Technology Management

Good Bye 2011...

2011-12-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

Source: Business Insider

CTO Job Trends in the US - past 5 years

2011-12-21T12:41:00.000-08:00

CTO Job Trends

CTO jobs

How good CIOs can judge the future?

2011-05-02T17:59:00.000-07:00

The CIO as Corporate Psychic
12:04 PM Monday April 25, 2011
by Robert Plant Harvard Business Review

Every day on my way to work I pass a store offering psychic readings, and I'm often tempted to stop in and ask what lies ahead in the tech world. Is the "cloud" just a passing phase? Will "social analytics" tools prove to be reliable? Will they integrate with current Business Intelligence systems? What impact will terahertz frequencies have on communication technologies?

Those are the kinds of questions that CIOs get all the time. Chief information officers are expected to see deeply into the future and generate IT predictions that companies can build their strategies around. Most CIOs don't like being cast in the role of corporate psychic, but there's nothing they can do about it. So here's some advice on how to make the best of this role and do a better job of seeing the future.

Don't follow the herd. It can be reassuring to sign up with one of the leading consulting firms, which perform solid research and are probably a notch more reliable than the corner psychic. But overreliance on these firms leads to industry groupthink, and complexity-theory research tells us that it's impossible to predict the behavior of a large system (such as the world of tech innovation) beyond the next few moves.

Read more at Harvard Business Review

HP with SAP? match made in heaven??

2011-04-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

Do you think HP with SAP a match made in heaven?? or NOT...
Here is a little disoriented but an interesting bunch of speculations nevertheless...

Source: ZDNet http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/will-hp-buy-or-merge/1703
Will HP buy or merge?
By Tom Foremski | March 15, 2011, 6:06am PDT

Christopher Baum, at Software Advice, takes a look at 14 possible acquisition targets.

HP Mergers & Acquisitions: Who’s Next?

I disagree with several of the choices especially his top choice: SAP.

Buying SAP is not a good strategy. IBM could tell HP why this is a bad idea.

Wall Street analysts have written many reports over the years about IBM buying SAP and what a great move that would be. When I was working at the Financial Times my editors would always ask me to ask IBM CEO Sam Palmisano, or Steve Mills, head of IBM’s Software business, about buying SAP.

I didn’t ask them that question because I knew it would have been a wasted question. I knew it wasn’t in IBM’s plans.

In one of my earlier interviews I had spoken with Steve Mills about the Software group and about some of its strategic mistakes. One of these was to try and get into the enterprise applications business. IBM lost a lot of money in the 1990s trying to sell its own enterprise software before pulling out and focusing on middleware.

But IBM salvaged some wisdom from that experience, as spending in IT shifted more to services; IBM realized it could make far more money selling IT services around enterprise software.

For every $1 that SAP receives in license revenues, companies are spending about $9 in services: installation, systems integratopn, operation, management. And IBM wins massive SAP contracts and therefore can book 9 times SAP’s revenues. Why buy the business? You can grow revenues faster in services.

Why should HP buy SAP when the best part of the business is outside of SAP?

The best part is in all the services required to build and use the software. SAP itself is trying to get more of that lucrative market.

That’s why IBM has greatly expanded its IT services business over the past ten years because there is a lot of money in services.

Error-prone processors

2011-02-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

Have you ever thought of having less accuracy in high processing power could be more desired for our future?? not intuitive but true...Read on...

Innovator: Joseph Bates

Processors are very accurate. An MIT computer scientist says making them more error-prone could mean faster, more powerful computers By Drake Bennett

What's the square root of 10? If you had to do it in your head, you might say "a little more than three." Computers, unlike humans, don't do back-of-the-envelope calculations. They just crunch the numbers to the last requested decimal place.

Joseph Bates, however, thinks we'd be better off if we were to let computers make some mistakes. Bates, 55, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon and the MIT Media Lab, has designed a chip that does what computer engineers call "sloppy arithmetic," or guesstimating. Slightly inaccurate chips would be "much, much littler and much, much more efficient" than current chips, he says. Accurate calculation is a series of discrete tasks, such as carrying numbers when summing figures, that take up valuable processing power. By ignoring some of those tasks, Bates's chip, he predicts, would have something like 100,000 times the computing power of a traditional processor.

With an error range around 1 percent, Bates's chip wouldn't be wildly inaccurate: One plus one might equal 2.02. In many applications, the resulting errors would either be imperceptible or automatically corrected. In digital photography and medical imaging, for instance, errors in the range of 1 percent would be invisible to the human eye. With other tasks, such as needle-in-a-haystack searches for particular images or sound files, Bates's chip could rifle through enormous databases, winnowing the list down to a few candidates for a more deliberate processor—or human being—to pick from. Bates foresees his chips being paired with traditional Intel (INTC)-style chips for this purpose. The result: smartphones with the computing power of desktops, and desktops with the power of supercomputers.
While he hasn't fabricated a sloppy chip yet, Bates sees the engineering as fairly basic. There's a consensus among chip engineers that, as Bob Colwell, formerly the chief designer of Intel's Pentium chips, puts it, "whatever challenges are down the hardware path are probably overcome-able." Bates says several companies are looking at the technology, though nondisclosure agreements prevent him from naming them.
Bates's central research interest has always been artificial intelligence—like many researchers, he came to the topic by reading Isaac Asimov as a boy. Growing up in Baltimore, he skipped high school and went to Johns Hopkins University at 13. In some of his earliest research, he tried to get computers to think like creative human mathematicians, to do the equivalent of word problems rather than the abstract language of sets and equations. His turn to sloppy arithmetic follows in this vein: Part of its promise is that it could help computers act more like the human brain, which takes all sorts of shortcuts to answer problems. "By allowing things to be approximate, you're a lot closer" to achieving true artificial intelligence, says Bates.

Source: Bloomberg Businessweek

11 Tech Predictions for 2011...

2010-12-27T16:44:00.000-08:00

Chris O'Brien has been great in his fortune telling with a proven track record. Enjoy:

By Chris O'Brien

Mercury News Columnist

Posted: 12/25/2010 10:59:00 PM PST

1. Facebook will pass 1 billion users. It will happen eventually, but the math will make this one close. Facebook has 550 million members and is adding 700,000 per day. That would put it over 800 million in 2011 at its current pace. But I'm betting that rate will accelerate just enough next year to put it over the top. And if China lets Facebook in, fuhgettaboutit. If Facebook isn't thinking interplanetary yet, it ought to be calling Vint Cerf at Google to see how his efforts to extend the Internet to other planets is working out. Because that may be about the only place this juggernaut will have left to conquer.

2. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will go. Shh. Listen. Hear that? It's the sound of the guillotine blade being raised. Perhaps, in retrospect, this was doomed from the start. While it sounds trivial, her inability to articulate Yahoo's mission in under 140 characters is a bigger failing than it seems. Yes, as Bartz says, Yahoo remains big in Peoria and other flyover hotspots. (And hold your e-mails, because I'm from Kansas. Go Chiefs!) But it's not enough to save her neck. Good news for the Yahoo board: I hear Meg Whitman is looking for a job. Just sayin'.

3. Hewlett-Packard will buy SAP. This is the deal that has Oracle's Larry Ellison squirming and trying to rip the reputation of HP. Ellison is probably hoping to make HP feel too defensive to try something this astonishing. When I've raised the possibility of this deal, people say, "Never in a million years." Ah, but how quickly we forget: SAP got close to the altar with Microsoft just a few years ago. And nobody looks at SAP today and thinks it's a healthier, happier company. Given that HP hired SAP's former CEO, it now has in Léo Apotheker the man who can make this deal happen, and, more important, make it work.

4. No big Internet IPOs. Zynga, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp, Groupon. Across Sand Hill Road, folks are praying for one of these to go public and revive the IPO market. Keep dreaming. The next generation of great Web companies are running from IPOs like they're being pursued by an army of zombies. Keep running, I say.

5. Read more...

Notes on Dreamforce 2010 - Day 2&3

2010-12-12T19:42:00.005-08:00

Please excuse my typos -- directly posting the notes taken real-time with my Blackberry
Keynote session:
SFDC acquired Heroku platform (by Ruby on Rails open source company)
Heroku has big presence in app development (e.g. Facebook and mobile apps)
Full text search, scales instantly and reliable (touching millions of users)
Strong Graphic generation and analytics

BMC remedy software announcement: RemedyForce
force.com 2: 5x faster

Peter Winters Avon CIO
Kelly services CIO
Mark White CTO deloitte

Cloud leaders are made not born:
Lnotes is "Asbestos" of software
Turn server rooms into wine cellars: has racks, cool, and secure
Hosted by Appirio

Enterprise architecture roundtable:
Participants Dell ent arch, qualcomm, genentech, sfdc
Security: single sign on implemented. Pink federate.

Day 3:
Agile development: strong push from SFDC CIO

Notes on Dreamforce 2010 - Day 1

2010-12-08T00:56:00.000-08:00

Please excuse my typos -- directly posting the notes taken real-time with my Blackberry

Keynote session:
Force.com enhancements
Database.com as the new cloud open for any program, via easy to connect toolkits for jdbc, php, etc
Free chatter announcement for everyone
Oracle exologic put down by Benioff as false cloud - cloud means multi-tenant
Benioff handshakes w/ guests in the front rows --reinforcing the theme - Collaborate!
Black eyed peas singer Will.I.am in the audience composer of the Dreamforce '10 theme song
Joking on Benioff's rainbow socks
Saasy and Chatty as sfdc mascots on the cloudexpo floor
Steve Fisher: If not multi-tenant its not cloud. Social data model in the cloud
50% of attendees from companies with 1000 and less employees

Mark Benioff Keynote speech - 15,000 people in Moscone

Yefim Natis - Gartner - Defining the cloud:

Internet: connecting, web: informing, cloud: serving.
Browsers enabled internet to web transition, SOA would do the same from web to cloud.
Difference between Hosting the old way and new way with Cloud is the shared internet resources.
PaaS is the least developed model but highest future potential that defines the enterprise architecture. 2011 is the year of PaaS including Microsoft Oracle SAP IBM etc.
Cloud types: Private cloud, virtual private cloud, community cloud, public cloud - cost efficiency increases towards public cloud.
By 2013 PaaS tops cloud provider leadership. By 2015 cloud platform experience as a necessary skill.
You can enter the cloud at any of the 3 levels IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, not necessarily a hierarchy.
App infrastructure platform as a service: aPaaS (app) and iPaaS (integration) emerging by 2013.
Microsoft's attitude toward the cloud is similar to how quickly it adopted the internet. Serious investment planned.

Running to break-out sessions

Transitioning enterprise apps to the Cloud: Dileep Srinivasan, Chris Clegg from Cognizant
Trends for CRM: wireless, mobile, cloud, digital channels, social media communities
Emphasise Risks to mitigate for CRM deployments
Important to ID Business case: quick wins, metrics
Bring on-board experienced resources
Decide right scope for the project - not necessarily include full-blown CRM functionality
(i.e account and contact mgt): leave supply chain or order management out. Define what to leave out at he beginning.
Select correct implementation approach: not necessarily agile especially for enterprise level project. Leverage visualization of the requirements thru prototyping but do not extend it to rest of the project in later phases of the deployment.
Must have committed executive sponsorship:
Organizational change mgt program: business champions. Need to generate excitement within org.
Customization and integration: unexpected surprises usually pop up here. Largest chance of risk.
Target quick wins for CRM.

The one and only Steve Wonder

Enterprise wide deployment to multiple businesses:
Integration options varies:
SOAP API - webservices SOQL statements.
Partner solutions informatica, IBM (Cast Iron)
Large data - use Bulk API faster
New REST API in pilot based on http protocol
Newly announced database.com not really new. It is currently in use with existing CRM backend. Uses toolkits to offer external connections for java, .net, ruby, and php.
Vmforce uses salesforce backend (force.com) and uses JPA (thru JDBC) to connect to.

CIO roundtable:
Jane Moran - CIO Thomson Reuters
Kirsten Wolberg - CIO sfdc
Dick - CIO Rehab Solutions
Is cloud a cost reduction?
Is cloud considered mainstream?
Is collab a priority?
How does the role of CIO evolve or transform?
Amazing party featuring Steve Wonder and Black Eyed Peas

Interview with Xerox PARC CEO on Innovation -- or what's left of it!

2010-11-08T19:11:00.000-08:00

PARC CEO Mark Bernstein talks innovation, Steve Jobs and Xerox

By Larry Dignan | November 8, 2010 on ZDNet

The Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) has a storied history and is responsible for much of the computing technology we take for granted. Today, PARC has a more refined mission as a wholly-owned yet independent subsidiary of Xerox.

