AnshuBlog

Desktopless World: Is Your Email Signature Stuck in Desktop Era?

2010-07-18T15:18:00.000-07:00

The world is changing to mobile. Are your email signatures and etiquettes keeping pace? I have been emailing my close friends, one friend at a time, on how their email signatures need to evolve and thought a blog post was over due.

But then I came across an excellent post from the GigaOm network by Dave Clarke - The Email Signature: From Efficient to Overkill - but I found that it still missed a key element - the mobile, desktopless world we live in. So, I am going to take creative liberty and improvise his post to share what I consider to be the key to a great email signature, and the etiquettes.

The key is to have a concise, one line email signature that captures how I can contact you and learn about you.

Here is a typical long email signature and yes, I copied it from a real person's email but changed the identity:

Hi Anshu,

I am following up regarding sale of 7,000 user licenses. Did you get the invoice?

-Linda

Linda P. Smith

Senior Vice President, Boiler Plate Inc.

799 Bounty Dr, Suite 204, Foster City, CA 94107

(919) 945 8344 Phone (919) 848 4843 FAX

Follow me on Twitter @LindaPSmith

Find me at http://www.linkedin.com/in/LindaPSmith

Blogging at http://followmeblog.com

Yes, this is a real signature. And I have seen longer signatures that include other modes of connectivity. So let's look at what is and is not needed in an email signature.

5 Steps to a Great Email Signature

1. No Email Address: This is an obvious one if you think about it - if I am getting an email from you, I already have your email address. Its redundant, get rid of it.

2. Only One Line: Your goal should be to fit your email signature on one line. This is the most important point (and missing from Dave Clarke's great post). Here is my email signature and how it looks in an email:

Hi Dave,

Great post on email signatures. Check out my post and let me know what you think about the improvisations I propose.

Anshu

Anshu Sharma | Vice President | 919.888.4343 (m) | www.anshublog.com

Here's why? Most people these days read your email on a mobile device and every additional line you have makes it harder to scroll and read a thread. Remember, this rule applies even if you are not sending the email from a mobile device - its about the recipient and not the sender.

3. No Fax: I agree with Dave, unless you work in a job where you regularly get faxes, leave it out. Your recipient can always call or email you to ask for it as needed.

4. No Address: Again, same as above. No need to include a mailing address unless you expect people to show up at your office. Make sure your website has that information (and that when people search your company's name on Google Maps or Yahoo! Maps, it shows up).

5. Avoid Social Media Overload: We get it that you have a blog, a twitter account, a great resume on LinkedIn and so on and so forth. Pick one URL that is most relevant and publish that in your signature. If you have been watching TV these days, you will notice that Honda and Toyota ask you to visit www.facebook.com/Toyota etc. and not their corporate website. The call to action to visit you must be simplified. You can then let me connect to other media from that website.

As we keep adding channels from LinkedIn to Twitter; and delivery mechanisms from desktops to iPhones to iPads; and message formats from tweets to texts to emails. Its upto us to help each other maintain a semblance of inbox sanity. A clear concise signature and a clear concise subject line are the first two steps in that direction.

The Linchpin and The New Polymath - The Indispensable Individuals and Organizations

2010-06-06T21:20:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite books of the year is the Linchpin by Seth Godin - it takes you on a journey from how our economy has evolved to a point where its neither necessary nor optimal for you to be a cog in the wheel of a faceless system that treats you as an anonymous resource that can be substituted - we are living in the age where those rules no longer apply, even if most of us don't know that or are in denial because we don't face the fact - more than ever, you are in control of your destiny. The book revolves around how you can be a Linchpin by being good at more than one thing - the power of AND over OR. If you are a writer and that's all you can do, you can be replaced by a slightly cheaper, slightly better writer - but if you are a writer who also is a great speaker or connects with his audience or writes about a passion that cannot be easily copied - then you are the indispensable linchpin. I see Tom Friedman of New York Times as a Linchpin, for example.

The New Polymath by friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani is about companies - which in my mind are nothing but a collection of individuals with a shared purpose - be it the end of software or the beginning of CO2 free automobile industry. The book takes us through a journey of many companies that embody a Polymath - they are not just good at doing one thing (making computers or phones) but are transforming the industries by being good at several - an easy example is Apple.

About Apple, Vinnie writes:

Steve Jobs is explaining one major reason for the iPhone’s success— Apple’s ability to integrate hardware and software engineering: “We realized that almost all—maybe all—of future consumer electronics, the primary technology was going to be software. And we were pretty good at software. . . . None of the handset manufacturers really are strong in software.”

That is a modern polymath at work—integrating multiple modern disciplines. An AND mind-set, not an OR mind-set. Tear down an iPhone 3GS and it shows Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and GPS transceivers and lenses and chips and circuits and batteries—a marvel of miniaturization. It functions as a Web access device, a camera, a music player, a navigation device, a compass, a voice recorder, a modem, and more—and, of course, it is also a phone. That is a polymath as devices go.

He then goes on to write about many companies and organizations that we commonly think of as cutting edge like Google, Apple but also those that you may not read about every day including National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the technologies that come together in the National Hurricane Center to Kleiner Perkins Cleantech. There is also an entire chapter devoted to Salesforce.com (the company I proudly work for) and cloud computing.

But above all, this is a book that uses the examples of these polymath companies to illustrate the key point - you (the company) need to bring together multiple, sometimes unrelated ideas & technologies to bear to create something beautiful, to create something of lasting value, to innovate and to transform - not just industries but people's lives.

As Marc Benioff says in the foreword to the New Polymath-

You have the power to create or join organizations that address society’s issues. You do not have to decide between making a social contribution or building a successful company or career. You can do many things. You can be a Polymath. As Mirchandani says, “it’s time for AND not OR.”

I see the two books - Linchpin and The New Polymath as two sides of the same coin - its only when you create or hire linchpins in your company that you can be a company worthy of being the new polymath.

VMforce: Why? What? How?

2010-04-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

There are a few questions every CIO, developer and business user will ask about VMForce:

What is VMforce?
Why does it matter to me?
How will it work?
Will it help me build new kinds of apps that are social and mobile?

In simple terms, VMforce service will allow every Java developer to write applications that can run in the cloud. VMforce provides out-of-the-box Java deployment in the cloud that is pre-integrated with a relational database, full-text search engine, reporting and analytics, user and identity management., as well as all the services that are needed to build, run, and manage an enterprise-grade business application.

VMforce allows developers to use Spring, the most popular framework for Java applications today to rapidly build an application and instantly deploy it on an enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure. The Spring Framework is backed by the SpringSource division of VMware.

Why does VMforce matter?

CIO

CIOs no longer want to spend 85 percent of their budget just keeping the lights on. They want to unleash innovation and deliver business value. This year's Gartner survey reveals the top ten items on CIOs' budgets. Virtualization and cloud computing are at the very top of the list, which also includes web2.0, mobile, and data & document management.

With the Force.com cloud platform, CIOs today have access to more than 1,000 business applications on the AppExchange that work with our multi-tenant architecture and require no additional development. Indeed, customers are taking advantage of the platform to create custom apps. So far they have built more than 150,000 apps.. But CIO's want to do even more.

If you are a CIO, here are few questions to help to assess the need for VMforce:

How much time and money does it take to build applications today in your current environment?

How can you match the innovation of the Facebook Era and bring it to your enterprise? The Facebook generation is no longer just people just graduated from college but also baby boomers (see this New York Times report).

Are you able to deliver apps that are social and mobile?

How much time and money is wasted in kluging together disparate technologies just to get basic features like search and reporting to work?

What if you could use all your existing in-house Java skill sets but not have to worry about mundane tasks that provide neither business value nor agility?

Business User

If you are a business user, here is a simple set of questions to determine if you need VMforce. Log in to your one or two most heavily used apps and see if the following rings a bell:

Does your application run inside the web browser?
Does your application allow you to search by any keyword across all data that you are allowed to see?
Does your application allow you to write a report that aggregates relevant data? Can you create a dashboard yourself?
Does your application allow you to see your data when you are on an iPhone or a BlackBerry? Can you even connect to your application?
Does your application have a feed for relevant changes to data that you care about just like Facebook?

This is just some of the functionality we take for granted in our personal lives when we use applications like Facebook, Google Gmail, and Amazon.com.Why can't all business applications offer similar ease-of-use and access?

