The Virtual Transformation

Article first published as The Virtual Transformation on Technorati

In August 1995, Microsoft launched Windows 95 in an attempt to capture their founder's audacious dream of having a computer running Windows on every desktop in the world. But in a world with an insatiable appetite for communication the vision statements have dramatically changed. Everyone is leaving their desktops behind and moving into the cloud and soon reaching for the stars. In an increasingly mobile world instant gratification is top order.

Bye bye PCs

Three global behemoths, Apple, Google and Microsoft are locked in a battle for supremacy, and there are the outliers, Amazon and RIM. One a bold maverick and the latter was once a visionary in the enterprise world, now fast disappearing into the background . While Microsoft still maintains a stranglehold on the PC marketshare Google and Apple have gone mobile and flipped the game on Microsoft. Over the last few years PC sales has diminished, as we speak there are more smart mobile devices (smart phones and tablets) sold than PCs. IBM sold their, once priced PC business to the Chinese firm Lenovo. HP is struggling to hive off it's PC business, in an attemptt to move into high value solutions and services. This is a testament to the fact that the era of the PC will soon be behind us. This is made possible through increasingly shrinking chipsets and cloud based services. While device footprint are increasingly portable, we are witnessing convergence, now no one carries an mp3 player, phone, and a camera, they just carry their smart phone instead.

Devices to services

In a fast evolving world and market place nobody has the time to marvel at product spec sheets, everybody is interested in the end service. In other words, what's in it for me? Hardware manufacturers no longer just publish technical specifications, instead feature apps and their services. So what sells now is Nokia's navigation services, Amazon Kindles's books online, iTunes music or YouTube's video channels and the device is merely a means to an end. This is increasingly driving the cost of the hardware down, as seen with the launch of the Kindle Fire. The device that runs the largest app store indirectly delivers the widest range of services. Apple sits pretty on top with 414,852 apps since its launch in 2007, while Google is fast catching up with 237,199 apps in the last 3 years.

Your avatar in a virtual world

Moving away from the physical world is a direct result of this transformative communication age. You no longer need to carry your wallet, just flash your phone to pay your check, Singapore is the third Asian country to adopt NFC for payments in a large scale after Japan and Korea. For many, shops are just viewing galleries, they try out new clothes and swipe the barcode to purchase it cheaper online. Track the delivery status, pay your bills, drop off a check, hail a cab, check-in to a flight everything from your phone. You can literally rule the world from the palm of your hands. Owe your friend money just bump your phones to transfer money. The line between the physical world and the virtual is fast blurring. No more cash or credit cards just a smart guy with a smart card in a smart phone.

Go east, get young and get rich

The new markets are rapidly moving east as the average age of the rest of the world is fast rising and the west is struggling to revive growth. China's median age is 35 and India's around 29, this means more than 25% of the world's population are under the age of 40. The youth in these regions are not going to stand in long queues to do business, they are going to do it online and will want it at a fraction of the cost. These are low cost economies where it's all about volume. India and China alone constitute over 1.6 billion mobile subscribers. Going mobile here reduces cost of services and increases reach to tap into a fast emerging middle class and remote corners where modern services remains remote. India just launched a 35$ tablet, this will expectedly, further kill PC sales in the region and will soon make India one of the largest internet markets. So while western economies are having to deal with an aging population the new markets are young and eager to absorb new technologies.

Competing with Free

Ever since Gillete offered shaving sticks for free while selling razors, we have inadvertently entered the age of free. We are seeing innovative pricing strategies and bundled services offering, banks provide free money transfer and make money off float, TV channels offer free online viewing as against paying cable charges. This is further made possible by the cost of setting up business on the internet coming down, dramatically reducing entry barriers. News channels have to compete with bloggers and the social media where people are experiencing instant news that is fast and free. So companies now have to build innovative strategies to monetize free.

Embrace the change

It is important to embrace this change and adapt to the new strategies. Business relying on online channels for new innovative services, is not another hype like the dotcom bubble, this is a paradigm shift. The shift is to value focused services, innovative pricing strategy with a constant downward pressure on costs, products and services that constantly evolve, supported by a strong technology vision and strategy. In short in the future there will be very few services that rely purely on a physical delivery channels. The industries most affected by this change are Entertainment, Media, Financial Services and Retail.

Invest in the right technologies

When the entire world is gravitating towards mobiles and the cloud, it makes no sense to persist with desktop and other physical services. Companies that are aggressively investing on their internet platforms have to make sure it's tablet ready and backed by mobile services capabilities. This is a significant change to technology roadmaps. Volumes and frequency of hits will increase, driving up traffic, therefore will require the supporting infrastructure, both in terms of availability and capacity. Mobile services operate on different technologies, this will mandate robust services based (SOA) platforms capable of supporting multiple delivery channels or end points that include PCs, tablets and smart phones.