We caught up with PARC CEO Mark Bernstein to talk shop and innovation. Bernstein has led PARC since 2001. The conversation was spurred by a question raised by Marvell co-founder Weili Dai, who argued that the U.S. needs a new Bell Labs.

Read more... on ZDNet

(Microsoft + Facebook) > Google?

2010-10-17T07:24:00.000-07:00

Facebook and Microsoft announced a partnership on Wednesday that will give the results on Microsoft’s Bing search engine a social twist — and could help both companies compete against a common adversary, Google.

It seems this is just what Microsoft has needed for a long time now. Does this mean a renewed beginnings of an existing empire?

Microsoft’s Bing Gets a Social Lift From Facebook

Source: Jenna Wortham @ NY Times, October 13, 2010

Facebook and Microsoft announced a partnership on Wednesday that will give the results on Microsoft’s Bing search engine a social twist — and could help both companies compete against a common adversary, Google.
The new feature allows people who use Facebook to see Bing search results that incorporate information from their friends, like restaurant recommendations.

When a user searches for something like a movie, place or product on Bing, information about how many of their friends “liked” that item on Facebook and related links they have shared will appear alongside the results. The Facebook data will help determine how prominently these will appear, said Yusuf Mehdi, a senior vice president for online business at Microsoft.
“It isn’t just about the common connections between data and the offline world, it’s about the connections between people,” Mr. Mehdi said.
Mark Zuckerberg, a founder and chief executive of Facebook, said the move was a deepening of the company’s current partnership with Microsoft.
In 2007, Microsoft paid $240 million for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook. Since then, the two companies have worked together to introduce advertisements on Facebook and incorporate Bing Maps into Facebook’s location application, called Places.
Facebook and Microsoft appear to be forming a united front against Google, a rival to both in several ways.
Despite heavy investment by Microsoft, Bing still greatly lags Google in terms of market share. Google has made several attempts to strengthen its social networking offerings and compete with Facebook.
At stake, analysts say, is the ability to know more about users, and to charge more for ads that are more effectively aimed at those users.
“Making search more social is ultimately going to drive more targeted advertising, which you can charge a premium for,” said Mukul Krishna, a digital media analyst at Frost & Sullivan. “Search hinges on that business model.”

Read more on NY Times (Source by: Jenna Wortham October 13, 2010)

Do we need a new Bell Labs?

2010-10-08T08:48:00.000-07:00

Source by: Larry Dignan on ZDNet
Marvell co-founder Weili Dai pines for the day when researchers could focus on discovery without the pressure to creates products.

She may be on to something.

In an interview on Smart Planet, I talked to Dai about education, research and development and tablets for poor countries. Dai is a key ally of One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte.

But the point that sticks with me the most is Dai’s argument that there needs to be a new Bell Labs, a research incubator that’s not necessarily about profit. Xerox’s PARC is another lab that mold. Bell Labs is now owned by Alcatel-Lucent. Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) remains a Xerox company.

Sure, these labs were bankrolled by big profitable companies, but the research arms were really think tanks. And a lot of that thinking shaped the Internet today.

Read more... on ZDNet (Source by: Larry Dignan October 7, 2010, 6:59am PDT)

VanGuard as #1 IT Innovator

2010-09-18T15:39:00.000-07:00

Implementing "volunteer" technology innovation teams is one of the greatest ways to push the limits in our cost sensitive IT environment. See how Vanguard invented and successfully initiated its R&D division within the IT department.

InformationWeek 500 No. 1: Inside Vanguard's IT Innovation Strategy

Getting employees to volunteer to work on projects is a key piece in driving its emerging tech innovation. By Chris Murphy
InformationWeek
September 15, 2010 12:01 AM (From the September 13, 2010 issue)

How do you get to work on the most interesting tech projects at Vanguard, the mutual fund giant? You volunteer. Like most companies, Vanguard has wrestled with how to make innovation a part of its everyday culture, without chasing every gee-whiz idea people come up with. Under CIO Paul Heller, volunteering has become one key piece of its innovation strategy. It's not a Google-like program, where engineers can set aside 20% of their time to pursue new ideas. Vanguard volunteers keep all their day-job responsibilities and log extra hours to work on more cutting-edge projects.

The strategy has several advantages. One is keeping the cost down to pursue prototype-stage ideas. An example is Vanguard's first iPhone app, which it launched last year. No single business unit could justify building an iPhone app based on short-term ROI. While smartphones are commonplace, the number of people using the new app in a week is less than the number using the Web site in an hour. So a volunteer team created a first version, which the retail investor division got without spending any of its budget. "The first release was kind of on the house," says Jeff Dowds, who leads IT systems for the retail group and championed the mobile project.

Read more on InformationWeek...

2010-09-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

Source: Geek & Poke

Salesforce: Cloud is strong, Chatter is growing and guidance is up

2010-08-22T04:56:00.000-07:00

salesforce.com proved another strong quarter towards gaining credibility with investors as well as its first hand user base. Chatter is crawling up full speed...

By Sam Diaz | August 20, 2010, 10:30am PDT

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, always a colorful character, apparently didn’t get the memos from Wall Street about Chatter getting off to a slow start or a rough economic environment on the horizon. No, to hear Benioff tell the story, everything is just hunky dory out there on the salesforce cloud.

Chatter was the one of the big talking points during the Salesforce analysts’ conference call yesterday, with Benioff taking the reins right out of the gate to squash any concerns that Wall Street might be having about it. In a preview of Salesforce earnings earlier this week, Larry Dignan highlighted some concerns about Chatter among Wall Street analysts. But here’s Benioff’s take as he presented it during yesterday’s conference call:

"Customer response to Salesforce Chatter has been nothing short of amazing. Within a week of the release, more than 10,000 customers had turned on Salesforce Chatter. Today, less than two months later that number has now grown to nearly 20,000 customers or roughly one quarter of our total customer base. We believe this is the most successful new software released ever. Not only does Chatter make our Sales and Service Cloud apps better, but when our customers talk about it, they are using words like amazing, exciting, fun, revolutionary, not words typically used to describe enterprise software and that’s why we believe Salesforce Chatter is the next killer app from Salesforce.com."

And it shows in the company’s quarterly results, which blew away Wall Street’s expectations and sent shares rising in yesterday’s after-hours trading and has them soaring today, up more than 13 percent in regular trading. (Statement)

Revenue for the second quarter was up 25 percent from a year ago, coming in at $394 million, and the company said the revenue growth rate climbed at its fastest rate in six quarters. The company reported earnings of 29 cents, well above the company’s projected earnings of 26-27 cents, which included a 3-cent hit for the acquisition of Jigsaw.
Wall Street had been expecting earnings of 27 cents on revenue of $384.7 million.