Developer

If you are a developer, here is a list of questions you need to ask about applications you want to build:

Can you start building your application right away or do you need to first install and fuse together ten different pieces?
Are you spending more time writing interesting, new applications or more time simply keeping the old ones running?
Are your OS upgrades, database upgrades, and hardware upgrades managed for you? Or do you have to spend time doing that?
Are you able to write the business logic of the application and then offer features like search and reporting? Or do you have to cobble it all together?
Are you using an infrastructure cloud today? If so, does it offer all the services you need to build your apps and does it automatically manage those for you?
Can you build apps that are mobile and social? How do you do that?
Are you having fun?

Programming used to be fun. We think it can be fun again if you can focus on what you do best and let all the painful stuff like OS and database patch upgrades be managed by the cloud provider.

How?

Java developers today have no clear path to building next-generation cloud applications. They can build on-premise applications and deploy them on legacy stacks, but installing and integrating the different pieces you need to build a truly useful application can be a nightmare. Or, they can take the same jumbled stack and run it in a hosted environment – renting servers by the houror by the month. While Infrastructure as a Service offerings have some benefits if you want to test an application or need spike capacity, they still require the developer and the systems administrators to do a lot of heavy lifting – it's like renting an empty apartment where water, electricity and garbage are provided but you must bring all the appliances, hook them up yourself, and make all the repairs. What you really want is a fully furnished apartment that you can customize to meet your needs and not be responsible for every minor upgrade or fix.

Before VMforce, a Java developer that wanted to run his applications in a cloud had to assemble, configure, integrate, and manage a cumbersome set of disparate pieces ranging from storage to application servers and a database.Even then the developer was only half-way done. Real business applications need more than just an app server and a database. CIOs need to meet demands of end users for features that most of us now take for granted and make it all work with their enterprise architecture. This includes:

Search: Ability to search any and all data in your enterprise apps
Reporting: Ability to create dashboards and run reports, including the ability to modify these reports
Mobile: Ability to access business data from mobile devices ranging from BlackBerry phones to iPhones
Integration: Ability to integrate new applications via standard web services with existing applications
Business Process Management: Ability to visually define business processes and modify them as business needs evolve
User and Identity Management: Real-world applications have users! You need the capability to add, remove, and manage not just the users but what data and applications they can have access to
Application Administration: Usually an afterthought, administration is a critical piece once the application is deployed

Java developers used to either spent days and months to build and integrate these features after they finished writing their business logic and user interface (what most people think of as an "application") or they simply avoided providing this functionality, even though it is critical to business users and to the CIO. Creating it was just too onerous. Developers needed to weave a net of technologies or perform a fusion of unrelated technologies offered as a set of products.And these are just the features of applications users have wanted during the last decade.

During next decade users accustomed to social apps like Facebook will demand features allow real-time collaboration and work in the new desktop-less world of iPhone's and iPad's. As a developer, how will you build these applications? What new technologies will youneed to master? How many servers will you need to connect just to get a feed fromyour latest order tracking up so that it can be served up via iPhone to end users? Why is all this so hard? How can it be easier?

Social Profiles: Who are the users in this application so I can work with them?
Status Updates: What are these users doing? How can I help them and how can they help me?
Feeds: Beyond user status updates, how can I find the data that I need? How can this data come to me via Push? How can I be alerted if an expense report is approved or a physician is needed in a different room?
Content Sharing: How can I upload a presentation or a document and instantly share it in a secure and managed manner with the right set of co-workers?

Image: Force.com Application with Chatter feed

The Force.com platform makes building these data- and process-driven business apps really easy. With Chatter as part of the platform, you get many services out-of-the-box from feeds and updates to secure data access from your iPhone or Blackberry without having to write cumbersome code or connect to various gateways.

Meanwhile, in a land far, far away, VMware is transforming how businesses run their applications. With SpringSource as part of the VMware family, they have an incredible set of technologies to empower developers and CIOs. Java developers have known, used, and love the Spring Framework as a much more productive alternative to traditional technologies.

We have married the two sets of technologies to provide a rich development and runtime platform for Java developers. So let's see what it is comprised of and how it works.

Build

Now, with VMforce, Java developers can use the familiar Eclipse-based SpringSource Tool Suite (STS) development environment (IDE) – leveraging Force.com as a powerful relational database. Force.com provides much more functionality than any on-premise RDBMS from full-text search to analytics to mobile access. Simply, write the code in Java and store your data in Force.com; you then simply drag and drop the app into VMforce in your IDE and your app is now deployed on VMforce.

Run

The application runs on VMforce inside Salesforce.com data centers. VMforce is jointly managed and operated with VMware. The data is stored in Force.com where it is securely managed and backed up. In addition, application data can be searched, accessed on mobile devices, and reported on. The application runs on top of VMware vSphere, vCloud, and the tc Server, an enterprise version of Apache Tomcat.

Manage

Actually, there is not a whole lot to manage. The database, the search engine, the mobile capabilities, the business processes – all are managed for you. This is not your rent-a-server and perform-fusion-on-it cloud. This is true cloud computing – no software and no hardware to manage beyond your application logic.

So, there you have it – an enterprise cloud computing platform for running your Java applications using the popular Spring Framework – all running on technologies from VMware and Salesforce.com – the leaders in cloud computing. All integrated and managed for you. Hello Cloud!

Cloud 2: The Second Revolution

We believe that Cloud Computing is ready for a second revolution. The first one moved applications such as CRM, human resources, and payroll into the cloud and provided functionality similar to on-premise technologies. The next-generation of cloud applications will not only run in the cloud but also offer features and functionality that meet the Facebook imperative of a social, desktopless world. We call it Cloud 2.

VMforce, a service jointly offered by our partner VMware and Salesforce.com, can help you build Cloud 2 apps on a trusted cloud infrastructure (Force.com) using a programming language (Java) and framework (Spring) familiar to millions of developers.

Java Developers can now go from "Hello World" to "Hello Cloud"!

Now What?

If you are a CIO, IT leader, or a business user:

Register at www.vmforce.com or contact your Salesforce.com or VMware account executive
Watch these videos to learn more about Salesforce.com and VMware
You can get started with a Free Force.com Developer Edition and not only build but deploy and run applications at no cost!
Encourage your development team to start building applications using the Free Force.com Developer Edition

If you are a developer:

Register at www.vmforce.com to get the latest updates including availability and beta signup information
If you are a Java programmer and already familiar with Spring, you can learn about Force.com atdeveloper.force.com
You can sign up for the Free Developer Edition, which includes all the great features mentioned earlier and start building Force.com apps and/or learn how to write these apps
If you are a Force.com developer and want to take advantage of Java, click over towww.springsource.com and learn to build Spring-based Java apps by using the SpringSource Tool Suite and all the innovation in the Spring community

Join the conversation with:

Steve Herrod (CTO, VMware)
Rod Johnson (GM, SpringSource Division, VMware)
Parker Harris (EVP Technology, Salesforce.com).

Get ready to be a Cloud 2 app developer with Java!

This what some customers and partners are saying about VMforce. Watch!

5 Big Trends I Missed and You Probably Did Too!

2010-04-24T10:20:00.000-07:00

I had an opportunity to meet an interesting set of Silicon Valley leaders last week, and I realized what a loser I am. Okay, so not really - but I did miss out on a couple of trends while I focused on cloud computing and social - trends closer to what I do for a living. I thought I would look back and give you a list of big trends I missed or didn't pay enough attention to, and what I plan to do about it:

