OX BLOG

OutworX readiness for Agile : Part III

2008-08-07T03:25:00.000-07:00

As more and more software developers and managers are struggling to improve their delivery capabilities, OutworX has steadily but surely started moving towards Agile Development as a means to deliver high quality solutions in shorter time span and with ever-shrinking budgets.
Truly, transition to Agile is not an easy task. We are ensuring how to make the move without breaking anything. We at OutworX are taking every move scrupulously and diligently.

We understand that Agile development is a substantially different method of developing software, which heavily relies upon speed, smooth and frequent communication, and a desire to provide the customer with a completed solution in a shorter time line. That’s why we have, firstly, started asking our team members if they are ready for the transition. At this stage, we are looking into the possible roadblocks, and the way to remove them, and also comparing it with our old method.

Secondly, we are not in a hurry. We let the learning evolve iteratively, which means we try to learn something out of everything. This learning process doesn’t require us to be an expert, and we mainly focus towards doing a single thing and doing it completely, making it a complete software solution in itself.

We in OutworX do understand that transition is not so easy, and every transition is bound to face opposition from within and own team members, which is also a sign of solid democratic structure where people come out with their apprehensions. Keeping in mind their apprehension, we are educating them and taking time to dispel the myths about the agile development, as we’ll work with them in the future.

In this regard, we are also telling our team members the risks of not going agile. We give reference of those companies which have excelled and outsmarted their competitors by adopting agile development process.

At OutworX, the one good aspect is that most of stake-holders in our organization have shown enthusiasm towards implementing agile software development, but we are taking into confidence even the small stake holders, and help them understand that switching over to agile methodology is a matter of our survival in the outsourced product development market. Moreover, all need to understand and assimilate the process in order to get it executed fruitfully. We are making every effort to change the mindset of our team members and customers as well regarding the software delivery process.

We understand that adaptation to new methodology will take time, and gradually everything will fall into place. And to learn from all our mistakes in the early days of agile methodology, we are going to document the progress carefully so that we can have true assessment about when and where we went wrong.

In today’s fast paced IT-driven economy, if we want to be successful in software, we need to learn fast from our mistakes. What we need to understand here during the transition to the agile development process, it is better to fail or commit mistakes fast, so that the process of learning should be fast-paced, and eventually we’ll be able to speed up software development process.

Posted by Bharat Bhushan, AVP, OutworX Corporation

4 Cardinal Values of Agile Methodology: Part II

2008-07-21T23:01:00.000-07:00

In our previous post, we have discussed about Agile Development Methodology and its increasing adoption by the software firms, which promotes high levels visibility, predictability, and quality by adapting and iterative development approach.

Continuing our discussion further, we would now discuss about the values entrenched in the Agile methodology. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development highlights 4 value statements, which we’ll explain for better understanding of the methodology.

The Agile Values:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Individuals work together to build software systems, in which processes provide them guidance and tools help them improve their efficiency. But, it is the people, with right technical and behavioral skills make all the difference, because without right people all the processes and tools can’t produce results on their own.

Working software over comprehensive documentation. Agile development emphasizes documentation to build products and software, as documents support communication and collaboration, enhance knowledge transfer, preserve historical information, assist ongoing product enhancement, and fulfill regulatory and legal requirements.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation. Agile development is driven by customers, product managers and development team, where each has specific roles, responsibilities and responsibilities. Keeping the letter and spirit of the contract, the project team delivers value to customers.

Responding to change over following a plan. During the development lifecycle of the project, priorities are changed for a plethora of reasons such as changed understanding of the project stakeholders, changing business environment, changing and evolving new technologies and platforms, etc. In such a changing environment, there should be room for change in the project plan. And, project plan should have the flexibility and adaptability to the change.

…to be continued.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

OutworX focuses towards Agile Development Methodology: Part I

2008-05-22T02:20:00.000-07:00

In today’s software product market, development firms are increasingly focused towards optimizing the development process of their products with unequivocal attention on innovation, quality, and cost. Firms that have the capability to speedily and economically develop products will gain unmatched advantage and edge over competitors.

Authors Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in their book “Built to Last” posed a question: “What makes the truly exceptional companies different from the other companies?" Answering to the question, they said, “Visionary companies distinguish their timeless core values and enduring purpose, which should never change, from their operating practices and business strategies (which should be changing constantly in response to a changing world)."

This is what we product development firms can achieve with Agile Methodology. Defining “Agile”, Jim Highsmith says, in his book “Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products”, “is a social movement driven by both the desire to create a particular work environment and the belief that this "adaptive" environment is critical to the goal of delivering innovative products to customers.”

Why do software development firms need Agile Development Methodology?