Rapid innovation with shorter product life cycles

A rapidly evolving product and services portfolio is much needed where entry cost with business going online have come down. Innovation in organizations cannot be confined to the R&D teams. Finally being able to convert new bright ideas into reality and doing it quick is the need of the hour. This is not possible unless business is supported with open innovation platforms, agile IT and business processes Product release cycles over the years have consistently reduced from years to months to weeks. Information sharing is simplified outside the enterprise and users are able to easily share rich content and communicate with ease. There is a significant step down when employees step into enterprises that are struggling to catch up. New apps are launched every day in the app stores and it is frustrating to work with a lumbering IT function that takes weeks to even provide a solution. IT and business need to transform themselves into light weight nimble teams that can provide quick turn around times and freely innovate.

Now or never

As the online consumer base grows, the physical paper based services will eventually disappear, further increasing the need for automation, dramatically shrinking turn around times and SLAs ,eventually transforming current business operating parameters. Organizations that struggle to adapt are more likely to fail in this new unforgiving world of business.

While there is a lot of debate on the future technology landscape, some of which is denial, some as a result of the new technologies being transitionary.In my mind the direction is clear, there have been some fundamental changes in the way business is done, the way technology impacts business and there is significant advantage in investing ahead of the curve.

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Digital embrace

Just as the world seems like this increasingly wired network of communities that constantly feels the need to stay in touch, are we in the process actually loosing touch? I don't find it unimaginable that soon mobile phones will be confined to the dusty corners of the nostalgia shops and people will never speak face to face. Everyone will only speak to their smart phones or whoever is in it. "Hey let's Hang Out at the Coffee Shop" would not mean meeting at a coffee shop but a Google plus group video conference during coffee breaks.

There was a time when people just received a morning paper, now I'm not sure what to read, Times of India, Straight Times, WSJ or a mix of everything on Flipboard or Evri. While I love the Flipboard magazine interface, I also love Evri's organization by topic of interest. Even better just read what every body is reading by tuning into your Twitter channel. We are so spoilt for choice on this information crazy highway you're just not sure where to exit. Does it really matter if I knew Colnel Gadaffi's whereabouts by the minute or his birthday even? Speaking of which, I rarely call friends on their birthdays, and remembering them is not so special anymore, thanks to Facebook reminders. I have so many friends on my Facebook I don't know most of them.

All of this just says one thing the virtual world has helped us go viral, not without infecting us in the process. Human beings are highly evolved species, our brain senses everything from body temperature, to texture and the subtlest of body languages. It will take a digital dodo to assume that a smiley can evoke the same human response as a smile. Communication advances has undoubtedly brought the world together, yet we run this risk of becoming transactional. It's so much easier to defraud, be ruthless in business or ignore a friend, as the person is just a digital rendering. You don't really know the person, because you never felt that handshake or warm embrace.

A story for bed time is a personalized children's book reading software. You can record yourself reading the book and your children can launch their favorite bed time stories, to hear and see you read them. An up in the air salesman's dream, a one time setup for a life time of guilt free cocktail parties and business travel. But maybe your children will never think of Noddy as that lovable little boy, but a funny kid in a car, as they never felt that good night kiss and your warm embrace. I'm sure as we speak someone is solving that with an iPad app, but you must realize, not everything is solved with a digital embrace.

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Operationalizing Enterprise Ecosystems

Article first published as Operationalizing Enterprise Ecosystems on Technorati (PCX5DZB6CX25).

In the times of F.W. Taylor, focus of enterprise process was on repeatability and predictability and less on adaptability and agility. A hundred years later automation is pushing the monotonous functions to computer systems, using tools like self service solutions and straight through processing. As enterprises mature the role of the desk clerk who will come into work and do the same job day in and day out will be marginalized. Every employee will be empowered with the power to think, plan and execute in the new innovative enterprise.

The biggest challenge in being the innovative enterprise is in transitioning from conventional organization and systems to one that enables mass scale innovation, building the ability to tap into many little idea bubbles and aggregating them into new product or services that impact change in the way business gets done. My belief is this can be a achieved by establishing the right frameworks and tools or an Enterprise Ecosystems.

While this is the future, it is important to understand where organizations stand today and the direction in which they are evolving and why we are in a much better place to make that transition today than ever before.

Enterprise evolution

Enterprise Strategy

Enterprise strategy is conventionally driven top down, where the board decides the strategic direction, the annual and quarterly targets. The rest of the employees are expected to pretty much expand on the vision and execute. While this model has served the interests of rich boards and some overpaid CEOs does it really do justice to the true growth potential of an enterprise?