Energy Management (or Carbon Apps): The silicon valley has several startups and big companies rolling out products that help you measure your energy use, monitor it and provide you actionable reports. On the other side, products like Cisco EngergyWise, are making it possible to actually gather such information. While I was aware of startups like Hara, C3 etc. - its only in last few months I have paid attention to this market and realized how big this can be. I initially dismissed it as a simple carbon footprint measuring app most likely sold to meet compliance need. But if you think through the future, you will realize that a fully integrated managed end-to-end solution that tells a company like Pepsi how much energy (and even other resources like water) it uses, where, what it costs and how it can lower its consumption - this could be an enormously useful and valuable product. Next time, I will suspend my skepticism long enough to see what a new market can be and not judge too quickly. Easier said than done though.
Social Gaming and Virtual Goods: I don't play video games, never have. I have always spent way too much time on the computer and thought of gaming as just another way to add to my stiff neck muscles. But in the process, I completely ignored how big Zynga with games like Farmville has become. Business Week reports that it made over $450 million in revenue last year primarily by selling virtual goods. Next time, I see a trend like this that I don't get - I am going to talk to teenagers, friends and spend time trying to understand it.
iPhone: I knew about iPhone and who didn't unless you have been living in Himalayas but since my work device was a Blackberry, I never bought one or used one on a regular basis till a few months ago. This meant I was out of the loop on the latest cool apps. And since I wasn't missing this functionality or that functionality - I wasn't spending time dreaming up killer iPhone apps. (I spend my time dreaming up killer cloud computing platform and apps.) Next time, I am getting the latest device - I already got an iPhone, a Kindle, a new Macbook Pro and am going to get an iPad. Owning cool devices is moving from a cost of living to investment column.
SMS: Yes, I know SMS and have used SMS but I never used it like the teenagers today do. Or spent time understanding how its changing the landscape in emerging markets. SMS is being used for all kinds of novel uses from providing medical advice to checking bank balances especially in places like Africa and India. There was a huge opportunity around this trend and companies like GupShup.com have done well to capitalize on them.
Video over Internet: Youtube seemed like a bad scheme to loose lots of money by splurging on storage and bandwidth and giving it away to consumers for free. I remember struggling graduate students at UNC Chapel Hill (top ranked school in Graphics and Virtual Reality) with streaming videos and trying to optimize the network and the codecs. Seemed like a joke 10 years ago. Between, Netflix and Cisco Telepresence - our lives are changed and will be unmistakably transformed in next 3 to 5 years as Cisco Telepresence like technology becomes cheap enough to be in every living room. What if every XBox, Wii and Samsung TV had telepresence built into it?

The list is even longer - I didn't pay enough attention early on to multi-core processors, SSDs, connected devices revolution, -- the list is long. What trends have you missed?

VMforce is coming

2010-04-13T22:56:00.000-07:00

VMforce is coming!

I am personally very excited. Come check it out at www.vmforce.com

Life Lessons from Warren Buffett Letter and Seth Godin's Linchpin

2010-02-27T12:03:00.000-08:00

I am an avid fan of Warren Buffett letters, and today is my lucky day because we have a new annual letter. And it comes with not just the update for the year but for the benefit of the new shareholders (due to partial stock deal in acquiring the Rail company) - a nice introduction and summary of how Berkshire operates.

I am neither a multi-million dollar investor (yet!) nor an investment guru so I read these letters for two reasons - learning how to think about your business (or business unit for some of us), and personal life lessons. I am also reading Seth Godin's latest amazing book Linchpin that asks a very simple question - Are you Indispensable? And while the two - Warren Buffett's shareholder letter and Seth Godin's book are on very different topics - I think there is a common underlying life lesson.

Let me share my key takeaways from this year's letter in light of Linchpin:

How We Measure Our Selves: Intrinsic or Market Value?

Warren Buffett and his team evaluated several metrics and settled on one. Here is what he has to say:

Our metrics for evaluating our managerial performance are displayed on the facing page. From the start, Charlie and I have believed in having a rational and unbending standard for measuring what we have – or have not – accomplished. That keeps us from the temptation of seeing where the arrow of performance lands and then painting the bull’s eye around it.

This question is equally important in our personal and professional lives. How do you measure your success? Here are some choices:

What car you drive? This one has an obvious appeal - everyone can see it and its hard to lie about it. However, just like a stock price that barely reflects the fundamentals - the car you drive says more about the size of your ego (and I am not going there), your inability to understand depreciating versus appreciating assets, or just taste. A fabulous car that makes you feel good when you drive or pick up your date can be a good thing - but has almost nothing to do with - how much money you make or how wealthy you are or even how interesting a person you are. It actually reflects how much you are willing to spend and how wealthy you want to appear and how boring you would be if you had a Geo Metro. This one was easy, let's talk about some hard questions.
What is your job title? Are you indispensable? I love getting promoted as much as the next guy but I learned a lesson many years ago that this again is an outcome that you have little control over - like the buy/sell decision by a Wall St. investor who just got money selling derivatives to a loser and wanted to 'buy something' or the investor who got a margin call and had to 'sell something'. In many companies, the promotions and titles are like that - in good years, we 'promote people' and in bad years, we have to 'trim'. If you let the management decide how you perceive your intrinsic value, you are going to be giddy when you should probably be scared and vice-versa. A much better question is - What value do I add? - and how can I measure it. In fact, job titles and roles are a limiting constraint that you want to break out of. Just because someone calls you a sales engineer doesn't mean that you can't build a super cool real world application or actually make a sale or help product team decide the next big thing. Superstars do what excites them, and then titles and rewards follow. I have seen this happen too many times in my 12 years of working life. As Seth Godin says in Linchpin, his latest book - Are you Indispensable? And if not, what's holding you back - and job title is a really poor excuse.
Why don't they pay me right? Everyone feels underpaid. And some are actually underpaid relative to the market, the contributions, and the skill set. But this is a wrong metric again - you should be optimizing for the net present value of all future earnings - and not this year's paycheck. If job A allows you to launch a (database) company's SaaS strategy for ISVs but pays less than many other jobs - you should still take that job because over the rest of your life path A will end up helping you make more. This is something very few people realize. As Linchpin author, Seth Godin says in his book-

"You weren't born to be a cog in the giant industrial machine. You were trained to become a cog.
There's an alternative available to you."
and adds..

"Do not internalize the industrial model. You are not one of the myriad interchangeable pieces, but a unique human being, and if you've got something to say, say it, and think well of yourself while you're learning to say it better.
- David Mamet"

I don't want to be a cog no matter how amazing the machine is. Do you?

What We Don't Do?

I am sure we have all read 100s of articles and books on deciding what not to do is as important as choosing what to do. In fact, what not to do turns out to be much more critical. But we as humans are really bad at NOT doing. I devoted an entire post to the topic of "Wisdom of Not". In this year's (FY 2009) letter Warren Buffett writes:

Long ago, Charlie laid out his strongest ambition: “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” That bit of wisdom was inspired by Jacobi, the great Prussian mathematician, who counseled “Invert, always invert” as an aid to solving difficult problems.

Think about it. And let's see how we can apply his wisdom to our lives:

Best at Something. Don't Take That Job or Buy That House: Warren says 'Charlie and I avoid businesses whose futures we can’t evaluate, no matter how exciting their products may be.' When evaluating your life choices, don't do something unless you understand it - better, you grok it. If you lived through the dot-com boom and bought stock in TheGlobe.com and Exodus because your neighbor told you or worse, your neighbor bought it, got rich and tried to hide it from you and then you caught on and bought it!! Then, you probably learned your lesson. For others, the home buying market may have been the teachable moment - as they say it.

We are ALL 'best at something' - Seth Godin points out that if you narrow your niche enough you can find out that while you may not be the best businessman (Warren took that title) or best Golf player (Tiger took that one and the waitress home) - you can often find that you are probably the best Thai food restaurant south of Market Street or the best tool for building web pages that do only one thing (Postlets).
Don't become dependent on the kindness of strangers: Warren Buffett says - 'We will never become dependent on the kindness of strangers'. I would add relatives and friends too. And for businesses these days, you can barely rely on bankers leave alone strangers. This means be a thoughtful spender (I didn't say frugal), invest if you can and make lots and lots of trusted relationships where you give. Strangers, distant relatives and surface-level friends may not be there for you when you need them but people that you were good to will often be there.

That's enough food for thought for a day's blog post. The Warren Buffett letter and Seth Godin's book have 100s of such insights if you look for them and have the right attitude towards it. Try it, and let me know what you think.

And don't be a stranger. Click on the link on my blog site to subscribe - and leave me a comment.

Days of Our Lives - On IIT Life, Indian Education, and Geekdom

2009-12-26T15:29:00.000-08:00

Like to wish all my readers, a very warm happy holidays and merry Christmas. I don't watch a lot of Bollywood cinema but yesterday I went with friends to go see 3 Idiots - a movie about lives of 3 engineering college students during the four years in school and then the life afterwards. Having spent my formative 4 years at IIT Kharagpur, the oldest and best (in my completely biased and probably untrue opinion since they are all awesome) of the Indian Institutes of Technology - I was transported back more than a decade in time.

Scene from movie 3 Idiots (courtesy: www.santabanta.com)

Let me summarize what I learned from the movie about how life and aspirations are evolving in India, the effects of the global pipes (Cisco calls it the Human Network), and what this should mean for education here in my adopted country USA (or the country that adopted me!).

