Venkat Srinivasan

Positioning a brand within an organization

2011-05-25T11:31:00.000-07:00

The advantages of positioning a brand within an organization - many, even a business savvy ones, do not get it and ignore consciously, even if they get it. The main focus is on the short-term results and achieving the self-centric milestones by doubling the effort on product positioning. Many are so short-sighted and parochial in their thinking that they are seldom aware of the existence of the two different, yet interconnected, positioning.

It is common sense, be it an individual or an organization, that positioning a brand is more important than positioning a product. The product positioning should roll into, part of brand positioning. While many "gurus" look at branding as a external thing - a perception/an esteem the consumer conjures in their minds, it is actually an orgnaizational wide effort and definitely helps organization's internal affairs more.

In general, Branding is all about

an abstract concept
a feeling, emotion, experience or a thought that is associative, subjective and aided/catalyzed by the organization
partly owned and created by customers
a long-term effort - both the investment and ROI have long cycles
an on-going operational effort and not one time show
an organizational wide effort

On similar lines, Product/Service positioning is all about

based on tangible and measurable parameters
more based on logical, scientific and rational parameters and values
owned and created solely by Organization/Provider
short-term effort - just concept-completion till the EoL
a one-off effort - per product that uses the brand value
More often defined and driven by a small team (of "all-knowing" "product managers"). In many organizations - even the hands-on engineers who make the product are not part and treated as resources

Brand, positioned well and once established, helps product positioning/success and compensates the occasional product-deficiencies, at times. A successful product positioning under a great branding only augments and reinforces the brand further. The brand always outlives the product and sometimes even the organization.

Needless to mention, while branding as much as it sounds like a blessing, could definitely turn into a curse, well not executed or when it becomes irrelevant and needs an orthogonal re-branding makeover.

Enough about branding, so what big advantages to an organization due to a well executed branding? Well, as I mentioned earlier, branding is an org-wide effort. Everyone from janitor to the CEO need to understand, assimilate and execute the vision and mission of the org. The branding abstract serves as one common corporate ideology and a principle/goal to strive for. When a brand is positioned well internally,

There is a sense of professional pride established
There is a sense of belonging in the org putting behind the personal-gains and petty politics
There is an effort to excel, on their own, in every undertaking of every employee rather than a just-get- it-over-with attitude
There is a pro-active drive and engagement behind one set of common objectives
There is a mutual trust, transparency and mutual-respect among fellow colleagues
Each individual serves as brand-ambassador
The teams and individuals measure-up, take-up the comradeship and are ready to do what is needed to provide the world-class experience to the stake-holders

Of course, establishing a brand internally and getting a buy-in from all is not easy to achieve. It is a top-down flow, needs great effort and sincerity of purpose from at the top.

Corruption in India is only a symptom

2011-02-22T11:37:00.000-08:00

Taking some pointers from Egypt & Libya - there seems to be many attempts of social activism in various pockets of the Indian community against corruption.

To me, the corruption is only a symptom (which becomes a root cause for many other problems in the society). In an ideal world eradication of corruption would be through individual transformation, see-within ......... But all those are long term and not really quantifiable/sustainable and very difficult to attain collective-polarization to build any meaningful critical-intensity for a harmonious community living. To me, it got to be look-outside-the-box, see-around in addition to see-within, reform now rather than wait for destiny.

Personally, I attribute the major causes of corruption to the below in the order listed .

State-Clergy cartelization
Politics-Crime Nexus
NGOs and public trust (charitable or otherwise) conduits
Lack of a rigorous punishment system

What we need is not political reform but political-party reform. What we need is not religious & spiritual reform for individuals instead religious-institutions reform. There is so much money & favors exchanged/parked between these two types of organizations - one would not dare to imagine. The reason for this is only because none of these organizations are accountable and have any basic mandatory meaningful and truthful disclosure. This is true with the NGO's and public trusts which serve as conduits for many of the illegit-money. While, apparently, all these sound like a one huge financial reform - but it does have a huge impact beyond financial regulations.

Bottom line , the letter of law (not the spirit of the law) is an absolute must and that is achievable only by tough-punishment standards. Having a holy, noble and sublime constitution with a diluted implementation is not only useless but dangerous.

PS: While it is true that the above generalization could be error-prone and someone could cite a few outstanding exceptions to the above, we can not selectively choose the mosquito that bit us and kill it in isolation. We need to spray the whole room and annihilate all the mosquitoes - though many of them haven't bit us, yet. The very potential is sufficient reason for preventive action. After all, culture is control, isn't it?

