Vineet Mittal's Weblog

It has been an exciting 6.5 years at sun. I have enjoyed the atmosphere and the technical camaraderie with folks around the globe. When i joined sun, i thought i will quit this place. But in this day and age, companies redefine themselves every year. Many years ago at AT&T we thought that convergence will happen, and now when it is actually happening i do not know who is the real winner. I did not think 9 years ago that apple will release iPhone with Cingular(AT&T). Unified Messaging now throws up interesting players and security is being discussed in the web 2.0 context. In last 6.5 years, Solaris, Java, J2ME and much of sun software stack has been open sourced. New computing models have emerged. Horizontal scaling has changed the game for the web. It has been very exciting to be inside a company that went through these changes.

I have been observing the behaviour of customer decision making of information technology infrastructure in developing countries. There are four kinds of buyers in the market

* Big Bang purchases for entire bank, insurance or government departments
* Incremental purchases in a mature IT shop in different sectors
* SME purchases from the system integrators
* Big Outsourcing from the companies that have truly matured

Big Bang Purchase is motivated from the fact that the IT in these organizations has been sordidly behind the curve and now a full scale ramp up will transform them from a small IT foot print to an IT led foot print. These are deals where there is no way to select the right application, right hardware, software and infrastructure because it is too big for any company to measure or put together. Solutions that are emerging for such deals are based on opporuntistic partnership between all parties concerned. In the end the solution will work and people will work their way through the problems and there is enormous windfall for the all the parties who win the deal. For the loosers however there is not much place left to hide. This kind of deal offers the lowest benefit to the customer.

Incremental Purchases in a mature IT shop are based on either improving the efficency of the old infrastructure or based on a newer set of apps coming in or of a new nich solution being developed. There are different variations of all of these purchases but one feels that the application team, the infrastructure team, consultants and vendors struggle hard to follow a process that is repeatable and demonstrates clear selection of technologies. I still feel that the governace of purchases needs improvements from all parties.

SME purchases are packaged solutions and these solutions are deployed within their limitaions. The packaged solutions offer clear value and can be bought to deliver the needful. However the customer still pays a high price becuase the solutions are pre packaged.

Big Outsourcing is for the companies who have clearly visualized that technology is an enabler but to differentiate they need to be fast to the market, manage the business process themselves and see if the governance controls can still be in the hands of the business while complexity gets done else where. In growth governance never gets looked at but as the market demand is high the outsourcing looks profitable for both purchase and the provider. There are few players but all parties are not taking enough risks to address the demand. In the end for this to be fruitful for years to come the innovations, governance and management controls need to improve. It is doable today but needs to be understood and driven.

I have been arguing in a lot of presentations that Indian IT is now in second phase where all the parties are assumed to be at a level 2 where they can be smart about their decision making. SOA is touted as a way of making this happen. Problems are many, the IT vendors may not have appropriate level of business domain knowledge, the consultant may not have the right inputs for the growth market, the system integrator may be stuck in the yesteryear, the IT purchaser might be overwhelmed by the proprietary advice he is receiving from all parties. In this mesh of confusion solutions get bought on relationship, closeness and trust and objectivity gets lost. I am hoping that in the coming years the governance of the IT - supplier, purchase, Consultant, analyst follows a path that is good for the customer. That is a kind of SOA between the stakeholders but badly needed in a developing country.

Because the opportunity is so big and the problems associated are so varied, the architect community gets litte attention. The focus becomes on coverage of the opportunity as relationship is driving the sales. I would like to see customers getting more pro active and demand more architecture attention to their issues from all parties concerned.

Executing innovation for thirdworld Sun has done many things right for the developing countries :
* Open Sourcing Solaris
* Open Sourcing App Server, SSO
* Providing Star Office free, Star Office is now available in many indian languages
* Creation of Solaris Enterprise System which is free to download
* Launch of JBI as standard alternative to expensive integraton
* J2ME has been a boon for cell phones in india
* Subscription pricing serves scalabale market

What more could be done? A: Well indians customer might appreciate an MNC aligned with indian customer goals
Indian Customer's are also some of the most aggresive and innovative in terms of adopting newer technologies. If this was not true i would see only few vendors in the market place. But most companies that are now starting shop in india are making india their sole focus in the region. The wealth of indian business has doubled in last couple of years. The returns any company gets out of the indian market is very high. Most times i cannot distinguish whether i am in the US at the start of the internet revolution or in india. But for MNC's to participate in this growth story, they have to make india their sole focus. Imagine any company starting out in 1995 and positioning itself in the US market but running its operation from panama city. It goes without saying that the company might miss the US internet revolution completely.

(2006-03-31 08:21:27.0) Permalink

At an engineering college convention where 3000 engineers from various disciplines had assembled, I was given a chance to talk about java platform versus the other development platforms. The main concern for a fresh engineering college graduate is to get a job. Employers on their part want to see some experience on the part of the students.

