its going to be the Indian Headquartered companies all the way in future ruling the IT services market. Financial Times recently wrote, China is far from the promised land for Indian software service giants. For service companies, In particular, there is a lack of suitable local applicants for jobs as project managers and quality control managers. In India, such people, typically with 5 to 12 years experience including stints in the US, are paid premium salaries. Software companies are forced to send project managers from India to Shanghai, raising the operating costs there. A lack of bilingual Chinese IT professionals, for jobs such as team leader, is also holding back expansion. One English and Chinese speaking programmer is required to oversee a team of four local developers who speak only Chinese. Because there is only a small number of bilingual programmers, they can command a salary premium of 30-40 per cent. These labour market deficiencies have not gone unnoticed among customers in the US, which is the biggest market for Indian IT. As I mentioned, China : No Big Force In IT Services,Its India All The Way. But I recognize that SAP could be looking at personnel of different profile – essentially to work as part of SAP’s engineering/testing. SAP is also very big in china – it is the largest enterprise vendor in china and therefore it may make sense for them to stay invested lot more in the mid kingdom. To attribute that expansion may not be in my view entirely correct – most of the Indian engineers would like to be part of a job which would help them travel outside India – most of the western companies – product & service companies included are yet to realign the model to meet this basic aspiration – that’s actually preventing them to scale up in great numbers as against good numbers. In my view, already SAP is big in India, but it may be unfair to name India as expensive compared to china. A recent Mckinsey report found the attrition in china at about 20 percent, compared with an average of 14 percent in the United States(Indian average for IT biggies may be similar), which itself has a very fluid IT labor market. Accenture recently reported that its global attrition level remain at 20%. Look at Oracle's India Plans. I would think that investments in various locations are in general mutually exclusive events, so long as things are not shut down in one location and corresponding rampup happens elsewhere.Also just a thought -lot better things can be accomplished without making press statements!!

Category :SAP, Emerging Trends, India

The CEO Factories

I have read years back Hal Geneen proclaiming that ITT as the CEO university. Its another matter that the conglomerate almost fell apart after his tenure. This is an interesting list of companies that produced the most chief executives – I have seen companies calling their key executives as CEO’s in waiting and some companies pride themselves as a company of CEO’s. There are some companies where every executive behaves like a CEO & there are companies where CEO does not matter & there are companies where CEO’s are everything – new economy or old economy does not matter!! There are companies where everyone likes to imitate the CEO behavior. I normally watch closely what happens to an enterprise after the CEO departs giving a true result about the effectiveness, much before the new CEO is able to bring in changes/stamp his imprints across the organization.But anyways an interesting list - Have always found CEO’s coming from deeply talent rich companies doing well – atleast the ruboff effect used to be pronounced. I have generally seen new CEO’S after taking charge driving change as change agents bringing huge difference to the DNA, Culture and ofcourse results. We have to grant that it is an incredibly powerful combination for a dynamite like CEO groomed in great instituitions (important that he /she does not get trapped in the comforts of the office).

Category :CEO

Young & Resurgent India – Time For An Action Bias

Following the keen focus planned on India , Manjeet Kripalini finds Indian top ministers and policymakers making many lucrative contacts among the foriegn power brokers on hand at the global economic conference – the high and mighty skipped annual jazz dinner at WEF to attend Indian cocktail. India has been helping itself quite effectively at Davos this year as can be seen by overflowing India sessions – late nights to early breakfast meets et all. Ministers acted like salesmen, high level bureaucrats wined and dined with global business leaders, Japanese big investors actively wooed for infrastructure investments. India actively talked about the 10 paradigm shifts taking place simultaneously in India – besides outsourcing, the country is now focusing on becoming a manufacturing base, largest middle class in the world, largest english speaking population on earth, the youngest nation with fortunate future demographics, all very attractive for global business. Indian industrialist have provided a matching visibility & support for attracting investments. India now needs an action bias – groundswell of interest can dissipate if nor converted into stretchable filed level pops – India is generally seen as slow in execution and in finalizing policy level decisions – delays in decisions related to airport modernization, all need to be stamped out with firm determination. Delhi Metro, Konkan rail lines – all have shown that India can deliver – obviously we need hundred of such new cases to report year after year. As Klaus Schwabdescribes, India needs to make further improvements in four important areas.
- The first is in education where the needs are particularly urgent at the primary and secondary level. Where tertiary enrolment rates are low, the scope for improvement in girls’ education is especially broad.
- The second is infrastructure; India needs to improve the quality of overall infrastructure, including roads, ports, airports, telecommunications and power generation.
- The third area for improvement is the extent of bureaucratic red tape and regulation – ensuring a favourable environment for business, especially entrepreneurship.
- Finally, India needs to continue to address its fiscal deficit problem, both its public debt level and its revenue collection.

During my visit to China last fortnight,someone told me that Shanghai city has more cranes than the combined number found anywhere else in the world – I am not sure of the veracity of this – but the effect is real. Let thousand and thousands of cranes crank, let decisions be made faster, let the execution of these engagements make record of sorts for execution. Let the slogan "No To Inertia" get more and more heard - clealry there is a huge chance to make a bright & better future for millions and millions of people lay there.

Category :India

RFID Tags & Privacy

Despite initiatives like this, concerns of privacy intrusion owing to RFID technologies abound. At one end views as vitriolic as RFID tag activated bombs exist where some think that given the one way trust nature of the protocols, where the RFID tag betrays vital information to any reader device, promiscuously, there is no reason why terrorists or military opponents could not easily target individuals or groups of individuals with landmines, booby traps etc. based on the RFID tags which are detected on a person e.g. a bomb which only kills rich American or European tourists or singles out military personnel from the local civilian population. The current plans to include contactless RFID chips in, for example, the new USA Biometric Passports, without any encryption at all, will lead to easier automated target reconaissance for terrorists, who will no doubt program a bomb to wait until several US Citizens are within range before detonating itself automatically.
Bruce Schneier points to an excellent cartoon by David Farley on RFID , Privacy Intrusion & Packaging. It says it all.The industry’s response is very limited – they are also struck by the frequency regulations across the globe – but to be fair privacy intrusion are only a limited dampener in the adoption of RFID – Some high voltage showcase success is what the industry needs now – Beijing Olympics may be that –that is a few years away - but obviously lot more needs to come from the western world.

Category :RFID & Privacy

The 2006 Forbes VC Midas List & Future Investment Directions

Michael Moritz of Sequoia, the NO.I in the Forbes Midas List says that consumer-tech businesses, are a pit of "muck and mire." As he sees it(after making tons of money out of it recently), they have low margins, require massive marketing budgets, compete with monster retailers' house brands and face Asian copycats. Though he has helped fuel the consumer craze, he laments the rise of handheld gadgetry: "The march of consumer technology will spell an end to tranquility & warns that most of the venture money going into consumer-related companies will be squandered, and the rest will be lost." David Chao (10)and Dixon Doll (24) were among the first U.S. VCs to woo middle-class shoppers in Asia. This year they took five firms public in Asia, including JCI, a wireless provider. Says Chao:"If there is any one engine that is going to drive the next bubble-good and bad-it will be those billion handheld devices that will be sold in 2007." Forbes notes that a lot of names on the list last year are gone with the disappearance of the gargantuan valuations of the boom era. The article also notes that with the continued rise of China and India and waves of driven, newly minted capitalists, these rankings will get more multinational each year. It is no coincidence that all the top five dealmakershave been associated with Google in one way or other. The list of sectoral interest, polled by readers,actually surprised me - by and large looks lot more balanced.I hope to see the oversee investment share move from 20% to higher number in the years to come.

Category :Midas List, Venture Capitalists

Sunday, January 29, 2006

The Digital 2.0 World: The Future Of Technology Nay Business

Listening to the podcast of a powerful panel on digital 2.0 in the world economic forum titled, the future of the technology sector, the panel chaired by Geoffrey Moore with participation by Bill Gates, John Chambers, Eric Schmidt & Niklaus Zinnstorm is a dream come true –perhaps the best panel that can ever be assembled. While we have earlier covered the big bang effect of digitization, the discussions in the WEF panel clearly took things to a different plane.
Geoff Moore set the framework for discussions on two fronts:
- Technology issues now transcend technology companies and are now nearly all pervasive across the industries & sectors.
- Gordon Moore’s law predicting technology capability improvements 10x to 100x improvements in about 5-7 years is probably losing what Geoffrey calls as its exploratory power whereas the impact of the internet is shifting( read my note on the impact on enterprise software )the focus towards service models – this means that Moore’s law is still relevant but more or equally powerful other forces are shaping the growth of the tech industry and by extension all industries & sectors.
What followed was one of the most illuminating discussions about the future/opportunities that technology would be creating for the business/society in general. Some of the points that came out in the discussions:
- Bill Gates who was invited first to talk, spoke about the almost near zero cost of computing, storage and bandwidth and admitted when asked about aligning Microsoft to the changing reality that catching up in some areas is also an important strategy that it follows while trying to create the future in the PC related arenas.
- John Chambers came with the notion that the shift now is from transactions to interactivity bringing about huge increase in productivity and means to reaching and delighting customers
- Eric Schmidt spoke about the how the various tech advances have really come together and created a perceptible critical mass – redefining rate of growth in driving new markets and new business segments. His point of increasing rate of adoption & the dawn of new service models creating new customers was quite insightful
- A point that Niklaus Zinnstorm built on – Skype has built up a customer base of 75 million in 3 ½ years & pointed out that ARPU costs are not relevant and the only the ecosystem matters more as the incremental cost of scaling up is virtually zero.
- The new metric now becomes the ratio of active users vs customers( right now it stands at single digit ) – this is applicable to Skype, Google & Microsoft as well.
- Eric Schmidt drove the points out the shift from technology enabling strategy to technology driving/determining strategy in the emerging world.
- As the internet becomes so ubiquitous and stable and with integration technologies getting simpler and open, small companies/startups anywhere in the world can focus on a chosen thing and create a huge impact – this is really a phenomenon that we shall see increasingly become significant in future. Talking of ubiquity of the internet, Gates added, "with ubiquitous connectivity “you can eventually even get rid of telephone numbers".
- The impact of all these in the business model changes across industries is what John Chambers highlighted, one that would be increasingly felt and amidst all these things what about the telco’s who have invested in the infrastructure wanting to get a share of the new pie – while John felt that net-net bandwidth shall become free and Bill spelt out the infrastructure players shall focus on new biz models centered around video rendering and related services opening up a new revenue stream. More is available in the podcast that includes Microsoft’s/Google’s digitization strategies.
- A lot more insightful, interesting and humorous discussions followed
In a nutshell the conclusions veered around:
- Free infrastructure- computing,storage & bandwidth
- More value shall be derived from IT enabling transactions to enabling interactions
- Digitization of all possible things, and make them available over the net – this would push for greater value creation through related services.
In Dealing With Darwin, Geoff Moore outlined the need for companies to innovate in various phases of its evolution, here he has more or less set the tone for the need of the business ecosystem to focus on the need to innovate and adopt in its evolution as well. Clearly the vision, readiness, availability and early success /demonstrations are happening - the key would be to see how things rapidly/deeply/innovatively shape the various business around the world in the Digital 2.0 world.

Category :Digital 2.0,Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

The Story Of Three Chickens -TCS, Wipro & Infosys

Subir Roy writes the story of TCS, Wipro & Infosys – He relates to these as three chickens which all laid eggs - One was shy, one was honest and one was a chicken with hype. All laid an egg each, ordinary looking, whose product quality was identical, say 100. The first made a noise of two decibels, so very few heard of it and came to see it. But with those who did come, it scored 98 plus. The second was the honest chicken. Its product quality was 100, it made a noise about being 100. Everybody came expecting 100, got 100. The end result was even or neutral, neither positive nor negative. The third chicken, whose egg was of quality 100, made a noise that it was 400, everybody came expecting 400, but got 100, that is minus 300. If you have not guessed it yet, the first chicken is Tata Consultancy Services, the second is Wipro, and the third is Infosys - the three leading lights of the Indian software industry. The three represent a fine conundrum. For the record, I disagree with the rankings or the comparison made in such narrow sense.

My Take: The article while recognizing the different marketing strategies these employ makes the claim that they offer near-identical services of near-identical quality and there is little to distinguish them in the way they meet customer requirements ( This is a myth – increasingly the offerings and depth or lack of it are showing up and look at the vertical revenue distribution/service offering revenue amongst these companies ). This is an excellent article – while there may be some misrepresentation of facts , the article is highly insightful – never have I seen something published like this with so much of detail – while being an industry insider with so many contacts and interactions – we get to know all these and perhaps a lot more but for someone not interacting with these companies – a highly recommended read about the major players that were mostly instrumental in changing the rules of the game.

Category :Indian Software Players,Offshoring

Google : The Logos Say It All

Courtesy of Jeff Nolan, came across these Google Logo's.

Can’t say anything more. While on this topic read this, this and this. Afterall, it is the right principle to respect the rule of the land.

Category :Google, China

Kosmix : Interesting Upstart

Matt Marshall writes about the latest venture of two of the founders of Junglee: Anand Rajaraman and Venky Harinarayan : the duo have come together to launch Kosmix. From siliconbeat : "Aiming to what they call as unsolved problem on the web - they are making an audaciously risky bet that they can crack the code on a vexing problem in search: finding the meaning, or at least the topic of a Web page. Kosmix is betting its deep technology can help improve upon Google's one-size-fits-all approach for many types of searches. Google may work well when you're looking for a specific answer.But what if there's no one right answer? This is where Kosmix wants to help you, by searching the entire web and narrowing the results to the particular area you are interested in - and then giving you a choice of answers". The duo claim most of these other sites crawling only 500 or so Web sites relevant to their niches. Kosmix, like Google and Yahoo, is crawling and indexing the entire Web. It has come up with its own technology to rank pages by category, instead of by keyword.
Kosmix doesn't use pagerank - or popularity, based on the number links to a page. As pagerank is seen as inefficient when it comes to categories. Instead, Kosmix looks at what pages that link to other pages are saying - to take a bigger stab at judging the meaning or subject of the page. Its like the "category rank" - essentially tagging pages with categories- call it "Auto-tagging the Web."
There are some interesting anecdotes as well: Post jungle.com acquisition by Amazon, they worked for a while in amazon.com and Rajaraman shares an interesting detail – when approached for an acquisition by amazon – he recalls: "And we kind of asked, at that point, 'Sergey, if Amazon were to buy you guys, what sort of price would you sell for?' I remember Sergey telling me: 'The only kind of price we'd accept would be something with ten digits [billions].' If he'd said nine digits, we might have talked." Kosmix has started with a health search, but will soon roll out travel and politics search, and will follow with a rolling thunder of scores of other types of searches. This is not lightweight stuff. They have filed patents, and there's tons of math in their algorithms. Interesting to watch – trials returned interesting results.

Category :Kosmix, Emerging Technologies

Techworld : Boom Or Bubble

Chris Anderson makes a good case to look at the current movement in the tech worlds as a boom and not a bubble. As he sees it three reasons are driving this:
- First, technology adoption has continued at a torrid pace (and even accelerated at times) despite the bust. The digital-media boom sparked by the iPod and iTunes has blown through even the most aggressive forecasts.
- The second reason is that the sunk costs of the dotcom era make the economics of entrepreneurship more favorable. We're now enjoying supercheap bandwidth. So, too, for storage, screens, and a host of other technologies that are benefiting from profligate '90s-era investment and research.
- With reducing prices – read this - one can can start a company today for a tiny fraction of what people spent five years ago. In this new environment, startups can grow organically. That means less venture capital is needed - and that's the third reason this boom is different.
So there you have the recipe for a healthy boom, not a fragile bubble: a more receptive marketplace, lower costs, and lighter pressure from investors, argues Chris. I definitely see an upswing in activities in the market, though enterprisewide adoption of new technologies look weak.Anderson captures the new dynamics in vogue governing the techworld.The key thing would be to see how to make this broadbased – for example, opensource foray into the enterprise is very limited, the promised internet’s disruptive effects , all need to happen now. The role of the investors can not be underemphasised from the supplyside and this should be felt at all happening places in the world like in india, fast becoming the technology epicenter. At the same time periodic checks that good sense prevails need to be taken. There is also an acute need to make enterprise scale changes happen in the industry to sustain the momentum - one that can provide measurable vaue to business.

Category :Techworld, Emerging Trends

Google & Enterprise Technology Players – Its Hedging Risk Strategy

Recently I wrote that Google inside enterprise would be a n interesting thing to watch – to recap, I wrote that if Google expands its footprint in the enterprise space - e.g., to develop content management or authoring tools - it will come as a hosted service or (like its enterprise search product) an appliance.
Recently, EMC and Google announced an agreement to integrate EMC Documentum Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) Services and Google Desktop search.Recently EMC’s software integrated both Google.com and the Google Search Appliance, letting customers leverage Google’s search products as information sources. Frank Gens predicts that in the near future many enterprise vendors shall begin to court Google aggressively. In his schema,Google would provide the Web platform with its existing, massive, computing infrastructure of hundreds of thousands of servers around the world. It could team up with a whole array of companies to actually write applications — from information and content management to business analytics—on top of that platform.
It can be seen that Google is stepping into the world of enterprise and this can be seen as a precursor to Google focussing its energy in the enterprise software sector as well in the days to come. Frank points to Google having similar agreements with IBM and Sun as well, but as I see it should also be noted that EMC dumped verity as the choice search player last year and is now embracing Google – clearly the Google brand is having a good pull. This is also a precursor to consumer technologies setting integrated under the hoods so to say in the enterprise landscape. Since individuals are getting so familiar with Google, coupled with its versatility, it is pushing enterprise players to court these products more aggressively. Pervasive devices usually associated with individuals are long getting integrated into the enterprise space – mobiles, blackberry’s, VoIP applications etc.
Frankly I do not attach great importance to Google moving into the enterprise space as earthshaking – there are far better enterprise players in the fray there – specialist players offering superior benefits. Google can play the game of being inside enterprise space- that could be the only disruptive influence therein. It should be noted that the best enterprise search player is seen as Vivismo and not Google. Also it need to be noted that press releases are just that and need not become a centerpiece strategy in occassions like this. EMC seeing itself as the winner in the ECM space, would like to broadbase its appeal and this should be seen as a step in that direction. I genuinely believe that one of the reasons that EMC wants to play the Google card is to hedge against any potential acquisitions that may affect the other search players – the space is beginning to see some consolidation of late (Verity got snapped by Autonomy in a surprising move recently) With IBM & Oracle failing to make any significant dent in the enterprise content search space,tomorrow can be anybody’s guess - so it is prudent to have a strong neutral player as part of your ecosystem and that I suspect is the biggest reason for this coming together – a good move indeed on the part of EMC - but I refuse to see this as a trend wherein google could move in to storm the enterprise market.