We need Agile Development methodology, as it promotes high levels visibility, predictability, and quality by adapting an iterative development approach. The “Manifesto for Agile Software Development” declares “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it. Through this work we have come to value:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”

....to be continued

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

OutworX strategizes Next Generation Web 2.0 Application Development

2008-04-28T00:39:00.000-07:00

In today’s technology driven market, Web applications are made of distributed parts instead of being just one application on a Web server at one domain. Web applications leverage external web services and APIs, and they are being bundled up into user distributable components such as widgets, gadgets, badges, etc.

Next generations Web applications are getting more social than they used to be. Powerful development platforms such as Ruby on Rails and cloud computing platforms Google App Engine are increasingly being used by new Web applications.

As we in OutworX moving more towards Web 2.0, building Web applications empowered with competitive features, we are focusing towards galvanizing our team members around following tips to build next generation Web 2.0 applications:

First, more and more of our team members need to understand basics of Web 2.0 and how we can it can be specifically plug into a viable business model.

We are developing our Web 2.0 competency center with team members willing to learn the new models for designing, building, hosting, and distributing Web application, coming out in the market.

More importantly, we need to understand our customers’ psyche which can be small businesses or big enterprises having specific needs, and once we understand their Web applications needs, we can offer them what they actually demand. However, we need not lose sight of the fundamentals of Web 2.0, because it’s what adds long-term value to your products.

Lastly, we need to use all the latest tools, technologies, applications, platforms in our personal and professional life to have better and deeper understanding of them, which will eventually help us understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist,OutworX Corporation

US recession not to curb H-1B visa demand

2008-04-01T01:02:00.000-07:00

As reported in Computerworld, “Recession unlikely to curb H-1B demand”, and the federal government is going to receive a record number of applications from employers seeking H-1B visas for workers from overseas. Apart from pent-up demand for H-1B visas and many of the largest H-1B users are offshore outsourcing firms, the fact is substantiated by none other than Microsoft’s Chairman Bill Gates at a congressional hearing this month, where he said that the annual visa cap "bears no relation to the U.S. economy's demand for skilled professionals." “…three bills proposing increases in the cap were introduced in Congress shortly after Gates spoke. Congress may make any cap increase retroactive -- a prospect that could encourage companies to submit H-1B applications just to make sure they have a place in line. For those reasons, there's a good chance that the number of H-1B petitions filed this year will exceed last year's total, further reducing the odds of getting a visa unless the cap is increased,” reported the magazine.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar,Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Web 2.0 Mantra: Faster, Cheaper and Better

2008-03-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, I have seen an article "Web 2.0: Not very enterprising" in Business Standard, which presents not very encouraging trend for the Web 2.0 market in India, and says “the Web 2.0 market in India is still struggling for direction and funding, though the start-up scene in the Indian consumer space has been vibrant.” To an extent, the statement is substantially true, as homegrown Web 2.0 sites are still miles away from mass adoption in comparison with global biggies like Orkut, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia. Further quoting a report from IDC, the article adds that “ Progress in this direction, this year, will be slow, though steady. Excluding established global players like Orkut, Metacafe, Digg, YouTube, Flickr and Wikipedia, Web 2.0 startups have a combined user base of around 1.5 million in India, after eliminating overlaps, according to IDC.”

However, this somewhat disheartening trend can be changed much to Indian Web 2.0 service providers by their proactive approach. In a report “How Indian Tech Companies Can Benefit From Web 2.0”, published in Nasscom website, discusses about initiatives to be taken by the Indian companies to leverage the benefits of Web 2.0.

First, it says about Speed of Execution and Effectiveness of the Indian Web 2.0 vendors. “Indian best of breed workforce coupled with best of breed web 2.0 tools and mashups of applications can keep Indian’s outsourcing drive front of the curve.”

Secondly, Developing Creative Services can again provide us an edge over global competition. Indian companies can deliver low cost web2.0 technologies over the web.
The report asks Indian companies to leverage Community in Solution Building by involving global tech talents with the increasing use of blogs, wikis and other web 2.0sources. It further adds, “ Active open communication and mind sharing through blogs, or managing requirements real time without putting a structural workflow around it can provide you a pathway to make a true connection with your customers and create a sense of stakeholder ownership.”

By being Early Adopters of Web 2.0 technology, Indian tech companies will be leaders in the Web 2.0 movement.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

OutworX President sees Offshore Opportunities in the US recession

2008-03-04T03:02:00.000-08:00

OutworX atmosphere is impregnated with expectations. Young Team OutworX always looks up to someone who can be a beckoning light to steer us to newer heights, uncharted zones, and unforeseen opportunities. Meet, Mr.Sanjay Govil, our newly appointed President, in a candid talk with Team NewsworX.

NewsworX: Welcome onboard and Congratulations for being the new President of OutworX. How does it feel?

S.G: My heartfelt thanks to everybody, especially to Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX, who has shown trust and faith in me. I have the great honor of stepping into the role of President of OutworX, and I make this move with deep conviction and enthusiasm. To me, OutworX has an incredibly bright future. Previously, I’ve partnered closely with many executive teams to steer strategies and directions, and today I’m looking forward to this challenge.