Geeks are Cool (in India)
While people definitely look upto the likes of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Sergey & Brin, there are no 'highest grossing' Hollywood movies depicting the lives of MIT or Stanford college students. The college movies that do well here are movies about getting laid, smoking weed or Spring Breaks. I enjoy those movies too, and there is the occasional 'Good Will Hunting'. But all in all, the celebrated lifestyle is that of either the rich or the jock. This means if I am a kid growing up, I want to be cool - and the route to being cool is to chase money & fame, not invention and entrepreneurship. The heroes in India are no longer the Bollywood stars (only), the younger generation looks up to the engineer entrepreneurs like Nandan Nilekani of Infosys. As Wall St Journal commented recently -

Twenty years ago, no one could have imagined that four of the 10 richest chief executives in the world could be Indian. But Forbes recently released a top-10 list showing how much India has changed. Lakshmi Mittal, the steel tycoon, was ranked second, followed by Mukesh Ambani (sixth), Anil Ambani (seventh) and Azim Premji (ninth); Warren Buffett came in first.

and -

The heroes of the old India were film stars, cricket players and, perhaps, freedom fighters and politicians. The heroes of the new India include businessmen. In 2003, when MTV India held a poll among its predominantly young viewers to pick the Icon of the Year, Anil Ambani won. The people he beat included filmstar Shah Rukh Khan and cricket hero Sachin Tendulkar.

This transformation was clear in the movie. The "hero" of the movie was a kid who enjoyed learning for learning's sake - to discover & invent, despised learning by rote - the curse of India education for decades, and goes on to teach kids. And yes, he gets the girl (the one in the orange Sari above).

Education, Education, Education
Nandan Nilekani talks about this at length in his book Imagining India - that India has a demographic dividend but for it to pay off, the country must invest in education. Whether the government is doing this well or not, the individuals definitely are. As the over-the-top melodramatic scenes depicted with tongue-in-cheek humor in the movie show, the 3 kids come from diverse economic backgrounds with the 2 poorest coming from families where there biggest (and probably only investment) is in the future of their kids. This is true in America too - I know of several families where college education is where all the savings go. But in India, 2 trends have made this remarkable - 15 years ago, most colleges were government run and so you either got in (1 in 1000) or you had to go attend a lame school teaching you curricula that was relevant 30 years ago. Today, there are private schools that will cost you an arm and a leg but teach you what you want to learn - computers, telco, management skills - and in English.

The aspirations have changed too. In two ways, with a diverse (and somewhat less noticed in the west) economy - Indian students no longer are confined to careers in medicine and engineering but can go be newscasters, photographers, animators, storytellers ... and earn a decent living doing that. Secondly, the poorer sections of the society are no longer willing to live with words like fate & destiny but are doing all they can to change it - by sending their kids to the best schools they can afford - which is far worse than most schools here but better than no education at all.

Family and Friends
Christmas is a great time to reflect on the year gone by, and as I watched this movie with a group of closest friends - I felt blessed and grateful. I remembered my IIT buddies from days at Kharagpur (India) where we had little in terms of conventional comforts - 100 degrees heat in summer was common with no air-conditioning (except in computer labs), erratic water supply, and dorm food nightmares. But we had friends, lots and lots of them. The bonds we formed are till this day some of the closest.

So as I close out this year, I am thankful to IIT for the education it gave me, the friends I found there, the friendships and hospitality of my adopted country (thank you North Carolina and California) ... and to my mentors. One of these days, I will write a post about the 7 mentors that changed my life.

Till then, go get yourself a (subtitled in English) copy of 3 Idiots (Netflix queue), or better still go watch it (with subtitles) at a movie theater near you.

Imagining India with Nilekani of Infosys

2009-12-03T20:21:00.000-08:00

I am on a 2 week annual vacation to India. I have often written about seismic changes in Indian reality, realty and perceptions. On this trip, I came across Nandan Nilekani's book - Imagining India. A thick tome but a book that captures how India has transformed, is transforming and the challenges and opportunities for its future transformation. Anyone looking to understand India must read this book.

I am not going to try to summarize the book but here are some key points that touched me and where I agree with him almost entirely:

The Demographic Advantage
Growing up in India, you were deluged with the message - India is overcrowded and getting worse - and that the reason we could not get a telephone connection in time (it literally took months if not years) was because there were too many people; the reason our roads were always poor was because there were too many people; the reason only 1 in 1000 people could get into an engineering school of choice was because there were too many people. And the solution was to prevent "The Population Bomb" from exploding. This did not make sense to me as I saw crowded cities like Delhi and Bombay offer better lifestyle than my grandparent's villages in Himalayan foothills. And, from the limited exposure to foreign media - I could see that places like Japan and New York had more people per square mile but did not have starving populations. Something was wrong with the picture.

In reality, the problem was not population but the system governing the population - a thinly veiled socialist rule that tried to optimize our lives every 5 years in the famous five year plans. Nothing much changed except the face of the politician that claimed to be solving all of our problems through the magic of socialism while fighting off evil capitalism and foreign hand in trade. This translated into very tangible effects on me and my family's middle-class existence:

No Books: While we were upper middle class by Indian standards, I distinctly remember that while I went to the best Indian private schools (some Catholic schools, some private run) - our textbooks were rather poor. And for a nerdy kid like me wanting to learn about everything from gravity to super nova, the only books I could lay my hands on were highly subsidized Russian books sold at Russian book fairs.
No Car: Our first car was a Fiat (that was based on a 1950's design) bought my father in 1988 for what was at that time his one year's salary. Imagine that - it would be the equivalent of an upper middle-class American paying $100,000 for a 2009 model car based on a 1960's design.
No Phones: When I went to undergraduate school 2000 miles from my hometown (like going from East Coast to West Coast for college), I had no communication with my family for entire semesters except a solitary phone call from a manned phone booth. These phone booths usually had 2 hour long lines and a 10 minute call could cost you hundreds of rupees.

I can go on and on about lack of basic medical care facilities that nearly killed me while studying at India's premier engineering school, or 'express' trains that took 28 hours to traverse 1500 kms with average delays of 4 to 12 hours.

Things are Better

Today, everything has changed and while India is far from perfect (or even functional) - its like India went from a 1900s America to 1950s America in 15 years in stead of 50. That's quite an achievement.

This transformation is creating massive opportunities at the bottom of the pyramid. These range from somewhat well-known $2,000 Tata car to small innovations like single use shampoo packets that cost $0.10 (ten cents). The impact of a ten cent shampoo or detergent for cleaning clothes is not to be underestimated. It transforms lives by giving the poor dignity.

Telco

If I had to pick two industries that have transformed the most and probably had the greatest impact on lives of people - it would be telecom and banking.

India went from 5 million in 1991 (mostly landlines) to over 500 million telephones (mostly mobile). In a nation of about 1 billion people, that means teledensity increased 100x. While these statistics are amazing, the impact on people's lives is even more so.

My Neighborhood Electrician

Everytime my Dad needed an electrician for an odd job around the house, till 10 to 15 years ago - he would walk over to the neighborhood shopkeeper that sold and repaired transistor radios and televisions and had a few people on his payroll. He would dispatch one of his men and collect the fees from my Dad. The electrician that actually fixed the wiring or repaired our television (yes, the socialist era TVs needed fixing on a regular basis) would get to keep a very small percentage of the fees.

Today, the electrician does not work for the middleman. He has more than one mobile phone and we simply dial him directly. He shows up promptly, charges us a more reasonable fee and gets to keep all of it. This has at least 3 beneficial effects:

No middleman means he gets to keep 100% of revenue and not 20% to 50%. This essentially at least doubles his income.
Being able to respond to calls while working, he claims he now visits 2 to 4 times more customers a day.
We, the customers, get immediate and personalized service which is greatly more accountable.

So, the electrician that was making about $25 to $50 per month now makes $500 to $1000.

All of this is changing millions of lives. Watch Hans Rosling's TED India talk to see how rapidly this change is happening.

And watch the following video to see India's glorious technological past - water harvesting techniques perfected hundreds of years ago showcasing great engineering feats.

Weird Myths in Business - Guest Post by Steve Greene

2009-11-10T17:39:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons its fun to work at salesforce.com is the extremely creative, talented people that are willing to question absurdities that other companies quietly accept.

Steve Greene, a colleague and our vice president of program management and Agile development put together some myths that many of us are easily led into believing. See how many you believe. I found out that I was behaving like I believed in a few.

View more presentations from Steve Greene.

Windows 7 Year Gap and Why They Can't Catch Up

2009-11-01T17:57:00.000-08:00

Finally, Windows 7 is out and reviews are mixed but better than Vista - generally seen as vast improvement over Vista (which was accepted by Steve Ballmer as work in progress or worse). But this is not what this post is about. Even if Microsoft built products that were really good with killer features, it would still lag behind many competitors by up to 7 years.