Ownership Structure

There was a time when organizations were started and owned by a few wealthy investors pooling their resources to start a company. As scale increased companies were restricted by the availability of capital. That changed with the advent of organized institutional finance and public capital markets. Ownership could rest in the hands of hundreds of thousands of investors driving up the scale of enterprise to heights never imagined before.

Management Control

Conventional enterprises depended on a centralized command and control model where a small executive team that decided the fate of thousands of employees. Systems were designed to support a centralized chain of command and a pyramid style organization, with management and control that rested in the hands of few, restricting growth and innovation. As organizations spread across multiple geographies and became today’s mammoth, global enterprise, product lines and services had to be adapted to the culture, tastes and preferences of the local markets. Therefore control shifted to regional and countrywide command centers and thereby broadened the span of control and adaptability of the organization.

Innovation

Innovation in most organizations was driven by R&D teams which was capital intensive and was restricted to the brightest minds in the world. This drove the thought that all product development is capital and resource intensive hence had to be centrally managed. With the internet and open source revolution we learnt that products can be loosely managed and allowed to evolve naturally, through mass innovation. Linux being the first of many successful open source products to prove products can be developed with no R&D teams and no executive boards defining go to market strategies or goals. It was the form of free enterprise that proved one does not need the restrictive corporate structures to successfully develop products.

If as in Fig 1.1, 80% of your organization was execution focused, 20% was ensuring goals set by the top 0.1-0.5% were met; the organization is wasting at least 80-90% of its intellectual potential. As the opportunities to innovate and generate value drops in the lower levels of the pyramid. This leads to typical idea bubble evaporation, where employees are forced to suppress ideas, either because they are so low down in the hierarchy to be heard or their job description doesn’t enable them to step out of bounds. Over time the lost bubbles cost organizations in terms of lost opportunities and employees who leave with their ideas to start off on their own or even worse hand it over to competition. The challenge can be addressed by creating the right Enterprise Ecosystems, a system that captures, develops and convert ideas into real world solutions.

A one hit wonder or sustained innovation

In the book The Element the author mentions an interesting anecdote where George Harrison one day got together with Bob Dylan and group of like minded musicians in a jamming session. What was a casual get together of music's greats resulted in Handle with Care which turned out to be Harrison’s greatest song in the post Beatles era. Is innovation truly a random event? Do we all have a Dylan or a Harrison in us? The answer in my mind varies based on what you set out to do. Do you want to be a one hit wonder or whether you want to create a system that consistently delivers? In an ideal world George Harrison and Bob Dylan should have got together and started one of the greatest rock bands after their album Traveling Wilburys but that never happened. That’s because what got them together did not keep them together. Traveling Wilburys was like an affair or a fling and had all the flair and charms of one. Innovation in the enterprise is not a fling; it’s about creating a sustainable and a constantly innovating enterprise.

The time is ripe for an innovation culture

Corporations ownership structures are decentralized, control is spread across the levels of the organization in flatter organization structures. The open source programs of the world have established that innovation is not restricted to exclusive product development teams and can be broad based. This proves the power of plenty. Yet it is necessary to have the mechanism to piece together a framework that can identify the right ideas and convert them into viable solutions in an enterprise.

Enterprise ecosystems

An ecosystem is alive, dynamic, constantly evolving, nourishes growth and is supported by a strong community. Enterprise ecosystems create the internal mechanism for their employees to create new ideas and for like minded people to collaborate and build on it to the point where it can become a solution that justifies further investments. The idea can be a product, service, or even a new process. The ecosystem acts as a system that enables the identification, evolution and formalization of an idea into an offering. Further it is a culmination of tools that simplify collaboration, processes and systems that incubate ideas across the enterprise.

Enterprise Ecosystems and the innovation lifecycle

Idea Generation

Idea generation can be a random lightbulb moment or as a result of more deliberate thought which may arise due to gaps in services or product offering. Typically when ideas emerge people don't think of penning it down or even sharing it and building on it. It is necessary to create the necessary tools to capture ideas, promote a knowledge sharing culture and define the reward mechanism to effectively promote idea sharing. This is to ensure every light bulb moment is captured and given the opportunity to grow into a future offering and does not turn into another lost bubble. The idea generation systems offered might include:

An innovation portal that facilitate idea capture via idea blogs, discussions and posts

An Innovation Council that monitors these programs and identifies those ideas that demonstrate value for further investments

Feedback loop

The web and the social media tools generate a lot of chatter. Several organizations have invested heavily in internal social media tools, but often fail to also build the feedback channel. A channel that can sift through the chatter and pick up relevant information and piece it together to form meaningful intelligence. Therefore when the enterprise sets up a mass innovation systems, there must also be the mechanism to identify the right ideas. The Innovation Council supported by the necessary tools will play a pivotal role in whetting these thought bubbles and identifying the diamond in the rough.