I firmly believe that we in OutworX have incredible assets, and our company has massive potential, drive, determination and skills, and we won’t be satisfied until the true potential of OutworX gets realized completely.

I am also convinced about our enormous potential for long-term success as a leading Outsourced Product Development & IT Services company.

NewsworX: When someone joins an organization, expectations rise high. What are your short term and long term plans and objectives for the company?

S.G:At the outset, I want to make it clear that short-term plans must be consistent with the long term objectives of a company. So far as short- term plans and objectives are concerned, I am establishing communication with our clients and the teams, trying to understand their capabilities, expectations and challenges. The longer term objective is to focus on growth both in our existing domain of Outsourced Product Development as well as the new area of IT Services. This growth will come from existing clients as well as new clients and new geographies through leveraging our proven competency in Identity & Access Management, Web 2.0 & Open source development, and Quality Assurance.

NewsworX: Give us a brief overview about the industry, keeping in mind the reported recessionary trend in the US economy? Do you see its ripple effect on the Outsourced Product Development market in India? Which are the industry verticals you are currently focusing on?
S.G: There appears to be a slowdown in the US economy, which opens up opportunities for service providers like us since even more US companies would be looking at off-shoring as a strategy to control costs. However there will be price pressures which will require service providers to tighten their belts and deliver “more for less”. But, more importantly, firms have shown faith in India, and they have announced plans to invest several billion $ in the India IT Sector over the next few years. We are in the Outsourced Product Market (OPD), and a number of study reports have reaffirmed the case of Indian supremacy in the OPD market. India accounts for almost 84 per cent of the outsourcing, with competition such as Canada, China and Vietnam way behind. A Nasscom-McKinsey report, states that the outsourced product development market pegged at $3 billion in 2004-05 is growing at 30 per cent annually to touch $8-11 billion by 2008.

NewsworX: How your customers get the benefits of offshore delivery? Could you explain your business model?

S.G:Our goal at OutworX is to work with our clients to help them deliver their products and services competitively in order to maximize their business potential. Our Outsourced Product Development and IT services allow our Clients to reduce time to market, improve the quality of their products, reduce risk of failure, improve predictability and reliability of the engineering process, while helping them lower their over-all product engineering costs.

So far as our business models are concerned our Outsourced Product Development (OPD) business has Flex Cell and Flex Factory models. Our Flex Cell model provides Clients with a team hired to meet their requirements and expectations. And Flex Factory enables clients to harness all the benefits of offshoring and outsourcing, without committing to usage of specific resources. In IT Services we offer the flexibility of “turnkey projects” and resource augmentation delivery models to our Clients.

NewsworX: Anything you would like to share with TeamOutworX? Plz…specify.

S.G: In order for us to be successful in our business, we need to make our clients succeed in their business, which can only happen through constantly delivering high quality products and services, on-time and at competitive prices. Finally, my profound thanks to Team OutworX for showing faith and trust in me.
Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

4 Fundamental Principles For Building Alumni Value Proposition

2008-02-01T03:04:00.000-08:00

Taking cue from my previous post, I would like to extend the concept of Alumni Value Proposition (AVP) a little further. There is a framework for building AVP, which is simply based on four fundamental principles:

Hire the best into the organization
Let them build the organization
Proudly Brand what they build
Alumni constitute our extended organization

Hire the Best. Since people like to associate with likeminded people, if organization has good people then it will attract other good people. Anybody who gets selected to join such an organization considers it a privilege that he/she is getting the opportunity to work with other good people who would make a huge difference in his/her life.
Correspondingly it becomes organization’s responsibility to follow very high hiring standards to avoid dilution in the quality of its people, and secondly ensure that word gets around loudly that this organization is built with good people thus ensuring that good applicants pool continues to grow exponentially.

Built by the Best. Once organization has hired the best employees, it should let these employees take complete ownership of building the organization, and also have them take pride that their contributions is what makes this organization great.

Let employees define the criteria for selecting right people for this organization and how to bring them onboard.
Let employees take charge of inducting and mentoring new people into the organization.
Let employees build a continuously learning organization by defining a culture of complete knowledge capture and sharing across the organization. Requiring everybody to document their learnings from projects and other activities they undertake – developing a strong habit and capabilities in employees to communicate well – extensively using tools like Blogs for external and internal publishing of contents.
Let employees recognize what they are best at and then take pride in training others in the organization to be good at that.
Let employees be the navigators who understand the tides of industry and the world around the organization, and then counsel others in the organization to mould their careers to be successful in rapidly changing tides.

Branding. As the organization does these great things it is equally important that it gets the word out. It should be proud of what it built and we must let others know how good it is from inside. Employees and Alumni are the true carriers of brand message. They should be encouraged to use blogs, message boards, trade magazines, conferences etc. to spread organization’s brand message.