The problem is Cloud Computing. If you look at some of the features Microsoft plans to release with Microsoft Outlook 2010 next year, they are pretty cool - conversations like GMail, search like Xobni, etc. Pretty awesome stuff. But when will users get to see this new product on their work and home computers - at least 3 or 4 years out. And so, if Microsoft recognized a killer feature like 'converstaions' in Gmail, and decided to add it to the product last year (2008), the product will be released in 2010 and by the time people replace their PCs and corporations adopt the latest as 'standard' - it will be 2013 to 2015 for many. Many of us are still running Windows XP 8 years after release (released 2001) even on new machines.

This is a huge problem for Microsoft. And why can't they break out of it? The one time selling model which collects all license fee upfront. Ideally, Microsoft would keep enhancing its products continuously offering new features (like cloud vendors of today do) enhancing the customer experience and keeping it fresh. But then no one would upgrade. So you are stuck 'creating demand' for your product upgrade by lagging behind. It works when you are the only game in town, and everyone else is bound by the same rules. Enter Cloud Computing.

Cool Outlook 2010 Search Feature: Too late to catch up with GMail?

Imagine if your existing Outlook started supporting faster search or conversations - wouldn't that change your perception of the products and the company?

So here is the conundrum for Microsoft - even if they respond to consumer demands and push out great features, they will still lag cloud computing vendors by 7 years. May be that's why they call it Window 7 - it has features that are frankly 7 years too late!

And this problem is not limited to Microsoft. Oracle and SAP face the same challenge from cloud vendors like Salesforce.com, Taleo, Omniture, SuccessFactors,etc. Fusion has been half-way done since 2006, and there are no signs of when customers will actually get to buy and implement - and then the users will finally see features like integrated search and analytics.

What do you think?

Update: Vinnie asks is Microsoft is winning the battle and losing the war, along similar lines.

Berkeley Haas >PLAY Conference, Digital Media, Diwali and Obama

2009-10-17T11:24:00.000-07:00

I know that's a mouthful of a title - but let me help connect the dots (or clouds).

I will be talking about Cloud Computing, educating the future CEOs about the distinction between water vapor (thanks to on-premise CEOs), vapor products (thanks traditional vendors), private clouds (thanks disharmony) and real cloud computing!

Its a great day outside. Its Diwali - a show of lights celebrating all that's good - but Obama can explain this better using digital media than I can using words.

So as I venture to engage in a discussion on Cloud Computing at the Digital Media Conference, I can't help but wonder how else - Cloud (Youtube) and Digital Media (Online Video) would Obama be able to reach a micro audience (okay a billion people but only 2% of the population in USA) without the two - Cloud & Digital Media.

Look forward to talking to a lot of young (and old) MBA students and others attending >PLAY.

http://www.playconference.org/panels.html#panel6

Write me your thoughts.

Cloud Computing is Difficult For CEOs To Understand

2009-10-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

Over the last week, there has been a resurgence in problems very intelligent people are having with the term 'Cloud Computing '. This problem is likely to worsen this week. So, what's going on ?

Upton Sinclair used to say- "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

I think - "It is difficult to get an on-premise CEO to understand something, when his maintenance revenue depends upon his not understanding it!", call it the Cloud Computing Sinclair Corollary.

For the rest of us that don't have that problem, its rather easy - an application that works on the internet without requiring you to install lots of software or buy hardware.

If you need further help, here is a video (hat tip Vinnie):

Next time you hear a CEO explain how he's finding it difficult to differentiate between decades of on-premise software and hardware, and cloud computing - give him a hug. He just can't understand - the maintenance revenue prevents it.

India Investment & Enterpreneurship Event with Mayfield VC and Former Minister

2009-10-07T21:17:00.001-07:00

I wanted to extend an invitation to the blog readers and discount (code: INDIA for 50% off) to an interesting upcoming event for those looking to do business in India.

On October 12th, 2009, join key influencers, and opinion makers at "Advantage India." Explore Investment, Business, and Career opportunities in India. Discuss industry issues candidly, debate new ideas and trends, ask questions, and share opinions. Network with technology executives, venture capitalists, investors, and intellectuals.

An award-winning journalist, scholar, politician - Dr. Arun Shourie, Former Minister, Information Technology, Disinvestment and Communications, India;
India's (Former) Lead Banker who co-chaired a G20 Working Group - Dr Rakesh Mohan, Former Deputy Governor, Reserve Bank of India;
The Silicon Valley VC who has the Midas touch - Mr Navin Chaddha, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund;
One of the most influential investors in technology - Mr. M.R Rangaswami, Co-Founder, Sand Hill Group.
V.I.P. Guest: Mr. Jamshyd Godrej, Managing Director, Godrej & Boyce Mfg. Co. Ltd.

If you are interested in what's happening in India and how to do business there, I certainly recommend this panel discussion.

More information here. Location: PlugNPlay Tech Center, Sunnyvale (Monday Oct 12th at 6.30pm).

Go Check it Out

2009-09-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

Its so easy to build websites on Force.com Sites - and its free.

I usually don't post stuff related directly to my work but I am really excited about this capability and the easy to understand video our marketing team put together.

No More Foreign Engineers and Scientists in Healthcare

2009-09-05T21:52:00.001-07:00

This is a plea to President Obama and the Congress. Let us prevent foreign engineers and scientists from working at any healthcare related business - healthcare machine makers (X-Rays, CT-Scanners, etc.), software makers (diagnostics etc.), pharmaceutical reserearch and many others. After all, none of them are certified & regulated engineers and scientists - we can't trust their foreign degrees and the decision makers who hire them - these people could end up degrading our healthcare and hurting, even killing millions of us Americans.

After all, we don't let foreign doctors practice medicine on our people - that would just let our poor people get cheaper healthcare over Skype from a doctor in Phillipines or India for about $5 to $10. We need regulation and stricter standards that the union (AMA) and federal government decides - not to create an artificial scarcity of doctors and keep pays and costs sky high - but to protect us!

Yes, we need the same kind of regulation for engineers and scientists. We need some computer science union like IEEE to be able to regulate who writes the website for a Google Health or Microsoft Healthvault.

Only by having regulation, can we help our scientists and engineers in healthcare make respectable salaries ($300K and higher) rather than the globally competitive market rates. (Learn more about how AMA helps do the same for doctors here.)

This madness must stop, now!

(For those challenged in art of humor, this is a sarcastic post to comment on how we have created an inflated cost structure and restricted supply by letting a union decide who can diagnose my flu.)

Facebook and Twitter - What Are the Killer Apps All About?

2009-07-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

Facebook - the future of social networking. Twitter - the future of future of social networking, and of media. You know the story of how these are changing everything from how teenagers communciate, tweeners look for and are denied jobs to how those on Social Security are turning to Social Neetworking.

We know the commonly discussed reasons why Facebook and Twitter rock:

Strong Connections: Stay in touch with people frequently. Know when they change jobs, or even just change at night to go to bed. Unlike email where people can drift away after a while of no direct contact - in the world of Facebook and Twitter, unliess you explicitly de-friend someone, its forever. More than marriage.
Loose Connections: Look Ma, no strings. Have your connections and ignore them too. Unlike email, you have no obligation to answer my updates or tweets. Live and let live but watch.
Asynchrnonous: Unlike IM and chat rooms, where we all have to be there together to chat - in Twitter and Facebook - its like a chatroom except you don't have to be connected simultaneously. Geeks call it async communication.
Synchronous & Real-time: I am sure you are noticing a trend here - the benefits of Facebook & Twitter emanate from both properties and their corresponding anti-properties. Stephen Hawking will shoot me now. But, Twitter & Facebook do update my status page in (almost) real-time as you tweet or update your Facebook.
Mobile: Its on mobile. iPhones. 'nuf said.
Discovery: Discover friends. Friends of friends. Strangers with funny pictures. Creeps. You get the idea.

But I think many, if not all, of these attributes are also true of your email & im (short for instant messaging). After all, by using a combination of email and im - I can write to you in a disruptive manner requiring real-time response or can write to you in a non-desruptive manner. Mailing lists, chat rooms, blogs all round out the other many modes of communication. Then, what makes Facebook and Twitter special?

What is it about Facebook and Twitter?