Read more on ZDNet

How to survive your first day as CIO

2010-08-22T04:42:00.000-07:00

Source: Geek and Poke

Will tablet be dominating?

2010-08-21T10:54:00.000-07:00

U.S. Customers Are Tablet-Hungry, and Not Just for the iPad
wired.com By Brian X. Chen August 20, 2010

Surveys reveal that a substantial chunk of U.S. customers plan to buy a tablet in the next year, and it’s not necessarily going to be an iPad.

Fourteen percent, or 27 million U.S. online consumers, intend to buy some kind of tablet in the next 12 months, says a Forrester research report (.pdf) published Thursday (chart below). Customers interested in purchasing a tablet aren’t primarily Apple customers, and they’re well aware of the crop of upcoming tablets from competitors such as Google and Hewlett-Packard.

Additionally, a similar study by the Magazine Publishers of America found that nearly 60 percent of U.S. consumers expect to purchase an e-reader or tablet within the next three years.

"Even though the iPad is the only widely available tablet PC on the market today, tablets have entered consumer consciousness in a very short time frame,” said Sarah Rotman Epps, a consumer product analyst at Forrester. “There’s interest in the category that goes beyond the iPad.”

Google to buy visual search firm Like.com

2010-08-18T10:49:00.000-07:00

Proud to see an old-time friend's invention is coming to fruition with Google...

By Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat
Mon Aug 16, 2010 2:27am EDT

Google is in the final stages of acquiring visual search and e-commerce firm Like.com for more than $100 million, according to a report in Techcrunch.

Citing multiple sources, Techcrunch said the acquisition looks like it will happen, though it isn’t clear why Google is interested in Like.com, which has a visual search technology. Perhaps Google wants to experiment with a new kind of search technology that appears to be getting traction. It isn’t clear if Google already has similar technology.

Munjal Shah, chief executive of Like.com, declined to comment to Techcrunch. Like.com was founded by Shah and Burak Gokturk in August, 2004.
Read more...

Recap on acronyms: SaaS PaaS IaaS...GaaS!??

2010-08-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

Cloud Computing's World of Acronyms: Enter at Your Own Risk

by Thomas Wailgum in CIO News

What hasn't the high-tech industry done to the poor "Cloud Computing" moniker? For the past couple years or so, "The Cloud" has been hyped up like a LeBron James appearance, contorted like a Yoga-practicing Swami, poked and prodded again and again, and then hijacked by just about every apps vendor in the known universe.

Sucked up in the marketing vortex of cloud computing's hurricane were software-delivery models SaaS (software-as-a-service) and "Web-based" or "on-demand" computing. Along for the ride now—and further flummoxing market watchers and IT customers—are more aaS's: PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service). (And don't forget about "private" and "public" clouds!)

Perhaps our favorite was the Governance-as-a-Service solution we heard about this winter. Yes, that's GaaS, friends. (But I digress.)

Read more on CIO magazine

Have we been wrong about outsourcing?

2010-07-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

www.mehmetmutlu.com
An enlightening commentary by Andy Grove...

Andy Grove: How America Can Create Jobs
July 5, 2010

There's more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas.

Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass-produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny (figure-E).

That's a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies did not participate in the first phase and consequently were not in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.
Read more on Bloomberg Business Week

Elif Safak on TED: The politics of fiction

2010-07-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

You can't create the next big idea at will anymore than you can make the love of your life walk into the room in the next half hour

2010-07-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

www.mehmetmutlu.com
Go relax a bit..hunting down ideas may be against the very nature of finding the right ones for you. Read below and it will make sense.

Start with an Idea
by Dan Pallotta

When I was 24 I moved from Boston to L.A. in search of a record deal. Never got one, but Edgar Winter did record a song I wrote called, "Stranger to Love," for a B horror movie called Netherworld. Those songwriting days taught me something important about new ideas, where they come from, when they surface, and how to relate to them.

Night after night I would go into my loft and bang away on my guitar, trying to coerce a song out of it. It would take me months to write each song. This method we might call How Not to Write Songs. I was going about it the wrong way, and I notice a lot of entrepreneurs and businesses doing the same thing. They create businesses without an idea, or without a strong idea (which is why you can't understand what the hell they're talking about when they describe it to you). They build form around the absence of an idea and call it a business.
Read more on Harvard Business Review...

Little bit about Project Management...

2010-07-29T11:57:00.000-07:00

Practical Analysis: The Project Management Predicament

Telling your partner that you'll get to his request in four months doesn't go over better by showing him the other projects ahead of his in the queue.

By Art Wittmann
InformationWeek
July 10, 2010 12:00 AM (From the July 12, 2010 issue)

Our survey on project management recently came out of the field with almost 700 responses. We aim for about 500 responses, so any time we get well above that, we know we've hit on a hot topic.

Respondents fell more or less into two groups. The first group consists of companies, like software makers and banks, that create complex products closely tied to IT functions. For them, project management is a well-developed science. The software folks will typically talk about waterfall vs. Agile development, and the large, complex banks and other organizations talk about Six Sigma and devote whole departments to project management. Then there are the rest of us--the second group.
Read more...

Are you a morning person? It may pay off!

2010-06-25T12:47:00.000-07:00

Defend Your Research: The Early Bird Really Does Get the Worm
by Christoph Randler, Harvard Business Review

The finding: People whose performance peaks in the morning are better positioned for career success, because they’re more proactive than people who are at their best in the evening.

The study: Biologist Christoph Randler surveyed 367 university students, asking what time of day they were most energetic and how willing and able they were to take action to change a situation to their advantage. A higher percentage of the morning people agreed with statements that indicate proactivity, such as “I spend time identifying long-range goals for myself” and “I feel in charge of making things happen.”

Read more at http://hbr.org/2010/07/defend-your-research-the-early-bird-really-does-get-the-worm/ar/1

No Need for a Cloud Strategy!?

2010-06-20T04:53:00.000-07:00

Why You Don't Need a Cloud Strategy
The trouble with creating a "cloud strategy"? You're focusing on technology, not business benefit. Forrester's Randy Heffner advises you focus on how cloud can enhance your existing architecture strategy.