Treat Alumni as part of extended organization. Alumni are a great asset for any company as they take companies message in their new companies. If that message is strong then it greatly benefits the company in attracting more good people. Organization must strive to stay connected with its Alumni and simultaneously create strong reasons for alumni to stay connected with it. To facilitate this it must use tools like Alumni website and newsletters.

Building Alumni Value Proposition based on this framework is our joint responsibility and our primary mission for 2008.

Posted by Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX Corporation

Web 2.0 Technology Driven 8 Business Trends

2008-01-11T05:22:00.000-08:00

An enterprise create real wealth by combining technology with innovative ways of doing busines.This is what came out in The McKinsey Quarterly which identified 8 unique business trends empowered by the Web 2.0 technology in its article " “Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch”..

McKinsey’s Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch

‘Distributing co-creation’: "Technology now allows companies to delegate substantial control to outsiders—cocreation—in essence by outsourcing innovation to business partners that work together in networks. By distributing innovation through the value chain, companies may reduce their costs and usher new products to market faster by eliminating the bottlenecks that come with total control."
‘Using consumers as innovators’: "Consumers increasingly want to engage online with one another and with organizations of all kinds. Companies can tap this new mood of customer engagement for their economic benefit."
‘Tapping into the world of talent’: "As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence."
‘Extracting more value from interactions’: "...a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, "which will be core to the workforce by 2015.
‘Expanding the frontiers of automation’: "organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service."
‘Unbundling production from delivery’: "Use these technologies to offer other companies—suppliers, customers, and other ecosystem participants—access to parts of their IT architectures through standard protocols”.
‘Putting more science into management’: "The quality and quantity of information available to any business will continue to grow explosively as the costs of monitoring and managing processes fall......Information is often power; broadening access and increasing transparency will inevitably influence organizational politics and power structures."
‘Making business from information’: "Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities."

So, "creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies." Apply these trends in a wide variety of businesses, and be the winner.

Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

AJAX, Enterprise Mashups, and SOA

2008-01-08T23:13:00.000-08:00

According to JSON inventor andYahoo! Architect Douglas Crockford, one of the things that AJAX has enabled is mashups, which he boldly calls "the most interesting innovation in software development in at least 20 years."To him,"mashups are the fulfillment of the promise of competent architecture and highly reusable modules”, offering “a whole new class of interactivity and value”.

Mashups originate with Web 2.0, which epitomizes development on the fly. With the rediscovery of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) technology and the mushrooming popularity of rich Internet applications, we now have the ability to create mashups that quickly solve business problems by using the standard dynamic interfaces that front services. Mashups provide a quick and easy way to solve many of today’s simple business problems — and should scale nicely to solve more complex and far-reaching problems in the future. Now-a-days, more and more enterprises are looking into how they can benefit from mashups to improve their business.

With the increasing use of mushups, “the line is blurring between the enterprise and the Web. However, mashups live on that porous perimeter, offering the reusability of an SOA plus very rapid development using prebuilt services outside the firewall. Soon, we may live in a world where it’s difficult to tell where the enterprise stops and the Web begins. It’s scary — and exciting at the same time,” says Dave Linthicum, a blogger in InfoWorld.

More complex mashups move toward composite applications - made up of many services, which is an advanced SOA concept. And, enterprises should be prepared properly to leverage mushups for their business growth. In this context, it is better advisable that the enterprises need “to design and deploy an SOA with mushups in mind”. He further adds, “mashup preparation can be divided into six familiar stages: requirements, design, governance, security, deployment, and testing. These are core architectural bases you must touch if you are to arrive safely in the promised land of mashups on top of an SOA.” They make the value of an SOA much more visible over a much shorter term.

Now, we are in 2008, and we need to first know a few critical questions to ask next about AJAX, Web 2.0,RIA (Rich Internet Applications),Mushups, and then look for their answers. Eric Miraglia of Yahoo! Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON; Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb; Chris Schalk, developer evangelist for Google; John Crupi, CTO of JackBe; Joshua Gertzen, lead developer of the ThinWire AJAX Framework; Kevin Hakman, co-founder of TIBCO General Interface; etc have raised a few pertinent questions:

How significant is Enterprise Mashups to you (your customers)?

How can I make AJAX applications that easily go offline? (i.e. can work easily and in a similar manner when not connected to the Internet.)

Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud?

Is AJAX about more than just web development? Should we be campaigning to replace all desktop apps with an AJAX equivalent?

How do you apply user interface patterns and user experience design to your AJAX project?

What are people mostly using AJAX for? Enhancing existing website, building a new website, building an application, replacing an old client/server application, etc?

Read complete AJAX questions

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

2008: The Year of RSS

2008-01-02T23:23:00.000-08:00

A latest post on newsgator speaks about what will be the trend throughout 2008 in RSS, both from the consumer and enterprise RSS perspective. It highlighted the following trends in the year ahead:

Portal Plumbing. Using RSS / Atom as a way for backend systems to funnel information (both publishing and retrieving) into a single access points that are easy to use and easy to manage. As increasing number of users are using iGoogle and Netvibes as their own aggregator, and are using RSS to accomplish this.