Idea project development

An idea to be converted into a final solution will have to be designed, developed and tested. It further requires feasibility studies, market research and commercial evaluation to be converted into an offering. So as ideas bubble up via the feedback channel a project group is setup to further build on it and test it. The important element here is time and resources. Just as in the open source world, not everybody quits their day job, here also the idea is developed using a team of volunteers who truly believe in their idea. The team will have to be supported with the necessary management and collaboration tools to manage their project. It must be developed under the umbrella of an Innovation Council, to ensure that the focus is maintained and the necessary expertise is available. The initial beta tests can be conducted within the organization's volunteer groups. The end outcome will be a solution design, feasibility study, a beta tested product or service and a business case.

Create new offeringOnce the offering is adequately flushed out, feasibility study is complete and business case is established the Innovation Council will carry out the first level evaluation of the idea. Evaluation would examine the quality of product or service design, it's feasibility, impact to existing product or service lines, value proposition, market preparedness, targeted consumers, alignment to organization strategy, competitive positioning, investment requirement and commercial viability. On passing the litmus test the Innovation Council will represent the idea to the executive teams that will make the final decision on the new offering. Once the executive teams approve the service or product offering, the idea is passed on to the new product or service transition function. From here on it becomes part of the organization's process for a new product rollout, spearheaded by the innovation team.

Organization considerations for success

Establishing the Innovation Council

The Innovation Council will have to be represented by the various functions of the organization. It must be a group of experts with sufficient industry exposure and understanding of the organization's various functions. The council must be able to invest sufficient time and effort in identifying the ideas for further funding, whetting the various offerings presented, providing the necessary expertise and governance to the innovation program. This is a critical function and group that must have an open innovation mindset, this is pivotal to the success of the entire innovation program.

Reward Mechanism

When it comes to the open source communities, the driver is to build open products outside the mould of the corporate world. The ideals here is for a cause that is sometimes and not always non-profit. But this may not work in an enterprise context, so the organization must structure a reward mechanism, which has to be adequate to motivate active participation. The rewards could range from a one time pay off to royalty sharing with the employees and leadership roles in the new product or service lines.

Innovation cultureWhile a sizable reward is motivation for an innovator but the organization must have an innovation culture.

Not suited to a centralized command and control organization setup, requires a democratic leadership structure that empowers their employees

Employees hired must have a creative bend of mind and the aptitude to innovate

Organizations that largely hire low cost and low skilled resources who lack the skills to design and develop products or services may not deliver sufficient value for such setups

Must be supported by the internal groups for knowledge sharing, closed organizations where there isn't an active community for sharing and exchanging ideas will struggle to innovate

External programs, training and entrepreneurship programs to grow the innovation culture will nurture the talent pool and egg them on to innovate

Products that have very long gestation, that requires several years of specialized research may not be candidates for mass innovation

In a world where information dissemination is faster and simpler than ever before and rate of change is rapid, where fortunes are made and lost in quarterly cycles, innovation is critical to thrive. The role of employees is no longer to turn up in factory lines and execute mindlessly but to create value and innovate. The challenge is to turn the tables on the 80:20 rule of the old and increasingly provide employees the opportunity to move up the value chain. Enable them to assume leadership roles unhindered by stringent organization hierarchies and a central command imposed. While doing so it's essential to empower employees with the tools and support systems that nurture ideas and enable them to evolve into product or service offering. In order to create the new innovative enterprise, it requires sustained innovation, yet the freedom to mushroom from any corner. The overarching framework that enables the enterprise to evolve organically and unobstructed is the Enterprise Ecosystem.

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Applications2Apps and Enterprise Ecosystems

Article first published as Applications2Apps and Enterprise Ecosystems on Technorati.

Twenty years ago I remember standing in long queues at 5:30AM in the morning, with an application form in hand at the railway station waiting for the mainframe to churn out ticket availability. The Indian Railways is the fourth largest in the world and transports 30 million passengers every day. The system changed the way ticketing was done from manual registers to centralized ticketing. So I could choose the train service across different lines and not be restricted to services offered by one booking station. There were two major breakthroughs the ticketing system achieved; it aggregated localized service and automated enterprise processes.

Internet Self Service Channels

As the internet delivery channels matured, automation moved from enterprise processes to client processes and I no longer had to fill paper forms or stand in queues, I could login to a self service portal and get the job done. So CRIS (Center for Railway Information Systems) maintained a powerful ticketing backbone capable of processing millions of transactions and started building out services which was directly exposed to end customers.