I suggest that the key reason Facebook (and to a lesser extent Twitter) are so popular is because of the following:

No Spam: Since only selected friends who I have accepted as part of my network (or have chosen to follow on Twitter) can invade my inbox (or Wall) - your Facebook and Twitter feeds don't include the following- Nigerian Uncle leaving a Million Dollars, Male Enhancement Magic Pills, Canadian Drugs, and Hot Nannies. This functionality can also be achieved in email if you actively maintain a white list (a list of people that you always accept email from) and send all email not from the white list to trash. Essentially, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter help us create Gated Communities.
But its Coming: This was true so far. But as with all new modes, eventually man (and monkey) figure out a way to use the machines for un-intended purposes. A Canadian man was recently fined over $800 Million for compromising Facebook users' accounts and then using them to spam. Twitter search will slowly become worse as more fake online identities get created and watching #IranElection as the news developed made me realize that spam is here on Twitter.

So while Faceboook and its ilk have many features and functions that keep us logged in for hours- its the 'gated community' feel that provides an escape from the spam hell that my Yahoo! mail and other email accounts of yore have become; that I value the most.

What do you think? Leave a comment here or follow me and talk to me at http://www.twitter.com/anshublog

Enterprise Software Gotcha

2009-07-18T16:49:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin, one of my favorite reads, recently had a nice little post about how product marketing tries to trick people into believing that their products are more than they seem - bigger, cheaper,stronger, healhier and so on. Rather than working with what value the product can actually deliver the marketing folk get carried away and like to claim more than what they can deliver.

He points out the example of an item on sale that looks bigger than it is - and then adds:

"There are lots of things you can do to make the sale. They often are precisely the opposite of what you should do to generate word of mouth. I know, you can't have word of mouth unless you have a sale, but a sale that leads to pain is hardly worth it.

My rule of thumb is this: every person you turn away because your product or service isn't right for them turns into three great customers down the road. Every bad sale costs you five."

Enterprise Software industry suffers from the same disease. Traditional vendors who are only in it for the initial sale will often tout features that are half-baked, or try to blur the line between products (WebShpere & Fusion do this well) so that the customer has almost no idea what is in a particular product versus a feature in one of the products of the family.

With SaaS, its easier - you get what you see. Most customers start out with mini deployments or trials actually experiencing the product before they make much larger commitments.

I don't know about you but I want to be able to see how big the bowl is before I try to make a cake in it. Mmm.. Cake.

Strategy: On Death of Newspapers and Impending Dealth of Airlines

2009-04-23T18:18:00.000-07:00

I don't think too many airline CEO's read my blog. I do know a few tech CEO's that do read it. Let's pretend to be an airline CEO - I want you to answer this question:

What business are you in? Flights or Meetings?

Just as newspapers thought they were in the business of gathering news and printing news papers; the music industry CEO's thought they were in the business of vinyl records, tapes or CDs; many airlines appear to think they are in the business of ensuring flights are running on time, tickets are sold and customers pay extra for baggage (monetization). I think they are wrong.

Serving Customers with 50 year old technology - the flying machine (Image)

Cisco Telepresence is to airlines what Google Search was to newspapers and classfieds. And airlines have a choice - they can rethink their mission and realize that what customers are looking for is not flights or tickets or baggage fees but meeting business counterparts face to face, connect with family and go on vacations. The visionary airline CEO would then try to see how Telepresence would impact this market. And then take steps to re-imagine their business.

Here are things I would do if I were the CEO of Mythical Air:

Embrace Telepresence as another mechanism for people to meet and declare that we would help customers with this.
Create "Mythical Air" Telepresence Lounges - in major cities and smaller towns. These lounges will include Cisco Telepresence.
Mythical Air Lounges in airports will also include Cisco Telepresence - while this may threaten our 'flights' business but in reality our customers would be happy - if they are late, they can connect via telepresence. Even when the flights are on time, they can leverage time in the lounges doing business - and learning how useful this system is. So, next time they are likely to buy Mythical Air Telepresence trips rather than Airline trips.
Tie up with major hotel chains to partner and run Mythical Lounges inside hotels. Now our customers can run global meetings by meeting regionally in hotels.
Work with Expedia, Orbitz and others to list Mythical Telepresence among the 'flight options' in results. So, when a customer types in Sacramento to London - the results include flight from Sacramento to San Francisco and 'telepresence flight' from San Francisco to London (and offer a hotel in San Francisco).

Imagine if,

Newspapers had co-opted internet search and publishing
Music industry had co-opted internet delivery

Let's see if any airlines re-define their mission statements and co-opt this innovation. Or do they all end up fighting this trend and each other for the shrinking market. Blue ocean or red ocean?

(If you find this post interesting and would like to be a valued reader, please subscribe by email by entering your email in the right-hand top corner. We don't spam, ever. Or you can subscribe by RSS.)

McKinsey Report Misses The Mark on Cloud Computing

2009-04-17T00:03:00.001-07:00

Couple of McKinsey guys have kicked up a micro storm in the Cloud Computing world with a presentation that claims that moving your data center into the cloud is not advantageous for IT. I am quite confident that others at McKinsey would differ - perhaps those presenting at another conference that is not catering to a server-hugging data center audience.

As TechCrunch summarizes - 'The report paints cloud computing as over-hyped and maintains that cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) overcharge large companies for a service the companies could do better on their own. The study also says that while cloud computing is optimal for small and medium-sized businesses, large companies will spend less if using traditional data centers. Virtualization is the optimal way to go, says McKinsey, and by implementing virtualization in-house, corporations can reduce costs when factoring in depreciation and tax write-offs. Virtualization, which McKinsey says can boost server utilization to 18% from 10%, lets you treat one machine like many, by carving the servers into many virtual engines, so that software can maximize power from one machine and add scalability. Not only is this cost-effective for companies, but cloud computing takes advantage of virtualization.'

I believe that this report misses the whole point when it comes to Cloud Computing.

What McKinsey duo did was assume CIOs take the same exact crap software and run it on exact same excessive number of nodes provisioned for the full month at peak capacity numbers - and move that to the Cloud. That's just wrong!

This is even worse than ASP model where at least the vendors provide 'managed services' and even then it was a big failure. The real value of cloud computing kicks in when you leverage a full application platform (such as Force.com) to either buy applications written to take advantage of a multi-tenant platform or write your applications on this new stack.

Why McKinsey Report is Flawed?

There are some key things that the McKinsey duo ignored:

1. Elasticity vs Provisioning for Peak Load: They assumed that if you buy 50 servers internally, you would rent 50 servers in the cloud for the full 30 days a month. In reality, the rent by the hour approach means you could be renting an equivalent of 1/2 to 1/10th the amount.
2. Elasticity for Unmet Peak Load: How does a CIO provide a 50 node cluster for one small group in the company that wants to analyze last 17 years of demographic data? By saying "No, we can't do that. It will cost $7 million." With an external platform, he can say yes, and pay for 50 nodes for 3 hours.

These two apply for Cloud infrastructure providers like Amazon Web Services. There are additional economies of scale that kick in when you look at multi-tenant application platforms such as Force.com. With a multi-tenant platform, you are now talking about having a highly optimized environment where multiple customers are leveraging the same set of servers (and cost of maintenance, upgrades, security, etc.). The McKinsey duo does make a distinction between Cloud infrastructure and Cloud services but omits any mention of the advantages of moving the applications to Cloud Service platforms (in their jargon).

Credit Where Credit is Due
As a blogger, it is my duty to throw gasoline on a burning fire and not rain on the cloud parade! Pardon my puns. But to their credit, the McKinsey duo (which I assume does not reflect opinions of all of McKinsey) does make some points that I agree with.

First, the private cloud is not a magical solution to your data center challenges. They suggest - Rather than create unrealizable expectations for “internal clouds,” CIOs should focus now on the immediate benefits of virtualizing server storage, network operations, and other critical building blocks.

Second, virtualization is a powerful tool for making your existing applications in the data center use fewer resources.

Third, public clouds are providing business benefits to SMEs. I concur. But I believe and large organizations like Cisco, Dell, GE, etc. that have been cited for using SaaS applications are proof in my view negate the notion that cloud computing is somehow not enterprise ready. A look at the customer list of vendors like Google, Salesforce.com, Taleo, Workday etc. can prove otherwise.

My Enterprise Irregular friends and other bloggers have already pitched in with their opinions.

Deal Architect's Vinnie writes - I would normally ignore yet another “overview” of clouds, but being McKinsey it will get read by executives and several of their generalizations about “not being cost effective for large enterprises” are just plain misleading.