RSS will be the transfer protocol between yourself and your social networks.

Ease of use will be greatly enhanced with discovery and filtering mechanisms to help you find new content and sort/organize the feeds you already subscribe to.

Atom publishing will become more important as well within social networks. A widely adaptable comment publishing protocol will emerge that would allow users to comment on an item.

Within the enterprise, the use of authenticated feeds to access transaction and master data systems will rise.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Google Planning Online Storage Service!!!!

2007-12-27T04:00:00.000-08:00

Google is developing an integrated service that would allow users to store and organize their information on Google’s servers, according to a report in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal. The Journal said that, internally, the service was known at one point as "My Stuff."

With this service, Google would join an array of vendors, such as IBackup, Xdrive, and eSnips. Itself a veteran of the online storage industry, Google’s Web-based tools, such as Picasa, Gmail, and Docs, already provide free storage and additional levels of paid storage.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar,Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Mission 2008: Alumni Value Proposition

2007-12-19T22:29:00.000-08:00

Companies that create a strong Alumni Value Proposition for their employees successfully attract and retain best people. Aah!? You might wonder. Employee retention and Alumni in same sentence, isn’t that an oxymoron?

Ok, let me try to explain why I made above statement with couple of examples. McKinsey and Solomon Brothers are two companies that are considered most coveted companies (in their respective domains) by every jobseeker. Although if you talk to any employee at any level in these companies, he would tell you that his jobs is extremely demanding, he works almost 16 to 20+ hours a day 7 days a week, often for lower pay than his counterparts in other companies.
So if it is not the money, and if it is not work-family life balance, then what attracts jobseekers to these companies that they always consider them as dream companies to work for.

After speaking with a few senior people at McKinsey and other organizations I realized that it is the Alumni Value Proposition (AVP). When a company tries to create AVP it is no different from what good universities do to attract best students and give to its students when they become Alumni.

So is there a framework for building AVP?

It starts with building a comprehensive process for selecting the best, because first pillar of building AVP is to have best people in the organization. And if you have good people, they connect with former colleagues, locally and globally, build a positive environment about the organization, attract smart people, and, eventually, inspire them to join and build the organization. Also, these very people help peers in career building by counseling and mentoring them properly and adequately.
But, what if these very good people opt to move on to some other organizations. You would be pleasantly surprised to know that it is Alumni who eventually become a great asset for the country.

How? Let’s find out.

It is alumni that take companies message to their new companies, and if that message is strong then it greatly benefits the company in attracting more good people. In today’s fiercely competitive knowledge-driven market, only those companies can thrive which believe in and create AVP. To stay connected with their Alumni, companies need to leverage tool such as Alumni network website and newsletters that enable them to

• Connect with former colleagues, locally and globally
• Communicate and expand social network via live and online events
• Collaborate on special projects or pilots, find a job, a candidate, a supplier, or generate new business contacts

Further, companies need to work on Knowledge Creation, which has been widely recognized as strategically important for organizational learning and innovation, requiring employees to document their learning from projects and other activities they undertake – developing a strong habit and capabilities in employees to communicate well , using tools like Blogs, social community sites, external and internal publishing of contents, etc.
Teamwork plays an important role in AVP, where people own responsibility collectively. It is teamwork that motivates employees to take pride in mentorship and coaching other employees (old or new).

To add grist to the mill, companies let employees take ownership in building the organization, let have them take pride that their contributions is what makes this organization.
Don’t you think that their contributions to recruiting process play a big role in bringing the best into the company.

Branding is one exercise that companies need to do constantly to deliver the message clearly, confirm the organization’s credibility, connect with your target prospects, motivate the audience, and, most importantly, create a positive environment for the company across the industry. Apart from PR activities including media coverage, seminars, webinars, etc, employees and alumni are the carriers of brand message.

And, now, let me conclude that building Alumni Value Proposition based on this framework is our Mission 2008. On the sheer strength of AVP, I look forward to the future with a goal of attracting the best people, creating a niche for OutworX. Alumni represent the company, peers will look up to you for career counseling, and alumni will help establish the future strength of our company. The journey has begun…

Posted by Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX Corporation

6 Essential Things Developers Need to Know About Google’s OpenSocial

2007-12-02T23:53:00.000-08:00

Folks,

Awfully sorry for giving latest updates on Google’s OpenSocial model for social networking applications so late, as your Blog Evangelist was a lit bit tied up with some other important activities.

What perceived by some as Google’s smart move to outmaneuver the increasing popularity of Facebook, but this is not going to stop developers from building applications for Facebook.