By Randy Heffner on Thu, June 17, 2010 | CIO.com

Amidst the overwhelming buzz of cloud computing, IT decision-makers must sort the reality from the hype to determine where cloud might provide business value for their organizations. Cloud is an important development in the landscape of computing options—to the point that most organizations will one day use cloud or cloud-like offerings—but there's no guarantee that cloud is right for your organization right now. For example, many of the most-talked-about usage scenarios for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) entail specialized situations that few enterprises can relate to. On the other hand, there is real value, and your business may be able to achieve substantial benefit from cloud computing.

When any wave of industry hype gets fevered and loud, CIOs often ask architects to create a strategy for the new industry darling—in this case, cloud. The problem with creating a "cloud strategy" is that, by placing your strategy focus on the technology rather than on your business, it's easy to lose focus and assume that adopting cloud-based offerings is a sure path to business benefit. In reality, there are numerous tradeoffs between cloud options and traditional computing options. Nearly every cloud solution has a functionally equivalent non-cloud alternative, so to maintain focus on your business, it is best to build your strategy around the business decisions to which each type of cloud offering is directed. This approach fosters more level-headed consideration and comparison of cloud and non-cloud options, and it establishes a stronger foundation for a long-term evolution toward cloud and cloud-like options as they mature.

Read more on CIO.com...

The Need for IT I&O “Reform” -- Gartner Blogs

2010-04-15T08:12:00.000-07:00

Cameron Haight looks at IT process improvement from a different angle and tries to align it with the 'Agile' way of operating IT in the new world...I strongly believe the approach he is experimenting deserves a chance...His thought process is definitely targeting to trigger the IT leaders and the community as a whole to start to 'walk the talk'...rather than introducing yet another process to add to the redundancy pile.
Here is what Cameron has to say:

April 7th, 2010 by Cameron Haight on Gartner Blogs

With the topic of healthcare reform receiving much continued spirited debate, it’s time we turn to another area needing a new approach (and hopefully stimulating interesting debate in terms of approaches). We need to rethink how we manage the “health” of IT. It may in fact require some drastic “medicine” but in the long run the goal is to make IT service delivery not only more efficient, but effective. Read more...

salesforce.com chatter launch

2010-04-08T20:21:00.001-07:00

CRM Cloud Technology

2010-03-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

CRM Technology For Travel | By Gregg Hopkins
The Time Is Now For Cloud Computing

by Gregg Hopkins, President and CEO, Libra OnDemand

At the Dreamforce conference last December, Salesforce.com released the White Paper "5 Reasons CIOs are Adopting Cloud Computing in 2010. "It's a great read, so I decided to sparse the article together with how I feel it applies to hospitality CRM and related technologies.

For years, companies such as eBay and Google have used cloud computing to bring easy-to-use services to consumers. Salesforce.com has been a pioneer in bringing cloud-based applications to users as well.

Cloud computing is transforming the way IT departments deploy custom applications during lean times. By offering a fundamentally faster, less risky, and more cost-effective alternative to on-premises applications, cloud computing will forever change the economics of hospitality information technology. Even though we are experiencing one of the most difficult economic situations in 50 years, CIOs must continue to deliver additional business value in the face of consistent budget cuts. The old models increase complexity and generate additional cost. IT departments of all sizes are now looking to the cloud to break the cycle. I find this to be especially true with hospitality IT departments worldwide, as they are reevaluating their strategies and looking for innovative ways to create competitive advantages. CIOs are redefining their value to the enterprise by looking for new, cost-effective alternatives for application enhancement and development, including cloud computing.

IT projects have always been judged by three financial criteria: initial capital expense, ongoing operating costs, and time to value. In 2010, while planning for gradual recovery, IT projects will continue to be evaluated rigorously by this criteria.

Many hospitality organizations have already made, or are in the process of shifting to cloud-based solutions. However, for those that are still on the fence, here are five reasons why companies are betting that cloud computing is the right technology strategy for 2010 and beyond:

Delivers faster time to value
Requires no up-front capital expense
Minimizes operational costs
Requires fewer technical resources
Simplifies integration

Read more...

Source: hospitalitynet.org

Another excellent TED speech: Stewart Brand proclaims 4 environmental 'heresies'

2010-02-22T19:26:00.000-08:00

Xerox’s New Chief Tries to Redefine Its Culture

2010-02-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

A great New York Times article on Ursula Burns & Xerox...

By ADAM BRYANT
Published: February 20, 2010

HUNDREDS of Xerox sales reps have flown here from around the country for an annual pump-up-the-troops meeting. The main attraction during a marathon day is a face both familiar and new: Ursula Burns. She’s an old friend to many of them, and there are plenty of hugs to go around for the people she’s grown up with during her 30 years at the company.

But there is also a new distance, a new curiosity about what she will do, given that she is no longer just Ursula.

She is Ursula M. Burns, the C.E.O. And even though she became chief executive in July, taking the baton from Anne M. Mulcahy, she has been keeping a low profile, spending months working on the details of a huge Xerox bet, the $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, an outsourcing company. Read More...

Jonathan Harris: the Web's secret stories

2009-12-27T17:51:00.001-08:00

Cloud Computing Myths

2009-12-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

7 Cloud Computing Myths Busted

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and others are investing aggressively in the cloud, even as critics point to security, reliability, and compatibility issues. We cut through the fog.

By Serdar Yegulalp
InformationWeek
November 14, 2009 07:00 AM

What is it about "the cloud" that has people, well, getting their heads up in the clouds over it? Almost no other IT innovation in recent memory has engendered this much enthusiasm -- and furor, and confusion, and outright misunderstanding.
The cloud isn't exclusively a cure-all or a calamity in progress; neither is it a savior or sinner. It's a new tool for solving emergent problems, and like every new hammer in someone's hands it can make everything look like a nail.

More Software InsightsWhitepapersThe Shortcut Guide To Virtualization & Service AutomationIT Tipping Point for Midsized Companies: Deciding When to Move to Tier 1 ERPWebcastsTapping into the Information Pipeline in Real-Time: Creating new levels of visibility and control for the Oil and Gas IndustryNavigating Business in Stormy Conditions with Event ProcessingReportsHybrid CloudsHTML 5 Starts Looking Real (Dr. Dobbs)Videos
SAP's Marge Breya provides a demonstration of the latest BusinessObjects Explorer On Demand, as well as two brand new products not even in beta yet: Kona (a cloud-based BI tool) and 12 Sprints (a collaborative decision making tool, also in the cloud)In this piece we'll examine many of the current myths -- good, bad, and bogus -- about cloud computing. Many are borne by simple ignorance or inexperience. Others are legitimate criticisms in the guise of gripes. And some are entirely too on target, and need to be nipped in the bud by prospective cloud-creators before they get bitten by them.
1. Compatibility Issues

Myth: Cloud computing is too proprietary.