Category :Google In Enterprise, Emerging Trends.

Friday, January 27, 2006

The Venerable CMS Players

CEO departures normally precede/succeed bad developments inside an enterprise. Tony Byrne wonders how come when both Interwoven and Vignette announced improved results ,their CEO’s are headed out. Hopefully these two vendors are not getting acquired. Vignette's Thomas Hogan is moving on to HP Software (HP was always rumored to be on the lookout for acquiring a content management vendor & an EAI vendor), while Interwoven's Martin Brauns is retiring. Pointing to decent Q4 earnings (Vignette, Interwoven),& rounding out successive years of steady but very modest growth is indeed a respectable accomplishment. These two companies have withstood the onslaught of the bruteforce consolidation and stood their ground. For a quick comparison, look at the state Broadvision is in today – once it used to be revenuewise bigger than these two players put together. Let’s hope the change makes these two companies much better.

Category :CMS Players, Emerging Trends

The Rising Spectre Of BPM

The change in the BPM world is dramatic : from process modeling & workflows the framework has improved to support all aspects of the business & digital world across the process. This provides for a tight intrlocking of desired actions to real results BPM suites combine process modeling, execution and performance management in a coherent set of software tools linked by a coherent management philosophy. Because it is neither IT infrastructure nor an enterprise application, BPM is still not well understood by IT. Instead of treating business modeling, IT implementation and performance management as independent endeavors, BPM unites them with an integrated set of tools and an overarching management philosophy of continual incremental improvement.
Naming five reasons to invest in BPM, Bruce silver lists them:
1. Simplification – Documenting current process architectures and analyzing them for simplicity & efficiency constitute the bulk of BPM engagements
2. Efficiency. Efficiency improvements are the No. 1 source of return on investment from BPM.
3. Compliance and Control. BPM ensures compliance not only with policies and regulatory requirements but also with best practices tuned to performance objectives. BPM tools encourage reuse of process fragments throughout the organization while allowing local variations where they make sense.
4. Agility. Through orchestration, services get interconnected & render themselves to be modified quickly in response to changing demands.
5. Continuous improvement. Like corporate performance management systems, BPM supports high-level strategic metrics, drill-down analytics and alerts when results begin to deviate from performance targets. BPM can turn alerts into automated real-time escalation and remediation procedures, providing zero-latency response to the business environment. Ultimately, parameters distilled from actual operations can be fed back into the process model to begin the next cycle of performance improvement.

My Take: The BPM space winners are surprisingly not the big players but the best-of-the breed lot. It is time that we begin to recognize the players based on their capabilities and general strengths and not necessarily look at the big players for all types of solutions – Big players need to be grilled a lot more in their ability to provide emerging cutting edge solutions on specific niche areas– while they may be the starting posts for any enterprise procurements – as things evolve it may become the case that they may not be seen near the end posts in evaluation post everytime. Therein may lay the solution for the growth of the enterprise software sector and the ability of business to overall extract better value from IT. Bryan Stolle once wrote there is still much innovation to be done, especially as the market gets more and more vertically focused. With the current moods however many innovative vendors will have to shut their doors before they get the chance to be the next Salesforce.com. Big vendors also need to begin to get measured on new parameters like innovation /innovation absorption, to ensure that they stay along the curve of progress. As I wrote recently I do not see how the large platform players can do away super special players( there are many of them - some have existed for decades - though a majority of them for just under a decade) or provide justice with specialized smaller companies like rules engines, collaboration systems, content management systems, document management systems, procurement solutions, business intelligence etc. Clearly there shall be several smaller companies that would co-exist as part of the larger enterprise ecosystem. Big vendors may not be the only choice for connecting all the dots in enterprise space(while unarguably they shall hold the central place there) - other specialist/niche players also hold a legitimatley well earned space - the sooner this is understood and get reflected in thoughts and actions - the better it is for the complete enteprise ecosystem - without further straining the already near fatigued corporate buyer sentiments.

Category :BPM, Emerging Technologies

Blogs On Enterprise Technologies

Vinnie points out that while we use and enjoy Google, Yahoo and Apple products, most of us work with and professionally appear more interested in enterprise technologies and vendors. He says that he is almost on a crusade to see more blogs written on enterprise vendors and topics like telemetry, biometrics, BPO, SaaS - not just consumer technologies and web 2.0. He is spot on when he points out that the enterprise spend is over 10X the consumer spend, but the overall attention of media and blogs appears the inverse. I do write about personal/consumer technologies, partly because there are more regular developments and the pace of change is faster but enterprise technology is close to my heart and clearly it has much larger impact on the society as a whole. As Dennis Howlet points out we have to play the game – otherwise in the memeorandum model, enterprise blogs get subsumed. Whats the game like – when I mailed Gabe a few weeks back and asked for a clarification – promptly he wrote me back - Every night the process described here repeats:
http://blog.memeorandum.com/050922/whos-included and he recommended you link a lot and strive to get linked to make sure the blog surfaces in the tech filter. Addressig my concern of recent posts not surfacing in tech memeorandum , he wrote that if you appeared regularly before but not now, it's probably because some posts of your got some attention earlier but not recently and suggesyed that I post some more things other people link to you're likely to show up again... I found the logic a little strange!! On a related note,it is also deplorable to see that for the American media/aggregators/filters–blogosphere included, the rest of the world does not matter – barring a few exceptions. Its time that a movement called enterprise blogs get noticed in the expanding blogosphere.

Category :Enterprise Software Blogs, Blogosphere

The Gadget Proliferation & Privacy Risks

While many are closely watching the Google Vs Federal Govt issue & Google's decision to accept chinese censorship, perhaps we overlook how even our personal data that we keep with us are sometimes vulnerable for others to potentially misuse. The venerable Bruce Schneier writes that it's now amazingly easy to lose an enormous amount of information. In the article that appears in the Wired magazine, he points twenty years ago, someone could break into an office and copy every customer file, every piece of correspondence etc. Today, all he has to do is steal a computer/portable backup drive or copy all data, and one would never know about it. With miniaturization and proliferation of small devices in this increasingly digital world, If anything, this problem has gotten worse. The digital devices have all gotten smaller, while at the same time they're carrying more and more sensitive information. The laptop could easily contain every e-mail sent and received over years, and may contain , an enormous amount of work-related documents, and all personal details. USB’s normally carry so much of backup data. Blackberry’s & Treo’s contain all email info, phone numbers and a detailed log of phone calls made/received. He offers two possible solutions:
- The first is to protect the data. Hard-disk encryption programs like PGP Disk allow encryption of individual files, folders or entire disk partitions. Several manufacturers market USB thumb drives with built-in encryption. Some PDA manufacturers are starting to add password protection - not as good as encryption, but at least it's something - to their devices, and there are some aftermarket PDA encryption programs.
- The second solution is to remotely delete the data if the device is lost. This is still a new idea, this may gain traction in the corporate market. Important aspects that end consumers should focus on and push the manufacturers/service providers to share.

Category :Privacy, Data Risks

Thursday, January 26, 2006

GENI : The 350Million Dollar Dream

Seldom do I get the time & patience to look at projects in the academia( no disrespect meant – its just that I do not find the time to look at them – being choked in the commercial world for a long time!!) –Some friends shared the information about the new internet related efforts. The GENI (Global Environment for Network Investigations ) is an experimental facility being planned by the NSF (with an outlay in excess of 350 million US$), in collaboration with the research community works with the goal o enable the research community to invent and demonstrate a global communications network and related services that will be qualitatively better than today's Internet. The belief is that if the Internet is going to deliver increasing value to society, then experimental facilities that allow the research community to address new threats, exploit emerging technologies, enable new applications, and foster the embedding of the network throughout the physical world needs to be fostered.

The draft conceptual document released recently highlights the limitations of the current internet:

-The Internet is not secure - with worms, viruses, and denial of service attacks, and there exists enough reasons to worry about massive collapse, due either to natural errors or malicious attacks. Problems with “phishing” have prevented institutions such as banks from using email to communicate with their customers. Trust in the Internet is eroding.

- The current Internet cannot deliver to society the potential of emerging technologies such as wireless communications. Even as all of our computers become connected to the Internet, we see the next wave of computing devices (sensors and controllers) rejecting the Internet in favor of isolated “sensor networks”.

- The Internet does not provide adequate levels of availability. The design should be able to deliver a more available service than the telephone system. In particular, it should meet the needs of society in times of crisis by giving priority to critical communications.

- The design of the current Internet actually creates barriers to economic investment and enhancement by the private sector. A large number of specific problems with the Internet today have their roots in an economic disincentive, rather than a technical lack
Besides highlighting a few more limitations, the report points out that these limitations are deeply rooted in the design of the Internet. It is easy to overlook them because of the astonishing success of the Internet to this point. we may be at an inflection point in the social utility of the Internet, with eroding trust, reduced innovation, and slowing rates of uptake.

While the current looks like this, the future Internet must enable and encourage:
- A world where mobility and universal connectivity is the norm, in which any piece of information is available anytime, anywhere.
- A world where more and more of the world’s information is available online—a world that meets commercial concerns, provides utility to users, and makes new activities possible. A world where we can all search, store, retrieve, explore, enlighten and entertain ourselves.
- A world that is made smarter—safer, more efficient, healthier, more satisfactory—by the effective use of sensors and controllers.
- A world where we have a balanced realization of important social concerns such as privacy, accountability, freedom of action and a predictable shared civil space.
- A world where “computing” and “networking” is no longer something we “do”, but a natural part of our everyday world. We no longer use the Internet to go to cyber-space. It has come to us. A world where these tools are so integrated into our world that they become invisible. Good project worth monitoring for progress.

Category :Internet, Emerging Technologies.

The Disruptive Effects Of Big Bang Digital Convergence

As we covered earlier digitization does not respect any defined categorization such as tech or consumer electronics. We are now seeing a collision of three massive industries Viz. the computer and software biz( US dominated),the consumer electronics sector(Asia centric) & telecommunications industry( across the world). All three groups will have a hand in building the digital wonders that are headed our way. Paradoxically, none of these industries, much less a single company, can put all the pieces together. As this article points out, convergence used to be a much talked word in the past – but most saw some combination of television, computers and an intelligent network that would give consumers much more control. Today, Video is popping up on cellphones, iPods, TiVo's and Web sites. And as for blogs, photo-tagging sites like Flickr, podcasts and the rest of the bubbling digital stew, it's clear that lots of media are coming together in lots of devices in lots of ways. This convergence spells trouble for many established companies. The anything, anytime, anywhere paradigm is really going to shift the world of media.
Old-line media companies' fears can be lumped into three nightmarish categories:
- Business-model anxiety : Newer services like Apple's iTunes, TiVo's Video from advertising-supported Web sites, Bit Torrents all these are questioning the notions of existing models.
- Creative anxiety : With facilities for production of any combination of video, text, sound and pictures for viewing on a 50-inch TV, a laptop computer or a cellphone screen. conventional media is getting increasingly puzzled about how to counter the onslaught.
- Control anxiety : With weblogs and the rise of online communities, commoners can be distributing podcasts and movies online on their own. The career prospects for hit makers, gatekeepers and even fact checkers may well be in doubt.The internet has broken down the barriers & accelerated the development of new solutions like efficient ways to deliver high-quality video signals. The primordial soup of more bandwidth, more storage, more devices and more people creating content which is inherently digital, is inherently very powerful and the speed of absorption has alighted ahead of the studied response of the old media. Covergence is cutting through the sheath of tradition of invincibility.

Category :Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies, Convergence.

The Internet : Social & Community Ties

Courtesy of Howard saw this well compiled note titled internet ties. The report submit that the internet is reinforcing new set of ties in the society & that this would improve over time while reaching larger masses. The internet has become part of everyday life. People routinely integrate it into the ways in which they communicate with each other, moving between phone, computer, and in-person encounters. Instead of disappearing ties, people’s communities are transforming:
The traditional human orientation to neighborhood- and village-based groups is moving towards communities that are oriented around geographically dispersed social networks. Today people’s networks continue to have substantial numbers of relatives and neighbors — the traditional bases of community — as well as friends and workmates. The internet and email play an important role in maintaining these dispersed social networks. Rather than conflicting with people’s community ties, the authors submit that the internet fits seamlessly with in-person and phone encounters. With the help of the internet, people are able to maintain active contact with sizable social networks, even though many of the people in those networks do not live nearby. Do not miss out the section on the role internet plays in taking decisions. A must read report if you want to taste a sample of the profoundness of the report : Even though there are fewer people contacted, they are a greater percentage of your network. This pattern - the percentage of one’s social network contacted declining as network size grows - holds true for almost all forms of contact analyzed in the Social Ties survey. The one exception is email. As the size of people’s social network increases, the percentage of one’s social network contacted weekly by email does not decline but remains about the same at about 20% of core and significant ties.

Category :Internet, Emerging Trends, Social Networks

Digital Rights Management Or Digital Restrictions Mongering

The title of the post says it all. Wired News has a story about the impact of DRM on the future of the digital entertainment industry. The article brings up some excellent points about the effects of DRM in bringing limitations on innovation within the industry.This year may be the year that gadget makers finally conquer the living room, replacing DVD players, VCRs and personal video recorders with all-in-one media devices that serve up HDTV, pre-recorded movies and digital music. If so, it will likely also be the year that people learn the meaning of DRM, an acronym the industry says stands for digital rights management, but critics say should stand for digital restrictions mongering. The key players in the CES market for whom DRM is highly relevant look at it more as a problem than a solution and hence come out with suboptimal means of enforcing DRM. Google, generally recognised for doing things right recently came out with its own DRM standards, adding to the complexity. While on this do not miss reading this.I agree with cory doctorow’s view that technology companies will eventually decide that entertainment companies' demand for DRM is hurting their bottom line & that’s when truly innovative gadgets will become available. Clearly doing less with more and more powerful gadgets will not go well with the masses.

Category :DRM, Emerging Trends

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

EDS may buy MphasiS

(Via Economictimes) In what may be seen as the second largest deal in the local software services sector, slightly smaller than the $593m Oracle paid to acquire Citigroup’s stake in banking product company iFlex, it appears that EDS may buy out Mphasis. The total acquisition cost may be around 1600 crores. It is said that EDS is likely to not only buy Baring’s stake, but also Jerry Rao’s (MphasiS’ chairman) stake. Jerry Rao is also the current chairman of Nasscom (Correction : Jerry Rao was the chairman of Nasscom till last year. For those who may not know this - N.R.Narayanamurthy of Infosys is his maternal uncle as well.). The speculation is that the discussion between EDS and MphasiS is also intended to determine how the senior management, including the founders of MphasiS, will be absorbed in EDS. Jerry Rao, the former Citibanker-turned-entrepreneur who set up the company, is expected to head the global financial services practice of EDS post merger. Currently, Jean-Louis Bravard leads EDS’ global financial services. The rationale for the acquisition is that EDS wants to ramp up its financial services practice to compete head on with IBM Global Services. EDS has been working on strengthening this practice for the last three years. IBM’s acquisition of PwC has helped it to steal a march in this domain. Now, EDS is trying to bridge that gap by acquiring MphasiS.While both EDS & Mphasis have not confirmed or denied, am not too sure of how much value would accrue to EDS by this acquisition - atleast for two reasons - key people are said to be moving out/already moved out and the valuation might be seen to be a little high.. This may also mean that more offshore companies with annual turnover less than 200 million may choose to sellout.

Category :Offshore Acquisitions

Yahoo Not Obsessed With Growth In Search Share

Yahoo! Chief Financial Officer - Susan Decker recently told Bloomberg News that Yahoo! does not intend to gain market share in the search space. "It's not our goal to be #1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share." (via Steve Rubel). Decker says Yahoo! will instead improve advertising on its search results pages to bring in more revenue, saying that Yahoo does not think it's reasonable to assume that it would be going to gain a lot of share from Google. She declares that, "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share." Yahoo!'s comments underline the difficulties any Internet company faces in trying to challenge Google's dominance of the Web search industry. Google has at least double the market share of Yahoo! and Microsoft Corp. In Internet search, the largest and most profitable segment of online advertising. To boost revenue from each search, Yahoo! plans to make ads more relevant to search terms, meaning people will be more likely to click on them.Yahoo is not moving fast enough here. On the one hand while it claims that thay are very strong in Asia , it is surprising to note that yahoo ads are not rendered if the site publisher does not have a US postal address. Google has this facility for several months!! Consider The final punch : “Our goal has been to hold our share and to be a leading, if not the leading, total marketing platform, which would include both brand and search." One can’t find fault with Yahoo : its perhaps the most sensible of the internet companies.

Category :Yahoosearch, Emerging Trends.

2006: Ominous Signals For Enterprise Software

The year that past by was an eventful year for enterprise software vendors - small vendors finding difficult to expand and began to get acquired, the acquiring entities after spending so much on acquisition found their stocks wailing at several year lows. New technologies keep getting mindshare. 2006 appears to be another testing year for software vendors. Courtesy of Paul Kedrosky. saw this collection of perspectives on Enterprise Software. Greg Gianforte sees 2006 as the horrible year for software vendors. As he sees it,2006 will be a horrible year for software vendors who don't understand the technical and business implications of SaaS, as well as for those that remain slaves of Oracle and Microsoft. Pointing out that the issue as usual isn't just the technology itself It's whether the vendor can package and deliver the technology in a way that solves the customer's business problem and is relatively painless to assimilate into an IT environment that's already quite complex and tough to manage. He predicts that the hosted SaaS model will continue to grow, while the conventional high-TCO model will become increasingly unappetizing to corporate IT buyers who now have a great alternative. Open source will also continue its ascent as buyers realize there is no reason to pay outrageous licensing fees for proprietary operating systems, databases and web servers when the open source alternatives are just as good or better. Companies will also spend on technologies that enable them to create a superlative customer experience across all channels, since competitive success in a "flat earth" economy will depend more and more on differentiated service - rather than price and/or features. In a globalized economy, it is tough to compete on price. And with technology proliferating so quickly around the globe, it's also tough to compete on technological innovation alone. So a great customer experience has become a critical competitive differentiator.
Radha Basu, CEO, President and Chairman, SupportSoft, Inc sees transition happening for enterprise software vendors. She sees the rising trend of convergence of the consumer world and the enterprise. In 2005 there has been an increased convergence in consumer-facing technologies that is forcing enterprises to re-inspect their internal software needs. Fast adoption of wireless, VoIP, high speed data access and other forms of IP-based service delivery when combined with an increasingly mobile workforce, is causing enterprises to re-evaluate how they use technology to serve themselves and their customers. Mass adoption of technology is now helping drive enterprise adoption of new solutions. For, David Gould, CEO and Chairman, Witness Systems 2006 looks favourable.