But that doesn’t mean that OpenSocial doesn’t have advantages. According to Joe Kraus, a Director of Product Management at Google, OpenSocial will make things easier for developers "because it makes it easier for them to focus on making their web apps better; they get lots of distribution with a lot less work. It's good for websites, because they can tap into the creativity of the largest possible developer community (and no longer have to compete with one another for developer attention). And finally, it's good for users, because they get more applications in more places."

Better if you look at the 6 essential things, which you need to know about Google’s OpenSocial:

OpenSocial only offers the lowest common denominator, not the full richness of each social networking platform.
OpenSocial is largely based on open standards and there's only minor developer lock-in.
OpenSocial is a real doorway to social networking data portability as well as potential security holes.
OpenSocial is simple and straightforward but also capable of developing full-blown, rich Internet applications.
OpenSocial is from Google and excessive philanthropy should not be expected.
A new era in competency in social software is being ushered in by models like OpenSocial.

If you want to know more about Google OpenSocial, look at the video....

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Significance of Data Encryption

2007-11-26T03:00:00.000-08:00

Data encryption is all about the scrambling process of stored or transmitted information, making it unintelligible for the unintended recipient. It is being increasingly used by the financial industry to protect money transfers, by the merchants to protect against the credit card fraud, and by organization to security against leakage of proprietary information. To know more about Data encryption, click here.

Posted by Manhar Goandi, Project Manager, OutworX C orporation

Standardized Security Test for Software Developers

2007-11-23T02:06:00.000-08:00

Hi Software developers folks! As announced by the Secure Programming Council, a standardized test is on the anvil to test software developers’ knowledge of secure programming. With such standardized security test, companies can ensure that their developers have a basic knowledge about wrapping security into software applications.

The council is rolling out its "Essential Skills for Secure Programmers Using Java/JavaEE" the first of six standards initiatives. Later, it will add skills tests for C and C++, as well as languages .Net, PHP, and PERL.

The proposed testing will include areas such as data handling, authentication, and session management and access control. The skill testing is designed to not only ask developers whether they know what encryption is but whether they understand the differences between PKI encryption and other forms of encryption, said Ryan Berg, co-founder of Ounce Labs and a member of the Secure Programming Council's Java and JavaEE steering committee. SANS will administer the tests, which are scheduled to begin on December 5 in London and continue for the next eight months in cities through out the United States and Europe.

The tests cost between $50 and $450, for participants ranging from students to employees of large corporations.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Google launched Android, mobile phone platform

2007-11-13T00:06:00.000-08:00

When Team OutworX was in the festive mood, Google –led Open Handset Alliance has released the Android. Android is an important part of Google’s strategies of providing access to information to users wherever they are. Android will soon be the foundation for many mobiles and will create a new mobile experience for users with new applications and new capabilities, so far unheard of. The Android Software Development Kit (SDK) will deliver a complete set of software for mobile devices: an operating system, middleware and key mobile applications. Look at the Android OS early look.

Download here the Android, and more details about it are available here.

In addition, Google also announced the Android Developer Challenge, which will provide $10 million to developers who build mobile applications for Android.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

OpenSocial: Google answer to Facebook for social networking power struggle

2007-11-02T01:56:00.000-07:00

Realizing its broad social networking ambitions, Google is coming out with OpenSocial, a new project, which is a set of common APIs that developers can use to create applications that work on any social networks, called “ hosts”, that choose to participate. OpenSocial allows developers to access core functions and information at social networks:

Profile Information (user data)
Friends Information (social graph)
Activities (things that happen, News Feed type stuff)

And, more importantly, what precisely seems to be Google answer to Facebook. Google’s approach is new in this sense that instead of launching yet another social network platform, it provides an easy way for developers to create an application that works on all social networks. There are two categories of partners in OpenSocial: hosts and developers. Hosts are the participating social networks, which include Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle. And developers include Flixster, iLike, RockYou and Slide.
MySpace and Six Apart are soon joining Google’sOpenSocial initiative.

OpenSocial addresses the problems of developers learning yet another markup language for every social network platform. In OpenSocial, developers will immediately start building on these APIs to get distribution across the impressive list of hosts above.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Does OutworX have Profile,Community & Widget on Facebook ?

2007-10-26T00:55:00.000-07:00

We all know about Facebook, which is a media, community and application platform that offers a thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and word-of-mouth marketing. Originally kicked off as a destination for students to connect with one another through social networks, the site has expanded to include companies, professional networks and geographic regions. As per one rough estimate, over half of Facebook’s 43 million users visit every day, spend an average of 20 minutes on the site, and view over 54 billion total page views per month. Now, it is impossible to ignore the growing size and scope of Facebook.

Also, the company announced a set of APIs to make integration and support with third-party services even easier for consumers. The Application Platform gives a web team the capability to swiftly deploy a widget.

In addition, Facebook provides you with targeted advertising option to market effectively, where you can provide messages segmented by location, gender, and or preferences.

If you want to know more about Facebook, click here .