“Solutions-as-a-Service” - the Real Business Need of the Hour

2010-07-28T11:24:00.000-07:00

Abstract: The cloud computing has come a long way and still evolving/maturing at a rapid rate. The rapid adoption partly accelerated and fueled by the dire global economic conditions, is the testament to its success, despite the fact there are many a technical and non-technical open issues at various levels including but not limited to legal, security and ownership. While the cloud computing in its broadest common denomination is fast maturing and getting standardized, many organizations have started thinking about the next phase, the “Solutions-as-a-Service” – which is the extrapolation and application of cloud computing to solve real business problems. While basic cloud computing encompassing the infrastructure, the platform and the software as a services, does exhibit an upfront compelling business proposition in terms of CapEx reduction and TCO benefits, one has to understand the ROI is one time in the current model. The real value-add and the recurring business ROI comes in extrapolating this cloud model to the solutions as a whole in the services industry. This article dwells on the concept of “Solutions-as-a-Service”, in addition to the existing Cloud computing and establishes the need and the benefits of the same.

Cloud Computing as it stands today: Before we go to "Solutions as a Service", it is imperative we understand the Cloud Computing as it stands today. There are multitudes of definitions of cloud computing and myriads of flavors of implementation. As someone famous said – “so many tech marketers are using the term "cloud computing" in so many contexts that it can almost mean anything—and yet often means nothing”. Yet, there is one fundamental fabric portraying a set of principles, properties and attributes across all of them that nail the definition of Cloud Computing. The additional properties and features are the bells and whistles which serve as market distinguisher.

Simply put any service that is hosted and delivered over internet that has the following qualities is cloud computing.

On-Demand – pay as you use
Elastic – as much or as little
Provider Managed – Completely managed by the provider

Further one can easily classify a Cloud service into the following

Infrastructure as a Service - Amazon – network, servers, storage, data-centers, power, back-ups..
Platform as a Service – Force.com, GoogleApps, sugarCRM – platform/tools to build apps
Software as a Service – Oracle, Sun, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft – core software, apps, building blocks, software services (email, word-processor, data processing, data management …)

A cloud could be typed based on the accessibility, the intended audience and type of services offered. And could be

* public – open to all,

* private – to a select few or

* virtual private cloud – an access-controlled public cloud.

* Consumer Cloud Computing

* Enterprise Cloud Computing

The cloud computing has many an upfront benefits to the users as well as the providers and win-win deal for both. Some of the drivers to embrace the Cloud Computing from the users perspective is very obvious from the definition of the Cloud Computing

Early start-up time
On-Demand - Pay as you use
Reduced Cost - Lower TCO - No procurement
Flexible - As much or As little
Less IT - No upgrade (software, platform and infra), Less maintenance - Fully managed by the provider, Negligible downtime
Highly Scalable on-demand
Global accessibility
More Business Focus

High Quality of Service

From the providers stand point, the Cloud Computing brings in a complex business model especially in enterprise world addressing the needs of SMBs and highly resource intensive. Irrespective of the specifics of each cloud computing business models, the following benefits stand apart across all the cloud computing business models.

Recurring income
On-demand subscription model
Proportional to the value of services
User lock-in due through content/data-lock-in

From the business point of view, in the traditional services industry, the monetization involves many actors. In a traditional non-cloud based services industry, there are different players/actors who play a significant role in the business model realization. Some of them are ISVs, VARs, Channels and SIs, who play a very critical role in service realization. All these players, it is expected, one-way-or-other, would get morphed/mapped to the new cloud computing paradigm. The ISVs would continue to produce software independently for cloud and host it in the cloud instead of shrink wrapping the same. The role of the Channels seem to be diminishing and more and more taking the online route, would promote and channel services instead of products. The VARs and SIs would need to redefine their roles as more and more software products embrace the Cloud. The VARs and SIs would no more function as System Integrators or Service Providers but would transform to become solution providers using the cloud.

What is Solutions as a Service? Any solution, enterprise or otherwise, that is a composite cloud service based on the cloud aggregation, on-demand integration and on-the-glass assembly of various cloud services encompassing IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services, built on the Cloud and in the cloud (with no need for any special hardware or software), inheriting all the properties and QoS of the underlying cloud computing environment. “Solutions-as-a-Service” is the logical extrapolation of cloud computing.

While at a very high level, the software based “Solutions-as-a-Service” seem to have a great overlap with Software as a Service, it is a common knowledge, any meaningful, scalable enterprise solution encompasses all the layers (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), not to mention the facts, currently, one needs a special set of tools and very many resources (T&M) to create a meaningful solution using the PaaS and SaaS. Mostly, the resulting “Solutions-as-a-Service” is interoperable with various IaaS environments and/or interoperable with various other PaaS and SaaS depending on the choice of the open-standards adopted in the service creation. Currently, the integration, assembly and aggregation are not on-demand and not done with in the cloud, using the cloud and seldom the resulting solution is a cloud service.