Agile Platforms

This is a journey most enterprises have had to go through. In the last few years enterprises have started investing heavily into analytics to understand consumer behavior. The data gathered is used to structure products and services alike and this in turn resulted in the need for agile technology platforms as consumer behavior did not operate in a set path. A dynamic business environment where life runs on quarterly cycles cannot afford anyone the luxury of working on a set annual plan. Therefore IT is forced to transform their platforms to become nimble, responsive to change and support a quarterly release cycles.

Enterprise Ecosystems

With the introduction of tablets, smart phones and cloud computing Google and Apple have stopped building packaged applications and instead provide a massive ecosystem. They provide an ecosystem that empowers the world to build their own apps and in doing so they have changed the game. Rapid strides made in the world of telecommunication and technology has made consumer appetite and possibilities endless. So why bind the consumers to the boundaries of one enterprise’s vision? We have unwittingly stepped into the age of Enterprise Ecosystems.

The second transformation is applications are decomposed into small light weight apps enabling Micro Services and Multichannel Services offering. So in the dark ages of the mainframe computers you had monolithic applications running on massive servers the size of an average cafeteria. In the 90s you had to install a large desktop application from a CD-ROM. Today you download and install apps the size of a floppy disk. If the only banking service you use is the ATM, just download the ATM locator app versus logging into a website and navigating 10 different menus. Further I want to be looking for a coffee shop and then find an ATM via the same maps application. So the services are focused, multi-channel and mapped to a specific need that needs instant gratification.

Virtusa an IT services company recently organized an event called the Hackathon, where developers were encouraged to build their most innovative mobile applications in 8hrs. Some of the apps that the developers came out in a day were mind blowing. Such was the resounding success, they further extended the concept to come up with their own internal innovation ecosystem, where developers in their free time can come up with their own apps. The expectation is that as the beta apps mature they will build micro service offerings for their clients based on employee innovation. In doing so they have recognized the power of mass innovation and empowered their employees with what might be the beginnings of a larger Enterprise Ecosystem.

Today’s employees are forced to live two lives on the one hand they use a powerful set of tools to communicate, share and solve complex problems in their personal lives, they walk into work only to be locked into ageing systems and inflexible processes. In my recent article Crowd in the Cloud, I wrote about how the consumers are taking control and collaborating amongst themselves to solve their problems, while enterprises are playing catch up. Innovation has always been random and decentralized and very difficult to tap into in a large enterprises. With the power of technology, enterprises need to create the necessary Ecosystems, empower their employees to create their own Micro Services, and keep pace with the frantic pace of technology change.

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Keeping Tabs

I practically live in my computer, but sort of ties you down at home or you got to lug around the laptop all over town. Reading an ebook with the laptop on my chest can get pretty hot and heavy for all the wrong reasons and I almost need to redecorate my living room to hook it up with my sound system. So in 2009 I bought an HP Tablet PC in the hope that I could finally read my ebooks with a swipe, twist it around and voila, I got myself my good ol’laptop again. As I used it believe me wasn’t easy reading on travel with a backlit display and the weight felt like carrying a Greek marble tablet. So I went and got myself one of those nifty ebook readers the slimmest lightest gadget out there called the Jet ebook reader. Loaded up my ebooks and started reading, great under sunlight easy to carry around. All was good until I tried reading some of the illustrated magazines, ebook readers takes publication back to Windows 3.11 days with their monochrome displays. So out went the ebook reader. I had almost given up looking for the all in one device until Apple launched the iPad. With its slick design, light, touch screen display, 3G support, it was god sent. So like every judicious electronics shopper I started reading the reviews and watched product demos online as I went through the glittery specs my eyes finally landed on the fine print, NO MULTI-TASKING. It felt like a kid being told Santa wasn’t real. I am still amazed how the 25 million iPad owners feel when they have to turn off their music to check the incoming email, it made the device seem practically useless. I quickly realized the iPad was a tablet prototype and the real deal is yet to come.

March 2011 was the much awaited iPad 2 launch, which turned out to be a big disappointed. They did fix the multi-tasking bug, but with the poor front facing camera and Apple’s frustrating stance on flash and micro SD support left a lot to be desired. At the same time there were a host of competing products being launched, right from the RIM’s Playbook to the so called iPad killers in Honeycomb tablets. So let’s flip it around, why not look at what I want my tablet to do and not do.

Phone vs Tablet

Samsung created this unwanted confusion by rushing into the launch of Galaxy Tab before Android launched their tablet OS and in doing so created an accidental hit. The smaller foot print made it compact and easy to carry around and made quite a few Android apps targeted for the phone work. Further you could even make phone calls from the tablet, does it make a tablet also your phone? Some of those carrying it looked pretty ridiculous answering calls on it to be honest. I would certainly look at it as a means to video conference but not to replace a phone. So let’s safely leave this feature out of the criteria list.