If you want to develop a Facebook platform application, click here .

Participate in Poll

Now, we request Team OutworX to participate in the poll, and let us have your mandate on the following points:

What should be Outworx Facebook Strategy?
Does OutworX have its profile on Facebook?
Can we kick off a Community on Facebook?
Shall we deploy a widget/application on Facebook’s Application Platform?
Can you suggest a widget/application to be deployed on the API?

Send in your mandate at oxblog@outworx.com

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation.

Listas: Microsoft's New Social Bookmarking Service

2007-10-22T06:28:00.000-07:00

Listas is a new social bookmarking service from Microsoft Live Labs for you to keep track of content you come across while surfing the Web, and sharing it with other users. It is presently in a “technology preview’ stage for you to play with. It lets users to make their own containers, with all sorts of links, and supplement it with text, images, and RSS feeds, using a WYSIWYG editor.

Microsoft’s Listas is clearly a more advanced effort than TagSpaces, providing users with a bookmarklet to tag any item of their choice. Listas is specifically designed to handle media and collaboration in a better way. Like other social bookmarking services, Microsoft has included a toolbar to help users speed up their list creation.To know more about, Listas click here.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation.

Facebook Vs. MySpace: Race for Superiority

2007-10-22T00:25:00.000-07:00

There is no end in sight so far as race for superiority among social networking sites is concerned , particularly between Facebook and MySpace . If a recent post of TechCrunch can be believed, “MySpace remains the most popular social networking destination”.

As per the new figures released by HitWise, MySpace is losing its market share at least in Australia, as the Facebook razzmatazz goes on. “Facebook has tripled its traffic in the 10 weeks to October 13” as compared to MySpace, which has lost its visitors by 5% during the period.

The post further says that it is tough to grow traffic when you’re already at the top. Though MySpace is soon going to open platform to provide additional services to its members, not much is happening on MySpace front at least for the time being. What goes in favor of Facebook is amazing word of mouth publicity. However, the post accepts with increasing lot of people is using Facebook , maybe it will soon become the only choice in online social networking.

You can read the complete post on the TechCrunch.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

Significance of Web 2.0 lessons from the BBC

2007-10-19T01:01:00.000-07:00

Forrester in one of its recent blog posts discussed how the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) experimented successfully with social computing and adopted various Web 2.0 tools. Today, the BBC has thousands of bulletin board users, wiki users, and hundreds of bloggers. All these tools have added enormous value to the company; however, it was not an overnight success. Have a look at some of the key lessons the BBC learned from its Web.2.0 experiment:

Enterprise Web 2.0 tools can be the catalyst for a more collaborative work environment, and the BBC’s internal forums, one of the Web 2.0 tools, helped the company to be more collaborative than many formal initiatives they had tried in the past.
Experiment, start small, and clarity in ownership have been the mantras of success in a collaborative business environment, as Web 2.0 tools have transformed the traditional hierarchical and command and control structure and prepared the organization for flattening effect of these tools. As the forum environment was collectively owned, people took the responsibility for its sensible use.

Web 2.0 tools breed trust. “The BBC found that when people are given responsibility, right tools, and a little coaching, most of them will do the right thing”. Increasing use of social computing tools also let the people understand the value of their efforts. A transparent policy about the proper use of Web 2.0 tools like blogs and wikis, and make the workforce understand its ramifications, let both employees and management work towards the organic growth of the company.

Challenge yourself, venture where no one has ventured before, has been source of innovation at the BBC. “At the BBC, employees were allowed to post on internal forums about anything they wanted to. Someone started a conversation about the pros and cons of being single. This evolved into something awfully close to a dating service. Managers, as you might imagine, were cringing.” But, producers turned up for producing a program on being single. This was truly an example of delivering true business value out of something seemingly most un-business like preposition.

If interested, you can read the complete post on the BBC here.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation

“Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

2007-10-17T03:19:00.000-07:00

It was an odd night on October 2nd, and I woke up at an ungodly hour of 3:30 AM. After making a cup of tea, listening to BBC TV, I pondered what made me wake up at this moment. I looked at the date, I have just completed my first 6 months in the OutworX family.
The last 3 weeks were hectic, and throughout the appraisal process I came to know most of you better than ever before, yet there is still to know lot more. My thoughts wondered a bit more and I remembered Paul Gaugin’s eternal question – “Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?”

Pondering on the answers, I thought, that answer to the first question is we at OutworX are as diverse as our vast nation, with our own culture, ideas and ambitions, which I had felt during those few hours I spent with all of you during the Appraisal process. However, despite my consistent effort, I couldn’t get any convincing answers to the last 2 questions. I thought, if we need to grow, we better do something to at least seek the answers to those 2.

So, here we are with our own blog wherein we will seek the answers in a joint forum which will eventually give us clarity of thought and goals ahead. Sharing of ideas and thoughts is the best way to learn ourselves and also to let the world know about us. More you express, the more clarity we will get on those 2 answers, which will be a key to our success; at least, it will put us on the right path-a path where we want to go in near future.