Technology companies such as SUN have indeed solved the problem of experience by making most of the technologies “open sourced”. This is a powerful motivator for the students as they can contribute to the open source movement and indeed be able to work with the best developers around the world before they step out of the college. I personally think they got the message. The other development platform does not have this option for the students. I do not see how the other platform can win without the support of these students.

I also learned first hand that students want to create java communities, but were dissapointed that “java user group” in bangalore does not exist. Some of them want to start one. Hopefully they will start one. But it was startling that a “java user group” did not exist as a cross company community in the bangalore.

I think most students agreed that java is the mainstream application development platform, but were concerned about the efficient IDE's? I also got questions about the speed of java, perhaps they were not updated on “HotSpot V irtual Machine”. Some students had developed java games and wante d to know how to given them to service providers like TTSL, Airtel for earning their share of the revenue.

On the whole addressing 3K students and talking to them about the java economy and removing myths about java and uncovering lies from the *Soft's prezo was a satisfying experience. Listeners appreciated the *Soft free laptop, Java on their cellphones, Open Source, Community, Regional Language Star Office, JAVA Chips for identity.

I hope they will participate in the java community and start not one but many java user groups.

Free and World Class Web Services for third world Sun announced the availabiltiy of the Solaris Enterprise System free to use. The concept of Solaris Enterprise is deeply embedded in the notion of "Operating Environment". In the past an operating system provided you a way to write applications without mucking with the hardware specific details. Now most application developers write their applications on J2EE, JVM, Web Services, Web Standards, and IETF standards. It made sense for SUN to add these open technologies that were otherwise transacted as Java Enterprise System into the concept of an enteprise Operating Environment.

Some folks might view this is as a marketing gimmick but that is exactly what it is not. Inumerable IT shops in the post dot com era were still struggling to bridge the developer and system administrator gap.To run web services and be really succesful with it one needs to think in terms of web services end to end. If products from vendor and the customer are aligned with this vision then there is a a very good chance of bringing the technology and business alignment needed to making webservices successful.

For the first time in my understanding the CIO's can view the ROI, Architectural advantages, the real reduction in technology complexity and start focussing on the real job of taking web services to the employees and external users. For the developing country like india it is important that we start taking advantage of the free SUN offer. India needs to find a way to get majority of the people at the bottom of the pyramid to experience what the rest of the world is able to do today. Please read Mr.Prahalads eye opening article.

For the most part now a small organization can have the same best technology as the big guys have for free. The big guys of course can commodotize the whole thing and focus on the real big wins in the web services arena. I feel this is the time to acclerate your web services projects and but them on the internet highway.
Now this is great news because i have been in many meetings where i felt that only if customers could try out our software and actually use it to their advantage on their own. For example getting 99.999 high availablity on our application servers is free now.

Most of the products at sun have been developed using open technologies , so it makes it easier for somebody with skill set of java,xml,unix to latch on to the products and solve your orgainziations problems without as much bothering the vendor.
Just look at the array of powerful products that are available for anbody to make use of , web servers, portal server, directory, SSO( access manager), mail server, calendar, instant messaging, integration server, message queue, and much more.

Indian IT departments need to take a revised look at their infrastructure and ask following questions :
* What are my top 5 web services that i want to deploy but the cost,complexity barrier kept it from happening?
* Do i really use all the fancy features of this email product that costs me a bundle every year
* How do i make my organization productive?
* Can i really do something to align business with IT?

Wishing you all the best with free, world class web services.
(2005-12-04 22:04:15.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Aligning IT with Business? SOA can help I attempted another presentation at a well attended conference in the BFSI sector called Banknet in mumbai. This time around i was talking about SOA( Service Oriented Architecture). For past some weeks i have tried to understand the problems on the ground to get a SOA project going. One of the big problems is being created by the technology companies themselves. Quite a lot of technology companies are trying to pitch in products when it comes to SOA and many places where we went we had to undo the damage done by the previous SOA talks. It is hard to imagine any other force at the moment that will drive the momentum towards the alignment of the IT with business than the SOA.

