My colleague and friend, Saday Tiwari presented at the Customer Engineering Conference along with Olaf Schnapauff on the technology and success factors in India versus other more established geographies in the mobile telephony space.

They discussed how the mobile phone transforms the lives of millions of Indians. An example they cited was that of a fisherman returning from the high seas with his catch. Traditionally, the fisherman was locked in to the port he set out from, almost always selling at a price well short of what he could potentially obtain. With mobile phones becoming affordable and ubiquitous and Service Providers offering widespread coverage, the fisherman can now, even as he returns from his fishing trip, discover where he can command the best price in the vicinity. The Network is making the difference to humanity Sun Microsystems and other organizations are hoping to achieve.

Mobile Telephony Subscription Growth	Organized Retail Growth

Infrastructure in India is growing at a pace that seems at once astounding and inadequate. The mobile services market is a great example. In March 2002, 45 million Indians owned a phone (wireline or wireless), approximately 6.5 million of whom were wireless subscribers. Five years later, wireline subscription is stagnant but wireless subscription reached 168. Nearly a quadrupling in 5 years. Over March 2006 - March 2007, monthly growth was at the rate of 6.5 million subscribers. If anything, the growth has been accelerating (to 8 million additions a month now) and we reached 200 million wireless subscribers in August. The one statistic that we cavil at is that of teledensity - with a population of over 1.1 Billion in the country, we still have a long way to go.

Such growth figures are evident in other sectors too. For example, the organized retail sector amounted to 4 Billion USD in 2005 and is projected to grow to 64 Billion USD market in 2015 (projections vary, but this number is at the lower end of the band).

The technology challenges that service providers in various sectors face are similar : they are worried primarily about the ability of their IT infrastructure to scale to unprecedented levels. They need technology to handle unpredictable load characteristics. Deployments have to be highly efficient in their resource utilization. Technology should lend itself to reduce the time it takes for a business idea to be rolled out into a product - the first mover advantage in general is enormous. These are precisely what we believe characterize Redshifted application workloads. Workloads (and infrastructure supporting them) that in our estimate will dictate the demand for computing in the future.

This is why I characterize India as a redshifting nation - the entire infrastructure (telecom, financial services, retail, hospitality, travel ...) is growing at an astonishing clip. Moore's Law implies that the performance that can be extracted out of the real estate on a chip can double every two years or so. Saturated application areas can therefore be well served by computers, as the rate of growth of their workloads will not be as fast. Indian IT infrastructure however is under-served by Moore's Law, thus fueling demand for more and more system capacity.

Sun's research and development strategy recognizes this trend (see Greg Papadopolous' presentation at our Analyst Summit earlier this year), and our technologies are being shaped by the need for massive scale systems tailored to deliver agility, efficiency and a competitive edge to our customers.

[Note : Added some hyper-links and explanations to the original post]

Tags : suncec2007 India

Computer Sweden reports that user names and passwords for over a hundred accounts at government organizations worldwide have been posted on the Internet. The organizations include Indian ones too.

The breach is troubling in itself, but a casual persual of the passwords used by some of the Indian embassies and institutes will leave one gasping :

Enough said.

Tags : India Security

As Venkatesh Hariharan reports, the committee formed by the Bureau of Indian Standards to discuss India's vote on OOXML has concluded that India will vote No with comments. The committee has been deliberating over the past few months on the issue.

Avi Alkalay writes that Brazil has also voted No.

Update : The Economic Times reports on the unanimous Indian committee decision.

Tags : OOXML ODF India

Raghunath and Manoharan announced Google Labs for India in the wake of Independence Day. The technology playground has begun by unveiling a couple of nifty tools : an iGoogle Gadget that provides an on-screen keyboard to compose search queries in various Indian languages, and an Indic script Transliteration tool that converts Hindi words written in the English script into Devanagari.