The definition of “Solutions-as-a-Service” includes all kind of solutions. Any solution could be modeled as a service. It could be data services – one could easily provide Data Management Solutions as services, Network solutions, Cloud Composite Applications, Messaging solutions, Storage solutions, Disaster recovery, back-up……

Forward Integration - Social Equity with CRM

Let’s take a sample scenario and demonstrate the power of the Solutions as a Service. Let’s assume that an Organization ACME Inc would like to use a cloud based CRM Software-as-a-Service, preferably an open-source CRM to cut cost. Since the CRM service is a cloud service, it comes with the Cloud Computing QoS like high availability, latest version and global accessibility. While this is all very essential and must have features in a cloud service, it does not really help significantly in generating leads using the CRM tool, which really is the goal in subscribing to this service. The lead generation, using the CRM tool, is the first step in revenue generation for the organization. The real ROI on the CRM investment is measured by the number of leads generated using the CRM service. With the current cloud computing SaaS model, the QoS and the features provided are kind of standard and does not provide any particular solution to enable, help and accelerate the lead generation process – which is the real business requirement. The CRM tool is kind of enabled and aid the lead-generation but does not facilitate the lead-generation in an innovative way

Reverse Integration – Social Applications for CRM

Now that we have leveraged the social equity enormously, one would have tons of leads generated, hundreds of lead to follow, many a people to meet and convert every lead to a sale. In such a case wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a set of social applications, which would display all the meetings, calls, leads and maintain reminders as one integrated dash-board portal for each user displaying only user specific data. This would be the ultimate QoE and a dream come true for every sales professional to have all the relevant essential data in one place on one portal.

Summary:

This article has discussed and shown the many capabilities and features of cloud computing platform for delivering “Solutions-as-a-Service” Cloud Services.

First, this article discussed the existing Cloud Computing environment including its definition, classification, benefits and participants.

Second, this article discussed the need, definition, attributes and benefits of the “Solutions-as-a-Service” paradigm.

Third, this article demonstrated the power and benefits of “Solutions-as-a-Service” model with an on-the-glass demonstration of forward-integration of enhancing the lead-generation using a CRM cloud service by leveraging the social equity from the social computing world

Fourth, as part of the demonstration, we also illustrated the reverse-integration of creating social applications that would serve as dashboard portals and gateways to various CRM chores like calls, leads and meetings specific to a particular user.

The next generation of Cloud Computing services is based on “Solutions-as-a-Service” model, which addresses the business requirements and issues.

PS: The above was a multi-part article I penned in 2009 for a friend of mine, who specialize in the same. I am taking the liberty to revise the same and publish it as part of my blog, as the relevance and the validity of my thoughts are even more compelling today.

Wish you a very Happy New Year 2010

2009-12-31T00:13:00.000-08:00

Wish you all and your families a very Happy, Prosperous and an Eventful New Year. May the Omnipresent Bestow upon you and your families His Special Grace and Blessings in abundance on this joyous occasion and fulfill all our dreams.

“May the Almighty protect us.

May the Almighty nourish us.

May we work together.

May our study be enlightening! May we never hate each other!

Let there be Peace. Peace within, Peace outside. Peace in this world, Peace for all beings”

My heartfelt Wishes & Prayers for a wonderful 2010.

Technorati Tags: New year,Wishes,2010,Meaningful Prayers

Links - WS-* (RX, TX & SX) - new versions apporved

2009-02-16T18:58:00.001-08:00

Almost this missed my attention. OASIS members have approved the new versions of WS standards.

Three WS-RX standards

WS ReliableMessaging 1.2,
WS ReliableMessaging Policy 1.2 and
WS MakeConnection 1.1

Three WS-TX standards

WS-Coordination 1.2,
WS-AtomicTransaction 1.2 and
WS-BusinessActivity 1.2

Three WS-SX standards

WS-Trust 1.4,
WS-SecureConversation 1.4 and
WS-SecurityPolicy 1.3

Technorati Tags: OASIS, Web Services, WS Security, WS Reliability, WS Transactions

Eco Awareness - Tidbits (cont)

2009-02-01T01:49:00.001-08:00

Considering the severe drought in CA, the below (thanks to Rani) are very helpful and timely.

Water-savvy Ideas:

fill a cup or a small bucket or yogurt container with water. see how many cups you need to brush your teeth, or wash your face, or whatever.
when you wash dishes by hand or rinse dishes for loading, let the rinsing water collect in a big pot. you can use this also on the lawn, or for houseplants
A new study has shown that using the dishwasher is more water-saving than hand-washing (assuming you don't rinse). Here are the details:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/01/built-in-dishwasher-vs-hand-washing-which-greener.php
launder in cold water whenever you can. it gets most things just as clean
if you have a lawn, check the sprinklers so they don't water the sidewalks. adjust during rainy seasons to fewer days. consider changing your landscape to drought-tolerant plants so you have to water less
avoid using the garbage disposal - it takes water, too, and the junk has to be cleaned out of your water. compost the scraps instead
look for and fix leaks, and close taps tightly.
set your hot water heater as low as you can stand. you can turn it
up just when you have guests and then back down again

Technorati Tags: Eco-Friendly, Green World, Global Warming, Green Gas, Drought, California

Individual Social Responsibility

2009-01-31T09:12:00.001-08:00

Thought I would make use of this channel as part of my ISR initiative. I know a few, who are looking for hands-on, expert-level Senior Java Engineers/Architects in Bangalore, India. Looks like there are a few openings. If any of you are interested or know someone suitable and up to the challenge, please rush your resume along with your linkedin profile.