At present, no two clouds are alike -- both in nature and in IT. Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN)'s cloud platform is nothing like Google (NSDQ: GOOG)'s, which is nothing like Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT)'s, which is nothing like and you can insert the name of any other up-and-coming cloud provider here.

And yet "proprietary" has not proved to mean "useless" -- not by a long shot.

Think back to the early days of the personal computer. The first wave of PCs were all from different makers, used different hardware, and weren't remotely cross-compatible. Programs written for the Apple II weren't assumed to have any interchangeability with the Atari, the Amiga, or even the IBM (NYSE: IBM) PC itself.

What few common platforms that existed -- e.g., CP/M -- were largely for the sake of porting and running existing applications to those platforms, rather than for creating a crossbar of compatibility among them. None of this stopped a remarkable amount of development from taking place -- and the various platforms were able to compete heavily based on their differences.

Granted, the situation today is totally unlike that. People expect a great deal more cross-compatibility as a matter of course -- between devices, between applications, between platforms and environments. What's most proprietary about the platforms isn't so much the way they work on the inside as the fact that talking to each cloud, getting data into and out of each cloud, and managing functionality within each cloud are all done differently.

The proprietary nature of the first wave of cloud computing platforms is, for lack of a better way to put it, a necessary evil. And maybe even not all that evil in the first place, when it grants you access to platforms like Linux (Amazon.com) and languages like Python (Google), which on their own terms are as open as they get. Things could be made less proprietary outside clouds and among clouds, although odds are the standards that will exist between clouds will develop more as a consequence of what people are actually using (e.g., EC2) rather than something drafted in the abstract.

More on Information Week...

World Internet Usage Statistics

2009-09-04T11:58:00.000-07:00

2009 global internet usage stats as published by Internet World Stats.

Displaying the internet usage by population ratio; what shows us below is that the regions, claiming the 74% of world population (Asia, Africa, Middle East) are all below world average.

The good news is that the user growth in those regions are booming; Africa and the Middle East are both increasing approximately at a fascinating 1360% and Asia at a 516% rate, which proves that they are on a fast track to better connect with the rest of the world.

Source: Internet World Stats

Meaningful Data in the Cyberspace

2009-06-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

There is information on the internet.. Tons of it. There is also the underlying data, which is underutilized. We need more tools and presentation layers to extract and format the data in a useful form. A response is overdue on the increasing need of valuing the invisible data hanging around the Net. Here is an interesting read:

The Algorithmic Workout

Marc Digesti logs on to one of the weight-free CPro resistance stations at the Core Performance Center in Santa Monica, California, and downloads a custom workout designed by his new coach: an algorithm. After tapping through a body-part map that allows him to note injuries, Digesti begins pulling a cord as directed by an onscreen video. As he guns through five reps of a biceps curl, the monitor displays his power output in watts for each arm. "You can see that I fall off a bit on these last reps," Digesti says breathlessly, while the screen message "Behind schedule!" prods him onward. "Next time the system might give me a little less weight."

At Core Performance, personalized workouts have been digitized and automated — think Club One run by Deep Blue. The gym's founders spent two years poring over decisions made by a coach and embedding them into workout equipment that compares a gym rat's goals (say, run a marathon) with their stats (like VO2 max) and nutrition habits to calculate a progressive series of workouts. Data from each session is saved in order to improve subsequent ones. The principle is that workouts you measure are workouts that make you fitter — because you train more precisely and work harder when you're getting quantitative feedback.

Core Performance charges up to $65 a workout — what many gyms charge for a month. But the idea is spreading. At Wicker Park Fitness, a Chicago gym that costs $500 a year, customers can plug their USB drives into cardio machines and store info like time, distance, incline, and calories. And YMCAs around the country also now let customers use a similar system.

Wicker Park co-owner Mason Goldberg is convinced that obsessing over the numbers helps: "People love to track things. It brings out their competitive spirit."

Source: Jennifer Kahn - Wired Magazine

A few words on what it means to transform IT during a recession...

2009-06-06T09:22:00.000-07:00

Down To Business: This 'Gateway Recession' Must Transform IT

Today's economic environment calls for a much deeper and more disruptive self-evaluation than business technology leaders are used to.

By Rob Preston
InformationWeek
June 6, 2009 12:00 AM (From the June 8, 2009 issue)

Forrester Research CEO George Colony calls this the "gateway recession," the end of the line for business as usual and the true beginning of the digital economy, where everything from innovation to customer relationship building and brand loyalty will be turned upside down.

This recession will be particularly disruptive for the business technology organizations that underpin the digital economy. In the previous post-dot-com recession, IT was taken to the woodshed for a lesson in fiscal responsibility--the calculus of ROI and the art of "doing more with less." Today's recession calls for a much deeper and more disruptive self-evaluation, where tech organizations must (finally) reduce the 70% to 80% of their budgets that goes to system upkeep to free up more money for investments that tilt the competitive playing field. The brightest CEOs and boards of directors will stand for nothing less. (We'll be exploring these issues in depth with CIOs and other CXOs at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, Sept. 13 to 15 in Monarch Beach, Calif., under the theme "Navigating The Boardroom.")

David Thomson, an expert on the attributes of high-growth companies, says the challenge for CIOs in a recession isn't to cut their spending from 2.1% of revenue to 1.9%. It's to change the spending mix. Leading growth companies understand that CIOs must invest more of their budgets in systems that drive growth and boost the efficiency of other company departments, whether supply chain, sales, or product development, so that when the economy turns, the company is even better positioned to bury its rivals.

New architectures and business models are in play to change that spending mix, from virtualization to software as a service to offshore outsourcing. One Fortune 50 CIO recently told me that he almost welcomes a downturn every five years as an opportunity to overhaul the IT infrastructure to position the company for the next growth wave.

This gateway recession is also an opportunity to change the culture from one that's internally focused on "user" co-workers to one that's externally focused on paying customers. At its best, business technology is an instrument to deliver more revenue and profits. The most valuable tech pros are customer-facing retailers, bankers, brokers, and shippers, not just IT trench dwellers. And as such, they're less vulnerable to being outsourced or laid off in a cost-cutting binge.

