Stitching systems together

As the need increases towards providing Internet scale systems either to serve consumer business or to serve enterprise businesses – various SaaS providers are working towards building huge IT infrastructure needed to support their services by stitching boxes together. Companies are putting much effort around how to architect, build, manage and provision such an infrastructure.

To that cause – Sun recently announced “BlackBox” effort as it tries to find its way and regain its footing. The pictures of the “Blackbox” are just great – it is datacenter pre-built in a shipping container and ready to be hooked up. Kinda data center on demand shipped to you right from the port. Side effect – it also saves the building cost needed to house the data center for much of the entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their ideas. Can this thing be rented? Check it out for yourself…

 

CIO Panel

Yesterday, I co-hosted a CIO panel session organized by the local TiE-Rockies group. We had quite an accomplished group of CIOs in the panel. It included:

• Kamalesh Dwivedi – CIO of TeleTech. A public company in global BPO space
• Tim Graumann – CIO of McData. A public company in Storage space.
• Kumud Kalia – CIO of Direct Energy. Growing energy firm in the North East and Canada
• Patrick Hellman – CIO of Mercury Company. A private company in real estate business
• Session was moderated by Jim Conboy, a partner at Wolf Venture and a local VC.

All are accomplished individuals in their own right and shared some insight of their challenges. Hopefully entrepreneurs were paying attention for opportunities that they can create to help ease CIOs pressure.

Some discussion – pay attention entrepreneurs, if you are looking for ideas or pitching to CIOs – were:

1. Challenge in keeping up with the turn over of employees in certain industries. Having a solution that can enable fast employee on-boarding and quick ramp up of knowledge will ease pain.
2. Integration with various suppliers and systems remains a challenge – particularly in the unregulated industries. Discussion was standardization, common vocabulary and integration. How to quickly enable 360 degree view of customer.
3. Skillset demand in the IT industry is shifting from programmer to more of an analyst who understands business process has business skills, knows/configures/tests the functionality, etc. is more in demand than a programmer.
4. If you are targeting CIOs to sell – don’t start with them. Start with their reports or managers so that you already have a relationship established with the people who will actually do the work and influence the approval process before reaching out to CIOs. This will help you since CIOs anyway will delegate the task of review/analyze to their reports. So start at the right level.
5. CIOs are going to be risk averse from the get go. They are hard at work balancing risk between keeping the business running on everyday basis (can’t stop the business and get fired) as well as ensuring their company can grow/launch/penetrate new market/product (can’t have systems that will prohibit company growth or get fired). So tailor your pitch to CIOs need rather than just another cool invention.
6. CIOs are not too concerned about outsourcing since much of the development anyway is done by Oracle, SAP and Microsoft of the world. They are typically configuring and using a system to the best use for their business processes – which is not a common skill to outsource. Also see #3.
7. CIOs are waiting and watching hosted/SaaS model. On one hand it is good for them as they have a service provider that can be held accountable and need to conform to their SLAs of quality, availability and security. On the other hand of loosing control – CIOs are just too good at deflecting question for now.
8. CIOs are increasingly confident of the secured perimeter around the company. It is strong and hold back external agents from penetration. They are more concerned about fraudulent use of company property by internal folks or company employees leaving their personal data outside of the company – like when visiting a doctor.

A good session with accomplished individuals – who shared their insight for budding entrepreneurs to understand and fulfill CIOs need.

Data everywhere, Information somewhere, Decisions nowhere

Sometime back, I wrote my thoughts around Enterprise 2.0 and how it is about leveraging social communities within an extended enterprise. I was asked whether Enterprise 2.0 is just another round of attempt to deliver on the promises of better analytics and knowledge management. I have already covered my thoughts on why Enterprise 2.0 is more than that. Regardless, I believe progress within analytics/business intelligence space is key towards achieving Enterprise 2.0.

Relevant data that provides everyday vital information is key to making decisions. And it is a powerful notion that influences people behavior.

Various opportunity areas where much progress is happening within enterprise industry are (this is not a comprehensive list, feel free to add others that you see missing) :-

1. Delay between generation of data and for the corresponding action to take place - How to quickly get to decisions? New analytical models around SOA/Events based architecture paradigm are emerging here. How this system will scale and perform as the trend continues to evolve from batch to realtime for widely available 24×7 system with more internal/external end users will be the testament and tipping point for possible Internet scale adoption.

2. Disjointed analytics from everyday business process - How analytical information get closer or be embedded within business applications like billing, accounting, other ERP applications, CRM, etc. so that users have their transactional and analytical information available side by side to take action when things happen. Much progress is happening here on daily basis by the application, analytics and integration vendors trying to bring analytics closer to business processes. 

3. Automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions - How to overcome or provide additional intelligence needed in the data to be able to identify and isolate bad information generated due to the noise from the actionable good information? Today, much of these interpretation happens manually. I am sure some level of human involvement will be needed but the idea remains how to automate “most” of the regular tactical decisions needed to keep things flowing on everyday basis. SOA/BPEL/Events based architecture has the promise to potentially automate “most” of the tactical decisions. But the challenge will be how to eliminate noise before acting on some information. You don’t want some automatic tactical decision being made due to a noise that result into potentially more bad situations.