Appirio's Balakrishnan maps out the Cloud with infrastructure, platform and applications as three different tiers with their own pros and cons. He also questions McKinsey report's primary topic - moving existing apps to the cloud, and concludes with - We have seen the benefits of cloud platforms first-hand at over 150 customers, including companies like Avago, Genentech, Japan Post, Qualcomm, Starbucks and Dolby. Once customers experience the benefits of cloud platforms - quantifiable savings, rapid time to value and innovation that drives the business, they seldom want to go back. This is why 90%+ of customers plan to increase their spending on cloud platforms. In these economic times, there is no greater vote of confidence for cloud platforms than that!

Nick Carr is much more postiive on the report but even he finds that the report entirely ignored SaaS applications - 'The cloud also, of course, provides a way to tap into powerful software-as-a-service applications that can provide substantial savings, not only in equipment and labor but in licensing and maintenance fees, over the cost of installing an in-house application. (The McKinsey analysis ignores those opportunities.)'

I expect the blogosphere to continue this discussion and I hope the discussion will include the missing pieces from the report - benefits of Cloud Platforms and Cloud Applications - and not just focus on infrastructure Clouds.

Update: Google has an excellent post on this titled 'Official Google Enterprise Blog: What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing'.

Take Twitter and FriendFeed to Go with Feedly Mini

2009-02-11T00:37:00.000-08:00

Feedly today announced its launching Feedly Mini - a floating toolbar that shows up at the bottom of your web browser as you visit a website - and lets you engage in conversations via FriendFeed and Twitter. For those who don't know what Feedly is - it combines the best of RSS Reader, a magazine-like interface (think Newsweek home page) and makes it come alive in the context of conversations via email, Twitter and Friendfeed.

Let's take an example - reading the New York Times editorial page. While the New York Times has a comments section - those comments are from people that I don't know and have no background on. Before Feedly Mini, I would have to post this on my Twitter page or FriendFeed to start a conversation with my friends - and do so manually. But with Feedly Mini, as shown below, a small non-intrusive toolbar floats up at the bottom of the page and in less than few clicks - I can discuss the bailout with my friends.

What does the Feedly Mini do?

One killer feature (shown below) is the ability to Tweet a blog post or web page directly from that page with less than 2 clicks. I simply click on the floating toolbar and add my comments and it shows up in my Twitter stream. Easy.

Re-Tweet From Feedly

The other feature that I really like is the ability to see what people are saying on FriendFeed about the blog post you are reading (or a newspaper webpage - like a New York Times Editorial page) and to be able to join the conversation directly in-context (see below).

Join FriendFeed Conversation from Feedly Mini

Summary
As the web goes from a publish subscribe (one-to-many) model to a conversational (many-to-many) style, tools like Feedly Mini will increasingly be important. Just as most of us no longer log into our computers or iPhones without turning Yahoo! or Google instant messaging on, the browsing of the internet will no longer be a lonely experience. You get to participate in a conversation in-context and with people that you are friends with. Of course, the term friend is loosely defined here. Very loosely. But that's a topic for a future post.

Try Feedly Mini out, and let me know what you think. And remember, comments are to bloggers what flowers are to women!

Update: Robert Scoble writes about Feedly Mini - New Feedly combines Google Reader, friendfeed, Twitter in great way for social network addicts.

Update 2: A commenter told me to forget about Twitter and focus on my day job. Here is a post on how Dell sold $1 Million worth of equipment via Twitter.

Multi-tenancy is Better for You - the Customer

2009-01-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

Lately, the topic of multi-tenancy and single tenancy has again come up for discussion. A leading on-premise vendor recently argued in favor of single tenancy by saying: "The bad thing with multitenancy is when it goes down, you guys write about it on the front page. I don't want to be on the front page for anything bad."

Let me explain what this means for the customer versus the vendor by using an analogy.

Airplanes carry a lot of people. When they go down or even have a small scare, they make front page news. This, over the years, has made aircraft manufacturers like Boeing and airlines that run them prioritize safety and trust over every other bell and whistle feature.

Motorcycles are different. One goes down, a person dies. But it doesn't make frontpage news.

So what's safer? Which mode of transport is actually safer for you?

(Hint:Airplanes are one of the safest means of transport while motorcycles are the least safe - even though airplanes make headlines.)

Trust First

Multi-tenant software businesses work very hard to keep the systems up and running, to keep them safe, to earn and retain the trust of their customers - prioritizing it over bells and whistles. It took Google all of less than an hour to recover from the badware problem - because many of its customers were simultaneously impacted - and fixing one customer's problem meant fixing it for everyone. Imagine, a similar problem in your favorite OS, and how many days of patching and fixing it would take to deliver the fix.

Single-tenant software is good for the vendor. Your instance goes down, you and only you are impacted - even if its down for hours or days. The vendor can resolve the issue at the earliest or at leisure - with no risk to its own business either way! Your fortunes are tied to only yours - not the vendor's and not of others.

As Dirty Harry would say: Do you feel lucky? Well do ya punk?

Barry Diller is Right - Stop Laying Off People

2009-01-31T15:56:00.000-08:00

Barry Diller speaking at the Reuters Media Summit opined that companies with healthy revenues and profits should not add to the economic misery by laying off people at exactly the wrong time - when its hard to find other jobs.

There is a certain perversity to the recent layoffs. In good times, smart companies like Google and Microsoft like to hoard talent - living up to the classic "Let's get the right people on the bus and we can then figure out where to go" theme. And it has served them well, mostly. Most graduates of my engineering college that I knew ended up at Microsoft and Oracle in early to mid 90s and this decade every one seems to have landed at the Googleplex (except the really really smart ones ;) ).

The current economic crisis has adversely affected every industry - even the one's that have little to do with mortgages, credit default swaps, or derivatives. But it seems like its the season to cull the ranks, stop questionable projects and trim the fat. While every business deserves the right to manage its workforce, it does seem rather cynical to be trimming fat that many businesses have been carrying for years. The question is not why but why now?

As Barry Diller points out:

The idea of a company that’s earning money, not losing money, that’s not, let’s say ‘industrially endangered,’ to have just cutbacks so they can earn another $12 million or $20 million or $40 million in a year where no one’s counting is really a horrible act when you think about it on every level. First of all, it’s certainly not necessary. It’s doing it at the worst time. It’s throwing people out to a larger, what is inevitably a larger unemployment heap for frankly no good reason.

Are businesses laying off people because they don't have to justify the lay offs? Is it because sacrificing 3% of your work force is the equivalent of modern day sacrifice to please the Gods (on Wall Street)? Is it because what you as an executive are supposed to do?

My question is - what exactly do these companies stand for?

This question goes to core of long-term viability and building great companies. When I think of Google, I know it stands for 'organizing the world's information and making it easily available'. When I think of Apple, I know it stands for products that work and are appealing to the end-user. When I think of Dell, I think of getting value for my money and good quality products without unnecessary frills. The failure of Yahoo!, me thinks is that it has failed to find a mission for itself - and is in a me too race with Google. This is what the new CEO Bartz must fix first. Coming back to question of mass layoffs, its time businesses tried in good faith to find a way to keep as many people gainfully employed as possible.

So while the executives at most companies are asking one hard question: how many people can I lay off without adversely impacting my prospects? Let me suggest a few others:

What does our company stand for?
Does my product deliver real value so that customers will buy even in dire times? If not, why not?
How many board members and executives are delivering 10 or 100x what my average sales engineer is delivering? If not, why is he still here?
If I cut the salary of my top 10% earners by 20%, how many fewer people can I fire? How many more can I hire?
How do I take advantage of the current sale on talent? Buy low sell high?
Can I tweak my compensation package to reflect what's more dear today (cash) and what's less valuable (stock)?

What do you think?

(All opinions expressed here are personal. Read full disclaimer on my blog website.)

Satyam CEO Exposes Faux Capitalism

2009-01-07T09:38:00.000-08:00

Fascinating. Incriminating. Disappointing.

Satyam's CEO has written a mea culpa letter to the regulatory authorities indicating a fraud of epic proportions that included inflated cash balance, fake earnings and more. He said, the scheme reached "simply unmanageable proportions" and he was left in a position "like riding a tiger, not knowing how to get off without being eaten." CNBC referred to it as the "Indian Enron" on air today.

The Tiger Got Away
by zeeshan Nasir (creative commons)

This will cast a long shadow on not just Indian IT companies but on all Indian companies, and perhaps other emerging market companies in general.

The sad reality is that this company is not alone. I suspect worse frauds by other Indian companies in the "Tier-2" category. Even Tier 1 companies like Reliance, DLF and Unitech appear to have used tricks to inflate assets. By way of example, a lot of companies in India bought land in villages (at very low prices) and as real estate value went up, they showed value of "land banks" as assets on their books. Reliance, the largest Indian company, earlier last year had an IPO for Reliance Power - a company with virtually no assets but plans to build several power plants. The Reliance Power IPO was a classic dot-com era style offering - there was very little there except a shell company with ambitions.