The blog post illustrates the transliteration through the opening lines of a popular Indian song Ek Sur. An inspired choice, the line

Mile sur mera tumhara to sur bane hamaara

in Hindi approximately translates into

When my harmony/music combines with yours, it becomes our (a new) harmony/music.

It loses something in my translation, but you get the idea. The song was composed for Independence Day 1988 and is the perfect anthem for the Participation Age.

Tags : India Google

The technical debate around whether OOXML (ECMA 376) should be approved as an ISO standard (fast track or otherwise) has been raging for a while. Numerous organizations and individuals have expressed technical and legal concerns. The latest summary of the objections I noticed is from the New Zealand Open Source Society. Vikram weighed in with his objections to an Indian approval of OOXML.

The last two months however have seen reports from various countries questioning the basis on which their votes are being decided. The constitution of the committees and the manner in which the national position is decided seem to me to be flawed.

The chair-person of the sub-committee deciding on the Swiss vote ruled that objections raised by participants were not enough to justify a Disapprove with comments option, presenting the body with only Approve with Comments or Abstain with Comments choices. The Swiss Internet User Group has outlined its objections to OOXML as an ISO standard, added that the majority wanted to vote Disapprove with Comments and alleges conflict of interest in the choice of chair-person (nominated by the committee chairman who is the Secretary General of ECMA).

In the Netherlands, a No with Comments got near unanimous support, but that was insufficient : since the local Microsoft entity was against it, the decision was that Netherlands would abstain.

In Portugal, the committee was presided over by a Microsoft representative who apparently denied entry to Sun and IBM because, hold your breath, there weren't enough chairs in the room. In a subsequent meeting, the committee has decided to vote Yes with Comments, by the narrowest of margins.

Italy will abstain following the narrow failure of the Approval choice when it was put to vote in a committee that began with only 5 members but ended up with 83 in an astonishing rush to join. The US committee deciding on the issue also seems subject to a spike in organizations joining as members.

Spain will abstain, after the Approval vote did not obtain the required majority. But the disquieting allegation from there is that Microsoft distributed a document selectively quoting from a Government of Andalusia letter to distort the latter's support for ODF as support for OOXML.

Roy Schestowitz summarizes attempts in South Africa and Ghana to influence the votes of those countries.

The Bureau of Indian Standards will have to decide soon which way India will vote (Update : India has voted). The constitution of the committee deciding on the Indian position and minutes of its meetings are available at the website of the Indian ODF Alliance chapter (of which Sun is a member). The debate in India has begun to feature in mainstream newspapers.

Meanwhile the Sun OpenOffice.org development team has begun work on Open Office import filters for OOXML documents as explained by Michael Brauer.

Tags : OOXML ODF India

When August 15 comes around as it, strangely enough, does every year, some images inevitably flash past : sepia toned but indelible. Images of a flag being unfurled and scratchy footage that has Jawaharlal Nehru speaking words burnt into the consciousness of Indians who weren't even born in 1947. Somehow though, we don't get past the first two lines of that speech : Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.

He did say more though, and the sentences that remain with me are The future beckons to us. Whither do we go and what shall be our endeavour? To bring freedom and opportunity to the common man, to the peasants and workers of India; to fight and end poverty and ignorance and disease; to build up a prosperous, democratic and progressive nation, and to create social, economic and political institutions which will ensure justice and fullness of life to every man and woman.

It will take a while before we can declare freedom, if we were to measure ourselves against this set of objectives. I believe that our generation has an opportunity not granted the ones before to progress significantly toward achieving these goals. The past decade has seen us making economic and infrastructural strides that possibly exceed those of the previous fifty years. Every one of us can leverage that for meaningful social change that we can individually make. This Independence Day for me will not only be a commemoration of what was achieved sixty years ago, but also a day of anticipation for what will be sixty years hence. Happy Independence Day!