Past success may not ensure greater business this year onwards, market consolidating or not. Clearly we shall see a different landscape of enteprise software vendors when 2006 closes.

Category :Enterprise Software,Emerging Trends

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

SOA & The Profound Impact

Few months back, I wrote about SOA & the potential for profound change. The article higlighted that a longstanding dream of enterprises - to define the enterprise as a set of process models - becomes possible and processes begin to take center stage in defining, configuring and running software. Software can be described using many levels of models: data elements, business objects, services and processes and SOA influences all these tiers of software. Forward looking organizations realize that these changes will have an impact on everything from development tools to methodologies of deployment, maintenance, selection and procurement cycles. Dave Chappell of DavidChappell associates points out that SOA needs to be thought in terms of :
- Application architecture (Guidelines, patterns, and practices for creating service-oriented applications),
- Infrastructure architecture(Guidelines, patterns, and practices for managing and operating service-oriented applications) and,
- Enterprise architecture(Guidelines, patterns, and practices for using and getting business value from service-oriented applications).
He adds that in general developers are mostly interested in the challenges of building service-oriented applications, for instance, and so their focus tends to be on the application architecture aspects of SOA.A vendor of web services management tools commonly thinks of SOA primarily in the infrastructure sense, while an enterprise architect at a user organization is likely to be concerned mainly with SOA’s enterprise aspects. Many people ask me where is the profound change that I talked about happening with SOA – The answer quite simply lay in working on all the three SOA dimensions. Half baked measures always produce sub-optimal results. I wrote sometime back,"For now though, SOA is a recognizable and mostly virtual plumbing exercise. Most likely, vendors will draw their strategy from the experience of customers, and will adjust accordingly. Not to overlook the fact that though the vendor community is trying hard to improve their SOA maturity,evolving standards and entrenched infrastructure mean more pilots and lab environments and more & more scope for innovations as adoption tends to improve". No wonder the SOA space is also getting consolodated as can be seen here, here & here.

Category :SOA, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

On Blind Spots

Jeffrey Phillips over at Thinking Faster has an excellent post on "Blind Spots". The deficiencies in us may not be directly known through just being self aware – but others may spot it easily. The sense of right or wrong for us is based on a mesh of several factors – cultural, social backgrounds and our belief system guides and shapes our approach. Citing the case of "learned helplessness", Jeff Phillips discusses about blindspot in terms of leading questions. What have we been trained to accept, or overlook? What cultural norms hold us back from doing more than we could? Do you have a virtual cuff around your ideas or your business process that keeps you doing the same things over and over? His advise:, question the stuff that gets in your way, the cultural things, the "things you should know" that limit your thinking or your productivity. It may be a bit hard to do, since so many of these barriers and behaviors are learned and become almost unconscious. Think about what you do and the barriers to your productivity. Question why these barriers - conscious and unconscious exist & suggests not be chained down by virtual ropes. Thought provoking read.

Category :Blindspot, Trends

The Erupting War Over The Usage Of The Internet

The telecom landscape is getting recast and the battle is becoming one of finding sustainable ways and means of extracting value from the digital content. As we wrote the takeovers of AT&T and MCI officially usher in the long-heralded Internet era.The old phone companies are artifacts, and the new telecoms will look more like their counterparts in cable and computers. Consumers and business will increasingly have their pick of new services from a bunch of providers that are fighting hard to win their business.But as that era fades,another is dawning.The telco’s if they have their way may decide whether msn or yahoo could load faster in an user’ system. The telco’s proposals have the potential, within just a few years, to alter the flow of commerce and information - and one’s personal experience - on the Internet. For the first time, the companies that own the equipment that delivers the Internet could, for a price, give one company priority on their networks over another. The telco’s do not think that the fees imposed by carriers alter the basic nature of the Internet. No broadband provider has proposed to block certain Web sites. But they have said Yahoo, for instance, could pay a fee to have its search site load faster than Google. Other possibilities include restricting bandwidth-hogging file-swapping applications, or delivering their own video content faster than a similar service provided by rivals. SBC CEO Ed Whitecare says that the internet sites & VoIP payers would like to use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using. The Internet can't be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo! () or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts! Recently an executive with BellSouth was quoted saying that the company would consider charging Apple five or 10 cents extra each time a customer downloaded a song using iTunes. Google and others say that the prospect of telephone companies imposing new fees on innovative and successful ventures is exactly the kind of thing that deters online commerce. Cable companies abhor the idea of enforced network neutrality just as much as the telephone companies. This represents a break with the commercial meritocracy that has ruled the Internet until now. Network neutrality is increasingly becoming the buzzword that some are trying hard to have it indoctrined into law and regulation. Google and Yahoo have joined their lobbying efforts. And online retailers, Internet travel services, news media and hundreds of other companies that do business on the Web also have a lot at stake. Giving priority to a company that pays more, they say, is just offering another tier of service - like an airline offering business as well as economy class. Network neutrality, they say, is a solution in search of a problem.

Category :Emerging Trends, Internet Trends,Teco's

Business Analytics As Bride Or Bridesmaid

I recently covered the topic of enterprise analytics. The philosophy behind business analytics had always been - mine the transaction data under your management to detect trends and extract insights that will give you competitive advantage.This only becomes more compelling with every year’s exponential expansion of the universe of accessible transaction data & the internet enablement of IT exacerbates the trend. Geoffrey Moore points out that Business analytics needs to close the loop from generating the insights to using them to drive operating procedures that can systematically capitalize upon them in time and at scale has been the exception rather than the rule.When the exception happens, the results are transforming. But for the most part we see a landscape of intermittent connections, flashes of insight, but no systemic gain. He is on the mark in pointing out that most of the business analytics engagements inside enterprises represent a highly evolved form of corporate entertainment. Its core practitioners generate insights without accountability. They communicate those insights to business managers, who do have accountability and who are moved to act, but who are unable to do so in time. As a result the insights become part of a growing library of great but lost opportunities, supporting a culture eroding into passive aggressive despair. The right answer as he sees is to grow business analytics in closed-loop systems where operationalizing the insight, making the bet, and keeping track of wins and losses, is inseparable from the generating the insight. With this firmly set in, organizations gear up to apply technology—with a mixture of brute force and finesse—to multiple business problems. Organizations shall then direct their energies toward finding the right focus, building the right culture, and hiring the right people to make optimal use of the data they constantly churn. In the end, as Tom Davenport very rightly says so, that people and strategy, as much as information technology, give such organizations strength.Most companies in most industries have excellent reasons to pursue strategies shaped by analytics.

The Recommendation Engines & Ecommerce Success

The NYTimes has an excellent article about the recommendation engines and ecommerce success. Amazon.com extensively uses collaborative filtering and association software that helps the system to make recommendations to customers based on purchase/interests shown by the customer. Web technology capable of compiling vast amounts of customer data now makes it possible for online stores to recommend items tailored to a specific shopper's interests. Companies are finding that getting those personalized recommendations right - or even close - can mean significantly higher sales. For consumers, a recommendation system can either represent a vaguely annoying invasion of privacy or a big help in bringing order to a sea of choices. Walmart.com had a toughtime when its recommendation system made wrong recommendation – all based on bruteforce matching. Wal-Mart's trouble stemmed not from the aggressive use of advanced cross-selling technology, but from the near lack of it.
Companies with more nuanced strategies have avoided embarrassing linkages. NetFlix claims that roughly two-thirds of the films rented were recommended to subscribers by the site. Between 70 and 80 percent of NetFlix rentals come from the company's back catalog of 38,000 films rather than recent releases. NetFlix's recommendation system collected more than two million ratings forms from subscribers daily to add to its huge database of users' likes and dislikes. The system assigns different ratings to a movie depending on a particular subscriber's tastes. The company credits the system's ability to make automated yet accurate recommendations as a major factor in its growth from 600,000 subscribers in 2002 to nearly 4 million today. Netflix says that a key driver to their growth will be the superiority of their website design and proprietary algorithms. The personalization of their site is really what makes their service so unique. At this point Netflix has now collected over 1 billion ratings for moves. They use these ratings to make recommendations of longtail content for their consumersSimilarly, Apple's iTunes online music store features a system of recommending new music as a way of increasing customers' attachment to the site and, presumably, their purchases. Recommendation engines, which grew out of the technology used to serve up personalized ads on Web sites, now typically involve some level of "collaborative filtering" to tailor data automatically to individuals or groups of users. Liveplasma.com, an online site for music and, more recently, movies, graphically "maps" shoppers' potential interests. Interestingly technology is not the leveler here - large online stores are having success through recommendations, smaller web sites are having a more difficult time using the technology to their advantage –partly because one needs a lot of customer data to find patterns that can help in making right recommendations to customers. As I wrote earlier, heightened competition, mass usage and a variety of services all open up new range of offerings and opportunities in this increasingly felt experience economy.

Category :Recommendation Engines, Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends

Monday, January 23, 2006

Transformational Outsourcing - Its Real

We recently covered on the topic of the phenomenal increase in average productivity growth , the growth rate in the last five years in the US is seen to be the highest over the past half century. Productivity associated with offshoring is always a hot topic- given that all major enterprises are actively embracing it - this draft OECD paper assessing offshoring & productivity finds positive correation between these two - atleast in the service sectors. Technology’s contribution is not just the progress that we see in the conventional sense –it is contributing highly positively to the economy & the expectation is that it should continue to do so in future.
Bweek writes about the new buzzword - "transformational outsourcing"- and suggesting that there’s a new attitude that is emerging in corporations across the U.S. and Europe in virtually every industry. A well written article starts by highlighting that the world is discovering that offshoring is really about corporate growth, making better use of skilled U.S. staff, and even job creation in the U.S., not just cheap wages abroad. The gains on labor savings pales when compared to the enormous gains in efficiency, productivity, quality, and revenues that can be achieved by fully leveraging offshore talent.The benefits can range from a chance to turn around dying businesses, speed up their pace of innovation, or fund development projects, create game changing radical business models,or help look at it as a broader plan to overhaul outdated office operations and prepare for new competitive battles. The uncorking of energy towards innovation and meeting customer needs and means to survival are all associated with benefits of offshoring.
Don’t miss out reading the fact that the offshoring maturity is reaching new heights – almost akin to “Processes , on sale” The net effect : Some believe this would lead to realigning companies to deliver products faster at lower costs, and are better able to compete against anyone in the world, others theorize about the "totally disaggregated corporation," wherein every function not regarded as crucial is stripped away. Some use this to create lofty goals – P&G wants 50% of all new P&G products to come from outside by 2010, vs. 20% now. Detroit and European carmakers may go the way of the PC industry, relying on outsiders to develop new models bearing their brand names. Big Pharma will bring blockbuster drugs to market at a fraction of the current $1 billion average cost by allying with partners in molecular research and clinical testing. The rise of the offshore option is dramatically changing the economics of reengineering. Read my recent article on the emergence of disruptive models in the software industry. Clearly the winning companies of the future will be those most adept at leveraging global talent to transform themselves and their industries, creating better jobs for everyone.

Complete with graphics and well tabulated data, it’s a neat read. Do not miss out the compilation of hot players in the offshore outsourcing world( though some statistics needs update in classifying players doing above billion dollar business & also some promotions into 500millUSD club even while it may well happen several qyarters into the future (clearly unitended though - but beware - Gartner/Bweek need not be right always! - this time even in reporting public financial numbers), major players in Outsourcing, Modular corporation. The case studies of Penske & BoFA makes the reading more rich. Is it all one sided - Hardly- Look at
this, relate Genpact came from the GE stable. Next time around while covering the topic - hopefully Bweek shall come with up benefits in hard numbers(these are beginning to get available) to make readers understand the impact in numerical terms much better.

Category :Offshoring, Outsourcing.

Dilbert On Mergers & Acquisitons

Just came across the Dilbert comic strip on acquisitions . Just thought that even scott would have struggled to bring forth the myriad reasoning, whims & fancies, ego trips to pursue acquistions!!.

Category :Acquisition

Sunday, January 22, 2006

The Gaining Momentum

You can think of this as a followup to the post Web 2.0 Applications Collections That Can Replace Desktop Apps. Ismael Ghalimi, the CEO of Intalio, has an informative blog about his application of GTD within a Web 2.0 application environment. Ismael has creatively coined a term office 2.0. As he sees it - the idea is pretty simple: use a generic web browser and a set of online services to provide all the functionality needed by a computer user, removing the need for any application to be installed on the computer itself. He is attempting through the extensive use of carefully selected services such as Gmail and Salesforce.com, to increase personal productivity without using using any application installed on a personal computer other than a web browser. No word processor. No spreadsheet editor. No email client. No files on the local file system. He is hoping to see if Sun’s original vision for the network as computer can actually be turned into reality today. He extends his thinking into the practical realm of organizing say-to-day things modeled after GTD methods of personal organization. This can also be seen as an early example of businessweb and in a way the internet ecosystem’s impact on the software world. The details therein and the energy & enthusiasm shown in building such apps are amazing – clearly pointing to the fact that a new niche is getting created – one that would get stronger and stronger in the days to come. I continue to hold the view that clearly the web2.0 movement is gaining momentum - though the coverage seems to be ahead - calling for a reality check. In it own waythe web2.0 ecosystem is beginning to be felt, albeit a small niche now.

Category :Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Fusion Message : Missing Zing & Glue

Oracle plans to add new features to its Fusion Middleware to enable developers to create composite applications using a visual container. Fusion Middleware put into perspective is a group of products that Oracle has had for quite some time—an application server, BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) engine, BAM (business activity monitoring) capabilities and more—that it combined to form Fusion Middleware a couple of years ago. Oracle has refined that product, and it has made a good deal of progress. Oracle missed a beat in Wednesday's Fusion road map presentation by failing to provide any real detail about the Fusion Applications themselves—where any changes will impact Oracle's huge ERP (enterprise resource planning) customer base. The omission of any substantive details leads some analysts to conclude that Oracle is nowhere close to half way there when it comes to bringing together the E-Business Suite with the PeopleSoft and JD Edwards suites to create Fusion Applications. Siebel comes with verticalised solutions and with a different data model – adding to the complexity. Joshua Greenbaum finds missing functionality, process and data models that are going to go into the functional areas, these are very complicated things that have to be dealt with to build the suite and thinks that Oracle is going to have serious trouble meeting a 2008 deadline." Granted it may be difficult to explain work-in-progress in detail to the external world, but fact is the excitement that went along with buyouts are clearly not see in the fusion message!!

As I wrote earlier, the challenge for new-new-oracle is the roadmap for integration.There are now four code designs and schema to be harmonized. Different classes of cutomers and multiple varieties of implementations to be supported and upgraded. Customers need to be convinced of the integrated roadmap.The transition challenges are indeed phenomenal in the design of the new platform and less said the better about the migrations that customers need to spend on. Come to think of it – there are not many companies in the world who have succeeded in integrating products with huge customer base all that well. During the acquisition proceedings of Peoplesoft,Oracle was predicting huge maintenance revenue stream – irritating some customers. Microsoft’s acquisition of Great plains and performance of companies like CA/DIVINE which acquired a lot of product companies have not been anything to write home about. Given all this - the choice platform it appears increasingly may not be the other one alone (who would no doubt seems poised to gain a lot) but a host of new players in the on-demand space along with less flashy players like Lawson+intentia and the retuned SSA global to an extent from conventional players.

Category :Emerging Trends, Oracle Fusion

Sonic(WSM + ESB) : Good Times Ahead

Post the acquisition of Actional, Progress announces that web services management platform will become a product unit within Sonic. This should extend the leadership that sonic has and would serve to increase the breadth of capabilities in SOA infrastructure offerings from Sonic. This acquisition marks a key milestone for Progress, and Sonic, where they are changing the shape of the industry by bringing together two major SOA infrastructure technology segments: Web services management (WSM) and enterprise service bus (ESB). The Actional and Sonic products can be used independently of one another, or combined to support the entire SOA lifecycle from service definition and deployment, to process definition and staging, to runtime visibility and real-time optimization. Dave chappell explains - Everybody has the target of SOA in their sights. But each organization views the path of how to get there somewhat differently – based on their immediate needs and concerns. Many organizations identify the need to secure and govern their web services – so we offer SOAPstation for those customers. Others see that they need to monitor and measure their SOA – so we offer Looking Glass for those customers. And others view their most immediate problem as being how to connect and orchestrate their services – and for these we have been offering the ESB. Regardless of the entry point there is an appropriate and best-of-breed solution to satisfy those requirements and a broader set of infrastructure capabilities when they move beyond those immediate requirements. It’s a good move by Sonic software, already recognized as the leader in the ESB space. The timing is also right - Web services and ESB are expected to drive further into the enterprise in 2006, with coverage focusing far more on management of Web services than on development and deployment Clearly, good time ahead for Sonic.

Category :Acquistions, Sonic,Emerging Trends

Web 2.0 Applications Collections That Can Replace Desktop Apps

PCWorld captures the best that are happening in the web 2.0 world – As it notes like a child progressing into adolescence, the Web has entered a new era of sophistication. We used to spend most of our time just surfing the Internet--reading and downloading whatever we could find. Nowadays we're more likely to create waves ourselves by sharing our opinions, photos, and home videos; collaborating by text, voice, and video; or adding our own data to maps that span the globe. Applications that run in a browser are now almost as speedy as those installed on PCs. The shift from consumption to participation is a critical change in the Web's evolution. It's now easier than ever to post photos, documents, and other files to a blog, or to publish content as a news feed. This is an excellent list of web2.0 applications in the making.
Following the excellent list from Dion Hinchcliff of The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005, we noted that it’s so amazing to see the number of new and innovative apps that are springing up, based on old and new technology alike.There are lot of such sites - also to note that the leaders are also potential takeover candidates - clearly demonstrating the potential value of these applications
Mercurytide’s paper show you how to use Web 2.0 applications to create an online platform for word-processing, spreadsheets, email, image-sharing, file storage, collaborative working, and for keeping up-to-date with current events. This has to be assessed in the background of the web becoming an integral part of all our lives & this uptake encourages those with ideas to create exciting new ways to use the web. These ideas are those that important web companies — such as Google, Yahoo, and more recently Microsoft — are putting their money and expertise behind. The ideas of Web 2.0 are in its infancy and consequently so are its applications. These applications are evolving in a direction that can be harnessed to the web as a computing platform. And while the current crop can’t replace your desktop entirely, they certainly want to head in that direction. In the next year or two we will see if they can continue their success and bring a life online closer to reality. This is an excellent overview of the online applications you can use to replace your PC’s programs. Clearly the web2.0 movement is gaining momentum - though the coverage seems to be ahead - calling for a reality check.In it own waythe web2.0 ecosystem is beginning to be felt, albeit a small niche now.

Category :Web2.0, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Saturday, January 21, 2006

Old Media ,Content value & Future

As we noted recently, the intersections of online world with traditional media is setting the market on fire.As we can see:
- 2005 album sales were down 7% from the previous year while digital downloads of music doubled! U.S. album sales were down about 7% as 2005 drew to a close, but the budding market for music downloads, which more than doubled over last year, helped narrow the revenue gap.
- Big enough slice of the book reading public will opt for digital delivery and that will have a significant, disruptive effect on the entire industry.
- Hollywood took 7% less at the box office in 2005 than in 2004 and growth in sales of DVDs has slowed.

Recenty Dow Jones announced more profits from online compared to traditional media(This in my opinion reflects two things: Online making traditional media reach to larger people and rise of online world can't be resisted - better embrace it -Indications are that combined strength of both online and offline readership of WSJ is larger than traditional print media readership).Retailers can definitely experience that buyers of all trendy and unique things surf online, do their research before any purchase - In the online world through comparison shopping, targetted advertising, promotional schemes, personalisation and preference patterns all provide unique value that can potentially drive offline sale as well quite significantly. Add mobile technologies and online world - the combination can really create deep impact in the offline world.

As the Economist sees it, media companies are suffering intense pain—and it is starting to seem worryingly permanent. Old media shares are losing marketcap heavily. One investor, who recently moved two-thirds of his $1 billion fund out of American media and into emerging-market companies, moans that “the market thinks something's going to get them, whether it's piracy, personal video recorders, or Google. The big groups have seen their newspapers and magazines lose readers and advertising to the internet; their music businesses suffer piracy and falling sales; and someone else's video games captivate new generations of consumers. Now come fears about film and TV, the bedrock of their business.
Prescription for success : The internet is still in the digital equivalent of the silent-film era. It has been formidable for text, still images and music, but is only now, with broadband access, entering an age of high-quality video. Yet, if Hollywood teaches one thing, it is that stories can be re-made and dreams can come true. Rather as big retailers, including Wal-Mart and Tesco, have discovered advantages online, so too will big media companies - thats the hope.As I wrote recently the internet's effect on the traditional world is just getting felt and more would follow.

Category :Emerging Trends, Online Media

McKinsey's Ten Year Trends

McKinsey comes out with a list of well thought out trends. Look at some of the statistics shown here :

- Probability that a company in an industry's top revenue quartile will not be there in five years: 30 percent.(Technology) - Multiple by which e-mail traffic has grown from 1997 to 2005: 215 (Technology/Social Phenomenon)
- Computational capability of an Intel processor, as measured in instructions per second (Technology)
- 1971: 60,000
- 2005: 10,800,000,000
- Increase in tax burden needed to maintain current benefit levels for Japan's future generation: 175% (Demographics)

Calling those who say that business success is all about execution are wrong. Ian Davis & Elizabeth Stephenson state that the right product markets, technology, and geography are critical components of long-term economic performance. By taking an analytic, historical and holistic approach, long-term trends can be extrapolated with reasonable confidence. Mckinsey believes that ten trends—macroeconomic, social and environmental, and business and corporate—will shape the global business landscape in the coming ten years. Companies need to understand the implications of these trends alongside customer needs and competitive developments. Executives who align their company's strategy with these factors will be the best placed to succeed. Reflecting on these trends will be time well spent.

The profound changes that are sweeping us are really minboggling. Look at this : More than two billion people now use cell phones. We send nine trillion e-mails a year. We do a billion Google searches a day, more than half in languages other than English

1. Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally. As a consequence of economic liberalization, technological advances, capital market developments, and demographic shifts, the world has embarked on a massive realignment of economic activity. The United States will still account for the largest share of absolute economic growth in the next two decades.

2. Its not only three billion capitalists entering the flat world, but almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade as economic growth in emerging markets pushes them beyond the threshold level of $5,000 in annual household income. 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones.

3. Innovation in technology, regulation, and the use of resources will be central to creating a world that can both drive robust economic growth and sustain environmental demands. Read the full article here - one shall feel much more wiser after reading this well compiled list.

Category :Emerging Trends, Predictions

Friday, January 20, 2006

Sun, Grids, Google & Hopeful Future

Tom Foremski asks sun's software chief, if someone were to try to build another Google, with its focus on inexpensive grids of PCs, could it be done more efficiently today using Sun's systems? Sun has always taked about getting ready to consider building grids that are customized for different industries–in addition to being a vendor to other grid builders. Because it knows how to run and tweak the IT systems it builds better than anybody else. Sun says that its systems are running over at Google now and Google is thinking about whether it wants to be running its own data centers and developing its own software. Another thing to note here :Google created its own operating system to run its grids. And now there are some within Google that question whether they should continue doing that, especially since there is so much open source software, and middleware available and increasingly, specialist grid builders.Do not miss reading this : "History shows us that if you make more computing power available people will use it. And they will build applications that will fuel the need for more computing" - Sun still beleives in this!! I think that sun requires ton of focus to speak about survival now. They better do it - even if it is on grid technologies.

CATEGORY :Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Outsourcing & Process Centricity

The news in the IT circle is the announcement of yet another mega deal win by an Indian HQ vendor. I particularly liked the statement from their stable that they conceptualised the "Blue ocean"strategy and created uncontested market spaces, by recognizing that the application outsourcing business was being increasingly commoditised and that it was coming under pricing pressure and so decided to chase large deals that would bring a significant transformation, to move up the value chain, and go for multi-service deals with application and infrastructure components. This seems to be paying off and it is now clear that there is a shift in the nature of outsourcing. As can be seen large companies are seen to be changing the way,they outsource. An examination of the biggest deals shows more companies are inking business-process outsourcing (BPO) deals, in which they turn over to a vendor the responsibility for a functional area such as human resources or logistics. As BPO deals have risen, traditional I.T.-centric outsourcing services have declined. There also are more players competing for the biggest deals, says David Tapper, director of I.T. outsourcing, utility and offshore services research at IDC. The numbers say it all:
- The total value of the top 100 fell slightly from $69.1 billion in 2003 to $68.3 billion in 2004. The value of the minimum qualifying deal rose 5% to $184 million.
- BPO contracts accounted for 25% of the total deal value, up from 15.2% in 2003. I.T. outsourcing deals lost share, falling to 75% of total deal value, from 84.8% in 2003.
IDC identifies besides that incresing importance of key business drivers for BPO adoption suchs as cost management, increasing focus on core competencies & risk management, as seen by business, the key trend to be noted is multisourcing, a tactic that divides work among multiple outsourcers. Multisourced deals accounted for $15.9 billion - or 23.3% of the total value of the top 100 deals. The multisourcing trend parallels a decline in the number of megadeals - contracts valued at $1 billion or more. Echoing this,it is now seen that deals valued between $500 million and $999 million grew, accounting for 29.7% of the top 100 in 2004, compared to 15% in 2003.
As I wrote earlier,most of the indian big players are said to have hired big six veterans to go after such deals. An acquisition of the big players may be the final assault on the dominance of big six – but this could mean that as seen by outsiders, the Indian companies may need to have a different mindset to manage –(with limited margins and more long term in their outlook). It may disrupt the traditional economics of the indian players, but nonetheless would be a move much needed in time. Certainly, I expect that one/two acquistions would be made by indian players in this space in 2006. This is possible, as adaptability and speed of operations have always characterized their growth in the last decade – the important thing is to not lose sight of humongous opportunities that lay in front and go after them as aggressively as they used to do while growing.

Category :Outsourcing, Emerging Trends

The Enterprise Software Market : Emerging Models.

It was always expected that enterprise applications shall begin to coalesce around open web services where users can pick and choose just the features they need, and support add ins of distinct blocks provided by other companies. This would enable business to create and modify applications more economically and swiftly.Leading edge products can come from a mega enterprise or a small IT shop) shall begin to roll out simpler, more flexible and easy to modify blocks of solutions, to meet customers demand of more flexible and agile systems. We have argued earlier that composites have the potential to transform enterprise application landscape. Today in reality, most IT applications inhibit & not truly enable business process change. To meet the business needs, IT must either build or deliver a new generation of applications that embody business processes, reuse existing applications, and are built to accommodate change with minimal effort. The enterprise application features are mostly maturing, and increasingly large enterprise users are finding less missing functionality in their applications, creating a downward pressure to spend on upgrades around these products. Courtesy of Jeff Nolan saw this wonderful note from
Alorie. The note rightly brings forth for discussion the fundamental shift that are beginning to happen today in the enterprise software market. The shift is perhaps realigning the fault line separating the old guard from the new guard.While the dominant vendors of today like the SAP’s, Oracle’s may have to push SOA & Web Services harder, there always remain the challenge of getting trapped in prevailing moulds.As Alorie very rightly points out there is it's been the status quo in the business applications industry for years . Today, something of extraordinary importance for the enterprise software market and something that starkly defines the new generation from the old guard is beginning to happen. Companies like Oracle & Salesforce.com may compete in the same market, but their messages to customers were worlds apart. While Oracle executives urged customers to "retire" custom-built programs so they can migrate more smoothly to next-generation releases, Salesforce actually encourages customers to build custom programs on top of its software. In fact, Salesforce's latest service is an online marketplace where customers can freely distribute and sell their home-brewed creations. The company wants to make custom software development as easy as blogging. While it easy to talk when there is incumbent encumbrances, it is hard to avoid realizing that the models are increasingly getting polarized – though the race may look unequal from a business revenue standpoint. But that’s generally said of all upstarts – but down the line that distinction may turn out to an advantage. It turning out to be a battle of product architectures & business models.

Category :Emerging Trends, Emerging Technolgies, Enterprise Software

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Blogs & Careers

Eric Spiegel shares some ideas about why blogging must be seen as necessary for career advancements : he thinks that blogging is an opportunity that can be used to your advantage. It now is common for job interviewers, customers and partners to Google your name before engaging with you personally. If your blog is found in the search results, they can get a feel about your disposition and experience regarding the subject matter of the potential engagement. If you have built a useful, thoughtful blog history, you could be well positioned to open the door for a fruitful business relationship. If not, you may not even get in the door. You can be sure if you claim to be an expert, you had better have a blog that covers your expertise or the door will be bolted shut. Good read for beginners considering blogging – also beware in blogs what is written is up for keeps and few times, bloggers have even lost their jobs for unintended indiscretions.

Category :Blogs

The Yin Is Here. The Yang Is Up In The Air

Nicholas Carr makes an important point about claims made by software vendors in ensuring business success for their customers.I am surprised that in claims/projections from product companies in general, the value derived through consulting is seldom highlighted. At one level, it may be difficult but not impossible to correlate in exact terms the relationship between IT investments and business success. From a consulting perspective, success/failure would be measured in terms of both output and input value. Output value is measured by how much more business value enterprises can get for intended expenditure. Input value comes from how much enterprises can do the same with IT for less. Consulting /services bridges the gap between vision & reality. Product companies provide a platform with a plethora of choices and combinations. In the recent past the message from most of them used to be - The best of the best practices are embedded inside as repositories. Uncork the genie – road to prosperity is crystal clear. Conceptualizing innovative models and rolling out cost competitive solutions are amongst other things the key elements of success besides organizational readiness & support. It is indeed the truth that top line standard products may not hinder trying out different/multiple models. From an age of fitting oneself to a readyware size, we have transited to an era of virtually unlimited options and means to try almost infinite levels of innovation. That means all the more reason to factor in the role of services bridging the gap – we see that enterprises of late spend lot more time in assessing service provider/consulting firm fitments related to product assessments. It is like discussing about the yin without the yang in place. On top of it any value derived is contextual. Emphasising richness,adaptability, versatility are one thing, but success doesn’t in general flow just along with a dimension and so claims that overlook these – would anyway look incredible. Read this as a post aimed in general about the practices followed in the software industry.

Category :BVIT, IT Trends

Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Salesforce.com Propels Into Next Orbit

Marc Benioff calls the new release of salesforce.com as “business web”, essentially SaaS + Web 2.0. This is an evolution from the no software punchline which used to characterize salesforce.com positioning earlier. He says,"The AppExchange is nothing short of a revolutionary platform for doing business on the Web. One only has to look at the impressive AppExchange partner listing to clearly see the computer industry shifting to the on-demand model. The AppExchange and our on-demand partners represent billions of dollars in company resources devoted to managing and sharing business information on demand. The exceptional power, ease of use, and quick integration and implementation of on-demand solutions continue to drive this revolution forward, from its roots in CRM across the rest of the enterprise. With its ability to leverage the creativity of our entire extended community of success, The Business Web truly is The End of Software". Some of Benioff’s words look quite interesting:

- The concept of the Web is social production. It's not just limited to open source–with standard platforms we can harness the power of social production
- It should be just as easy as publishing blogs.
- Customers are encouraged to push their apps into the AppExchange.While it is the case still that this is not a social web – in that leveraging of salesforce.com is non disputable and pushing into Appexchange is not exactly independent of salesforce.com.

Key customers:

- ADP with 6,700 subscribers,
- Merrill Lynch with over 5,000,
- Cisco over 4,500 etc.
Steve Gilmor captures it best : Marc is technology's Marilyn Monroe, too pretty to be taken seriously but impossible to ignore. And just as her beauty resonated with a profoundly disruptive comic sensibility, so too does Marc's intuitive grasp of the opportunities of the network let him continue to sell first and then deliver on the promise. It's a high-wire act, but one that both depends on and leverages the loosely coupled nature of the multinodal synergistic nature of the Web 2.0 alliance–Google, Skype, iTunes all interoperating over salesforce' AppExchange.
With Adobe, Business objects, Crystal reports as part of the ecosystem, salesforce.com is definitely getting better and better. All that it needs now are good wins, avoiding negative publicity on outages, half-a-dozen solid live implementations with demonstrable integration and TCO ( Not an easy task though). That should help it propel forward real quick.

Category : SaaS, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Multi-Tiered Internet : No No

Mark Cuban makes the case for a multitiered internet,with priority given to the applications that really matter. He argues that application importance may vary and so logically it makes sense that some 'Net be divided into various priority levels. As he writes :
"The internet is a great enabler and equalizer ... because it can help people in ways that can change and save their lives. He adds, the more we upload and download and share:Standard definition video, high definition video, home movies in DV and eventually HDV, multiple megabit photos the more bandwidth we consume. The more PCs and servers we backup online, the more Web2.0 applications we use , the more new database applications come online, the more bandwidth we consume. The more bandwidth we consume, the more internet traffic jams we have. The more internet traffic jams we have, the worse our internet applications perform. Medical and home diagnostic applications require bandwidth. They also require a quality of service that cant be interrupted because little Johnny down the road is trying to download the entire NBC schedule for his freshman high school class. To enable mission critical applications, you have to have mission critical reliability. And that mission critical reliability has to be able to reach any home that a broadband connection can reach. To do that you need multiple tiers of service".

My Take : Cuban highlights that the internet traffic growth is outstripping the growth of the underlying infrastructure, and that there's nothing we can do about that – but fact remains that traffic overload does not cause any of the slowdowns. The rise in traffic and the rise in cost due to tech advances are almost getting inversely proportional. A slowdown is most likely caused because the local network is slow- or because the data center is having network issues – There is a QOS already in place and any means to impose priority on content/applications in digital highway is NO-NO in the increasingly triple-play converging world. The internet’s success itself was based on the democracy & non-discriminatory approach adopted by it. Last mile problems can’t be solved by multi-tiering.

Category :Internet, Emerging Trends, Internet Regulations

Consulting Is All About Delivered Value

Call this as an update to the solution- to-the-solution conundrum note. Consulting, the poster boy of solution family, unarguably takes the central spot.It is here that the approaches can matter a lot and provides gretaer room for maneuvers. Answering a query about TCS, the well known services giant and leader amongst offshoring companies,not rated high in consulting, the TCS CEO says that TCS looks at consulting differently. To a query about TCS plans for consulting practice and asking him to respond to Forrester naming other big players in India as "leaders" while mentioning TCS as only a "strong performer", Ramadorai,TCS CEO says, " We are strong in assurance services, quality consulting, and in many other areas. We see where and when operational efficiencies come in. To us, consulting has to be very specific in certain areas of business and MUST translate into implementation. We do it slightly differently".

Then there is this view from G.B.Prabhat from Satyam – now when we are moving from an era of limited innovation to an era of potentially unlimited innovation, the perspective changes – the potential for services increases dramatically. consulting is all about creating both output and input value. Output value is measured by how much more business value you get for intended expenditure.Input value comes from how you do the same with IT for less. Former is how to get more biz value for intended expenditure. As he sees it,there are two factors "moving the industry's tectonic plates: that offshore matters and that delivery of business value to the customer, and not mere advice, is critical. Owing to the increasing interconnect between consulting and packaged implementation, he says that there is always a gap between vision and reality. IT has to be plugged in there. If you make promises on five counts, you typically deliver three, as a product vendor. You have to hire someone to do the other two. The taller the promise, the wider the gap, so, greater the scope for expansion of services. One view presented herein is that of my boss - so no comments!.

Category :Consulting, Emerging Trends

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

Guy Speak - Again

As a follow-up on the earlier posts, Guy now writes about ways to
attract the interest of venture capitalists.He provides some tips to aspiring entrepreneurs in fielding VC questions.Among them - don't fall for old trick questions. Venture capitalists will try two trick questions on you in order to assess your degree of cluelessness.
(1) Do you see yourself as the long-term CEO of this company? (2) What is the liquidity path for your company?“ The right answer for the first one is, ”My goal is to build a great company. If it means that I need to step aside, I will gladly do so when the time is right.“ The right answer for the second one is, ”Frankly, I haven't given a lot of thought to liquidity. My team and I are heads down and focusing on finishing the product. If we build a great company, I'm confident liquidity of some form will occur.“

While it makes interesting (funny) reading, I just can’t overlook the fact that the word –“customer” appears only twice and the word market appears just twice!! May be this is the art of pacakging!

Category :Venture Capital

Oracle Strikes Again ?

This one looks indeed interesting to read. Am not too sure whether this could be true –unlikely to be true, so tells an insider.

Enterprise Software : Emergence Of Disruptive Models

I wrote a brief piece for Sandhill about the internet ecosystem disrupting the growth of the enterprise software segment. The Year 2005 saw a shrinking of the market cap of the software sector stocks - fewer listed companies exist today than was the case twelve months back. Despite oracle's massive acquisitions & encouraging financial results, the stock is trading at its 15 year low P/E levels. Almost all the major software vendors barring a few shed huge market caps in the last twelve months and in the case of big vendors, the losses have been precipitous, despite showing healthy financial measures. Amidst all this, it has to be recognized that the software industry is changing in ways more basic and fundamental than ever seen. Going by past trends, there should be a next wave of growth that is looming large that the industry can go after/co-create and benefit. Today, reality looks different - a near stagnant growth and flat trends are being experienced. Enterprise software industry is forced to look at a pricing structure from an outcome based pricing as against cost plus models practiced today. The next stage of the internet's impact on the industry could also fuel a very dramatic change that could engulf the sector in the coming years. Fragmentation, nichiefication & consolidation shall characterize the growth of the industry. Obviously different players in the vastly heterogeneous enterprise software segment shall cope with the changes at varying paces. Every sizable enterprise software vendor would be subjected to traditional dynamics of competition and growth - while there shall arise a newer set of players leveraging the disruptive factors. The traditional vendors shall pursue a course of merging or acquiring companies to achieve the size and economies & move towards achieving "platform status" aimed primarily at marginalizing competitors, while the new set of players will fight existing vendors aided by disruptive, internet-powered dynamics. The two models shall increasingly compete. The Internet-based disruptors shall be focusing on tuning/perfecting their ecosystem around more innovation, while the traditional vendors shall be focusing on restructuring / realigning their ecosystem as a required defensive move. While it may be unclear as to how the potential mutation/morphing of the industry structure may lead to at the end, it is not to be disputed that a much more glorious future filled with growth awaits the enterprise software industry. Read the full article here.

Category : Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies, Enterprise Software

The Internet, Deflationary Effect – Music Stores - Its Just The Beginning

USA Today ran a story about U.S. music album sales. Get this: 2005 album sales were down 7% from the previous year while digital downloads of music doubled! U.S. album sales were down about 7% as 2005 drew to a close, but the budding market for music downloads, which more than doubled over last year, helped narrow the revenue gap. The article goes on to note that this isn’t particularly bad news for recording companies, but “it doesn’t bode well for music retailers.” Combined, album and singles sales fell about 8% over the same time last year. More than 95% of music is sold in CD format. Downloaded tracks from online retailers soared to 332.7 million this year, compared with 134.2 million in 2004, an increase of 148%. Download sales increased by 350% over the prior year. Michael Hyatt predicts, a big enough slice of the book reading public will opt for digital delivery and that will have a significant, disruptive effect on the entire industry. As he sees it, 5-10 percent reduction in sales would wreak havoc. It’s already happening with newspapers and magazines. In the online world through comparison shopping, targeted advertising, promotional schemes, personalization and preference patterns all provide unique value that can potentially drive offline sale as well quite significantly. Add mobile technologies and online world - the combination can really create deep impact in the offline world.

The Stalwart thinks that while today it's music stores, many kinds of mall stores are plainly threatened by the internet as well, which doesn't bode to well for malls. At a minimum, losing music stores will impact the mall's pricing power in terms of rent. As ameritrade CEO once said, in an environment where productivity, efficiency and scalability is the name of the game, you want to go where your costs are reasonable. The internet should have a deflationary effect, eventually, on land prices. The more technology changes the financial industry, as more work can be done in places like India and Omaha, the price in major metro’s like NYC would get a hit. While it hasn't happened yet, but it likely will -It's also hard to see how, over the long term, the internet won't have an effect on other commodities like paper and energy. As at this time, it doesn't seem like we've witnessed the true productivity gains form the internet. While there is a benefit from technology, obviously, to business, the true economic gains come when land and other commodities can truly be reduced or substituted for something cheaper. In the age of Youtube & Google Video, it is clear that What we are now seeing is just the beginning!!.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Enterprise Analytics

This report on the booming prospects of BI software segment makes interesting reading,while we also see this happeningcovered earlier here. Last week came across Tom Davenport's recent article in HBR titled competing on analytics. BAM, BI, CEP, analytics: whatever it might be – it is clearly making waves. We are seeing that industry after industry is beginning to heavily invest in enterprise data analytics.At a time when firms in many industries offer similar products and use comparable technologies, business processes are among the last remaining points of differentiation. And analytics competitors wring every last drop of value from those processes. Some companies have built their very businesses on their ability to collect, analyze, and act on data. Bringing out a relationship between heavy duty analytics users and market leadership, he concludes that business trying to reach leadership position need to invest in enterprise wide analytic initiatives. These "analytics heavy competitors" in general have top management sold out to the concept of analytics as a strategic differentiator, have several analytics initiatives going on, for ears together & pursue these at the enterprise rather than departmental level. He dismisses the use of the term "business intelligence" as being "the term IT people use for analytics and reporting processes and software".

He relates the success of analytics users like Amazon, Harrah’s, Capital One, and the Boston Red Sox to that of well known killer app beneficiaries such as AA( with SABRE), Otis ( with predictive maintenance) etc. Like other companies, they know what products their customers want, but they also know what prices those customers will pay, how many items each will buy in a lifetime, and what triggers will make people buy more. Like other companies, they know compensation costs and turnover rates, but they can also calculate how much personnel contribute to or detract from the bottom line etc and how analytics competitors do all those things in a coordinated way, as part of an overarching strategy championed by top leadership and pushed down to decision makers at every level.Pointing out that with such widespread use of modeling and optimization, any company can generate simple descriptive statistics about aspects of its business - average revenue per employee, for example, or average order size. Analytics competitors look well beyond basic statistics and use predictive modeling to identify the most profitable customers - plus those with the greatest profit potential and the ones most likely to cancel their accounts. They pool data generated in-house and data acquired from outside sources (which they analyze more deeply than do their less statistically savvy competitors) for a comprehensive understanding of their customers. Analytics competitors are more than simple number-crunching factories.

While competing on analytics means competing on technology, these forward looking organizations apply technology—with a mixture of brute force and finesse—to multiple business problems. But they also direct their energies toward finding the right focus, building the right culture, and hiring the right people to make optimal use of the data they constantly churn. In the end, concludes Tom very rightly so, that people and strategy, as much as information technology, give such organizations strength. Most companies in most industries have excellent reasons to pursue strategies shaped by analytics.

It is not without reason that I earlier wrote, "watch out for some consolidation in this space". Microsoft is hardly alone in eyeing this sector.Oracle recently described Siebel’s analytics as hidden jewel. Cognos, Business Objects may look attractive to enterprise majors.SAS may be the only major left untouched. Microsoft could also make some acquisitive moves besides SAP & Oracle. Oracle used its recent Oracle Open World conference to outline analytics as a key focus going forward. While there is a near consensus about the imminent consolidation in this space, the barriers could be self made – oracle looking at smaller acquisitions moving forward( they may be content with siebel analytics. As the analytics industry is a mega segment and a fast growing one at that( repeated surveys show this as a high priority spend area for enterprises), and a very important technology that could be used for competitive differentiation by business - the four majors may still make aggressive moves.

Category :Analytics, Emerging Technologies, Emerging Trends

Cringley 2006 Predictions

Bob Cringley’s predictions are always interesting to watch. This year instead of sky coming to earth kind of predictions (when Intel Mac deal was announced , he expected intel to buy apple– this time around, he is making some reasonably doable set of predictions. He predicts that home users will find this an exciting time, with new products and services galore, while business users - especially BIG business users - will have to suffer with the breakdown of traditional suppliers and with inevitable consolidation problems as their list of suppliers shrinks and product lines are merged. Some of his other predictions look very interesting and are most likely to happen (I have excluded a majority that I do not agree /feel confident about:
From Apple:
A. More announcements – bunch of media content deals, a huge expansion of .Mac to one TERABYTE per month of download capacity per user, a new version of the Front Row DVR application, and Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options - literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too.
B. Make some inroads into WINTEL market. Intel Mac + XP may become official and Apple may provide OSX for generic intel platforms with support structured along opensource movement like frameworks - offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages - a web site, forums, download section and a wiki. While on this topic, do not miss this well researched perspective, as to how different are Intel-Macs from Intel PCs & this perspective as well.

From Google:
A. A supplemental stock offering timed with a 20-to-1 stock split. 2006 is a building year for Google.
B. Google won’t go head-to-head with Microsoft with a desktop O/S or a cheap PC.

From Microsoft:
A. In 2006, Windows XP gets another service pack and/or facelift. Nothing more. Vista release may be delayed by one more year.

He also predicts that TiVO may be taken over - a distinct possibiltiy.By the way, he scored above average for his 2005 predcitions. Why is Bob so watched in the industry - my take, he is among the few who understand the convergene market and its impact and he thinks very differently and can make calls which are non-conventional and reason it out well enough.He also very correctly makes an interesting point this time –while discussing AppleVs Burst,he highlights that (last year it was MicrosoftVs Burst), big companies are only concerned about their patents and associated rights and takes patent rights of startups for granted.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

Some Reflections Of The Recent Trip

As I come back from china after a brief trip, just thought shall briefly post a follow up post to domain blocking in china. In this visit as well, I could not get past through the the great firewall of china. Blogger domain is blocked within china. Do not understimate the ability of chinese to control the net. Bruce Einhorn of Businessweek rightly points out that china would not have succeeded in censoring the net without the support and cooperation of foreign IT companies. As he sees it, this is the inescapable truth & this problem that has to be addressed. He adds that even if Yahoo is not there, they will have something else. If Google is not there, they will have something else. What is objectionable is the stonewalling that companies do. They don't take any responsibility, admit that there are certain grey areas and that their technology can be used for repression, or mitigate this. I tend to agree with the view that the fact is that foreign IT suppliers and companies are willingly, knowingly assisting the chinese police in suppressing political dissent. As we noted earlier,the chinese government promises broad and profound social reform over the next 15 years as China seeks to boost innovation and promises that the country will improve laws, regulations and government plans so they are more conducive to innovation. This is perhaps the time for western nations to make things change in the chinese mindset. But make no mistake about it- china is clearly poised for more and more growth and prosperity – it is indeed impressive that china has been able to pull millions and millions of people out of poverty and build infrastructure that would put many western cities to shame.

Category :China

Phil Smoot : Well Thought Out Simplicity Is The Key For Managing Megaservices

In an age where hosted service outages could get viewed seriously – particularly of importance were the recent Salesforce.com outage & Google outage. One of the reasons that corporates hesitate to outsource even email services are because of possible situations like this - not that in-house infrastructure may not break down - but still the bar is always set high when infrastructure/critical apps are hosted outside. Steve Arnold provides a glimpse of Google’s infrastructure in his book the google legacy , covered from an architectural standpointDespite its criticality seldom one gets to know in details how hosted servires capable of supporting millions and millions of users are architected, hosted & maintained. Came across this ACM Queueinterview courtesy of Dare Obasanjo. In the landscape of today’s megaservices, Hotmail just might be Mount Everest. With 10,000 servers spread around the globe to process billions of e-mail transactions per day, managed just by 100 system administrators –it stand tall among mega services offered over the net. Phil explains Hotmail as a service consisting of thousands of machines and multiple petabytes of data. It executes billions of transactions over hundreds of applications agglomerated over nine years—services that are built on services that are built on services. Some of the challenges are keeping the site running: namely dealing with abuse and spam; keeping an aggressive, Internet-style pace of shipping features and functionality every three and six months; and planning how to release complex changes over a set of multiple releases. Excerpts with edits and comments:
QA is a challenge in the sense that mimicking Internet loads on our QA lab machines is a hard engineering problem. Manageability is a challenge in that you want to keep your administrative headcount flat as you scale out the number of machines.
Migrating terabytes worth of data takes a long time and involves complex capacity planning and data-center floor and power consumption issues. More up-front planning around how to go backwards if the new version fails is needed. He points out the big difference between shipping products versus shipping services is to have a real awareness of exactly what effect an error or failure is going to have on the operations team. On new hires he cautions against the tendency to want to do complex things, but we know complex things break in complex ways. The veterans want simple designs, with simple interfaces and simple constructs that are easy to understand and debug and easy to put back together after they break. The administrative mantra is to automate. From an engineering point of view, the requirement has to be to build automation and instrumentation into the service from the get-go. The reality is that managing a live site - and this is mostly because of spam and abuse - puts a ton of pressure on the development and system engineering resources. The notion of tape backups is probably no longer feasible. Building systems where we’re just backing up changes- and backing them up to cheap disks- may not be the direction in future and predicts the emergence of the use of data replicas and applying changes to those replicas, and ultimately the requirement that these replicas be disconnected and reattached over time. The problems that are unique to scaling for the internet are those of basic client-server programming - that is, figuring out the browser/http/server data-access patterns and optimizing the protocols, extending these protocols as new functionality is introduced, and ensuring that these protocols work across geo-distributed data centers when the speed of light becomes a factor. Designing applications with built-in redundancy so that they are resilient to abuse is also a challenge. He points out that at a certain point, however, the engineering cost is overwhelmed by the operational costs. For managing a megaservice, the best advice is just basically to keep everything as simple as possible—simple processes, simple SKUs, simple engineering. A megaservice consumes the best in all the related worlds - hardware, infrastructure, security, adminsitration, design, managament, budgeting, planning etc. With the world increasingly moving towards the services model – what lay beneath the interview are tons of wisdom and practical sense – a must read for all – starting from CIO’s to managers to developers to administrators.

Category :Emerging Trends, Megaservices

Open Source - Economic Or Community Value

I am not here to discuss about the costs of adapting opensource, how it takes more efforts to deploy and maintain and how this may turn the professed economic advantage upside down. Opensource is not a movement – its not an ideology, it has nothing to do with morality or ethics, its plain economics – so writes, John Mark Walker. In his lovely article, he essentially argues that open source would have happened irrespective of Linus or FSF as it's related to the natural order of things: commoditization. The Internet only exacerbates this trend. In his own words, the commoditization of software and a gradual, long-term reduction in price have plays far more important roles in the proliferation of the open source. Business strategy designed to leverage open source should focus more on economies of scale (in terms of user and developer bases) and less on pleasing a mythical, monolithic community. Combining lower cost of production with the additional freedom and flexibility endemic to open source deployments, one sees two dynamics driving both adoption and production. The push of software commoditization and the pull of customer demands have created a perfect storm for open source software. It then means that the ecosystem to continually improve sets in - The evolving collective knowledge base carries another consequence: speed of innovation. Because of the speed with which users, developers, and companies can post documentation, patches, or new software projects, the product life cycle has shortened considerably. Software vendors must work harder than ever to stay ahead of the floating software boats. This constant drive for innovation means that products released just yesterday lose value more quickly than before, due to future products already filling the software pipeline. With prices approaching zero, software developers have two choices when trying to win over users:
(1) add features not available elsewhere, and
(2) release the source code.

I sort of tend to agree with the core of his arguments - A new outlook towards opensource would help realize significant implications for businesses planning to leverage it. An economic argument about opensource fills in with a different nature and shape.The commoditization of software and a gradual, long-term reduction in price have played far more important roles than previously recognized. The internet’s disruptive trend is creating a facilitating role in the evolution, advancements & adaptation of opensource.

Category :Opensource, Emerging Trends.

Outsourcing : Traditional Big Six Increasingly On Shaky Grounds

Recently this blog covered the development, Private Equity Dalliance With Outsourcing Majors. We also covered the restructuring of outsourcing players & noted the fresh action brewing in this segment. All this while there is flurry of new deals getting announced and amidst an earlier near miss of a potential takeover by CSC shows that a lot more action await us ahead. Also pointed out that attention should not to be lost on the fact that private equity players are active now- meaning multiple rounds of activities involving the bought out entities would follow in due course.

TPI finds,the trend to a larger number of smaller single function contracts and the increasing use of multiple providers is creating opportunities for a wider range of providers and driving increased competition, to the benefit of outsourcing purchasers and the losers: The Big Six. TPI assessment shows that the ‘Big Six’ of outsourcing – Accenture, ACS, CSC, EDS, HP, and IBM – could see their dominance challenged, with almost $100 billion worth of major outsourcing contracts due for renewal internationally in the next two years. TPI has published interesting statistics outling the change that is happening in the marketplace:

- Big Six incumbent in 72% of the contracts to be renewed,numbering 325 deals &
representing more than 50 billion USD.
- Increasing number of service providers winning contracts : In 2005, the top 100 deals went to 34 service providers ( 2004 -29, 2003 -30)
- Decreasing trend of the big six hit rate : - 53% of the Top 100 deals in 2005, ( 2004 – 57% & 2005 – 73%)
- Offshoring on the rise: 52% of deals involved offshoring in 2005, (2004 -40%)
- Big six hit rate coming down: 37% of TPI-advised contracts involving offshoring in 2005, (2004 – 52%).
- Small contracts proliferate: 70% were small to medium sized contracts (those worth $50 – $200 million), (2004 - 65%, 2003 -61%)
- Indian service providers strike rate improving: Indian service providers have 70% strike rate and win small deals and then grow the business through additional work orders.
- Decreasing market share (large deals) of big six marketshare : 43% in 2005 ( 2004-49%, 2003 -70%)

With TPI confirming that the megadeals are unlikely to fully go away,it makes the scenario much more tough for the traditional big six and all the more reason for exploring the possibility of indian vendors potentially making a bid for a few acquisition opportunities of major outsourcing players. With more confirmations like this, the scenario is indeed possible. Most of the indian big players are said to have hired big six veterans to go after ssuch deals. An acquisition of the big players may be the final assault on the dominance of big six – but this could mean that the Indian companies may need to have a different mindset to manage –(with limited margins and more long term in their outlook).It may disrupt the traditional economics of the indian players, but nonetheless would be a move much needed in time. Certainly, I expect that one/two acquistions would be made by indian players in this space in 2006. This is possible, as adaptability and speed of operations have always characterized their growth in the last decade – the important thing is to not lose sight of humongous opportunities that lay in front and go after them as aggressively as they used to do while growing.