My blog subscribers would get a preferential treatment - just kidding!!

Technorati Tags: Bangalore, Job Opportunities, Individual Social Responsibility, ISR

Where have all the leaders gone?

2009-01-30T23:53:00.001-08:00

In a downturn, it appears the managerial and leadership opportunities take more hit than technical ones. It has become a trend, where everyone is rushing to become technical and stay away from leadership and management roles. I know quite a few of VPs, CTOs, Directors and Managers, especially, in the software industry, who have started programming/coding, testing.... Even many recruiters prefer technical. Personally, I get more calls/responses for technical positions than managerial ones. Considering the number of folks who are becoming technical, it appears, as if, all this time, as managers/leaders, people were not adding much value or there is not much scope for any improvement/innovation. Also, there seems to be a perception, leadership and management are pastime things only during the times of plethora and high-tide.

In my formative years, I have been fortunate enough to get exposed to the works of very many great leaders. A couple that pertains to the corporate world are Dale Carnegie and Ricardo Semler. I derived/derive lot of mileage from their works. Their ideas, especially on leadership, management, corporate/industrial democracy and working on a plane of abundance, had a huge instant-impact on me. While I cherished every bit of them and put to use a great many of them, at every opportunity, the downside of getting exposed to such great idealistic views, early on in one's life, is that you assume that those are standard, widely prevalent and in vogue, while the world is far from it. Also, it results in setting high standards to go about and developing a rigidity towards perfection and excellence. May be, it was because of this, early in my career, my focus was more on technology and did not bother to keenly observe the shortage of leadership around me. Once cognizant of the shortage, I discovered there is a lot to achieve and miles to go.

I still believe, even in a downturn, there is more need for leadership and management skills than boom time and really there is a dearth of the same.

What do you say?

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Downturn, Dale Carnegie, Ricardo Semler

Eco Awareness - Tidbits

2009-01-26T22:50:00.001-08:00

Many of us have very little place for any economical (sometimes frugal) livelihood, ceiling on desires and far-sighted way of life. It is all about indulgence and grandeur (mostly meaningless) right from the bed, bath and beyond. That is all fast changing; more and more folks are becoming eco conscious. There seem to be a sudden surge of eco-awareness, followed, for a change, by concrete action all around. Really a good thing. Hope it is not a fad.

Anyways, a friend of mine, Rani, compiled(s) a set of eco-tidbits and I thought I would use this channel to spread the awareness, further. I have taken the liberty to emanate (as is) what I received recently about water conservation. I guess, the facts and figures, mostly pertain to NA, especially US, the land of measurement.

"normal" showerheads (pre-1992) run water at 5.5 gallons per minute.
For a five minute shower: 27 gallons!fill a bathtub halfway for a bath and you're at 21 gallons (full is about 42!)
new and low-flow showerheads are typically 2.5GPM - 12.5 gallons for a five-minute shower
bucket baths - typical plastic buckets are 5 gallons, if you make sure to use all the running water to fill the bucket. One good use is to fill a bucket with water while it is heating up and then use the water for the yard or plants or commode.
if you take a navy shower - get in, rinse off, turn off water while you soap up, then rinse off again - it's only about 3 gallons
of course, cooler water uses less energy than hot water. warm water is less drying too

Pretty interesting ...

Technorati Tags: Eco-Friendly, Green World, Global Warming, Green Gas,

Adieu

2009-01-23T23:59:00.001-08:00

We all know exits and merges are part of any journey and those are the trickiest ones, for it requires the art of juxtaposition oneself with the rest. Sometimes, it is that time in the journey (of life), we are stuck with the last lane, inadvertently, and the traffic in our lane does not go anywhere. Though we are left with an urge to switch on the indicators to announce yet another lane-change and the desire to take an exit to merge with yet another highway, en-route the fulfillment (hopefully!), at times, it so happens, the traffic is bumper-to-bumper and even the car-pool lane remains standstill with the rest. On top of this, if the lane becomes exit-only, with no expertize in mean-manipulative-maneuvers, one is left with no other choice but a forceful exit.

Though at first, at the outset, looks annoying, it works out to be a blessing in disguise. And many a times, exit-only lanes lead to the service roads, which work out faster than the high-ways during the peak times with heavy traffic. May be take a break and join back when the traffic has eased out.

OK. I will cut the euphemisms and make the point. I am writing this email, to let you all know that today is my last day at Sun. It has been 6+ years at Sun as part of the SOA/BI/ESB/EAI... I have enjoyed every bit of it. Sun, with its intelligent, hardworking, tech-savvy folks, is a great place to work; Professionally enriching and personally rewarding.

Wishing Sun and the team the very best in all their endeavors.

Till we meet again...