Tags : India

Sun India started off the Sun Financial Year with a kickoff at Amby (or Aamby) Valley, a township that aims to become one of the top five cities in the world, presumably sometime soon. The setting is perfect for that ambition - it spreads across 10000 acres amidst the Sahyadri mountain range, 150 kilometres south of Bombay. The Sahyadris are themselves testament to a spectacular event in the Indian peninsula - they and the Deccan Traps were apparently formed some 65 million years ago by volcanic uplifts following a huge eruption soon (relatively in geological time) after the Madagascar broke away from the Indian plate. The eruption laid "down" stepped layers of basalt lava - up to a 1000 metres in height.

I love mountains much more than, say, coasts or beaches. Since the kickoff was in late July and the rains had set in, the countryside sported a magnificent mantle of green. Our timing was perfect since quite a few of the mountains are bereft of vegetation in the summer.

I hitched a ride with colleagues driving from Bombay and we were bid farewell just outside the office by a rather imperious cat. It seemed like all the hustle and bustle that humans impose on ourselves was beneath its attention, but it did pose obligingly for a photograph.

The drive was uneventful, most of it on the Bombay-Pune Expressway. The entrance to the township is framed by 45m wide arches. Over 90% of it is open space with several natural and artificial water bodies, a profusion of gardens and, nocturnal golfers hold your breath, an 18 hole floodlit course. Drummers welcomed us at the Kickoff reception.

The Sun India office has grown dramatically over the last few years, in terms of every possible metric. We do meet most of our colleagues over the course of a year, but the kickoff is obviously the one opportunity to see them all in one location.

The event was themed on Formula 1, a subject pretty close to the hearts of several of us. We even had a Panasonic Toyota F1 car (a full scale replica I suspect; I didn't have the heart to examine it closely and make suspicion certainty) in our midst. True to the theme, a treasure hunt culminated in a race that had drivers sitting in dummy cars propelled by the drivers' legs. Judging by the hilarity occasioned by the running (quite literally) of the race, it was a case of the engines being willing but the legs treacherously weak.

The three regions in Sun India band together to assiduously kick butt through the year, but try to outdo each other when it comes to having fun at the Kickoff. We had amusing skits performed by the regional offices, and some of the wordplay should have warmed the cockles of the compere Cyrus Broacha's heart (his brand of humour is best sampled at The Asian Age column he writes). They (and the actress Simone Singh who participated on the second day) were all upstaged by an entertaining sequence of dance put together by women - colleagues and the wives of colleagues. The kids must have had the most fun - do not be deceived by the photograph alongside, Tejas was boogieing the night away and only interrupted it for forty winks.

We also had a booze and brains quiz conducted by Mitesh Agarwal. My team squeaked in second, with Rajesh Rege and Seetal Iyer providing the brains "half" (which explains why the team was called Jack, Jill and The Pail of Water), and yours truly answering a few thanks to the liberal consumption of beer. One of the languages used in The Great Dictator was Esperanto; I cannot explain my knowledge of this other than through a feeling in the gut induced by the presence of ale.

The Marathas are known for having contributed significantly to the religious, artistic and cultural make-up of modern India, but they were no slouches when it came to military stratagem. Exploiting the mountainous terrain, they built near impregnable citadels across the region, more than 300 of them, one of which is the Korigad (or Koraigad or Korigarh) fort that forms the backdrop to Amby Valley. The fortification on the plateau-like mountain top is still largely intact, and we saw several trekkers making their way up the 900 metre high mountain. The origins of the fort are shrouded in the mist that frequently envelopes the area, but it was taken by Shivaji in 1657, and remained in Maratha hands until it fell to the British in 1818.

We hosted members of the Sun APAC leadership - Denis Heraud, Ken Buchanan, Jerry Ashford and Andy Srinivasan - and they and Bhaskar Pramanik spoke of how the region as a whole, and India in particular, is poised for a shift in the use of network computing infrastructure to fundamentally alter society. Some parts of the APAC ail from divides that are deep rooted and anything but digital in nature. In fact, one of the promises of the products and technologies that Sun develops is the subversion of these divides, and the Sun India management consciously continues to look at ways in which we can further our cause. As we headed back from the Kickoff, and stopped at a restaurant for brunch, I saw this kid at another table whose demeanour was begging to be photographed. I cannot speculate on the life he will be experiencing twenty years hence, but I am willing to bet that the people at Sun Microsystems will continue contributing to it in essential ways.