Reading a book

An average paperback book measures around 216X135 and weighs 373gms, so if you are looking for a tablet to read a book I would imagine you would also look for a similar form factor. The 10 inch tablets clearly don’t fall into the paperback category both in weight and size. The closest contenders in this regards would be Samsung 8.9, RIM Playbook, Sony and HTC Flyer which is also the lightest.

None of the tablets have a viable solution to daylight displays and Super AMOLED has remained just a super rumor in 2011. Given this is the case I would go for the best displays, both Samsung tablets and to be launched Sony score highest with their 1280x800 displays but iPad 2 remains the best display unit out there.

Document publishing

Sending email, making presentations and editing spreadsheets and documents would primarily be the list of tasks I would like to do on the tablet. Today onscreen QWERTY keyboards try hard to replace physical keyboards with vibration or audio feedback, but that remains a distant dream. Can’t beat the physical keyboards when it comes to typing speed, so serious work does take me back to my laptop. A viable solution to this challenge could be a Bluetooth keyboard; some of them even come with a very slick leather stand that can be propped up like a laptop.

Camera

Will I run around taking pictures with a tablet, seems Ok to do it with a phone as it’s almost the same foot print as the point and shoot cameras. But holding up a 10 inch tablet to take a picture can be quite cumbersome to say the least.

If you are one who scans a lot of bills or documents, having a camera handy in your tablet can be great way to do it provided the rear camera is good. The Samsung 10.1 seems to have gone all the way with an 8MP camera; none of the other tablets come anywhere close to that.

Tablet is a great medium for video conferencing on the go, but most of the tablets have a really low resolution front facing camera. RIM’s playbook has the best 3MP front facing camera along with Adam (since its camera rotates both ways), while strangely most others are 2MP or lower.

Internet

Browsing the internet on most tablets is a breeze with their powerful dual core processors and 1GB memory is what most laptops ran 2 years ago. Adding to that is the great usability with the touch screen, pinch zoom and swipes make the entire interaction so direct and interactive. I think tablets were designed for the internet and beat the PC experience hands down. Having said that if you are wondering why your favorite news site looks so different on an iPad, its simple, they don’t support flash and probably never will. Why would you build an amazing tablet and not include Flash support, Apple fears losing revenue from its Appstore to flash based web developers so until it makes business sense better luck iPad fans. So the iPad is a great tablet otherwise, but the anti-flash support definitely remains a blemish.

Video watching on a 10 inch tablet is definitely better than the smaller ones and the quality of display matters, the Galaxy tablet and iPad are definitely top of the heap. While Xoom has a higher resolution display somehow it does not convert to a great display.

So are tablets PCs?

That’s my dream; clunky laptops belong in the museum, tablets are like the dog in the Vodafone ad tagging along wherever you go. But it’s too early for a tab to replace PCs, tablet applications will have to mature like desktop applications have and will certainly not be a replacement for heavy duty PC app users. So tablets for now will remain an evolving platform and will find its place as a powerful business and personal solution with every platform leaving you wanting just a little bit more.

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Crowd in the Cloud

In the pre-cloud era people dedicated time to maintaining well cataloged diaries to record birthdays, tasks, maintain contacts and meeting notes. Today people directly assign tasks to you, birthday reminders pop out of nowhere and contact information is automatically synced based on people’s Facebook profiles. Tiny droplets make an ocean and today we have the means to aggregate the tiny droplets, thanks to crowd sourcing tools.

This has a huge impact on business as well, one example is Tech support. Tech support now is a culmination of video logs on YouTube, so customers know what the problem is before they contact the help desk, they just want the support personnel to fix it and do it quick. Yet, it amazes me how the likes of HP and Apple mostly have marketing videos on YouTube and the product fixes and workarounds are mostly posted by random amateur techies. I am sure both the customer and HP would rather have the fix coming from the authorized technical support personnel rather than some amateur videos. Further call centers can no longer run robotic checklists with impatient customers who know exactly what they want.

Today’s savvy customers are quite freely embracing these tools and get their job done faster, while the corporate machinery is playing catch-up. Probably because those defining the organization strategies are not yet plugged-in and still thinking call centers and off-shoring when it comes to customer service, not to mention the challenges managing compliance and risk.

Social media is not just a buzz word that the marketing teams flaunt and put out attractive videos, these tools are transforming the way we service our customers, significantly improving efficiencies and re-defining SLAs. The bottom-line is companies today need to be nimble and have a holistic social media strategy, in short they need expert advice.