Another "gateway" realization is the need to give customers, partners, and employees freer access to one another via social media, Web 2.0 collaboration tools, consumer devices, and other "contraband" systems. As industry regulations get stricter and the world gets more menacing, the impulse is to move in the opposite direction: Lock down everything! But even the most regulated companies realize they can't wrap their processes and information assets in a hermetically sealed pouch. Colony tells of the defense contractor CIO who recently said he's far more concerned about making the company attractive to young people accustomed to using the latest tech tools than he is with losing sensitive information to leakage. Clearly, there must be a middle ground.

Of course, it's easy to oversimplify the transformation at hand. Organizations don't change overnight. But just as every CEO must kill certain businesses or reengineer them every five years, says HCL Technologies CEO Vineet Nayar, so must CIOs turn their own organizations upside down.

Source:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/global-cio/interviews/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=FVSUGMXWFM1WYQSNDLOSKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=217701955

Burns to Lead Xerox

2009-05-30T04:55:00.000-07:00

Xerox Appoints Burns as CEO
In an unprecedented woman-to-woman transition, Anne Mulcahy passes the baton to Ursula Burns—whose chief challenge is to revive sales
By Nanette Byrnes

In a widely expected move that is nonetheless remarkable, Xerox on May 21 named Ursula Burns its next chief executive. Not only is Burns one of the very few female CEOs, she is also the first African American woman to head a public company as sizable as copier maker Xerox (XRX), which had sales of $17.6 billion last year. And to have one woman, outgoing CEO Anne Mulcahy, handing the reins of one of the largest U.S. companies to another woman is unprecedented.

The promotion of Burns, 50, was a long time in the making. Like General Electric (GE) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), Xerox is known for an emphasis on executive development. "It's about meritocracy and meritocracy writ large," says Ilene H. Lang, president and CEO of Catalyst, an advocacy group for women in business. "Here is a company that over decades has been able to see talent wherever it is, even in nontraditional places. That takes work and care and attention."

Burns' engineering capability and her experience in a range of Xerox businesses, including supply-chain management, will no doubt serve her well as she navigates in a recession that's cutting into sales. Having a nontraditional background may also help Burns better develop the next generation of leadership at Xerox, analysts say.

Developing Managerial Talent
Mulcahy, 56, and Burns are Xerox lifers. Mulcahy began her 33-year career as a Xerox sales representative in Boston in 1976. Burns, who holds a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University, joined four years later as a mechanical engineering summer intern and climbed the ladder to head up manufacturing and supply chain. In interviews, Burns has said she stayed on at Xerox during its sharp downturn in the early 2000s because of Mulcahy's leadership. Mulcahy, who will remain as chairman, said in a statement, "I joined Xerox because it offered a level playing field—a sales environment where meritocracy ruled. And I stayed because the values of the brand, the culture, and the people are so closely aligned with how I think every business should operate." Read More

Source: Business Week

How iPhone 3.0 May Revolutionize The Smartphone Industry

2009-04-29T17:48:00.000-07:00

With a new business model for third-party software, peer-to-peer networking, and richer interfaces for third-party hardware, Apple's got a potential game-changer in iPhone 3.0.

By Mitch Wagner
InformationWeek
March 23, 2009 04:00 AM

It's easy to see why many people were underwhelmed by Apple's iPhone 3.0 sneak peek last Tuesday. Most of the attention focused on dull features like cut-and-paste and multimedia messaging -- capabiliites that have long been in demand by iPhone users, but which competitors have had for a long time now.
Eric Zeman sniffed that the announcement added features from 2007 to the iPhone. Ed Hansberry asked whether Apple pushed the mobile device forward with iPhone 3.0 and provided an answer: No.

I think I can see how Eric and Ed came to their conclusions. Early reports and blogging about the new iPhone focused on Apple finally getting features, like cut-and-paste and multimedia messaging, where the device lagged far behind its competitors. Catch-up games are just plain boring.
iPhone 3.0, however, does have three features which will be game-changing, if Apple and its developers exploit those features to their full potential. Apple revolutionized the cell phone industry when it introduced the iPhone in 2007. The company did it again last year when it introduced the iPhone 3G and App Store. And now it looks like it will happen a third time when iPhone 3 software ships in the second half of 2009.

The three features that can revolutionize the smartphone industry are peer-to-peer networking, APIs for hardware add-ons, and sales within applications.

Let's take them one at a time.

Peer-To-Peer Networking

The iPhone 3.0 software will enable peer-to-peer connections between iPhones and iPod Touches over Bluetooth, if they're near each other physically. The demo Apple provided on Tuesday was dead simple -- anybody who's tried to pair a headset with a cell phone knows it can be mildly confusing, but the peer-to-peer networking on the iPhone 3.0 software doesn't require pairing. Simply press a button in any app enabled for peer-to-peer connectivity, and the device will search for nearby iPhones and Touches that are running the same app. The other person taps a button to accept an incoming connection, and you're linked.
Read more

The inventor of WWW Tim Berners-Lee talks about the next web of open, linked data

2009-04-24T04:38:00.000-07:00

Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

SOA Mandates Data Management

2009-04-16T07:18:00.000-07:00

Short but insightful article by Information Management's Evan Levy, explaining what should be the focus with SOA initiations.

Evan Levy
Information Management Blogs, February 17, 2009

I’ve always said that the focus on SOA is too much on the "A" for "architecture." The whole idea of SOA is to define application functions and services that need to be accessible to other systems. Prior to SOA, it was always hairy to move data from one system to another.

But everyone thinks that SOA is an integration framework. In fact it’s a means of remotely accessing other systems and their related information without having to know the details. For instance, I don’t need to know how my cell phone number was assigned; I just need to remember that number so I can share it with my friends.

As I’ve said before, SOA is the evolutionary result of all the middleware companies trying to convince us to buy their hardware-independent products. SOA’s ability to business flexibility today is just as remote as the code objects of decade ago promising to make business more nimble. SOA isn’t a business term. It’s a technical term for technical people to focus on re-use, standard parts, and standardized processes.

Companies turning to SOA are looking for the holy grail. Consider the emergence of the term "SOA governance" to address the conundrum of SOA development planning. The core issue is how to simplify developers’ work in building applications without having to understand the technical details and obstacles in between. Just because I have advanced features and functions doesn’t mean I don’t still have to focus on software development fundamentals. Design reviews, code re-use, and development standards still matter.