The next 6 months I dedicate to 2 important themes about which I will write in my next post. And, those 2 themes are –

a) Excellence in ‘EXECUTION’
b) Communication and Sharing.

I have just chosen the themes, but it is you who will help me paint my canvas.

Now, I welcome all of you to the world of blogosphere, take up your pen and paint- brush and start expressing yourself.

Posted by Goutam Bakshi, VP (Engineering & Technology), OutworX Corporation

Can Facebook be Built in India?

2007-10-17T03:08:00.000-07:00

Recently I had the opportunity to attend a panel discussion on outsourcing, titled – Building Facebook in Bangalore: Outsourcing 2.0 – it had a good mix of panelists – one early stage investor, couple of entrepreneurs, and one CEO of a boutique outsourcing firm. Entire discussion was focused on panelists’ perceptions on differences between culture of Indian engineers and the culture of Web 2.0 companies – and at the end their conclusion was that it is very painful, if not impossible, to build Facebook kind of services in India.

I do not subscribe completely to the conclusion drawn by our panelists. I believe that some of the most attractive and sustainable consumer oriented Web (2.0) services can be built by engineers sitting in India. And, I argue that three cultural traits of Indians, i.e. diversity, adaptability and entrepreneurship, make the Indian minds rightly suited for doing so.

Cultural diversity has never been new to Indians. A country that is built with democratic fiber, rapid globalization, and a very successful and unshackled media, has exposed Indians to far reaching global cultural diversity. Adaptability trait of Indians has trained Indian minds to always listen, understand, and adopt the alternate viewpoints, much more easily than other countries, once this exposure is made. And finally, entrepreneurial Indian mind is always looking for ways to make a “useful” enterprise out of everything new they learn through this exposure.

This makes Indian minds lot more similar to Silicon Valley minds that start and build great Internet businesses.

However, having said that, there must be some reason why panelists’ with their experience with outsourcing were converging on the conclusion that they did. Yes, there are a few reasons, most important of all is picking the Right set of people and motivating them to do work for them. Often people go into outsourcing with misplaced convictions, some of them were clearly resonated by panelists – “I would save 80% in labor cost”, “I would not hire engineers with top school education because attrition is very high in that group” etc.

Second important factor is attention deficiency disorder in Indian engineers. This often goes hand in hand with entrepreneurial trait as well as competitive job market in India. Indian engineers work very hard to reach the 90th milestone but after that their minds often get attracted towards other new things, and they do not give same rigor to last 10 milestones- often referred as “finishing touches” or “final packaging” – this is where their American counterparts building consumer products are clearly differentiable – Americans understand very well that packaging plays a huge role in attracting consumers to products even in a crowded market.

At OutworX, we strongly believe in building the right teams. We hire the right people, and motivate them to highest levels. We do not believe in conventional thinking and do not let misplaced convictions distract us from our goal of building the right teams. We train our engineers to understand that race never ends on 90th milestone, it just gets more competitive in final 10.

We recognize the above three cultural traits of Indian minds, we create an open environment in the organization that exploits these three traits to fullest and further nurtures them in the minds of our engineers.

Yes, Facebook can be built in Bangalore. But what is more important is whether your idea, that is generation ahead of Facebook, can be built in India?

My answer is resounding Yes. Talk to any OutworX engineer to see for yourself how.

Posted by Rajiv Jain, CEO, OutworX Corporation

OutworX Launched OX Blog

2007-10-16T04:40:00.001-07:00

I am truly pleased and, at the same time, overwhelmed to officially announce OX Blog, the corporate blog of OutworX. With a view to improve employee relations, customer relations, and to perk up business processes, we have launched our corporate blog, as blogs have become one of the most economic, efficient and effective platform for both internal and external communications.

OX Blog is our sincere effort to establish a direct relationship with our customers and our employees that build trust and loyalty organically, demonstrate our corporate openness, show our product development expertise and technology capabilities, make obvious our thought leadership, and amplify our corporate message across the industry. And, more importantly, with our corporate blog we are ready to engage in dialogue our clients and market, as well.

In today’s Web 2.0 driven environment, web strategists are relying more and more on blogs and social media platforms for better and real-time interactions with their clients and employees, we too,with OX Blog, are geared up to harness very tangible benefits in the form of customer information and lead generation, increased sales, new business opportunities, higher organic search engine rankings , and in general extra buzz about the company on-line.

In order to accomplish this, creating and maintaining a corporate blog proves to be a very demanding task for your corporate blog evangelist, who is going to have a very tough job in hand, requiring corporate approval for most of the blog initiatives and activities. So the blog journey has flagged off, now enjoy reading, responding, and commenting.

Posted by Praveen Panjiar, Blog Evangelist, OutworX Corporation