Regards,

VS

Technorati Tags: Farewell, Adieu, Parting

Product Marketing - the secret behind product success

2009-01-22T00:53:00.001-08:00

Product Marketing (mainly inbound) is the foundation and the secret behind successful productization. By, inbound product marketing, I mainly refer to the product definition and management including competitive and technical analysis. Productization begins with product mangement and well begun is half-done.

Many people think of product management as a kind of day-to-day operations maintaining a long laundry list of to-dos. That is really a run-of-the-mill product management, a classic symptom, indicating the engineering controls the show and the product management is merely playing a program management role. To me, personally, the product management is a very crucial, critical and a creative role with an ultimate ownership, sufficient authority and a high degree accountability for productization. In fact, in many a companies, the product management, as part of the product marketing, sponsors engineering activities.

Product management is also the bridge between the engineering and the rest of the world, including but not limited to customers, field, competitors, management. This requires the product management to be as technical as possible and dual-speak. On one hand with the engineering they need to interact, understand and converse technical things - translating the business requirements. On the otherside to the customer and field the product management needs to be business savvy & cusomter focused.

The product management also needs to share the management vision, supplement it further by being creative and setting new trends passionately. The product management has to be progressive and derive its input from various sources. Many a times, the least common denomination of all the sources would be the requirement for a product. The product management has to be ever vigil, listen continuously to the sources and keep balancing consistently the productization, in an iterative fashion. The predominant sources of information/input for the product management seem to as follows.

The existing/target customer/field base requirements/pain-points/expectations
The Competitor's business and product roadmap
The in-house innovation/creativity - many a time ahead of time-curve
The industry trends/predictions
The community, if any
The standardization - note, this is not an innovation

From the above list, it looks like the intersection of all the above sources seem to offer the most optimum/ideal set of input. But, it really depends on the type of the enterprise, the time in the history and other factors. For a startup there may not be a customer base to listen to. Similarly, for an established enterprise, especially in a downturn, listening to the existing set of customers may be a bit more important than going behind trend-setting/standardization anticipating a new set of customers in a distant future and expending time and resources on the unknown.

So, it is very important to get the product management, early on in a product life cycle and all the time, correct. Any goof-up here, especially in the early stages, really shakes the very design and architecture of the product and makes it ineffective and useless. Also, the inbound marketing actually aides and serves as basis of the outbound marketing too. So it is all the more reason we get the inbound correct.

Technorati Tags: Product Management

LinkedIn endorsements - Science or Art

2009-01-16T21:53:00.001-08:00

I have been using linkedin for quite sometime. I like the open, transparent, 360-degree endorsement mechanism. But, when I try to analyze and derive something out of these endorsements, for a profile, it falls short. In my view, the number does not matter really. It is the quality of the endorsements that counts, in addition to who endorses and when. The following, diluting the philosophy behind endorsements, occurs one too many times, making it difficult to derive anything precisely from these endorsements.

People follow a quid-pro-quo pattern - you endorse me - I will endorse you. Think about this; In a low-tech world, when one requests our recommendation - we do not expect the requester to reciprocate the favor.
In a pyramid hierarchy - when u have a large base - the bottom sucks-up to the top
The endorsements are skin deep - not detailed. Mostly, everyone assumes a positive intent and register a positive endorsements

I was wondering how one can really get something out of this and truly evaluate a profile. Below mentioned fun scoring-mechanism is a good start to do the same.

Every one-way endorsement fetches 1 point
Every 2-way endorsement fetches half a point (this to an extent lessens the weight of the manipulators)
Endorsements from your peers/managers carry a 2 pointer (one-way), 1 pointer (2-way - if initiated by the manager), half a point (2-way- if initiated by the sub-ordinate)
Endorsement from your subordinates/partners/clients carry half a point (this takes care of some arm-twisting compulsions)

We could keep extrapolating this, but you get the point, right?. For fun, that should be more than enough. Now, you go and figure out your score.

Technorati Tags: LinkedIn, Endorsements, Fun, Product Management

Satyam - Corporate ill-Governance or Accounting Fraud or Both?

2009-01-08T20:24:00.001-08:00

Satyam means truth in Sanskrit; not an iota found in Satyam corporate governance & accounting, I guess.

I can understand if a value of an asset is inflated/overstated and a liability is deflated/understated in a corporate balance sheet. But how do you inflate/deflate the cash position stated in a balance sheet? Unless, you lie about it and cheat the investors.

To me it looks like a combination of Enron and Madoff scheme.

Technorati Tags: Satyam, Enron, Madoff

Paramahansa Yogananda on sleep

2009-01-07T21:03:00.001-08:00

Links - A simple sleep technique from Paramahansa.

Also a rare video clipping. Thanks to Manju.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Prosperous New Year

2008-12-23T14:38:00.001-08:00

Hello All,

Wish you all a very happy holidays and a prosperous, eventful, purposeful, happy New Year. May the Omnipresent Bestow His Choicest Blessings on all of us on this joyous occasion and may all our genuine dreams come true and sincere prayers answered.