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Never remember never forget

Today everyone is forgetful. I don’t remember birthdays, holidays, meetings and my tasks for the day. My faithful smart phone does it for me. Three thousand years back the Vedas, a Hindu religious text, was handed down generations by word of mouth and took a lifetime to perfect. Generations were dedicated to carrying the body of work intact. Then the Chinese invented paper and everything changed. People still chanted the Vedas but there were some who dedicated their years for a different cause. This in turn spurned mass education programs and eventually the industrial revolution.

Today we are confronted with a different problem we have an information overload, there are approximately over 1.5 million books in the western world alone. Google dedicated six years using sophisticated scanning equipment with robotic arms to digitize them, just so that we can search and find anything we want. Google enables us to solve almost any problem in the world just by helping us find the solution. So the challenge is no longer how but about finding the right solution to a problem.

Having all the facts in your finger tips is no longer a factor of memory but how accessible your enterprise information is. So now what matters is the ideas I can bring to the table and leave the facts to my faithful gadgets in the cloud.

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One for all to all for me

Pre-Cloud the world assumed people in general are the same, you had one news paper, one News channel and people ran the same trail for years. Today everything from your news to your coffee is personalized. You determine how much milk you want in your coffee and the temperature if you may. You chose your morning news from a collection of topics on YouTube channels and custom build your morning paper using your faithful e-reader. Everyone does not want to be like the other and believe they are different. This mindset change is pretty dramatic and revolutionizes the way we service customers. From a world where everything was commoditized and mass produced, we are in a world where everything is personalized, custom built and yet mass produced.

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The old world and the new

One might wonder, if people had the same routine for the last 60 years, what has changed? People have been reading the news, the weather report, going to coffee shops and meetings since the last 100 years, so why are we so plugged in? Because depending on how you look at it everything has changed or nothing. My father visited the Grand Canyon and took a helicopter ride across the canyon in 15 mins, I hiked it over 2 days. My father still tells me he did what I did over 2 days in 15 mins and I still maintain he has not seen the canyon.

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Living in the cloud (Blog series)

Us humans have walked the planet earth for over 200,000 years. In this time we have seen a stone age, bronze age, the industrial revolution and now we are entering a new age which is just as pivotal, what could be called the age of the cloud. Yet when you live through each day so much seems to have changed yet nothing.

I wake up in the morning brush my teeth, grab some coffee, check the weather, catch the morning news, read the paper, go for a quick run, shower and check my calendar, drive down to meet a client, check in to the nearest coffee shop and grab a quick breakfast just in time to make it to my appointment. Probably fits the description of any urbanite in the last 60 years. So then what’s changed?

Let’s quickly rewind the morning scene and play it back a little differently now. Wake up in the morning brush my teeth, grab some coffee, log into Wunderground check the hourly forecast, switch to my news reader catch my personalized news, turn on my trail tracking software go for a run, compare the speeds of my last 5 runs, check my phone calendar, jump into my car turn on the GPS, spot a coffee shop on the way to the client office, grab a quick breakfast , whoops I’m late, so just dial into a video conference and continue to enjoy my breakfast.

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Indian IT services industry, the way forward

India's growth story

As India continues to grow and surpass unchartered territories one tends to wonder is the trend likely to last forever? The ruling government projects that we will average a growth rate upwards of 8% for the next decade and replicate a China like growth story. One might argue that if China can, so can India, in fact economists like Sanjeev Sanyal predict that we will experience an Asian renaissance much like Europe.

Undoubtedly India’s growth has been miraculous, unlike China, the growth has been despite poor policy implementation, corrupt-unstable governments and snail paced infrastructure development. We have 700 million people who are in the employable age; the number is expected to rise to 829 million by 2015. Which means close to 72% of the population will be young and employable. The demographic change will increase our savings rate close to 35% of GDP, reducing our reliance on external capital to fund our growth. We are potentially entering a period of prosperity not witnessed for more than a thousand years in India.

Post liberalization India has been in a tearing hurry to make up for decades of mediocrity and catch-up with the western economies. While growth has been a constant, the sectors have varied over the last two decades. India’s growth was initially led by IT, now we have sectors like manufacturing, banking, financial services and infrastructure becoming the engines of growth.