Expect to see more of this from India, and perhaps other places.

Glass Half Full

But all is not lost. On the positive side:

This makes companies like Infosys and Wipro even more valuable. They are truly well managed and ethical compaines. For years, Wipro and Infosys have had to live with potholes and hostility from local governments because they refused to bribe local politicians.
India has a process and regulatory system that while not perfect, still exists. I don't expect similar companies in China to do a mea culpa. It will be interesting to see how Indian regulatory bodies deal with this.

Finally, it was my fear of bubbles and inflated balance sheets that made me write this post on Indian Bubble - my most popular post ever. The myth of a billion consumers waiting to buy condos and mobile phones can be laid to rest for now. India is a huge economy for many opportunities but it has not repealed the laws of gravity - everything that goes up too fast must come down.

What would Warren Buffett do?

All these scandals from Enron to Madoff to Satyam are making us investors feel like we live in Alice's Wonderland where its hard to trust anything.

So, what would Buffett do? One can only learn from his writings and interviews. It seems like his method of relying on people and signing multi-billion dollar deals based on relationships, family history, etc. is a far more trustworthy system than relying on a gaggle of for-profit, near-term oriented auditors, advisors and all.

And from an investor perspective - the misalignment between shareholders and management keeps getting wider. I have often said that I prefer founder-owned and run companies because I trust them to do what's best for the long-term interest of the business. With Raju and Satyam, I have to question that assertion - it seems owner-manager-founder can also sink ships - although as he claims (and yet to be proven) he made little money from this as he hasn't sold his stake - in his letter he claims he has not sold any Satyam stock over several years.

A Few Rhetorical Questions:

How do I know which companies to invest in given that managers and board members are for-hire and short-term oriented?
How do I assess risk when everyone seems to be willing to lie for a fee?
Am I better off with owning a Subway franchise (a common theme amongst first-generation immigrants) than investing in public companies? Are we going back to days of tangible ownership of assets?
Final Question: Are shares no different than CDOs in that they are no longer promises that can be fairly evaluated, valued or trusted? If we can't trust shares, is our modern economy built on CDO-like bubble?

What do you think? I am curious.

All views expressed here are personal opinions. As with all my posts, please read my disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Predictions for 2009

2008-12-31T19:50:00.001-08:00

The season for predicting the future is upon us. Except its become extremely hard to predict the future after what happened this year: the financial system nearly collapsed, an African-American with Hussein as his middle name became the President, the Iraq war became a fringe issue, Alaskan geography and bridges became the center of editorials written by foreign press, China had great success with Olympics but still got hurt by the American consumer and finally, the house prices in New York and San Francisco came down.

This may scare away some but some of us are going to still take a swing at it. Here are some of the predictions that I have read and found interesting: Jeff Nolan, Appirio, Coda, GigaOm.

Seven Predictions for 2009

1. Oil will not go back to $100
Despite dire predictions of increasing demand from emerging global giants (China & India among others) and oil supply peaking, this myth will be nearly impossible to recreate in 2009. Airlines and SUV manufacturers can breathe easy.

2. Personalization Gets Widely Adopted
I am currently reading the book by CK Prahlad (New Age of Innovation) and it advocates a move towards a reality where businesses are targeting and selling to one customer at a time - in fact, 'co-creating' value with one customer at a time. Together with interesting case studies by another great book on related topic - Groundswell (by Charlene Li) - it seems likely that businesses will look to personalize and offer solutions rather than mass products and that this trend will go beyond technology to what are traditionally known as manufacturing, retail, banking etc. but in the new world order are all businesses offering personalized services/solutions to the individual business or consumer. In order to do this effectively, businesses will need to change their mindset and use information technology platforms that enable agility. Clould Computing platforms like Force.com can play a key role here - look at how Starbucks is co-creating value with its customers by running Starbucks Ideas and so is Dell with Dell Ideastorm.

3. Obama disappoints
Its bound to happen and we might as well accept it - Obama will disappoint his most ardent supporters especially the ones on the left. But this is a good thing in my opinion - George W Bush made his supporters proud and look where we landed.

4. Social Networking becomes (just) a feature
Social networking has rapidly become mainstream. While this is good for the consumers - in that they can expect a social experience on their favorite online property be it Google or Yahoo! - it does pose a challenge to stand-alone social networking companies that will increasingly have to offer more than just ability to connect to keep customers happy while they continue to struggle with revenue models. Its quite likely that leading search, email, IM and homepage providers will continue to drive social networking features into their products. The leaders in social networking (Facebook and LinkedIn) have a window of opportunity but if they fail to grow revenues, they may end up in the arms of the giants rather than as the next Google on their own right.

5. Madoff level online fraud
The major banks and online brokers have done a commendable job over the years of beefing up security but its still too lax. These entities still have not moved to state of the art multi-factor authentication or use pre-approvals for major transactions. I don't understand why its possible for me to transfer $50K from my online brokerage without them requiring me to verify my request by at least one other means (like SMS or Phone). The technology exists. Can you imagine the damage if 10s of thousands of us lost $100,000 overnight? As far as predictions go, I hope and pray that this does not come true but wanted to raise it since the ramifications of a major online bank or brokerage being compromised on a grandscale would be really bad (like the Madoff scandal) and further erode confidence in our institutions.

6. Airlines start treating customers fairly
Okay, so this is a complete joke. They will continue to use every excuse in the book to raise fares and fees while lowering the levels of service. This is one industry that is somehow set up (due to incentives? economics?) to compete on price and rarely if ever delight customers.

On that note, I recently was in Las Vegas and prepaid for my room via Luxor's online website for booking rooms. I get there and they add a $5 per night charge for "telephone service". Stop and think about it - they want to charge $150 per month for basic telephony service that I don't want to use. I protested since I have a cell phone and don't care for their phone and did not plan to use it. It was a non-negotiable fee and they refused to waive it. What really outraged me was that if they want to charge me $5 (or more) and its compulsory, why can't they simply add that to the room rate when I booked the room especially when I used their own website. Outrageous! I guess they are learning from their friends in the skies charging all kinds of funny fees.

6. Telepresence is The Killer App of 2009
Yes, telepresence. The ingredients are here: displays (and televisions) are getting cheaper, networks are already dealing with increasing video content, and the software/hardware to bring it all together is here. Cisco is clearly a leader here today but I expect others - both that have announced products like HP & Polycom - and those with lower profiles so far (Microsoft, Nokia) to join in.

7. GreenTech Bubble Bursts, Seeks Bailout and Subsidies
With the price of gas staying low and consumers cutting back on spending (and therefore fewer Hybrids will be bought for status), it will put enormous pressure on some of the green technology companies. Also, the tens of billions of dollars our government seems ready to pump into the dying three automakers will make it an attractive target for lobbyists for the green technology companies to seek their "fair" share. In the end, we the taxpayers, will end up subsidizing both sides of this battle. This reminds me of what Vinod Khosla, the genius investor, has been saying throughout this current boom - the only viable green technology is one that can compete at a price point of coal powered energy in India/China (the Chindia Test). As before, he was right and those VCs that followed him blindly and overinvested will look back on the year of $100 oil with longing.

While I shared a few ideas that have caught my attention, there are several more trends worth watching from personalized medicine to the "Better Place" experiment. I will keep an eye out for these trends and keep writing about them.

Finally, I want to thank each one of you for reading my blog. Time and attention are the ultimate currency in today's world and I am delighted you spend a tiny fraction of your fortune in talking with me. Thanks!

Heart-warming Story

2008-12-06T11:01:00.000-08:00

The San Jose Mercury News has a heart warming story on Foundation For Excellence (FFE) - a silicon valley based charity that helps bright kids in India that can't afford education stay in school, go to college and achieve success.

The best part is that the gift of education transforms not just a single student but their entire family's future. For example -

Growing up in the coastal city of Chennai, Rajee Nair said she and her sister always earned very high marks in school, and each received scholarships from the foundation.
Now the 29-year-old engineer lives in Fremont, where she works as a consultant for Infosys Technologies. She has been able to support the higher education of two younger sisters back in India and even buy her parents a home.
"Their lives are now taken care of,'' she said.

I personally know Rajee - and she is such a positive, bright light in the lives of many. And now she is helping the cause in turn.

So this Holiday Season, please consider making a contribution (click here to donate now).

Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas!