Pavanz

Virtualization Concepts & Market Category Mapping

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 21:33:00 +0000

Drive to change business models to survive or thrive the disruption landscape creates a need for additional capital. This in-turn drives the need for efficiencies and agility of an organization at the same time. In my opinion, this can be achieved by prioritizing on the appropriate virtualization approach as required to complete the business model pivot. For example, if a bank wanted to enter insurance market as a carrier they can simply purchase such capability from a Business as a service provider rather than build the infrastructure necessary for that shift.

Cloud Middleware – Comparing Messaging Middleware (MOM) Cloud

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 18:18:00 +0000

As all applications move into the cloud, so do their integration needs. The advantages of message oriented middleware have always been realized for a long time now. Let’s take a look at how to achieve messaging based integration while in the public cloud. The options in this space can be broadly classified into two types:

Software hosting on ones own servers or shared infrastructure

This way you can just take the software that your enterprise is familiar with and deploy it on your DMZ infrastructure or have it deployed on one of the software hosting providers. This way you will be paying for your license costs and have to support it all by yourself.

Open source and some proprietary software has been built based on message queuing exclusively for this purpose – popular ones include rabbitmq and OWS2 Carbon MQ. Unless you need to use highly advanced configuration or put in your own tweaks, a hosted version of this software will be available. It might be cheaper to use hosted version unless your volumes are huge and you already have staff to support.

Using messaging middleware applications already built for this purpose

There are several hosted messaging middleware implementations available today in the public cloud. This space is getting more and more mature by the day and some of them have come a long way and have been around for over 2 years now and have significantly invested into their business and are here to stay. On Linxter a popular cloud messaging provider alone, there have been about 48 million messages exchanged by over 120 clients within past two years.

Below is a basic comparison of some of the popular providers that I have come across on the web and I believe this list is extensive. If you feel that another product needs to be added or if you would like to include comparison on another aspect, I would be more than happy to add it. Please drop in a message in the comments or e-mail me.

In the next post in Cloud Middleware series, we will take a look at what how to implement messaging for apps deployed on Google App Engine (no messaging services provided in-built).

Messaging Middleware Products

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 03:46:00 +0000

Award winning IBM WebSphere MQ (WMQ) software has been having a monopoly in this space for over a decade now. WMQ has about 83% of market share (in 2005 - probably more now). The product is so popular that a lot of consultants working in space can't think beyond this product for the advantages it offers. Here is a comparison of are 47 messaging middleware products based on the cost, suitability for enterprise deployment and product maturity in market with links where you can find more information about it.

Please feel free to contact me should you need further analysis on comparing them. Let me know what are your thoughts on options in this space and which one of these is your favorite product.

Your browser does not support iframes. Please visit <a href="http://www.pavan-pendyala.co.cc/Messaging">this link</a>

Note: This spread sheet is licensed under the creative commons Attribution. As long as you give due credit to Pavan Pendyala, you are free to use it.

Physical Office Vs Virtual Office

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Fri, 22 May 2009 15:14:00 +0000

This post describes how to have a virtual office possibly eliminating the need for a physical office based on the size and criticality of the business.

The main business functions that you server for the office for a start-up would be:

Establish presence – means to contact

Showcase competencies, services and products

Facilitate in engagement of services– a shop in the marketplace

Workspace for the employees of the organization

Finance/Compliance planning and handling

Let us look at how we can facilitate this in the IT world and the advantages.

By having an address that represents your idea/company, you are establishing you presence on the web. This can be achieved by buying a domain. There are several vendors that provide these services with Godaddy, eNom and Name.com as pioneers. Your domain name can cost you anywhere between 2$ and a million dollars based on what your chosen domain name is. It is important that you choose your business name which is catchy, easy to remember and close to your business/company. It is best to go with .com as most of us use this by default. If you want one for free, you might want to try co.cc for a start.

Remember that the page that comes first when you visit your domain is like your reception. The home page should be used to give a glimpse of your idea/organization and should showcase your competencies, services and products. You should be able to route your visitor to the section based on his interests from this page.

The most important link that should be present on the home page should be the contact us page. This is essential and is like the business card that is given to the visitor. This should include all possible means of communication with you that preferably includes a feedback box that the visitor can key in anything. This helps those visitors that do not have access to e-mail leave their communication immediately. This becomes all the more important if you are not equipped to sell your products from your website. Most websites today have live chat features to facilitate a virtual visiting experience. These solutions are available from about 50$ a month where in agents who can assist your visitor are deployed on a 24*7 basis.

If you believe that your services can be sold online, it is always beneficial to have a shopping cart facility added to your website. Ideally you should be able to collect payments and deliver goods online. Alternatively, you can collect the customer information and contact them to confirm the order and ship it for Cash On Delivery. You can make your website e-commerce ready so that you can collect and deliver goods online using credit cards or internet banking for a fee upwards of 50$.

Another important aspect that a physical office facilitates is the workspace and facilities for carrying out the job. This can be replaced by a computer with internet connection complete with a VOIP phone. All the documentation can be done using digital signatures and soft copies thereby helping you go green and save a lot of money that you would have to incur otherwise. For a start, if you are hiring employees in a work from home mode, this set-up can prove to be extremely beneficial. I recommend that you take advantage of Google Apps to provide solutions for most of the functions listed here. You get a document repository with free software that won’t compel you to buy software licenses and meet the legal regulations.

For the finance and compliance planning, today even conventional offices totally depend on ERP software. Application providers like salesforce.com have been successful in bringing almost all these software without any purchasing costs and hardware costs using cloud computing.

So as we see from the above, it is very much possible today to run your business from an office that is totally virtual! Doing this saves you a lot of costs. For legal issues, you can register your business having your home as address and cut down on the rentals/ any other expenditure you would have to incur.

Do share your thoughts..
-Pavan Pendyala

Owning your first office on the net

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Fri, 22 May 2009 11:18:00 +0000

In this post, I talk about the options one has if they want to own some space on the internet. This post will be of use to you weather you are creating your own personal website or you are presenting a business idea or are actually working towards a project! Read on..

Blogging:
Simplest and most reliable way of having your space online is opening an account with blogging service providers like www.blogger.com (Google), www.wordpress.com, home.spaces.live.com (MSN) or www.myyblog.com (yahoo). The service is a lot more stable than what you can have if you were to host it yourself and the best is that it comes for free to start with. You can post any content onto the blog – pictures, videos, text etc. However the shortcomings of using blogging sites is that the amount of customization in terms of the site templates is limited and also you need to stick to the page structure that gets generated automatically. The result is that if you want a custom URL for your post/page, the chances of you being able to get it are bleak (or you need to switch to advanced settings). If you want to simply keep log of your activities, maintain your own dairy or have a passion for writing or presenting some technical or useful content to the world blogging is for you.

You are also allowed to use your own domain name for your blog that is hosted with these service providers, so you don’t have to compromise on using the sub-domain name that is given by the blogging service provider. You can also opt for templates other than the standard ones supplied with your blog. You can either find templates on several sites on the web or you can build your own. This website you are seeing here is a blog that is using a non-standard template. You can also get feedback or comments when you go with blogging. Finally, if you have a lot of visitors on your blog, and like doing this, you can run advertisements that can get you some dollars.

Building 5 page websites:

If you need more than what is offered by these blogs, you can create your own website. Being as creative as possible while maintaining simplicity is the key to success here. If you tend to use too many graphics or flash in them, the search engine bots will not be able to get to the content you serve and you might suffer visitor losses. For creating these websites, you need to know HTML well while knowledge of some multimedia can be helpful. To learn more about HTML, you can use this tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/htmL/ . There is also a certification option from W3 schools on this technology which is free and showcases your skills.

If you do not have the time or expertise to create these pages all by yourself, there are a plenty of websites that offer various website templates for free and for a fee. You might want to simply pick one and customize it. There are also tools like Dreamweaver that are available in the market today that can help in building/modifying these websites very quickly and with little knowledge of HTML.

Once you have built your website, you need a place to run/host it. For this, you have several webhosting service providers. There are a lot of webhosting providers who offer you a lot of stuff for free, but their quality of service (page rendering, availability) is generally poor or they place ads on your website and can’t generally provide you with custom error pages which can become quite an issue when your website is gaining popularity. From my experience, I can recommend www.000webhost.com. Then, when you have enough budget and can afford webhosting paying about 5 or 10 $ a month, you can get excellent service.

Using auto installer scripts:
Now in your website, if you want a guest book or a contact us tab with a form to reach you, you will also need a place to store data and write some code to validate what is being put into the fields. This is not possible using plain HTML. You might want to use some other web programming language like JSP or PHP that would write to either the file system, or to send an e-mail or to write to a database like MySQL. To be able to do this involves a database, scripting languages and SMTP facilities. Using these webhosting often simplifies creation of your websites that are to be run as “Content Management Systems” aka forums, or custom blogs where you can store data and grant access permissions to registered users. The simplification is by using auto installer scripts that install the related open source framework.

By opting for these web hosting service providers, you also get to have e-mail ids that use your domain name. This is very essential according to me if you were to present your micro business professionally.

-Pavan Pendyala

26 ideas for starting up your web business

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Thu, 14 May 2009 11:13:00 +0000

If you aspire to find a place in the web world, here are some options that simply can’t miss considering. These are based on the assumption that you can browse and know basic HTML. Keep watching this blog for more details and creative ideas on each of these options.

Without any monitory investment when you have skill and time on hand:
1. Blogging and then pay per click

2. Designing website templates
3. Making simple 5 page websites
4. Building Websites with auto-installer scripts
5. Building websites that can store and render data
6. Building e-Commerce websites using existing gateways
7. Offering a standard web platform to a startup
8. Offering pre-recorded training
9. Search Engine Operations
10. Building hosted utility applications
11. Advertising

With some investment when you also have access to expertise in that area:
12. Offering web hosting (using your own computer)
13. Offering advanced/custom software hosting
14. Cloud offerings

Other means of making money:

Training
15. Open-house Training Programs
16. Custom made training programs to corporate
17. On-line hosted e-learning modules
18. Pre-recorded sessions

Research
19. Recruitment
20. Market Research
21. Trends
22. Competitors

Writing
23. Business Plans
24. Business Proposals
25. Readymade Templates
26. Articles/ White Papers

With everything that is in the real world taking a place on-line to expand its presence globally, all ideas that you might have to implement in real world should find a place in the web world.

Note:

1. This would probably cover a lot more than what most other paid training programs like Trendy Works Web Entrepreneur program offer but is accessible for free.

2. This post is fourth in a series of posts on the preparedness of Indian techies in case of a recession and a large number of layoffs. This would also have pointers for all those who would like to be self -employed or those interested in start-ups in the field of IT.

Trendyworks.in Web Entrepreneur Program Review

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:04:00 +0000

While I was passing by Clock Tower in Hyderabad yesterday, I saw a large hoarding of Trendyworks.in. With a lot of interest, I immediately took a look at their website.
They are trying to spread the word that there is a lot of scope in web business and we should start looking at these as options to make a living and not stick to conventional jobs. In fact they are using “say no to jobs” as a caption in their campaign.

This is in line with my thought process. The target audiences are students from colleges, people with spare time in their jobs. I feel that targeting students is a great idea as they are a good fit for this job. I know a few folks who have make a living out of these websites that they have started during their college days. Students will have access to all the resources that are required for this business – time, computer with an internet connection.

That advertisement reminds me of the search service that Google marketed about a decade ago. However, their service was free and with an idea to serve everyone. In sharp contrast, trendyworks is now trying to teach how to create a website and earn revenue from these websites by advertising which is an already established business. They charge around INR 16000 for the training program which if not carefully taught might end up being just another program in Ameerpet area. The charge seems to cover all their advertising, training and other overhead costs leaving them a good profit margin. I would also expect that they would run this program as a campaign program for their products on http://www.trendyworks.com/.

They are not teaching something that is original or a technology that they made. The exact cost one has to incur when they have interest in learning this is the time and cost to be spent on surfing through Google. There are plenty of resources available on the internet that talks about

How to create a website
How to host website from your home PC
How to create domain names and configure them
How to create an enterprise class set-up for free (use of open source tools)

I have learnt all this and more in about a month. I will be publishing tutorials (notes and references) on how to do this from my experience. In case you are already in the middle of doing something and need help, feel free to contact me.

Another side to their program is that they are creating a lot of hype and also say that they will be choosing candidates based on an entrance test which according to me is a not so good idea. I feel that most of the successful entrepreneurs are self-made and learn their lessons themselves and we cannot create good entrepreneurs by training them in classroom for a few days/weeks.

-Pavan Pendyala

Birth Of Gig Economy

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:26:00 +0000

There were a plenty of rumors some time back that a lot of the software companies in India are likely to move to a model where they pay just for a task or for the hours the resource has worked on to accomplish the task and there would not be any jobs that would get you a safe assured pay check every month – in short there would be only contracts. Oracle was the one who made a press release of this stating that it was piloting this model.

My take is that this is very fair and they should be paying a lot more per hour than they do today. After all this means that there is going to be no bench pay and no pay when there is no real work to do. This would allow competition if implemented properly and everyone who knows the technology might get a chance to work on it. There are a lot of very talented young minds that are being crushed and not being provided with ample opportunities today because they do not have enough experience. They might be able to make a proof of concept and demonstrate their expertise over the subject, but then they are not given a chance because they do not have experience and are also not compensated accordingly. While I agree that we may not want to risk a very critical task by letting an inexperienced person handle it, they should not always be undermined.

I work for a large company and interact day-in day-out with a lot of these techies in IT. I wanted to discuss on the quality of professionals we have today and how much can they really do if they lose their current plush job that earns them couple of lakh rupees! We needed some more people to work for us on a project and had to hire people. This was the first time I was hiring people and I was astonished looking at the quality of professionals that I was coming across. A lot of them would be worth nothing while they expect a fortune!

-Pavan Pendyala

Thoughts on Start-ups in India

noreply@blogger.com (Pavan Pendyala) — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 13:52:00 +0000

Gone are those days of the dot come bubble burst in the US and across the world when web designing and creating websites was something that would fetch you a lot of contracts and work. We had a lot of companies that dealt with multimedia and website creation at that time (around 2002) all over the place. A lot of them have shut shop and majority of that crowd either settled for some java developer jobs in India while a few other lucky ones got to USA for better prospects. I understand that a lot of those projects were for US clients and when almost everyone got a website done, the fad was gone and so were the associated jobs. Another thing that I don’t understand is why isn’t a similar thing happening in India when it was India Shining till a year back? Is it because of lack of man power?

The set of people who worked on that have now got on an average over 10 years of experience and are in their late thirties. Since most of them are paid well and have settled, they do not like to do the simple websites anymore and so there aren’t many of them available to do these websites for a competitive price for the same kind of requirement.

Is it because the population in India is still not hooked onto the internet enough that everyone does not feel the need to have a website? Why the superstores like Spencer can’t offer free home delivery of items on an order taken over internet just like they do it over the phone today? Is it because of the average age of population that they are catering to do not know how to use a computer? Is it because the costs of building a website like that are so expensive that the store cannot afford it?

Why can’t someone come up with a portal where one can order food like Dominos Pizzas or Hyderabad Biryani over the internet? I am sure that the people sitting in Hitech City IT offices would love to place an order and pay online using their card (thereby avoiding the tip also) and enjoy food after all they don’t have time for almost anything. Another case that was a major hit is the www.redbus.com that offers coach booking services primarily to this segment.

-Pavan Pendyala