4. Meaningful presentation of various analytical knowledge – gleaned from wide variety of information at different level of granularity. Information need to easier for human to read, interpret, drill down and act upon. So much progress has been happening here due to Web 2.0 and touted reverence to the dashboards that demos so well. The need here is also to continue to make it pervasive, available wherever needed, and making it available in wide variety of form factor.

5. Ever increasing size of data - Advent of new technologies like RFID and increasing automation of processes has opened up the flood gate of data (structured/unstructured)that needs to be analyzed and aggregated on daily basis. This is growing data size to manage and analyze by leaps and bounds. Increase bandwidth, much innovation in the storage and other industries for faster access continues to push the limit. One hear terra/peta/exa byte much more often in conversations – something not common just few years back.

6. Quality of data that gets integrated and aggregated from various sources - Maturity of the integration/EAI products, better cleansing and aggregation tools, increase automation, etc. are helping keep data fresh, consistent and actionable.

Analytics future is exciting as the technologies are maturing, business use cases are evolving where market is looking beyond aggregated historical trending information to reflect the current or future needs. Companies are asking for front view (real time, forecast data) beside rear view mirror (historical information) to run business. Continued consolidation of the industry – Reporting, Performance Management, Analytics, Data Warehouse, Knowledge Management, etc…will keep this space exciting and help bring several of these information islands closer.

Hole in the wall

I recently read Dr. Sugata Mitra’s experiment of “Hole in the wall” and how kids living in the slum of India learned basic computer skills on their own. An interesting experiment suggesting how kids in young age are motivated to self learning and picks up the needed computer skills on their own – while adults require hand holding to accomplish the same skills. I am sure this is a generalization – but where does this fire in the belly to learn and be self-motivated goes away as kids become adults?

Anyway, this effort has great potential to help poor kids who otherwise would not have access to computers. Based on the success of Dr. Mitra’s earlier experiment, “Hole in the wall” is expanding its effort. They are making computers available more broadly across poor neighborhoods now spanning in India and Cambodia.

Here is an old interview of Dr. Mitra about his experiment.

SOA will kill ERP?

AMR wrote an article sometime back whether evolution of SOA will kill ERP.

I would think, if anything it will spur ERP backbone growth and help unlock various enterprise vendors to build better (and complete) stack for different industries, sub-industries, geographies, emerging markets, etc. that are currently unreachable due to the time and energy needed by the close systems. SOA based ERP system will create far reaching vibrant franchise ecosystem needed on successful ERP backbones to truly scale the business by reaching beyond the current markets/industries thus paying off better margins to the companies who end up having successful SOA enabled ERP backbones. Key will be around how to create and manage successful franchise.

Going Solar

Recently, Google announced its plan to go solar at its headquarters. Several wealthy individuals, investors, companies are deeply committed to the cause of making the environment better. But this is good corporate example where a company is going beyond contributing money or investing to the cause - to actually doing what it believes helps the environment. This is a fair size effort with a capacity of 1.6 megawatts – to the tune of generating enough electricity for 1,000+ homes. We will see how other follows to such a trend as there are good economic reasons to do this as well.

It’ll be interesting to see when would such energy alternatives become widely available as a bundled offering at cheaper cost to tip the scale for mass adoption at consumer level. I mentioned some of the needs earlier and will be willing to hear what others say on mass adoption.

Windows Live Writer for offline blog posting

Finally, I moved to offline blog posting. Until now, I had to be connected to WordPress to post a blog – but today I downloaded and started using Windows Live Writer to blog offline. This is the first post from Windows Live Writer. I am hoping it will help pulling together post while I am not connected or traveling. Check it out for yourself.

Long tail of charity

I am sure we all look for meaningful ways to contribute back to the roots that provided us all the support we needed when we were growing up.

Recently, I come to know about Room to Read and instantly liked their model of engagement – both at the donor’s end and the recipient’s end. It is founded by John Wood who used to be an ex-Microsoft executive. He wrote his calling and how he started Room to Read in his book “Leaving Microsoft….”. In some sense, it is the “long tail” of philanthropy that has all the potential to scale and bring the systemic changes needed at the global level as macro business/technology trends continues to make this world smaller and smaller.

On donor’s end – having a transparent system with low overhead helps them know how their contribution is truly helping. No smoke screen or black hole where money goes and you have no idea who/where it end up helping. It is a great crowd puller where people can relate to the meaningful impact they are doing in the world at their own capacity.

Also, partnership model with the local community that is benefiting from the charity is a great way (possible systemic way to bring the change) to make any contribution successful. It brings their skin in the game needed to cultivate the proud ownership and a feeling of accomplishment on their part necessary to bring social change. At the end of the day charities that just hand out money to a cause without much community participation loose the luster and fail in bringing the systemic change.

I have always admired successful micro-financing model work in Bangladesh done by Mohamad Yunus. The model that Room to Read uses also reflects several similar aspect.

Bottomline – I am a believer that solving world literacy is the key to several of our modern day problems in the society today. Ironically, it is more visible in the populous part of the world. May be success of model like Room to Read has the potential to eradicate the world with such flaws.

From what I gather, Room to Read funds a girl education for a year at $250; builds a library at $2,000; builds a school in a village at $8,000. To help just reach out to Room to Read – I am sure they will be thrilled to hear.

PS: I am in no way associated with Room to Read program.

Startup Ideas

Anyone looking for startup ideas that will get famous VC backing – look no further. Here is a list of compiled startup ideas actually suggested by well known VCs that they would like to fund.