While we prepare ourselves to bid farewell to Y2008 and usher-in Y2009, let us take a moment, pause a while and contemplate on the bygone. As someone said, sometimes, one needs to stop to change the direction.

Each new year brings different set of experiences to different people and leaves many a shades of feelings to the individuals. Many claim, Y2008, with all the troubles and turmoils, to be one of the worst years in decades, especially with multiple wars, terrorism @ our backyards, a global financial meltdown causing a domino effect around, energy crisis and the global warming. I personally feel it is a watershed year and would be remembered for generations.

That said, never the less, Y2008 is slightly different and in fact, it has been unique, a leveler and most secular, in providing some common experiences to majority of folks across the globe, transgressing gender, age, wealth, color and creed. It has united people together, the countries closer, the allies more aligned and the non-aligned more inclined to align. A bad year (just like a bad teacher and a bad boss) teaches much more valuable lessons than a good year. But of course, the cliche, the experience teaches only the teachable, holds good.

I know we have miles to go; needless to mention the enormity of the challenges that lie ahead. But, I am very confident this too shall pass and there is no reason why we should not be optimistic, hopeful, assume a positive intent, count our blessings and take this unique opportunity to contemplate, catalog, learn from the past & present and put to use our experiences to derive a few pointers to set the direction for Y2009. Even if you do not share this thought, just go out and enjoy the present - our wishes. One year at a time!

Once again happy holidays and a happier New Year.

Wishes and Prayers,
.....

Technorati Tags: xMas, Christmas, Happy Holidays, New Year, 2009

Links - JavaFX 1.0 - Truly a remarkable milestone

2008-12-05T21:52:00.000-08:00

Success is a thin-line that separates a genius and an insane, people love winners, every journey starts with a small step, today's history was yesterday's present, patience & perseverance pays.......yada-yada-yada. we all have heard these cliches very many times.

But very rarely one gets to witness, feel and realize these in action, all at one instance. Yes, JavaFX - formerly known as F3 (Form Follows Function), is one such rare instance. Against many a corporate trials and tribulations and roller-coaster FUD rides, it has seen the light, this week, with the release of its version 1.0.

At the very outset, Kudos! and Bravo! to the teams that worked hard to make this happen and a special congratulations! to Chris, the father of JavaFX.

Further, I could provide a little more background inline with what has been mentioned here and express my pride of my past association with him. It all started with this one man, Christopher Oliver, trying to do some thing different, from the scratch, alone, something seemingly orthogonal to the organization's line of business. This is all possible only because of the perseverance, tenacity, single-minded focus and a vision of Chris and I guess the accommodating nature of his boss too.

Incidentally, my technical association with Chris was a bit prior to his branching off to JavaFX. We use to be collocated (even after he started working on JavaFX) and literally spend innumerable hours in collaboration/discussions in productizing BPEL/WS orchestration components and Java CAPS product suite. It is said 'being genius is a package deal';it's no different with Chris. A technical radical and a rebel that he was, with all his idiosyncrasies, he was a technical genius and always ahead of the curve. I always admired and respected his technical out-of-the-box, why-so/why-not contra thinking. His ultra-fast dexterity and agility, be it with the computers/software or with basketball is pretty amazing. I am sure, above & beyond all these, his one-pointed-focus, do-or-die killer spirit, with no escape options, made JavaFX a reality. I am really privileged to have known him and proud to have worked with him in the past. Wish him and JavaFX many, many more laurels.

Links

2008-12-02T14:36:00.001-08:00

Burnout & Rustout - Well identified and very well put. Also, the statistics, if any indicator, provides some insight into the future of work-life balance. That said, IMHO, a burnout is better than a rustout and a forced-rustout could also cause burnout. In addition to the article, the fourth way to break the burnout is to juggle between tasks. A change of work is rest, isn't it? Further, adding a shark in the tank could be a potential cure for rustout and complacency.

Startup suggestions - Though the article addresses the European Startups, it very well applies to Asian and other Startups. Further, to a large extent, it holds good at an inter-personal level and understanding of these subtle cultural nuances/differences only helps.

Links- Very timely advice

2008-12-01T20:44:00.001-08:00

Bootstrapping and lean-living - Very timely, profound and pragmatic nuggets. I wish the "so-called" billion $ companies get to read this and implement a few, if not all. It is, indeed, a piece of very well articulated art.

Technorati Tags: Bootstrapping

Child is the Father of Man

2008-09-19T08:55:00.000-07:00

Recently, one of the week day mornings my wife was trying to wake my daughter up, to get her ready for the school. In her sound slumber she requested some grace time and as it was wee hours in the morning she came by my side to cuddle along. In my own half-asleep state, I wanted to be more magnanimous; told my wife not to disturb my daughter and granted her a day-off. My wife complied with my instruction implicitly and never disturbed her. It was a very thoughtless, mindless act of mine trying to make my daughter over happy by granting more than what she asked. I got up a little while later and got ready to get to the office.