Category :Outsourcing, Emerging Trends, Megadeals, Acquisitions

Saturday, January 14, 2006

SaaS Aggregators

Amy Wohl writes her last column in the series on SaaS titled,"Succeding With Software-As-A-Service". Rajesh Jain introduced her columns to me. Her columns were always a good read – written in simple language. Most of the times, I used to think that she was attaching exaggerated importance to SaaS – nonetheless, her columns used to remain a good read. In here last column she makes predictions about the growth and shape that the SaaS market may experience in the next 3-5 years. Amongst her predictions :

1) SaaS will increasingly look like a great solution for commodity problems like Email, for companies of any size.

2) Large traditional software players to seriously offer SaaS-based alternatives to their traditional software offerings & urges the need for a full-function alternatives rather than Microsoft's recent foray into on-line services, offering incremental services to Office users, but still requiring the customer to install Office on every workstation and multiple Microsoft servers within the firewall.
She also predicts the arrival of SaaS service aggregators ( extension of service like ondemand apps) who pull together multiple SaaS offerings and make all of them appear within a portal - yours or theirs - together with anything else you'd like to see there, all at a single per person per month fee. None of these expectations are new – but a sense of realism that this may take 3-5 years in noteworthy. Lets continue to read her personal weblog.

Category :SaaS, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Solution To The Solution Conundrum

Chris Nel opens up a discussion on what qualifies to be a solution. Speaking briefly,in my view, solution brings context into the equation and provides for fusion with related elements and build inside the ability to extend and scaleup/down, integrate with other blocks and in the process facilitates the customer to meet his current requirements to actualize future aspirations. Solutions would in general involve methodologies & tools that encompass better parts of learning gained elsewhere. Invariably solutions look at cost/benefit tradeoffs, local/global optima balancing and in general would strive for better TCO - by maximizing benefits in the resource/time/cost/benefit dimensions.Innovation plays a major role in any solution. On a somewhat slightly related note –look at this interesting statement from Nandan Nilekani in last week’s Q3 investor meet - he thinks that the real way to look at consulting is to look at consulting and package implementations together. In his own words,"frankly when the legacy companies talk about consulting, they actually talk about package implementation as much as consulting so if you really look at these two together its close to 20%. And to that extent, I think and one of the big endurance in the last year has been to make a consulting and our package implementation services work seamlessly together to create an end to and value relation capability. That is working very well in the field and this combination enabling us to bid for global conformation projects with the large client. So, I think I would see package implementing and consulting together, that is the strength of the service offering for us(Infosys)". By the way, indiastockblog.com is an impressive site – part of David Jackson’s seekingalpha network – I am sure that this would be a very valuable repository – one that would be repeatedly referred.

Category :Solutions, Emerging Trends

Thursday, January 12, 2006

China : Tech Strategy Plan

As I begin a brief trip to china,came across this newsitem on
china’s tech strategy. China will look beyond its borders for science and technology talent while turning attention in the science and technology fields to innovation. China needs to boost manufacturing and information industries, produce technologies for cleaner and more efficient energy use, innovate for better infrastructure to relive the bottleneck effect the country's huge population places on its resources. The country has already created global alliances with overseas companies, and indications are on towards increase in that practice. The chinese government promises broad and profound social reform over the next 15 years as China seeks to boost innovation and promises that the country will improve laws, regulations and government plans so they are more conducive to innovation.

Note: Blogging may be suspended till Sunday if am not able to access blogger.com from within china. Remember Irving Wladawsky-Berger's recent experience. Alternatively shall try and ask someone to upload ( in the past used to do -not to my liking though as I need to disturb others) – but anycase I have a very busy schedule while being there.

Category :China

Apple : Clearly On The Rise

Looking at Steve Jobs Macworld address,it is evident that Apple is making big strides at making the Mac a powerful and simple media creation tool for ordinary commoners. The iLife suite encompasses a blog like iWeb, this would definitely become popular. Apple's iPod/iTunes numbers are mindboggling –
- 14m iPods sold last quarter
- 32 Million last year(2005) out of a total sale of 42 million iPods
Clearly Apple is hoping that the new iLife/iWeb would gain similar popularity and deliver numbers likewise. The new Intel-based Macs is creating a lot of Buzz. Apple is shipping two new Macs based on Intel processors. There's a new iMac and a new portable called the MacBook Pro.
The iMac G5 recently underwent a revision and had a good configuration and its performance was noteworthy in its class of system. The move to Intel certainly provides an added benefit in the form of multiple processor cores. Multitasking on the iMac will be better served. As far as the MacBook Pro goes the move towards intel makes it lot more attractive. When comparing it to the recent PowerBook G4, it's very compelling. Intel’s focus on the desktop market makes Apple a natural ally.Apple’e innovation edge has come into sharper focus now. Diehard Mac fans were certainly expecting a Mac with enhanced media functionality, like DVR. Apple is now putting all efforts in rolling out Intel based Mac quickly and perhaps not on substantial redesigns. What to make out for the consumer – a price competitive, reliable, trendy new line product – Is it a radical improvement – definitely not but a good improvement overall. But Apple would significantly enhance these in a quarter from now - after all Apple & Innovation are inseparable - heady days ahead.

Category :Apple, Macworld 2006

RFID Adoption Traction Set To Improve

RFID is set to be at at the core of business processes and therefore its adoption "was expected to change competitiveness substantially. This study says Wal-Mart customers are finding the items they wanted in stock more often due to the retailer's use of RFID technologies when compared to control stores. But for a while the global RFID scene has been little silent, but signals that things are changing are on the horizon says ABI research in its report, RFID Trends for 2006 . The report notes that the world looks to North America, EPCGlobal looks to the enterprise, and label converters look for position,
The latest release of ABI's "RFID Research Service" highlights three trends in a market already experiencing rapid growth.

- First, the RFID market is becoming increasingly global, but the United States remains a very important piece of real estate within it. A number of RFID tag and reader vendors based outside the United States working to establish footholds and strengthen their presences in North America. This is generally a good thing: "Increased competition, and the infusion of international perspectives, will have a beneficial effect on the markets."

- EPCglobal is, trying to play a role in determining reader/network interface standards. But this is traditionally the territory of technology giants such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, BEA Systems, Sun Microsystems and IBM.

-Finally, 2006 will be the year for label converters to jockey for position. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of companies that assemble labels and prepare them for mounting. They are urgently assessing their positioning and differentiation. With many arge market opportunities and niche opportunities, and how well these companies position themselves will have a great impact on their success.
And a related article titled"Crafting Success in Supply Chain Transformation," makes an interesting reading. With initiatives like this, this clearly the RFID buzz is on the rise.

Category :RFID, Emerging Trends

Patents Management : Changing Contours

For the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM was awarded the most patents-more than 2,900-by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The three multiparty efforts to increase review of patent applications,partly taps open-source developers and collaborative software. Partners include the Patent Office and the Open Source Development Labs OSDL, an industry consortium that launched a "patent commons" for open-source communities quite recently. The U.S. patent system and the quality of patents are increasingly high-profile issues in the technology industry. Patents litigation has forced intellectual property licensing firms to become more active.The NYTimes wrote, the patent office has come under increasing pressure in recent years from critics who contend that it issues patents without adequate investigation of earlier inventions. As a result, conflicts over published patents have loosed an avalanche of intellectual property litigation. The OSDL is hosting a Web site called the Open Source Software as Prior Art project, which will be designed as a way to search through existing open-source code. IBM, Novell, Red Hat and VA Software's SourceForge.net are participating. The third initiative, calls for a system to rank the quality of the patent application, leading to a Patent Quality Index, a system to rank the quality of the patent application.Also read,do not miss to read why patents should not be equated with Innovation. The US is the economic engine of the world – lets hope that it continues to innovate faster, better and emerge stronger. Collaboration in innovation is always a workable solution. Together with the Asia let more innovation blossom and let the world prosper a lot more - innovation and prosperity are closely related.

Category :Patents, Innovation

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Korea & Mobile Internet Platform

Korea has arguably the best conditions in the world for a mobile handset-based Internet service thanks to its state-of-the-art infrastructure and an abundance of Internet-capable smart phone users. Base stations cover almost every corner of the nation and more than 30 million among the country’s 48 million people carry high-end smart phones. starting september, South Koreans will be able to use their phones to access the Internet just as they do today with their home computers. Korea’s main mobile carriers will open up their wireless Internet platforms to other firms. Cell phones released later than this September will be prepared for the software making on-the-move Web surfing easier and shall have user interface to the Web similar to that of personal computers , whereby users can directly type in the domain address to enter any site . The take-up of the Internet cell phones, however, has been slower than expected since wireless companies mandated clients to enter the mobile Internet via their own Web portals, thus blocking unbounded access to the Web. The envisioned steps are projected to boost the Internet use on the road in tune with the growing trend of get-your-information-anytime-anywhere in Korea. The debut of the high-speed download packet access (HSDPA) early this year will play a pivotal role in buoying the go-anywhere Internet. HSDPA is an up-and-coming wireless technology that is expected to bridge present third-generation systems, wideband code division multiple access (W-CDMA), and the 4G platform. As a turbocharger of W-CDMA, HSDPA promises a real-life speed in the neighborhood of 2 megabits per second, similar to today’s fixed-line broadband. The long-heralded HSDPA will make the cell phone-based Internet easier and cheaper. Korea is clearly proving to be the mobile paradise and this would be another crown in their jewel. After all what Korea & Japan does today in mobiles, rest of asia shall embrace shortly and the US would follow suit..

Category :Korea, Mobile Internet Platform

PC Sale Model Not Aligned For Personal Buying

Walt Mossberg brings forth the point that the PC industry operates on a false model of the U.S. computer-using population. It imagines the world is divided between "consumers," who lie around at home playing games and listening to music, with the occasional homework assignment or tax form thrown in; and "enterprises," large corporations where computing is controlled by IT departments and only mission-critical tasks are performed. If these models acknowledge small businesses at all, they get lumped into a category called SMB, for small and medium businesses, where the minimum size is something like 500 employees and an IT staff rules.
In fact, the most accurate way to divide the computer-using world is into two segments: the one controlled by an IT department and the one controlled by the people who actually use the computers, be they consumers or small-business folks. A vast amount of business crucial to the U.S. economy is conducted every day in the non-IT part of the computing world. The computer industry loves, and caters to, the IT segment because it buys machines in large quantities and is run by a geeky priesthood that speaks the industry language. By contrast, the non-IT camp, even though it is larger in the aggregate, buys one, two or three machines at a time and tends to be nontechnical.
If the industry favors selling only to IT departments and developers - this is in part because an engineering/IT-driven organization, as many tech companies are. Volume driven models encourage a few large enterprise deals can be a lot easier for a small software company to manage than a couple bucks from each of thousands of consumer customers. Microsoft software & cellphone carriers also have working models favoring big corporate buyers. This is where Apple scores. No doubt, the world would be better off if the biggest computer companies started catering more to the non-IT part of the market, where significant number of computers live.

Category :Business Models, Emerging Trends

iPod As Toast : Nope – iTunes Is The Standard Of Digital Music

Clayton Christensen fears that iPod's success is built on a strategy that won't stand the test of time. He says that like in any other industry - not just computers and MP3 players - be it in aircrafts and software, and medical devices, and over and over – one can see that during the early stages of an industry, when the functionality and reliability of a product isn't yet adequate to meet customer's needs, a proprietary solution is almost always the right solution - because it allows you to knit all the pieces together in an optimized way. But once the technology matures and becomes good enough, industry standards emerge. That leads to the standardization of interfaces, which lets companies specialize on pieces of the overall system, and the product becomes modular. At that point, the competitive advantage of the early leader dissipates, and the ability to make money migrates to whoever controls the performance-defining subsystem. In the modular PC world, that meant Microsoft and Intel , and the same thing will happen in the iPod world as well. Apple may think the proprietary iPod is their competitive advantage, but it's temporary. Three years from now, the proprietary architecture may not be as dominant as it is now.
I had always been a little concerned about Apple’s closed standard approach. However, Apple with its dominant marketshare and nearly complete mindshare is in a very formidable position – several of its imitators had to bite the dust . Apple’s digital music leadership can’t be compared with the miniscule marketshare Mac had years back when Wintel gained dominant marketshare. For all that Apple could announce partnerships for video transfer and support wider range of standards – if push comes to the shove. Apple is demonstrating that it can accomodate, to grow like adding features like FM to iPod. History may not be the right indicator for future happenings – atleast in this case –iPod competitors may have to try harder to dislodge it – but, Apple iPod would shape the future of the digital music and not otherwise. Afterall the iPod is the standard of digital music.

Category :iPod, Open Standards.

Let Good Sense Prevail

Ticketsense writes that recently, Mark Stahlman of Caris & Co. set a price target of $2,000 per share on Google. With the direction of the stock lately, anything seems possible, but when you look at the size of Google at $2,000 a share, it looks a little more ridiculous. Stahlman, the investment banker wrote the prospectus that brought America Online public, stresses that he believes that the excitement over Google is different than the hype he saw during the Internet bubble of the late 1990s & believes that broadband, grid computing. Currently, the largest company in the world is General Electric with a market cap of $375 billion. At $2,000 a share, Google would have a market cap of $591.5 billion. The case rests - Let good sense prevail.
(Image Courtesy :Ticker Sense)

Category :Google

Systinet Gets Acquired : Surprisingly By Mercury

Mercury, which makes a suite of tools for testing and monitoring business applications, said the acquisition of Systinet will better position the company in the emerging market for service-oriented architecture infrastructure and tools. SOA is a way to design computing systems so that individual programs can be reused and combined with other applications. A service that provides access to customer data can be written once and used in several different applications. Systinet provides a dedicated server, called a registry, for keeping track of a company's catalog of services enabling the administrators to attach policies, such as access rights, on how services can be used. Some may tend to look at Systinet being close to an infrastructural utility. Traditionally seen as close to BEA – this acquisition by the beleaguered Mercury looks a little surprising. May be they wanted to be equidistant with Oracle as well or perhaps Mercury offered the best deal. Systinet products enable, publish, discover and manage SOA business services, and make it easy to build secure and reliable Web services with Java and C++ applications. Systinet products are centered on industry standards such as XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI.

Systinet is a fairly well run company and the exit would have given good returns for the promoters. Tom Erickson said more than an year back that, "The motivation is to try to create some real value in the SOA space because we believe that there’s going to be a play, and we’re going to use [Systinet] as kind of the vehicle to achieve that. We believe that there’s an opportunity that when a paradigm shift happens there is an opportunity for a new company to emerge. If you go through time you can see this repeatedly again. There has been a new major player in the software industry appearing when there’s paradigm shifts because some of the older players fail to make the transition, whether it’s in the hardware transition from mainframes to [minicomputers] to micros, whether it’s been software transitions from mainframe to client/server to all along the way. Because [however] Pincus was involved in BEA, they’re the company that funded BEA, they have a similar vision -- [that] we can do this again. Tom Erickson, whom I know for sometime is someone always on the move & he must have ben indeed happy to have brought. Congrats Tom & team. This acquisition makes sense for Mercury and systiner as well - we can expect Mercury help systinet family of products reach large number of enterprises.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Enterprise Software : Time for Counterintuitive Thinking

Recently writing about the enterprise software mid-life crisis,I wrote that it will be harder than ever for small companies to win a share of the new technology spending pie.The software companies have a huge untapped source of credit that they could use to fund future growth & the software companies will steadily increase their use of debt to fund growth as the industry continues to mature – This could keep fanning the wave of innovation in enterprise software.
Ray Lane writes in this week’s sandhill op-ed,“many software companies will be busy trying to convert their offerings from products into services & software-as-a-service (SaaS) was the number one item on the agenda of 70 percent of software executives. This he says may be a MISTAKE - a service offering is not going to mask a vendor's inability to create innovative products and gain market share”. He prescribes that the industry needs to look and innovate –dominate paradigm as a way to grow. His prescription for growth makes a lot of sense:

The non big four software vendors need to aspire to become he Microsoft of a specific sector, or the Google of an entirely new sector and he recommends :
- Technology acquisitions to increment platforms and points out that acquisition remains a relatively inexpensive way to adopt new technology and business models - and it can result in securing domination.

- "Verticalizing" their offerings - The ability to serve an industry's needs better than any other supplier will require continuous domain innovation and will likely result in growth.

- Embracing openness – while building a new software product or reengineer an old one, build it on open source software. As customers are moving in this direction open source products will deliver an exponential advantage in future competitiveness.

I fully agree with his view that technology investors are excited about consumer opportunities now( In fact I recently wrote briefly questioning the rationale behind this excitement – but no doubt excitement remains), but enterprises want innovation. And enterprises continue to spend billions on IT products year after and there are still many unsolved problems in business computing & notes that there is a lot of innovation to come in this industry & predicts that the enterprise software companies that move to innovate and dominate today will be the most successful companies five years from now. A refreshing piece and a must read for all interested in enterprise software.

Category :Enterprise Software, Emerging Trends

Innovation: Changing Footprints

Courtesy of Vinnie came across this businessweek article on sustaining US innovative capabilities wherein Roger Martin writes, there is a romantic notion in North American business that its future lies in design and innovation, while India and China will be the home of less skilled, lower-paying operations churning out the products and services the U.S. comes up with. He points out after visiting India headquartered global service firms that these globally oriented outfits are not entrusting all creativity, design, and innovation to "first world" opponents while they huddle over their workstations. He warns that If North American businesses genuinely want to ward off Indian and Chinese rivals, they'd better start by rejecting the notion of an apparent trade-off between low cost on one hand and design and innovation on the other. He was perhaps referring to views similar to that of Daniel H. Pink, author of the new book A Whole New Mind, wherein he argues that the "left brain" intellectual tasks that "are routine, computer-like, and can be boiled down to a spec sheet are migrating to where it is cheaper, thanks to Asia's rising economies and the miracle of cyberspace." The U.S. will remain strong in "right brain" work that entails "artistry, creativity, and empathy with the customer that requires being physically close to the market." (Note : I feel that this viewpoint may not be entirely incorrect - there may be differences in degrees of accepting this but can't be dismissed as wrong)
As covered in this blog earlier in a related post the sanely views of John Hagel & John Seely Brown noticing that the entrepreneurial outfits in China and India are relying on innovation as a way to get better faster. it's a different form of innovation. In the U.S., when executives talk about innovation, they tend to focus on breakthrough products or technology. But in China and India, the majority of businesses focus on rapid incremental process and product innovation. It's much less visible. It doesn't grab the headlines. But over time it can lead to impressive advances. Asian companies are already leading in developing mobile-phone technology, aided in part by their domestic markets, which have become early adopters of this new technology. Just as the personal computer was the platform for tech innovation in the last three decades, mobile-access devices will be the platform for innovation in the 21st century. Asian businesses are well-positioned to develop the next wave of breakthroughs on this key platform.Innovation is an accomplishment that the US has invested heavily in and taken great risks to achieve.
My Take : Is it the end of the road for the west : No Way - Most leading Western companies are turning toward a new model of innovation, one that employs global networks of partners. These can include U.S. chipmakers, Taiwanese engineers, Indian software developers, and Chinese factories. IBM is even offering the smarts of its famed research labs and a new global team of 1,200 engineers to help customers develop future products using next-generation technologies. When the whole chain works in sync, there can be a dramatic leap in the speed and efficiency of product development . Do not miss to read why patents should not be equated with Innovation. The US is the economic engine of the world – lets hope that it continues to innovate faster, better and emerge stronger. Collaboration in innovation is always a workable solution. Together with the Asia let more innovation blossom and let the world prosper a lot more - innovation and prosperity are closely related.

Category :Innovation, Chindia, Emerging Trends

After Google PC whisper, Its Now About Google Office & Google OS

After the talk around Google PC fizzled out - now there’s a new thread going around with the possibility of Google OS. Jason Calacanis writes that Google will:

a. launch calendar and office suite in the next six months.
b. by the end of the year they will come out with a Linux-based OS and offer it for free to PC makers. Those PC makers will love Google for giving them a free OS and Google will love extending the reach of their money maker: google Adsense.

As he sees the big win: Google can offer PC makers something they have never had: reoccurring revenue. Not only can Google give a free OS and office suite, they could offer them 10% of the Google Adsense revenue of that computer/user-FOR LIFE! The Google Desktop is the greatest growth opportunity for Google right now, and Google needs to find growth if they are going to live up to their valuation. For those reasons , Jason adds that he thinks this is a done deal.

My Take: A Google OS and Web-based Office has been rumored for so long now, it's almost become a staid topic. As I noted that for quite a while Google has assembled an impressive OS Talent available today. Commenting on recent announcements, Nick Carr thinks it may be a trojan horse, allowing Google to automatically update software on users PCs - thus routing around Microsoft's control of the OS. While developing web based office may be relatively easy for Google – given that a few are floating in the market(in real sense this may be tough given the fact this is in a mature product category and the start itself needs to match the current standards - few have failed in their attempts in the past), rolling out an OS is a different cup of tea altogether – for one it needs to be tested with so many apps – surely the world would know about it atleast six months earlier – ther’s now ay Google can launch such a thing secretly – The opportunity to launch such offerings in the marketplace are bright – will Google pull it off – all I can say is it is best endowed to do that – lets wait & see – but I would be happy to keep avoiding discussing Google for atleast a week – there’s too much of talk about google going on now. I can however say that any confirmed news about Google OS/Office would be first scooped by Blogosphere and not mainstream media. As I wrote earlier Google has got to become lot more direct and set speculations at rest.

Category :Google, Operating System, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Monday, January 09, 2006

Competing With Google : Beware Of Huge Costs & Efforts

Dare Obasanjo writes, Google tends to create initiatives that are either much more expensive for their competitors than them to provide (e.g. giving users gigabytes of storage space for email but limiting sign ups on the service) or would be detrimental to their market share to compete with (e.g. allowing non-Google clients to access the Google Talk servers). For every dollar Google spends on some of its efforts, its competitors are forced to spend five to ten dollars. Here is a back of the envelope calculation that illustrates this point. He points out that for 5 million email users it provides 12.5 petabytes storage@ 2.5 GB/user, whereas Yahoo provides for its 219 million users 210 petabytes of storage. Google has forced its competitors such as Microsoft and Yahoo! to spend orders of magnitude more money on storage which distracts them from competing with Google in the places where it is strong. More importantly its competitors have to provide from 10 to 20 times the total amount of storage Google is providing just to be competitive. This is often the dilemma when competing with Google. On the one hand, you have customers who rightly point out that Google is more generous but on the other the fact is that it costs us a whole lot more to do the things Interesting. Here's making scale or lack of it working to its advantage - looking at it the other way, Google imagines, innovates and delivers without feeling encumberred by past investments, methods or competitors.

Category :Innovation, Google

Guy Kawasaki On Top Ten Lies Of Entrepreneurs

We earlier covered Guy Kawasaki’s list of the top ten lies of VC. Guy now wants to make it even – here is his list of top ten lies of entrepreneurs. The second list looks lot more funny but quite realistic – Like a few of them so much – am reproducing them :

- "Gartner says our market will be $50 billion in 2010". Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day.
- "No one is doing what we're doing." This is a bummer of a lie because there are only two logical conclusions. First, no one else is doing this because there is no market for it. Second, the entrepreneur is so clueless that he can't even use Google to figure out he has competition.
- “Oracle is too big/dumb/slow to be a threat.” Larry Ellison has his own jet. He can keep the San Jose Airport open for his late night landings. His boat is so big that it can barely get under the Golden Gate Bridge. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are flying on Southwest out of Oakland and stealing the free peanuts. There's a reason why Larry is where he is, and entrepreneurs are where they are, and it's not that he's big, dumb, and slow. Competing with Oracle, Microsoft, and other large companies is a very difficult task. Entrepreneurs who utter this lie look at best naive. You think it's bravado, but venture capitalists think it's stupidity

Read the full list here. I shall take sometime to stop laughing after reading this and get normal.

Category :VC, Entrepreneur

Technology & Exit Costs

Scott Mcnealy writes about corporate procurement of technology – while experts may know this very well – it makes sense for the ordinary masses to hear it from he CEO of Sun. He says that most businesses have become pretty savvy about the true cost of technology—though not nearly as savvy as they should be. Three things are critical; they have two covered.
- The first thing—cost of acquisition.
- Next up: the ongoing cost of running everything.
- Third one - The barrier to exit, or switching cost(mostly not considered).
Given technology’s faster rate of obsolescence, he argues that the third one may become the most important factor. Pointing out that several enterprises suffers on this account, he explains that enterprises are locked into proprietary file formats, proprietary applications, a proprietary programming environment—all of which create big barriers to exit. But most buyers don't think about how much those barriers can cost them—or they don't think there's anything they can do about it. Switching is always going to cost them.
His solution is to get answers for questions like :
- Is the technology based on industry standards?
- Are all protocols and programming interfaces open, published and royalty-free? Have they been adopted by some or all of the computer industry?
-Are all the data formats open and freely available? (If not, your current vendor essentially owns your data.)
- Is there a community development process (and not just one company) behind the technology?
- Is the sources (not merely the distribution) open? (The ability to buy the exact same technology from different distributors won't change the fact that you're tied to a sole-source supplier.) etc, and points out that the answers need to be carefully assessed and factored inside the purchase decision. He advocates considering the cost of acquisition, operation and exit in any technology purchase and not just stop at the first two. Several times we may not get direct answers for these when investing in sunrise technologies - particularly on software. There we may have to settle for a judgement based on nearly equivalent answers. Say for example - locking into Netweaver or .net technolgies - in such occassions investments are made hoping that the technology would better reach with passage fo time. There the trackrecord of the company promoting the technology would be am important consideration.A good read.

Category :Technology Acquisition, Emerging Trends

Yahoo @CES : Silent Advances

Yahoo! announced its new Yahoo! Go suite, consisting of Yahoo! Go Mobile, Yahoo! Go TV, and Yahoo! Go Desktop.This is significant as Yahoo! shows how a traditional Internet content and service provider can link to pervasive devices like phones and mass devices like TVs . Russ has hyperlinked most of the coverage. Listen to the keynote speech wherein Yahoo promises to keep these services open for pother applications to access. As Charlene Li sees it, compared to the Google announcements, Yahoo!’s Go announcements have a strong connection to consumer electronics and will have a much bigger impact over time than either Google Video or Google Pack. This is because it sets off a race among phone and device makers to tap into the Yahoo!’s large user base. But it’s also worrying because the investment that service providers have made in their own services is now to tie in users becomes less important if the user can take their services with them from phone to phone, provider to provider. Device manufacturers will be more willing than their provider counterparts to let users choose between Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google mobile solutions – or mix and match as they please. Go Mobile in particular expands Yahoo’s reach beyond the desktop – Yahoo! stated that there are 2 billion mobile phone users around the world, compared to 900 million Internet users). Once again silent advances from Yahoo.Clearly yahoo is executing well . If we see , yahoo made the most out of Web. Yahoo’s acquisitions in the past have always been very useful to it and its recent Web 2.0 related acquisitions could make Yahoo the byword for innovation - or it could look like the company was foolishly sucked into the Web 2.0 hype. Yahoo does not feel that it can pass up this gamble and advances very silently – no wonder even reported offers like this look unattractive to it.

Category :Yahoo, CES 2006, Emerging Technologies

Portable Media Devices & End Of Boredom

Mark Cuban writes that portable media devices, whether Ipods, portable gaming devices, phones with all their features, or whatever have solved what has been a generations old nuisance for all of us, boredom. We have our little devices and now we are never bored. We dont find ourselves staring off into space unoccupied, wondering what to do. We dont find ourselves muttering about how bored we are sitting on the train, or on a plane, trying to do anything to make the time go by more quickly.Our little mobile devices are so popular because they are the ultimate, continuous distraction. They are the easiest cure for boredom.We are going to become increasingly dependent on these devices not because we think they are amazing or wonderful, but because they are there. Portable video will be successful not because it will siphon off viewing from traditional TV. Portable video sells and will sell in increasing numbers because its a better cure for boredom, and a better distraction than just music, or just a phone, or just games. Daydreaming and zoning out arent dead and gone, but they now have a soundtrack and a video. Read his full note here

My Take : The online music market is mostly aimed at the teen segment, iPod takes the cake here.Look at this - may be 30% of US population may not be using internet, may be more than 70% of world population does not use the internet. Similarly disturbing numbers would be available for the mobile as well (but mobile reach may be better). Tivo is not known inside most parts of Asia that much. The greatest challenge would be to find means of taking technology to a vast mass hitherto not used to such benefits. Criticism also abounds that with such technologies proliferating, more and more people are getting lonely and behaving detached from society. Concerns on public usage of these private gadgets also keep getting heard. Seen at another level, with so much of attention related concerns like continuous partial attention, getting more common - we have to see a limit on how much of this digital disruptions that we amy tolerate in our lives - but some would argue that iPod has a soothing effect on the minds of the listeners. There is also the thought that boredom is a choice that one makes and these gadgets give us the illusion that boredom is gone because. But with all this there is no denying that the personal electronic devices are making a huge difference to so many million lives.

Category :Digital Gadgets, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technologies

Online Video : How Do The Players Stack Up

Triston Louis makes an excellent comparison of all the available online video offerings. As he sees how the major players could slug it out :Apple is using its dominance in the iPod space to try to gain power in the living room; Microsoft is using its dominance in the living room to try to get traction in the non-PC world (and gets an early edge as it will play on the Sony Playstation Portable and works on the Treo 700w); Yahoo! is hoping that an alliance with Nokia, which has a strong position in the mobile phone business, will help it in that space. This makes for a future battle in the portable video space with Microsoft getting an early hedge.
In this space, it is interesting to see two different business model collide: on one side, you have companies that are looking to offer advertising supported content to the masses and charge a premium for some of the content. The charging model on the premium content is also divergent from player to player: Apple is looking at a fixed per unit price, while AOL and Microsoft are looking at an all you can eat price for a larger fee. Although Yahoo! has not announced much in this space, they look primarily to the advertising supported model as the way to go. Google, on the other hand, is going to try to create a marketplace based on variable rates, and will probably use something similar to an AdWord for Video type of program to subsidize their own free content. These are all early positions, before next year CES, most of these differences could go away - however putting up with so many DRM till them looks too much.Read his article here

(Image Courtesy : Triston)

Category :Online Video, Emerging Trends, Emerging Technolgies

Sunday, January 08, 2006

iTunes : Standard For Digital Music

Verizon launches as service that lets customers download music to mobile phones wirelessly, as well as transfer songs to cell phones from PCs. By doing so Verizon is ready to take on Cingular and Sprint who have launched similar services recently. Verizon says it'll one-up rivals with a 1 million song music library and other improvements. Next up is a subscription offering. Instead of paying per song download, it will let users pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited downloads. As can be seen Verizon and other wireless firms hope music services will follow ring tones as a big revenue generator. The approach is to give users flexibility in how they get songs — via PCs at home or via wireless phones. The Motorola iTunes phone offered by Cingular downloads songs from PCs, but it has yet to offer over-the-air downloads. MTV announced plans for an online music service called Urge with partner Microsoft. Verizon projects that data services - driven by music, games and its already popular ringtone offerings- will account for 25 percent of revenues by about 2011, up from 6 percent today.
Key things to note:
- While countries like Japan and Korea are mobile centric these services are very popular while the US is highly PC centric - Verizon’s PC offering may be seen as more costly than that of iTunes, on the face of it.
- iPods design can’t be matched by mobile phones - They are soon as more hip.
- Next week Macworld may see some more pathbreaking annoucements from Apple to further fortify its unassailable leadership.
For now, iTunes shall reign supreme – it is after all the standard for digital music.

Category :iTunes, Digital Music, Emerging Technologies

Siebel : Oracle’s Best Acquisition

The Long awaited contest is showing signs of results. Siebel analytics is beginning to show early success in some cases as a preferred option in place of pureplay BI solutions. Siebel’s product vision and investments are beginning to show results. Pity that they sold out so early. Many think that CRM is not a hyper growth market – Siebel should not be seen just as a s CRM company. Siebel’s analytics, on-demand solutions and composite applications platform called the Component Assembly and their PCA equivalent called Component Application Sets (CAS) are the newly emerging potential winners . As I wrote earlier, am sad to see Siebel go - but am surprised what would Oracle substantially benefit out of this - how would Oracle hold on to such a large customer base and how would they feel about Oracle's acquistion. I can not avoid thinking about the developments in other industries. The integration challenge increases significantly for Oracle.I personally beleive that this would benefit in an unexpected way SAP & SaaS application providers & Oracle in that order - SAP customers using Siebel shall closely begin to look at SAP CRM, nervous siebel customers may begin to look at SaaS to tide over immediate switching pains and Oracle may also benefit to an extent. The early field reaction gathered from siebel customers have not been negative to Oracle, so far. In fact many say that the technical support from oracle has substantially scaled up. We have to see how oracle grows these four distinct growth engines OF Siebel - CRM, Analytics, On-Demand, CAS. It would be interesting to see how Oracle’s fusion vision binds all these. Siebel certainly had a lot of promise – on the flip side, this may turn out to be amongst oracle’s best acquisition thus far.Now its time for Oracle to reverse the depressed stock price - after all SAP is one amongst the few stocks that did not shed marketcap in the recent past, while Oracle was aggressively engaged in acquiring companies.

The Defusable Demographic Bomb

The Economist writes that rich countries' populations are beginning to shrink and that may not be necessarily bad news. Excerpts with edits and comments:
Decades back dangers of population explosion were compared to with the danger of nuclear war. Now the onset of demographic decline is worrying rich nations. Russia's population is expected to fall by 22% between 2005 and 2050, Ukraine's by a staggering 43%. Now the phenomenon is creeping into the rich world: Japan has started to shrink and others, such as Italy and Germany, will soon follow. Even China's population will be declining by the early 2030s.The UN projects that by 2050 populations will be lower than they are today in 50 countries. When all this happens, India would be the only country with positive demographic trends. Demographic decline worries people because it is believed to go hand in hand with economic decline. Demographic decline is the consequence of the low fertility that generally goes with growing prosperity. While governments and business may be worries about demographic decline , productivity growth may keep up growth in GDP per person: as labour becomes scarcer, and pressure to introduce new technologies to boost workers' efficiency increases, so the productivity of labour may rise faster. Look at how japan is adjusting. Retirement ages can be lifted to increase the supply of labour even when the population is declining. The new demographics that are causing populations to age and to shrink are something to celebrate. Read the full article here

Category :Demographics, Emerging Trends

Venture Capitalist Talk

Guy Kawasaki writes a nice piece about VCs and about entrepreneurs ( I know a few VC’s well and a lot of entrepreneurs). His writing rings so real to me. Here's some of what he says:
"Venture capitalists are simple people: we've either decided to invest, and we are convincing ourselves that our gut is right (aka, “due diligence”) or there's not a chance in hell. While we may be simple, we're not necessarily forthcoming, so if you think it's hard to get a “yes” out of venture capitalist, you should try to get a conclusive “no.”" He adds,"Alas, entrepreneurs are also simple people: If they don't hear a conclusive “no,” they assume the answer is yes." (From "Let the good times roll by Guy Kawasaki" – calling this as example of the kind of breakdown of communication between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs that causes much pain and frustration for entrepreneurs – he goes on to list the top ten lies of venture capitalists.
It's well written, humorous, exposes the sometimes artificial, sometimes plastic words that come in conversations but contains some really good advice! - Go ahead read and enjoy.