The five red lights are out, and this year's race has begun.

PS : For what it is worth, the photographs I took of the event are at Flickr.

Tags : Sun India Amby Valley

The weekend heralded the onset of the monsoons in Mumbai. Most of the city has received 10% of its average annual rainfall (it pours in excess of 2300 mm every year).

The news reminded me again of Sun's participation in the SAP Summit a couple of weeks ago. Priyadarshi Mohapatra and Jaijit Bhattacharya, who manage our Retail Business and Government Strategy, discussed trends in their respective segments, and how Sun builds a secure and flexible computing environment for SAP solutions. Vasudev Nagaraj delivered an excellent presentation on Sun's Storagetek portfolio - disk and tape products that are complemented by a broad variety of solutions aimed at ensuring optimal performance, management and business continuity.

I spoke on the phenomenon we see of applications Redshifting, and the brave new multi-threaded and virtualized platform that Sun is building to address both traditional workloads and those that demand massive scale and brutal efficiency. Starting from CMT processors and an Operating System that demonstrated huge scaling a decade ago, the Neptune and Crossbow network layer projects, the ZFS filesystem, to virtualization through Solaris Containers and Logical Domains, our intent is to parallelize and virtualize at every level.

The biggest draw however seemed to be our stall at the Exhibition adjacent to the venue. A large number of the visitors were at the stall to enquire about our presence (our advertising lined the road leading up to the hotel, and hovered above it too!), our presentations and solutions. However some of them were also happy to see us thoughtfully distributing umbrellas. Two weeks ago, there wasn't a practical need for any, but several of our visitors must now be appreciative of Sun Marketing's prescience.

Umbrellas are of no avail though when the rain turns into a killer. If only we could do something about the needless loss of lives. When calamities strike, Sun contributes to relief efforts as does all of corporate India. However the administration should take the lead in ensuring safety during predictable natural phenomena. It is not like the monsoons snuck up on us, after all.

Tags : mumbai monsoons sun microsystems

Tata Steel did make it - the race with Companhia Sidurgica Nacional to take Corus over culminated in an auction that saw the Tatas bid 11.3 Billion USD for the European steel major.

The magnitude of the deal signals a distinct shift in strategy - the previous biggest acquisition by the Tatas was a 677 Million USD purchase of stake in US based Energy Brands Inc. The Corus acquisition breaks new ground in several ways - Tata Steel will be India's largest steel producer, outpacing the Indian public sector giant SAIL by a big margin. Private enterprise thus will dominate yet another sector in the country. The deal will also see them climbing to fifth in the world (from fifty sixth) in terms of production capacity. In broader terms, this would be the largest overseas acquisition by an Indian company. While there are some concerns about the premium Tata Steel is paying for the acquisition, and speculation about further debt liabilities to fund it, the move is indicative of the increasing appetite for risk taking in the nation. Entrepreneurship has never had a better climate to flourish in.

On a different note, Tata Steel epitomizes the never say die spirit of a few visionaries in colonial India. J N Tata, founder of the Tata Group in the 19th century, decided that his fledgling textile business would fuel the achievement of three ambitions - iron and steel manufacture, hydro-electric power generation and a world class educational institution. He succeeded in all three projects, but not before surmounting obstacles that frustrate most of us. The then Chief Commissioner of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, Sir Frederick Upcott, was particularly harsh on the steel idea, vowing to eat every pound of steel rail that the Tatas would produce. Tata Steel went into production in 1912. History is mute on the question of Sir Frederick's fulfillment of his vow, and today's acquisition can only exacerbate the indigestion his poor stomach would have been subjected to.

Tags : tata; india