KNOLANT: The New Business Technology Blog

Major Technology Transformations & How Time Flies

2011-10-22T18:51:00.001+05:30

I am writing this post after a long time. In the hiatus between the previous post and this, technology powering our lives has moved several notches. Android has moved to Ice Cream Sandwich 4.0 for tablets, Apple has released iOS 5, 3G is a reality in my country and hardware capabilities have leapfrogged many times that allow SAP and Oracle to build applications provide generational leap in application performance by concepts such as in-memory computing. It is also a fact that one of the towers of innovation in the tech world, Steve Jobs is no more.

The cloud over cloud has somewhat evaporated, with organizations and service providers having accepted the cloud as a fellow citizen of enterprise IT landscape. The Android Market now has over half million apps, and I use one of them even for banking! I have also upgraded my Android phone from 1.6 to 2.1 to 2.3.

Apple and Samsung are killing one another over intellectual property with no salvation in sight. And for one, the world instead of loving competition is loathing it.

Hope to keep up the writing more frequently now. Lets see if I can target 3 posts a week if not more. What do you say?

Blackberry Collapse Will have Cataclysmic Impact for Organisations not having a Plan B

2011-07-26T23:35:00.001+05:30

Even as the announcement of a job cut and some management alignment are out in the open, many observers feel Blackberry is collapsing under the weight of its own organisation that does not foster rapid innovation. Whether R.I.M will actually go down under and be sold off to some suiter such as Microsoft is a matter of early speculation, it remains a fact that businesses that have routinely issued Blackberry devices to their employees need to start looking at options. While no one has a corporate offering so complete as R.I.M, it is the devices that have got R.I.M that have got them into trouble.

If one sees two models of iPhones running on two different versions of iOS, or two Android phones running two different versions of Android, the user notices a very significant change in the total experience. That is not the case with Blackberry.

Nokia Innovation Derailed; Will there be a Reprise?

2011-07-25T10:29:00.001+05:30

The mobile devices industry is on the cusp of yet one more potential upset. Not too many years back, Nokia was an industry standard of what a good mobile device is all about it. At least in several parts of the world, including India.

Then someone sold them the concept of bottom of pyramid too literally. Nokia, no doubt a company that is capable of great innovations, almost completely closed its eyes on the top end of the market and focussed exclusively on making ‘cheap’ phones for the mass market. And today they realize that the sands below the feet have shifted. Instead of innovating at platform and convergence level, they probably were too focussed in cutting down the manufacturing costs to the point that they now probably compete with the cheap Chinese counterfeits. While their foray into frugal manufacturing may have succeeded, they have completely lost out innovation leadership to likes of Apple, HTC, Samsung, Motorola etc.

In fact, HTC and Samsung have managed to do exact opposite of Nokia. Few years back, they were perhaps considered as manufacturers of cheap devices, Today they are focussed on top of the line high value devices and their devices have been accepted and succeeded in the market.

The question is, what will be the new act in the play? Will Nokia continue its stodgy march towards finishing itself, or will there be a change of course. The answer perhaps lie in its history. Nokia began as a wood pulp company, dealt in rubber, made cables, tyres, etc. So there is a history of reorientation and course correction. As a company, Nokia may today be known for its mobile handsets business, but its past agility clearly shows that it has a great propensity to take bold decisions. IMHO, a healthy and refocussed Nokia will be a great thing for the consumer. Hope that happens sooner than later. I am in for my next Nokia.

Enterprises are Becoming More Daring With the Cloud

2010-06-01T23:49:00.001+05:30

As the foundations of this new idea based on the twin concepts aggregation and disposability find better grounding, enterprises are getting more daring with it. The best example is that all vendors, including the messiah of client server – SAP has joined the bandwagon.

To be fair, many people confuse SAAS and Cloud Computing as two sides of the same coin. It isn’t. You can have enterprise applications running seamlessly without any change and even have them hosted on the cloud. In other words, not every application hosted on the cloud is a browser based application. And not in every instance, is the application run on rented time.

These changes signify evolution. It is clear to me that after an initial splash in the form of GApps, even Google has found itself largely disoriented in this space. Microsoft, on the other hand, with its Dynamics portfolio of largely bought out applications, seems to be gaining ground. What is surprising to me indeed is that in this technology wave, no absolutely new vendor has emerged as a shooting star – something that happened in several other technology waves.

Some Quality Resources on Carbon Trading

2010-06-01T23:16:00.001+05:30

I came across some really high quality resources and pointers on Carbon Trading and I am providing a link to a collection in the hope that some student will find it useful.

What is Carbon Trading? – Really useful basics.
The Global Carbon Trading Market: Concepts, Regulations and Industry Trends to 2020 – this is a paid report available to USD 3500 and has only 98 pages. While I have not seen it myself, the TOC appears very promising indeed.
Carbon Footprint Calculator – This is very impressive tool that tells you how much of CO2 you might have released in driving the car 20 kms to your office this morning. Or how much of CO2 was released in the previous inter metro round trip by flight. And much more. You ought to see that one.
What’s the best enterprise Carbon accounting software? Well, the list is subjective and you may decide not to agree with it, yet it is an excellent compilation that can serve as the starting point of your solution evaluation.
Technology Models & Carbon Emissions Monitoring – well this is a little technical, should you have an interest so deep.

Five times as many firms will use Enterprise Carbon Accounting by 2011. Great pointer. It has a link to a report as well, which is available under USD 500.

Carbon Credits Business : Is it for Real – I

2010-05-21T16:11:00.001+05:30

Few years back, it became possible for EU based polluting companies to continue to behave environmentally more irresponsibly in the name of Carbon Credits Trading. It also became possible for less developed countries such as India and China to get some pennies in the name of Carbon Credit Trading, essentially to stay quiet while the West pollutes.

Take an example. The UN FCC establishes ‘norms’ of carbon pollution acceptance. Needless to say that most of the Western nations have a little trouble with their polluting industries. Instead of the polluting industries in the EU having to reduce their pollution, they simply achieve that of carbon reduction by paying off someone in the developing country such as India or China to reduce that much of pollution on their behalf. It is a method of credits or Carbon are sold. Each credit is equal to 1 ton of Carbon Dioxide reduction in the word.

The world is believed to have the capability to handle the handle only so much of Carbon in its stride. We humans have caused that limit to exceed in the world already ( and proudly call it as due to industrial revolution and you know where the industrial revolution actually took place). So instead of solving the pollution problem, the affluent West, decides, let me continue to pollute, and achieve my pollution reduction targets by paying off some money to stay happy!

(To be continued in several parts)

Cloudy Cloud Computing: Find it very nebulous?

2010-05-12T21:30:00.001+05:30

Every Tom and Jane in the business of IT talks about the cloud strategy these days. Some see it as panacea to managing a server room or a data center, others think it helps them reduce their dependence on irksome IT staff, yet others think Cloud is fashionable, and there’s need to adopt it, without thinking much about it.

I think many CIOs take this decision without a serious evaluation. The resultant consequence - often ill-thought out adoptions that do not bring in the right efficiencies.

It is a fact that there is no copybook definition of cloud computing.However, there’s clearly an infrastructure stack, and an application stack. Often, this application stack gets referred to as ‘service’ or by another much abused term ’SAAS’! Quite simply, the application uses the computing power of anonymous machines sitting in some invisible data center managed by someone else. Amazon is a typical example of this.

Coming to the applications now. Adopting organizations often get swayed by terms such as multi-tenancy of applications. Frankly, multi-tenancy comes at its own price. A multi-tenant application, mostly, cannot be tailor made to your requirements. Take it or leave it. Think about your apartment in a skyscraper. You cannot go grossly out of line with the rest of the building. You can maybe, change the colour of the walls if you like. It is standardized customization, if you so like.

That of course does not mean business processes cannot be in cloud. Business Process applications are rapidly maturing too. Force.com is an example of organizations that are moving forward in a rapid fashion.

That begs the question – should I, or, shouldn’t I. My suggestion is as follows:

- Have your own reasons for moving to cloud.
- Don’t think everyone on the cloud is on cloud nine.
- Have your own starting point.

Has OpenOffice.Org Completely Surrendered to MS Office?

2010-04-05T10:04:00.001+05:30

I raise this question because of the galloping gap between the OpenOffice.org office suite (commonly called as Open Office but yes, that is what the official name is). The word processor in Open Office is somewhat okay if the need is to publish basic documents. However, you’d find yourself quite challenged if you take to working on the spreadsheet and the presentation applications of OpenOffice.org.

Frankly, after Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, I do not see a great life cycle of OpenOffice.org as a free office suite. I’d reckon that either the free tag would leave shortly and Open Office would become a paid software, or it would just wilt and die.

Either way, right now OpenOffice.org needs a major transplant to survive and be a serious desktop suite.

Cloud based services lead in Gartner SFA Magic Quadrant

2009-08-20T23:34:00.001+05:30

Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant by analyst Robert Desisto is quite a revelation. It not just indicates continued investment by companies in sales force automation, but the top two vendors in this list both offer On-Demand services.

If you read this DestinationCRM coverage of the Gartner Magic Quadrant, you’d notice Salesforce.com continues to rule the roost in SFA area. No surprises there, because Salesforce.com has really been a visionary in this area.

What will surprise you is the ranking of Oracle’s CRM On Demand as the no 2, right after Salesforce.com. The third best position has gone to Oracle’s Siebel, which has been the big daddy in the area of CRM for a while now. The only solution categorized as visionary is Landslide's Sales P3 System, which is again an On-Demand solution.Long live the browser.

It is clear that cloud based services are becoming mainstream, spurred by cost as well as market drivers. Companies want to invest less in IT, at the same time, they want a tighter control of their sales processes and the sales team itself.

On the other hand I was also pleasantly surprised to note SugarCRM in the niche players list. SugarCRM holds the flag high for Open Source movement as the only Open Source solution to make it to this quadrant. SugarCRM holds great promise and makes things affordable for many organisations, who would not have moved beyond a spreadsheet.

Get this right: Enterprise 2.0 is about culture, not technology

2009-07-29T23:17:00.001+05:30

It is a common misconception that installing a wiki or setting up a blogging platform automatically leapfrogs your organization as Enterprise 2.0.There are mushrooming examples all around us of companies that have installed a corporate wiki and a blogging platform. However, most of them do not classify as Enterprise 2.0 because the organization wide buy in is lacking. Meaning?

We have all seen organizations in which individuals ‘hoard’ knowledge like its their personal treasure. We have also seen organizations in which the top bosses themselves like to keep the teams ( and individuals) to live their lives in silos(“Hope you did not share this with Tom. Even if they ask you just say you don’t know. After all they have no way to verify if you have this piece. Let Tom’s boss make a formal request to me”). Quite a teams, the teams are willing partners in this exercise(“My loyalty is to my division, after all, my boss decides my annual bonus”). In such organizations, IT initiative in making a knowledge sharing platform available(e.g. a wiki) would just fall flat.

If your CEO has an official blog, and maybe your company uses Twitter to promote itself, but you find that most blogging platforms are blocked at your corporate internet firewall, then having an internal blogging platform is akin to closing all books, but mandating that notebooks are for everyone. Clearly, blogs are about information sharing, and the idea of blocking external blogs and allowing internal blogs is clearly contradictory. Quite a few companies do not understand that. Even if you have no firewall restrictions, but your organization culture does not accept flat format communication such as a blog, then you are possibly not even Enterprise 1.0.

However, if your culture encourages sharing of knowledge and does not build artificial boundaries based on internal information arbitrage, then your organization is Enterprise 2.0 already, even if you do not have a blogging platform or a wiki installed in your intranet environment. Blogs and wikis are just IT tools that enable that culture. Get this right!

Saas Adopters have to worry about migration issues

2009-07-26T12:49:00.001+05:30

In conventional or on-premise setup, if one has to change the IT service provider, the applications (database and the codebase) remains with the client organization. The client has to identify a new vendor, who will do a transition from the old vendor and with some hiccups always, this will proceed alright and the new vendor will be in charge of the same application set. The users largely remain unaffected, and organizations do not have to invest in costly training.

Not in SaaS model. If you sign up with one provider, and want to migrate to another for your own reasons, you need to make sure business users are not affected. For this to happen, the new SaaS vendor must have the capability to take over from the old service provider, and data continuity must be ensure. Which begs the question- how does one ensure a seamless transition in a SaaS model?

How to decide which On-Demand CRM to Deploy

2009-07-24T20:09:00.001+05:30

Let’s face it. This is 2009 and IT spends are being deferred to a later date. However, the demand from IT in facilitating businesses continues to be the undiminished. In other words, expecting more from less.That means On-Demand or SaaS based applications is exactly what the doctor ordered. The challenge that CIOs face is which On-Demand solution to go for. The question is not whether, but how and who.

The big challenge is how do you compare the vendors. Price itself may not be telling the total story so cheap is not necessarily the in thing. There may not be too many reference customers. Different On-Demand CRMs for example, may have their limitations in customizability. For example, Impel CRM, that I noticed yesterday by chance, compares itself with Salesforce.com and highlights cost advantage on the parameter of customization, among other things.

Zoho CRM even offers itself free for upto 3 users. This should suffice SMEs and MSME. For example, this could suffice a one man fashion boutique . This could even suffice a two architect firm. This could suffice a doctors clinic.

This brings us to the next point which is domain knowledge. If the solution provider has little or no skill in your area of work, you could just end up in a bigger problem. You could even find yourself paying for costly customizations or completely finding the solution useless. There are reasons to believe that On-Demand is not going to work on one-size-fits-all. We would soon have industry specific solution offerings. While the solution provider would like to sell subscriptions in large numbers without little or minor customizations, the customers would like to pay as little for customizations. This should drive industry specific solutions to emerge faster.

Google Chrome Operating System: Who wants it?

2009-07-12T13:25:00.001+05:30

If the Google Operating System is as good or as bad as Chrome browser, Microsoft’s Windows 7 will have a cakewalk.

SaaS/ Cloud Computing versus the perceived disconnect with Data Security

2009-06-22T22:55:00.001+05:30

Since the term Cloud Computing and SaaS gain currency, there has been tremendous excitement in the technology watcher community. The same level of excitement has not seen in the business adoption of these technologies.

If one were to see the different IT applications, any application with regard to a financial transaction is considered a high risk, compared to one, let’s say, document management. That’s why it is long time since terms such as CC and SaaS are a few years away from online retail, financial services and so on. In comparison, Slideshare, a presentation sharing site and Twitter are hosted on Amazon web services. Risk perception = Difficult to answer the question – Is it a proven and safe?

It is not that SaaS is completely a no-no in the enterprise scene. Salesforce offers CRM application as SaaS. Salesforce.com had a revenue of little under 250 MN in 2007-08 which is not small pennies. It surely hosts a great amount of valuable data. Google Apps has found great favour with academic institutions across the world resulting in some extremely large implementations. There are quite a few ERP applications on the SaaS mode. At this stage, it is not really a proven to say that data in a cloud of on a SaaS application is any less secure. One the other hand bulk storage is becoming cheaper, thanks to companies such as NetApp.

It is more of a perception thing. Which boils down to the same old point of consumer behavior- Does your product promise hold credibility to generate sales?

Trevor at Kinaxis blog has an interesting argument. He says one of the big issues in Cloud Computing is if the company hosting the CC goes bust, how do you get the data secured? He argues that the on-premise applications are no more secure than those based on the cloud. He also argues that data can be lost by way of a simple printout, which can happen either way. I go with Trevor. Every year we read about sensitive data lost via misplaced or stolen laptops or disks lost in transit, including credit card data. Why, a senior British law enforcement official recently lost his job because he carried a printout of a plan the cover page of which was visible to the media, thereby compromising on the operation.

In short, it is not A vs B when it comes to on-premise application vs SaaS or CC. Both these solutions will probably continue to evolve in parallel, and address different needs.

Mahindra Satyam identity already under attack by Cybersquatters

2009-06-22T22:35:00.001+05:30

It is only yesterday that the new brand identity Mahindra Satyam was announced but it seems Cyber Squatters have been on the job for a while now.

After ICANN developed a mechanism to resolve such squatting, one would be tempted to believe that it is sunset for squatters of corporate brand assets, but clearly not everyone believes so. For instance the domain SatyamMahindra.com has been registered the same day the new identity announced. Clearly, the expectation is that the natural traffic arriving would get them some revenues on the parked page and also to possibly make some quick buck in case the company gets interested in acquiring this squatted domain.

If the above domain was booked on June 21, 2009, the domain MahindraSatyam.com was booked by a Gulf based cyber-squatter on May 08 itself.

This was even before the announcement of Tech Mahindra becoming coming out the eventual winner was made. Clearly, someone was just taking chance in the hope of making good money.

What is common to the both the cases that both the registrants have not chosen the privacy protection option usually provided by domain registrars, normally, at a small fee. Clearly, both want to be reachable in case someone gets interested.

Mahindra Satyam should move internet governing body ICANN and dispute the ownership of these two domains for reclaiming these two domains. With appropriate documentation, reclaiming should not be so tough.

Why Another Blog on this subject?

2009-06-20T00:00:00.001+05:30

There is great debate across the world on technology that impacts business. Here's my attempt to join this debate.Hope this blog lives up to your expectations. Do leave your comments and I shall respond.

Test Post

2009-06-19T21:56:00.000+05:30

This is a test post on Knolant.com