The IT services growth has been fascinating, now accounting for 8-10% of the GDP and 30% of India’s exports. Over the last few decades the primary driver for the IT off-shoring business was cost arbitrage. This was largely on account of our large pool of high skilled engineers and wage disparity. But after 20 years of 30% growth, there are close to 2.3 million people employed in the IT sector and the country will be close to a 100,000 engineers short to drive a 30% linear growth

Education

India generates close to 500,000 engineering and science graduates in year and if IT sector has to continue to experience a linear growth over the years institutes will have to proportionately increase the number of engineering seats. This increasingly seems harder as education in the country remains hamstrung. Education reforms are taking forever and the system is struggling to remain relevant. Education sector remains closed to eagerly waiting foreign institutions and therefore will depend on government spends and domestic private investors. Private investors are politically backed, corrupt and have little expertise in running these education institutions. The irony is India spends a meager 4.1% (U.S and U.K both spend 5.7% and 5.3%) of GDP on education which is a paltry sum for a knowledge economy, with 68% literacy and a booming IT sector.

While institutes attempt to crank out more engineers the quality of engineers becomes a challenge. Companies struggle to increase the graduate’s proficiency through factory like training academies that are expected to take in semi-skilled engineering graduates and convert them to highly skilled software engineers. As supply fails to keep pace with the growth salaries are expected to increase by 40% in 2011, further narrowing margins and increasing prices.

What next?

So the writing is on the wall, IT services have to move up the value chain. Given western economies are not yet ready to open up their purse strings, Indian IT services might be a low cost option to IBMs and Accentures of the world. We are already seeing two trends to back the theory, IT companies are beginning to invest into IT consulting, solution accelerators, disruptive technologies and innovations. On the other hand Accenture and IBM are expanding their investments in India. But will service industry transform to eventually change the face of the Indian sweat shops as one US senator commented? Going by recent trends, that is the next logical step.

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IPL auction : Country, cricket, dollars and more drama

Country, cricket or just dollars?

There's still a generation that firmly believes cricket must be played for the pride of the country, not for money. In fact some of them feel IPL cricketers are overpaid and that’s hastening retirement in cricket. I suggest let us take an honest look at the numbers in comparison to other international sports. 78.5 million dollars was spent so far in the IPL auction. The numbers saw a lot of jaws drop, but IPL is still a fair distance from becoming the highest paying sporting event.

Lets draw a few comparisons with another international team sport like basketball. Currently basketball is the third highest paying team sport int the world. The average salary for an NBA player is $5m, compared to IPL's $565,000. The highest paid NBA player last season was Tracy McGrady who landed a whopping $23m contract compared to Gambhir who won $2.4m. NBA pays 10 times more for any player compared to the IPL. One might argue the US GDP is 10 times India's, but sporting events are not measured by GDP but by TRP. The average number of viewers for the NBA finals last year was 3.6m when compared to 8.34m viewers per day throughout the tournament. This puts the enormity of the IPL in perspective, so let us take note of the facts before we get carried away by the number of millionair cricketers. So if you think this is too much there is more to come folks.

The rich did get richer…but what’s cricket got to do with this?

So while many believe in the 80-20 rule, the IPLs 20-20 formula seems to work on a 50-20 rule, in other words 50% of the $78.5m was spent on 20% of the players. The top 20% won bids at an average cost of $1.5m per player. A mere $10m was spent on the remaining 50% at an average cost of $158,696, or 1/10 the cost of the top 28 players. So, not everyone gets rich at the IPL.What this also demonstrates is that not all franchisee owners were smart bidders. They overpaid for some and were left with a lot less for other valuable players. Since there is ai salary cap per team, bid price is an equation of the amount left in the kitty and not the intrinsic value per player. A few glaring instances are Irfan Pathan, who was paid $1.9m compared to Mike Hussey, ranked No.3 in the ODI rankings, was paid a measly $0.43m. Another instance is of misplaced investments was Ravindra Jadeja who doesn't even make the Indian playing 11 , fetched $950,000. Compare this with Daniel Vettori, one of the most economical one day bowlers ranked No.1 in ODIs and a useful lower order batsman, was sold for $550,000. So auctioning is a complex subject and I am no expert, but certainly think the minimum bid price must be fixed based on a performance based pricing to ensure it not just all business after all.

Veterans ignored

The once famed left hand legends, Lara and Ganguly, find no place in the IPL. I am left searching for clues to understand why Ganguly persists after making three poor shows in the IPL and almost crossing the age limit. Someone who was once the god of offside batting looked rather meek against the swashbuckling T20 players. Class is permanent but does not always translate to runs on the cricket field.

Lara’s case is also understandable as no one has seen him bat since 2007 World Cup and to expect people to put their money on him might be premature. He might stand a chance if he can perform in the forthcoming English season and prove his mettle before he chooses to go under the hammer.

While the West Indians don’t seem to care if Lara played in the IPL or not; the Bongs went bonkers, burnt effigies and staged protests. It was not until King Khan soothed their nerves by saying “There is no KKR without Dada”, no one heard him whisper “As a mentor”.

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