The real challenge with implementing any kind of web service, or defining services that can be re-used, is in ensuring that the data they are dependent on is well-defined. Unfortunately there is no such thing as a business process that is data-independent. Until you’ve standardized your data, which means implementing data management and maintaining data in a sustainable way, you can’t have re-usable services. Period.

Source:
http://www.information-management.com/blogs/10014978-1.html

Simple, yet sophisticated: Impressive!!

2009-04-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

See the video that showcases how a simple idea with a very low cost setup could be put to use. Simply amazing...

Source: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/johnny_lee_demos_wii_remote_hacks.html

IT Valuation Challenges in the new world

2009-02-20T09:54:00.000-08:00

One of the main challenges for IT management is to be able to come up with business justification of new initiatives.

The real value of IT comes from the non-monetary aspects which are so tightly integrated into the business in that it is almost impossible to incorporate the value in the bottomline number. There needs to be a new way of thinking in IT valuation other than just outlining the cost savings, quality and revenue aspects.

The follwing article discusses IT valuation methodologies:

http://www.cio.com/article/103059/IT_Value_Methodologies_Do_They_Work_?page=1

Technology CEO

2009-01-28T16:56:00.000-08:00

Here is an interesting article my professor at Columbia University has published on ciozone.com:

Langer Report: The Mature Technology CEO
by Dr. Arthur Langer

http://www.ciozone.com/index.php/The-Langer-Report/Langer-Report-The-Mature-Technology-CEO.html

Will the Economy Kill 'Free' on the Internet?

2008-12-09T18:53:00.000-08:00

By Chris Snyder, WIRED Magazine October 2008

Web businesses that rely on free labor and crowdsourcing to survive are in for a rude awakening, says Andrew Keen, journalist, author and self-proclaimed hater of all things free.

“Is $0.00 really the future of labor in an age of mass unemployment?” Keen writes in a recent blog post. “Of course not.”

“The basic point is that free labor is fine when everyone’s got a lot of money and they’re employed, but when they start getting laid off, I think people’s attitude towards money changes,” Keen said in an interview with Wired.com. His book, Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture speaks volumes in the title alone.

In the interest of full disclosure it must be said that Keen strongly disagrees with the free economic model espoused by Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in the pages of the magazine and in an upcoming book.

Keen opined Tuesday in an Internet Evolution blog post that the current economic downturn will pop the open source, Web 2.0 bubble and sites that depend on the kindness of strangers for content like Wikipedia and The Huffington Post will start to see a decline in user participation.

“It will mean the success of Knol over Wikipedia, Mahalo over Google, theatlantic.com over the HuffingtonPost.com, iTunes over MySpace, Hulu over YouTube Inc., Playboy.com over Voyeurweb.com, TechCrunch over the blogosphere, CNN’s professional journalism over CNN’s iReporter citizen-journalism,” he writes.

Keen mentioned Mahalo as an example of a company that “gets it right.” But he has a different opinion of the microblogging site Twitter, whose investors recently mentioned plans to implement a business strategy in 2009.

“For a company like Twitter to announce that they might develop a business model next year, seems to me to be particularly absurd. You think they’d have more urgency in this economy,” he said.

“It’s a legacy of the old world. What’s happening is we’re in a twilight period right now between the old and the new world, and companies like Twitter are legacy companies,” he said, noting that this does not necessarily mean that these companies will close up shop. Self-indulgences at 140 characters at a time don't require much of an investment at a time.

But he does think, in the media realm, that Ariana Huffington’s content model could be dicey.

“If you’re a movie star in Santa Monica, or if you’re a powerful Washington insider, you’re still going to contribute your piece to The Huffington Post, but I think there are a lot of people, academics people who are losing their savings, who are going to be much less comfortable about just giving away articles,” he said, reaffirming his main point that the "cult of free" chapter in the history of the internet is finished.

“Your Wired readers will probably disagree but I think it’s a credible position given the current situation,” he said.

So do you agree?

iPhone Talk

2008-09-21T11:23:00.000-07:00

WSJ's Walt Mossberg on iPhone and Future.

Off-shoring going back to the roots

2008-09-14T12:36:00.000-07:00

Interesting to observe an IT kingdom born in India having developed itself using foreign potential, finally taking the front row in orchestrating big IT initiatives in the mainland.

IBM India is in the role TCS was playing 8 years ago in the US IT business. Though, Indian companies now have more stable resources and expertise than ever to move forward with taking over the local needs.

Here is an article on Friday's WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122115789955524399.html?mod=2_1571_leftbox

Infosys Sharpens India Focus -- source: WSJ
By RUMMAN AHMED and ROMIT GUHASeptember 12, 2008; Page B5

BANGALORE, India -- Infosys Technologies Ltd., one of India's biggest software exporters, said it will bid for three large information-technology projects from state-run companies -- a move that illustrates the company's growing focus on the local market.
Infosys -- a late entrant to the local IT services market -- is aiming to bridge the gap between itself and local leaders such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. and U.S.-based International Business Machines Corp., analysts said.
Landov
"In the coming days, a number of IT-service outsourcing deals are slated to come up, including projects for BSNL's billing system, a project by the Ministry of Commerce, and another for Indian Railways.
"We can't afford to ignore these," Binod H.R., senior vice president of Infosys's India business unit, said on the sidelines of a news conference.
Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., or BSNL, is India's biggest phone company. It is owned by the government.
"The IT-services market in India is stable and lots of investments are being rolled out which are multiyear and of a very large size in nature," he added.
Infosys started focusing on India as a market about a year ago. But IBM, TCS and Wipro Ltd. have been present for "at least five years," said a Mumbai-based analyst.
Infosys gets about 1.3% of its revenue from India, compared with about 63% from North America.
"Infosys has been wary of the lower margins -- about 17% -- in local deals which used to have a strong hardware component," while software exports to the U.S. yield margins of more than 25%, the analyst said.
But with the Indian economy growing fast and Indian companies looking to outsource more of their technological needs, Infosys has joined in, the analyst said.
"We see a tremendous amount of growth coming from the domestic market," said Mr. Binod, adding that Infosys is chasing business from the private sector as well as the public sector, although the nongovernment deals are smaller. "The public-sector IT-services deals are in the range of five billion rupees to 15 billion rupees" ($111 million to $333 million).
He said the company has already put in a bid for BSNL's enterprise resource planning, or ERP, contract.
BSNL said Wednesday it had received bids from India's top technology companies, including TCS, Infosys, Wipro and Satyam Computer Services Ltd. for its ERP contract, which is valued at a minimum of four billion rupees to five billion rupees.