As I was about to leave my home, my daughter got up and slowly came up to me. She very feebly started murmuring that she wanted to go to the school immediately. I tried telling her she already missed her transportation, but she would not listen and would not want to miss playing with her friends. Very quickly the request turned into a crying and I yielded to her tantrum. Finally, I agreed to drop-her in the school. My wife refused to get her ready as it was my decision to keep her at home, I ended up getting her ready and dropped her at school before I could go to office. The glee on her face was certainly worth all the effort.

The event would have been very insignificant, if I had got to my office with no further contemplation. While driving back from the school to the office, I was kind-of retrospectively introspecting on what exactly happened that morning. The event by itself was very normal and common, but the experience after the event drove some valuable management lessons.

First, one has to do what one has to do. One has to do the correct/right thing and not the nice thing; Never - especially if it is not the right thing. As a responsible parent I should have helped my spouse in getting my daughter up from the bed. This applies equally or more to every manager in discharging one's duties on a day-to-day basis.

Second, we should know where to take a pro-active initiative, be generous and magnanimous. Sometimes it is better to do what is just required not over do it. If there ain't a bug do not try to fix it.

Third, we should not allow our sentiments and emotions without unintelligently come our way in decision making and discharging duty.

Last but most important is the following. At times we, with our misplaced priorities and emotions (without much intelligence), we do things to please our folks around-us in the present, just to realize that the very same folks become unhappy at a later point in time. This holds very well with most of us. Many of us make lots of career decisions, ignoring what is right, by attaching too-much sentimental value to the present predicament and demographics. At the end, we only stand to witness the time catching up with our decisions and proving how short-sighted we are in our decisions. The so called compromises and sacrificecs looks very trivial and irrelevant.

Simple Event Processing (SEP), Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Driven Orchestration (EDO) and Interoperability

2008-09-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

Many consider the EDA as complimentary to SOA in solving many a real time integration problems, while some do consider it as SOA 2.0. I agree with both the definitions to a great extent and would like to add the EDA, as it stands is Event-Driven-SOA. And personally feel both are needed to solve any realistic integration scenarios and surely believe the next big thing in SOA/BI/EAI. Also, it is my understanding that neither SOA nor EDA are anything new and both were in vogue in many forms in one way or other always. What has changed now are the standardization, the widespread-adoption and maturity of the product offerings (especially ESB/BI, business integration as well as intelligence, vendor offerings). I feel EDA could be an answer for many a business problem and a methodology that could be applied to almost any integration scenario, be it data, application or process.

Further, in my view, an event, a message and a job are all synonymous. So I would be using these interchangeably. An event could generate a (set of) message(s) and a message could be just a payload/data or could have associated command/actions/context/instructions to process further. Never the less the event-generated message(s) is/are what matters to the processor/bus(ESB). Likewise an EDA and MDA (message driven architecture) are synonymous. MDA has been around for a long time and many consider that to be a form of SEP.

For Event Processing, excluding the ESB/platform, there are three components necessary. Event/Message source(s)/Triggers(s), Event/Message Processor/Consumer and Event/Message Driven Action/Service-Provider.

We could understand SEP/traditional-MDA using two examples. The first example of SEP would be our standard i/o device keyboard. As the keys are pressed the events are generated and the OS, the processor processes (queues/buffers) the same and invokes the corresponding GUI action (listener) is invoked. Most of the OS does this very well, reliability. The events are predictable, most of the time it is asynchronous some times/commands are synchronous/modal.

The other example could be a business process that receives two files (events) through FTP and a local directory, process the file - say co-relates the names of the files and invokes an action upon a match - say to store it in a database.

Both the above mentioned are even driven and serves many a business use cases. But both are SEP. Simply put SEP is nothing but processing of events that occur one at a
time, in a linear or serial fashion, very predictable, in an
synchronous or asynchronous message exchange mode, reliabily with or
without correlating to the exiting context/data in a not so real-time mode.

The system breaks and would fall short when you add the scalability QoS (Quality of Service) to the above scenarios. Say you would like to have multiple, unpredictable events occur at different times that need to be correlated and processed in real-time as it occurs that would decide a an action to be invoked. Then the event processing becomes complex and it is called CEP.

Simply put,

CEP = SEP + Scalability QoS + real-time-processing

While the above is true to large extent, to those, who say their SEP-system(s) was/were complying to the above much before the term CEP came into existence, the question is were the sytems capable of handling the events in real-time, as it was getting generated, reading the events at the source as streams. Fundamentally, the CEP differs from SEP in the following ways.

Spatial correlation of events - correlating multiple messages available at any point in time
Temporal correlation of events - correlating multiple messages available at different point in time
Cardinality of events (multiple simultaneous events of huge numbers)
Real-time events interception at source - as streams (more on ESP a bit later)

An example of a CEP is the real-time-OS kernel, control-systems, which processes and responds to an event as it happens in a pre-determined time.

In both SEP and CEP, it is very evident that SOA is the natural enabler that provides core processing and orchestration capabilities. While SEP inherently uses an EDO (Event Driven Orchestration) to process the event, the CEP needs a CEDO (Complex Event Driven Orchestration) and RTSP (Real Time Source Processing). The above equation could be re-wrtten as

CEP = SEP + Qos-Scalability + CEDO + RTSP

Before we break and continue later on the same, while it is really interesting and quite terrific to witness the maturity of SOA and the evolution of EDA, it is also a concerning when you think about the following.

Interoperability of EDA components/solutions. Is there a need for it? Not sure. But I would think the very fact of loosely-coupled, interoperable services ...... stuff was part of the SOA definition and contributed to the very existence and gain traction in the industry
Also, what about the vendor lock-ins of the EDA systems/products. It would be nice if a standard is evolved along side to address these with a foresight, putting to use our past experience
The contract/interface description, discovery of a EDA service? Is there a need for it? Absolutely. Are the current interface languages capable of handling it? Not at all
Can EDA be applied to non-real time scenarios too?

US - Capitalism - Is it working? - Capitalistic Socialism

2008-09-11T08:49:00.000-07:00

In a Capitalistic Democracy like US, I always thought Capitalism is synonymous to privatization, corporatism and free trade. The recent government take over of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae seems to cast a shadow on the effectiveness and usefulness of the practice of Capitalism. When many Socialistic Democracies like India are moving towards privatization and corporatism, US seems to be moving towards nationalization.

The poetic-justice in this act of nationalization (which is more synonymous to Socialism) is that it is been carried out by the Republican Administration which is akin to Capitalism.

The other aspect of this move is the approbation by the investment community and the wall street by reacting positively to this move. Looks like the word ideology seems to be only in the dictionary and no one give a - for the same. All that matters seems to be convenience and short term gains without analyzing the long term impact.

Interesting Observations

2008-01-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

This week I found some very interesting relevant out-of-the-box observations made in "How
Technology Amplified the Mortgage Crisis". Makes more sense along
with "The
Fundamental Religion of the Bottom Line". Irrespective of the industry one is the content/trend are very relevant and serves as a good word of caution.

Nano - a true testimony of Tata's social responsibility and disruptive innovation

2008-01-12T08:45:00.000-08:00

Tata - Truly remarkable. No one believed him, many even ridiculed him when he expressed the desire to make economical-car, the first time, 4 years back. But he never cared for his detractors, negated the nay-sayers and walked the talk.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jan2008/gb20080110_319276.htm?campaign_id=rss_topStories

Blogging - Resumed

2007-12-21T09:02:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I published any blogs. Not that I do not blog, but never felt the need for publishing. To me, publishing, without a purpose and a need was more of a means to

A communication (to the whole world) process
A statement/article of expression
A "News" making mechanism

with no clear objective and ends in mind.

But recently, I discovered an upside to this blog-publishing stuff, in
addition to the advantage of just blogging, which enhances the clarity
in thinking and refinement in expression when the ideas/expressions
goes through our hand once. The very fact that the content is available
for the public scrutiny, puts one under the microscope, increases our
responsibility, accountability and the ownership of the content
(ideas/views/opinions/suggestions...) in terms of its validity,
correctness and accuracy an order of magnitude.

So, bottom-line, I have decided I would blog at the least twice a week
beginning the New Year 2008.

So keep visiting the blogs below, keep reading and share your comments and suggestions.

Xtreme/Agile SOA

2007-10-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), the buzz-word doing the rounds for a long time, seems to be one of the most over-rotated wheel of the decade. Much has been said and to an extent a lots has been done in this field. While the world is trying to bottle the SOA and BI in new bottles like SaaS (software as a Service), IaaS (Integration as a Service), and moved 0n (back) to ROA(Resource Oriented Architecture) and RESTfulness, this is yet another humble, delayed effort in expressing (inflicting) my understanding of the SOA with an emphasis on "Xtreme"/"Agile" in the hope of gaining more insight.

Despite the fact that the SOA methodology had been around for decades, and in fact even before the acronym SOA was coined, the widespread technical-adoption was made easy only after it was coupled with the Web (services). Because of that very fact the SOA is almost-always misinterpreted with web services. In a true sense SOA can be abstracted, applied and used in multiple levels, in many a walks of life and not just at the technical level. The truth is, the SOA services could be any kind of services, including but not limited to web-services. Any application, product, service deed can be designed using the SOA principles. SOA is ubiquitous, omnipresent and all we need is to observe and understand details of the phenomena around us to appreciate the SOA principles in it.

Values and Innovation

2007-07-27T08:40:00.000-07:00

Many things in life are like Silence. More you speak about it, less you get to practice. Values and Innovation are one such things.

First Blog and Blog-Tool First

2007-06-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

Ever since I decided to blog, I was looking for a live yet an offline blogger that has familiar windows interfaces and works on XP and Vista. Now that I got one (Windows Live Writer), I thought I should put it to test before I get serious on blogging.

So as part of the testing as well as the first of my blogs I present these few lines.

I should admit the ease of use and the convenience the tool offers is amazing.