Category :VC, Emerging Trends

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Big Thinkers, Dangerous Ideas

The Edge highlights that the history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. Asking the question What is your dangerous idea may open new frontiers of thinking.Edge asked leading thinkers about an idea (not necessarily originated by the thinker in question) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true. John brockman, editor of Edge writes about the collection, "you will find emerging out of the 119 original essays ( from as many contributors) in the 75,000 word document written in response to the 2006 Edge Question — "What is your dangerous idea?" — are indications of a new natural philosophy, founded on the realization of the import of complexity, of evolution. Very complex systems — whether organisms, brains, the biosphere, or the universe itself — were not constructed by design; all have evolved. There is a new set of metaphors to describe ourselves, our minds, the universe, and all of the things we know in it". enjoy reading - an interesting collection indeed.

Category :Dangerous Ideas

Bill Clinton As Microsoft Honcho?

The new year has been filled with so many rumours – this one from Andy Abramson takes the cake. Steve Ballmer shall give way to Bill Clinton as Microsoft president. Andy writes, "sources near Microsoft headquarters report that over the past few months the ex cigar smoking prexy has made trips to Microsoft headquarters and has been interviewing for the top slot as the company looks at ways to transform themselves for the future. Given the global implications of technology, having a leader that is an ex country president would be massive".

My Take: I highly doubt it – but it could be the case that microsoft may have clinton on the board and in addition use him as an honorable mascot for various initiatives - Clinton is extremely popular outside the US. Today the task of running Microsoft and maintaining its pre-eminent posture may be equally tough or perhaps lot more tough than being the president of the united states or being the ex-president. Any way steve ballmer’s role and success shall come under lot more public attention. Even the charismatic Bill gates role as at the chief software architect has been under constant public scrutiny. Bill Gates is shrewd – that’s why amongst other reasons he got in Ray Ozzzie to do larger things inside microsoft - would we see some change around Ballmer’s position – we have to wait & see.

Category :Microsoft, Bill Clinton, rumors

Google@CES : Google Video Store & Google Pack Announced

The speculations are proving to be correct.Google announced the opening of the Google Video Store.It claims this to be the first open video marketplace enabling consumers to buy and rent a wide range of video content from a major television network, a professional sports league, cable programmers, independent producers and film makers.This fast growing collection of videos will include prime-time and classic hits from CBS, a full slate of NBA games from this season and outstanding performances from the past, music videos from SONY BMG, Charlie Rose interviews as well as news and historical content from ITN and new titles being added everyday. Google video will let viewers watch lots of high quality video on the web for the first time with facilities for search and browse, and video producers and anyone with a video camera can use Google Video as a platform to publish to the entire Google audience in a fast, free and seamless way. Additionally, content from Google Video can be viewed with a new player that can be downloaded for free from any playback page. It offers all the traditional playback options (play, pause, stop..) as well as a "thumbnail" navigation feature that enables users to browse through an entire video, or frames at a time, with a simple click of their mouse. iPod and Sony Playstation Portable users will also be able to download and watch any non-copy-protected content from Google Video, and even get it specially optimized for playback on their devices.
Google also released a Google Pack,a free bundle of software from Google and other software makers.Google Pack includes previously available applications such as the open source Firefox Web browser, a version of Norton Anti-Virus software from Symantec Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc.'s Reader software. Google said the bundle of programs, which can be downloaded online, was designed to simplify the installation of basic applications for computers running the Windows XP operating system. Google through this is trying to make the computers easier to use – attributing the impetus for Google Pack to the frustration of Google's two co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with installing basic software on new personal computers they purchased. It won’t be lost that Marissa Mayer said her recent personal experience with a new Apple laptop computer was that it was fast and painless to get up-and-running and that Google Pack is aimed at making the same experience easier on PCs.Google is targeting utility software first, in a move that complements its plans for its Googleplex, a server-based interconnected massive network. As noted here,today, all kinds of computing experiences can be delivered as services over the Internet, often free and supported by advertising. Clever Internet software can now turn flat, view-and-read web pages into snappy services that look and respond to a user's keystrokes much like the big software applications that reside on a PC hard drive.
In all several good reasons why these are significant:
1. Google is helping usage of internet infrastructure much better
2. Digital content – the most underleveraged gets an impetus
3. Search technology involving videos can only get better with Google’s muscle behind it
4. Google Pack wants to provide Apple laptop usage like experience to PC users.
I would have loved to see Google make annoucements/services related to Mobiles & Low Cost PC's - If only Google can say things like free OS and desktop apps for Low cost PC's the stage woud have dramatically looked far better.

Update : Read John Battelle's excellent perspective on these annoucements. Particularly noteworthy is the price sharing mechanisms between content providers and google trying to find a new mechanism for ranking.

Category :Google@CES, Google Video, Google Pack

Friday, January 06, 2006

Google Getting Ready To Take On Microsoft & Apple

The bugle is about to be sounded – if informed speculations are right – Google will directly begin to compete against Apple & Microsoft.It is widely expected that Larry Page will announce two huge developments :
- One aimed at taking on Apple’s iTunes: The plan is for Google to offer vidoes from big channels.
- The second one named - "Google Pack," a new downloadable bundle of software that includes Google Maps but also RealVideo and antivirus software, will eventually compete with industry giant Microsoft.

The very mention of Google getting into the video turf has made Apple hyperactive – Apple informed iTunes subscribers today that all four College Bowl games from ABC Sports were available for downloading and viewing on the video iPod, in addition to shows like ABC's "Lost," NBC's ubiquitous "Law & Order," Pixar short animated films, music videos and other video content. This way where is Google headed – the aim is clearly nothing short of the internet world domination. Bear Stearns analyst Robert Peck mused last month about a Google device that "could form a mini-mesh home network," including connections "from the Web to your TV and enable the transfer of video downloads from the computer to the TV." Financial Times explains the pay-per-download video service, dubbed the Google Video Store, is one of the most ambitious attempts to bring traditional television content to the internet.For Google, it signals the first broad service where internet users will be expected to pay for content, as well as the first time the company has forged deeper commercial relationships with content owners. Google Inc hopes to position the new video service as the internet’s first “open digital content marketplace”, a place where owners of video content can make as much of their material available as they want. The new Google consumer software “bundle” will bring a new level of cooperation between a number of Microsoft rivals before it releases the next version of its Windows operating system. As we noted that for quite a while Google has assembled an impressive OS talent available today. The WSJ writes that Google has developed its own digital-rights-management software to protect downloaded videos from piracy – one more standard!! If these initiatives fire - then Google would have identified revenue stream beyond adstream reveneues but would be directly competing with the likes of Microsoft & Apple – not an easy battle for anyone by any measure.

Category :Google, Emerging Trends

Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz Says Blogging Helped Sun’s Business

We recently covered on the topic corporate blogging and chris Anderson has started tracking corporate blogging phenomenon with the Fortune 500 enterprises.Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz Says Blogging helped Sun’s Business. Courtesy of Steve Rubel saw this Sally Falkow article wherein Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO of Sun Microsystems says that blogging had played a major role in the revitalization of Sun's reputation. Sun has gone from the 99th to the 6th most popular server company, largely because it has embraced authenticity and transparency in its communication initiatives, as wriiten there. Jonathan highlights that“We've moved from the information age to the participation age, and trust is the currency of the participation age & Companies need to speak with one voice and be authentic. Blogging allows you to speak out authentically on your own behalf, and in the long run people will recognize that. Do it consistently and they trust you.” Blogging done right can be a positive force in building and maintaining a reputation in today’s competitive marketplace. But it has to be done in the spirit of open communication and with a willingness to let go of the “corporate message.”

Some Benefits of corproate blogging highlighted herein:
- Increases search engine visibility and thus brand awareness
- Offers a direct communication channel to the public
- Builds credibility and trust
- Allows you to tell your story, uncensored by the media
- Makes your organization more “real” to the public.
Read the full article - it makes interesting reading.

Category : Bloggers, Corporate Blogging

Samsung - Another Milestone Crossed

Samsung breaks $100bn barrier and becomes one of only four Asian companies to top $100 billion in market value.The South Korean giant is also now second in size to Vodafone among non-US technology stocks.From a black & white TV producer from Asia in 1969 to what its is today – Samsung has come a long way. As we covered earlier in Glittering Samsung,the company being more vertically integrated ,supplying its own needs or buying from close associate group firms has become enormously useful with the model as digital convergence has blurred product categories. Samsung electronics is investing heavily. Research and development accounted for $2.9bn in 2003, around 8% of revenue and more money will be spent on brand-building. A decade ago, Samsung was mostly seen as a producer of cheap televisions and microwave ovens. Today Samsung dominates in most of the areas it operates in: Memory chips- DRAM (Mkt share -31.4%), Memory chips –flash (Mkt share 21%),Flat panels (TFT-LCD) (Mkt share23.3%) and in mobiles next only to Nokia (Mkt share -13.8%) Samsung is among the most widely held emerging market shares, with a market cap of 62 billion USD; by that measure it is already worth far more than Sony.

Category :Samsung, Asia

2005 - The Shrinking Sofware Industry

Bill Burnham writes that in 2005, the aggregate market capitalization of the software sector shank by almost 10% despite the broader NASDAQ market being up 1.4%. Anyway you look at it, 2005 was a bad year for Software stocks. There were 236 public software companies at the start of 2005, but only 213 at the end of the year, a decline of 10% - for every new software company that went public in 2005, almost 7 were acquired or went out of business. Bill notes that large cap enterprise software stocks almost uniformly declined last year, most by double digits.The spreadsheet has the details. While I want to write more on a related topic in the near future - some brief observations:

I see distinct trends for success:

- Not good to chase companies for becoming just big - As we earlier covered oracle's depressed pricing. The stock has never been this cheap since 1990 on a pure P/E [price-to-earnings ratio] basis. This at a time when Oracle spent more than $1 billion per point of market share.
- The companies that showed growth include that showed good vision about future, invested in future technologies and went after innovation as can be seen here, here.
- Companies that show leadership in specific segments shall continue to prosper – size may not matter here
- Software companies need to focus on innovation lot more - bring in the next growth platform.
- Improving customer care and relationships and fight the poor image the industry has now.

Category :Software Industry

BPO Trends Getting Stronger

Zacks reseach is always interesting to track. Indicators like Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) to Zacks #5 Rank (Strong Sell)are quite interesting. Zacks research finds that the outsourcing industry has a high Zacks Industry Rank of 2.88, or 58th out of more than 200 industries. The research notes that in a growing economy, number of business services companies will continue to benefit from clients looking to streamline operations. The industry’s services include consulting, information and data, information technology, marketing, payment processing, staffing, and other outsourcing services.The report outlines strong growth in the outsourcing industry over the next three-to-five years. Outsourcing has moved from a luxury to a necessity for many companies recently, with no evidence of a slowdown. Companies can outsource a number of services to other companies, and thereby keep a greater focus on its core businesses. Accentuating our earlier view, the report writes that the industry has advanced from running software and data centers to a growing trend toward business-process outsourcing (BPO), where a company takes over the back-office functions for clients, such as human resources, payroll, travel services and accounting. The companies that Zaks has outlined in this study report for potential growth shows the range of services - staffing firms, analytics offerings, customer management services -that are possible - am linking this primarliy for this list. The myriad opportunities clealry shall create a larger economy around outsourcing

Category :Outsourcing

Thursday, January 05, 2006

Private Equity Dalliance With Outsourcing Majors

Private-equity players are dallying with the business of computer outsourcing, in which corporations contract out their computer-maintenance and operations to the likes of CSC. The outsourcing companies generate huge streams of cash, a quality that private-equity firms seek because they can then put a lot of debt on the companies they acquire and produce greater returns for their investors. These outsourcing companies are in a highly competitive market that is being transformed by traditional offshoring vendors. A group of buyout shops including Blackstone, Texas Pacific Group, Bain Capital and Silver Lake Partners could announce the acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services. In a separate development, Blackstone Group and HP are exploring a possible buyout of CSC as private-equity buyers begin to sweep through the computer-outsourcing business. Although Blackstone is in both deals, CSC and ACS have different business models with only slight overlap. CSC does more IT outsourcing - that is, its customers outsource their information-technology networks for CSC to manage. ACS focuses more on business-process outsourcing, helping its corporate clients deal with processing their payments, for example. It is possible that at some point Blackstone might invite its partners in the ACS deal into the CSC deal. As we wrote earlier about the coming, restructuring of outsourcing players, fresh action is brewing in this segment. All this while there is flurry of new deals getting announced and amidst an earlier near miss of a potential takeover by CSC shows that a lot more action await us ahead. Attention not to be lost on the fact that private equity players are active now- meaning multiple rounds of activities involving the bought out entities would follow in due course.

Category :Outsourcing

The Microsoft Engine Roars In CES Terrain

Bill Gates speech in CES - tiltled Vision for the Digital Lifestyle exemplifies a far reaching vision with significant impact in the CES landscape. Gates said that the incredible momentum around all these new products and services shows that the digital lifestyle has truly gone mainstream this year and that it’s time to bring together the devices, software and services in people’s lives and take all these experiences to the next level. Om Malik writing on the MTV’s Microsoft-powered Urge says that the online music service will be selling to the ultimate demographic: the teen set. MTV’s unlimited airtime resources will be hard to match for the likes of Napsters, Yahoos and Reals of the world. Because in order to match MTV’s sales channel, they will have to spend spend spend. (Just like in the PC domain, Microsoft wants to be the “engine”, get a piece of the action, while others simply butt heads. )We already covered the perspective at the end of last year CES stating the likely ,impact of microsft's initiatives over competitors, though they may not realize it yet. Last year's decisive move was their MSN Video announcement which included deals with MTV as well as TiVo to make sure that TiVo To Go recordings play on Microsoft Mobile devices.Microsoft's DRM strategy and Windows Media WMA codec are going to allow them to have a massive advantage in the consumer electronics market, which includes everything from MP3 players, to mobile phones to your set-top box, to a host of other converged devices.Very soon anything you're able to record on your TiVo will be playable on your Windows Mobile device, the new MSN Video Downloads service (among others) will allow you to see television and movies, and the variety of integrated music stores will allow you to buy and play music. There's no competitor to this breadth of mobile media offerings right now or possible in the near future. It was clearly expected months back that though Microsoft may not lead in music downloads, though the combination of all the different WMA music stores, it might come close to Apple's iTunes. We also cautioned that the consumer electronics companies had better get a move on, because Microsoft is gaining allies in CE which are prepared to put Windows Media DRM on devices such as DVD players, DVRs and Home media servers, and these, mostly small Chinese players, will begin to eat into Sony, Philips, Matsushita’s and Samsung’s markets if they cannot offer in return a standardized DRM approach, and so on. Clearly the Microsoft Juggernaut is getting warmed up to move ahead.

Category :Microsoft, WMA, CES 2006

Indibloggies 2005 - Stage 1 Winners

Many of you would have known about/read blogs of the 2004 Indiblog winners. Stage 1 Indibloggies 2005 nomination stands completed now. The qualified blogs were selected through a well thought out mechanism of nominations and juror selections blogs. Some fabulous blogs have been shortlisted. The first stage finalists are listed here. Get ready to vote when it is thrown open – should be in a short period from now.
I was one among the jurors. Congratulations to Debashish and fellow jurors - it was an exemplary and enjoyable effort of a smart team coming together and bringing thing upto this stage. It was a good experience to use del.icio.us for the public nominations and scuttle for juror ratings. The whole journey was thoroughly enjoyable and it provided an opportunity to come in contact and connect with so many bloggers and their blogs. Last year winners have been excluded from the same category in this years shortlist.

Debashish summarises the process followed and the outcome thus far:
With more than 300 nominations made over 10 days and close to 25 Jurors browsing through the myriad flavors of writing and rating them, Stage one of the Indibloggies 2005 edition has come to an end. For the first time in the Indibloggies, and perhaps in the history of the internet, a social bookmarking tool was used in an award event.
Some interesting points:
- Indibloggies used the bookmarking tool del.icio.us for the nomination and Scuttle for the juror-rating phase.
- Jurors rated blogs in several award-categories on a scale of -1 to 5. A weighted score was calculated based on all Juror ratings for a blog in a particular category and a merit list prepared. The final list, in almost all categories, that makes it to second and the final stage comprises of blogs that were 40 percentile or above in the merit list.
- 63% of the nominated blogs were Blogger.com blogs. If few other blog-hosting services like live-journal may be ignored, Wordpress blogs must have been a close second.
- In all 193 blogs were rated by the jurors with about 15 blogs ending up with a negative or zero final score.
- Like last year, a private mailing list had all the Jurors deliberating and discussing over issues before and during the rating process.
- The whole rating process was also audited throughout, by three of the jurors to ensure a smooth completion. Please read, enjoy, go ahead and choose your favourites.

Category :Indibloggies, Blogs

Whats Good For India Is Good For America

(Via Senthil) Charles Wheelan writes, India is far more than a telemarketing curiosity, and "outsourcing" is only a tiny piece of the economic transformation going on there. Having grown at roughly 6 percent a year for the past decade with the potential to do even better, India is likely to be one of the most important economic stories of the next decade. Support for a democratic country as a showcase to the rest of the world, real opportunity for uplifting the lives of the poor and most importantly a richer India will make for a richer America –a s US product consumptions shall increase dramatically, products designed for Indian masses can benefit Americans, Indian competition and outsourcing by American companies will lower the cost and improve the quality of all kinds of goods and services. He looks at china as a geopolitical problem waiting to happen, whether it's Tibet, Taiwan, encroachment in the South China Sea, selling weapons to nasty regimes, or any number of other problems that stem from being an autocracy on the move. If China is the bad drunk at a party where a lot of liquor is being served, then India is the muscular guy in the corner quaffing mineral water. He looks like a good person to get to know. He concludes by stating that Americans lnned to hope for continued growth for the 1-billion-plus people in the world's most vibrant democracy.
To get an idea about the potential and its quality – lets look at what Stephen Roach has to say – as we covered earlier, the potential comes from the structure of the Indian economy: Private consumption currently accounts for

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