This time around the SOA community needs to make the case from the perspective of the business. I guess that was always the case but in the past that conversation was about better speed of processors, system architecture, web containers, application performance. As we have heard so many times the hardware is the solution to the software, the hardware has kept pace and with new multi threading chips coming out i am hoping that the system performance will cease to be an issue.What now matters is that given the hardware performance available can we do something to construct a whole new generation of service delivery platforms, reusable web services, federated architecture, cool wrappers on proprietary systems, business process management, inter connected loyalty webs, composite apps and massively distributed penny transactions?
There was evidence of federated services coming out like the "mchq" a federated service from ICICI and Airtel together that allows a credit card service from the mobile and one can use it for pay for shopping for as little as $1. It could turn out to be a very historic start for true federation services in india. It also suddenly opens a platform for whole bunch of people to get hooked and start some very creative transactions.
The IT side of the BFSI industry needs to be thanked and applauded because they have been the harbinger of adopting new technology and certainly take the risk on behalf of many other industries. The price/performace ratio of the hardware continues to fall we will see a great rise in more and more such services. India now has 50M mobile phones and that means 50M credit card holders right away. The potential is just amazing. The thirdworlds internet device is not the PC but the mobile phone. It is more valuable to a business person than the PC.
I am also looking forward to mobile office applications, one message box for fax, voice, data, email, ubiquitous storage. The list just goes on. SME market is huge in india and it may be only matter of time before somebody gets it right.
A point was well made by the CIO's at the meeting that though core banking solution is deployed by most banks but only some banks see better results. In a country like india where the growth is tremendous in most walks of life, it is not always easy to conceive of new and improved services. In fact it is very hard to figure whether a company is gaining market share or loosing market share in a growth market. It happened in the US that a large Telecom service provide lost its way because different business units did not want to use each others systems. Reuse of systems would have saved a lot in terms of technology investment, dupliation of business process and ROB( Return on business).
Another interesting point in the indian context is that much of the IT departments rely on the off the shelf applications to a large extent, this makes the overall IT very fragile as the SI's at the moment are not able to anticipate the changing business and as a end result the IT is de-accelerating at a faster pace than one actually feels. They all have the newest hardware, software but business indicators are not quite there.

Hopefully the IT, the risk takers, the vendors and the SI's will sit together to figure this out. I am gaining new and newer insights as i think about re-organizing the IT, the possibilities are endless.

(2005-09-23 10:30:02.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Hyderabad Trip We visited hyderabad after a long time from bangalore. I had a driver along with me to help me out with the long journey from bangalore(600 KM about 375 Miles). Road from bangalore was not too bad but there were very few places to stop along the way for food and rest room.
We started around 11 AM and reached the hotel around 11 PM in the night as one has to navigate the old hyderabad before we could get to our hotel. The road searching in hyderabad is best done by talking to people on the road. Every time we asked for directions, people responded well. The directions were all the same( go straight turn right and ask another person; old hyderabd is a maze of roads.)

Next day much to our dissapointment it was raining, but we tried to do the indoor things like snow park. The snow park does make the snow but there is little else to inside the snow hall except for a few slides and snowballing on another. The snow quality makes it a bad candidate for making a snow man. My daughter did not like it enough and we had to come out. The fee for the one hour of snow was $5 per person.
It was still raining so we visited the prasads multiplex. It houses a mall, kids activities and IMAX theatres. Hyderabad is a film crazy city, almost all the shows were sold out. We had to make do with little nuggets of kids entertainment spread in the mall.
The we visited the birla temple on the hill, the view from that place of the city is really magnificient. These days one cannot take pictures from that place. But the view does make you feel good about the city.
The food at the paradise and some of the other outlets was of good quality. Hyderabad is a great foodie place. Next day was spent around visiting areas of hitech city, jubileehills, craft bazzar( very impressive). I liked the infrastructure in that part of the city. Looked very organize, though people will take some time to obey the traffic rules.
we did some shopping for the pearls and came up with some good ones. That is another reason to be there. I am not a particular fan of the pearls. But in combination with coloured stuff they do look great. The hussain sagar(lake) has indeed become a center of attraction with the family crowds. even on a rainy day place was very much alive. Nice to see that it has been well developed as a tourist spot.
Coming back we started out in the night. The road was fairly crowded intially, but things became quieter as the night progressed. The reliance petrol bunks were safe places to stop for the nature calls. I took turns with the driver to ride the night through. Reaching bangalore at 9 AM was not pleasurable though in the middle of the peak traffic.
My overall feeling was that hyderabad has become a much more livable place. Low cost of the housing, the rent in jubilee hills ( the best area in hyderabad) is same as bangalore's ordinary rate. The food tastier and better. And a number of activities to do on the weekend.
(2005-07-29 05:20:53.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Banking on Security I gave a presentation to the Indian Banking Security Conference. It was nice to see the banking industry making an effort to combat the security issues. My major thrust was to provide historical perspective on how security breaches have created enormous problems for a country like india through the ages and then provided examples of where SUN IDM ProductLine can solve the issues for the banks. Most vendors felt that security projects get low priority as they are thought about as expenditure by the business units.
Hopefully the points made by the the regulatory folks will make banks focus on the "insider" theft problem. Business cannot happen in an atmosphere of distrust, we saw that with the erosion of investor confidence whenever security breaches have happened through the ages.

In the third world the problem is particularly severe as there are not enough legal framework's to nab the cybercrimes. The good news is that at the conference : police, banks and vendors looked committed to develop technologies and legislation to solve this problem. Use of technology to increase security can provide the banking industry with much needed protection that they need before the maturity models in terms of security processes are slowly learned inside the organization. Folks in the developed countries might think that the security models are weak in developing countries but the problems here is more to do with the discipline of security processes and implementation of the technology. Privacy is slowly becoming an issue for good customers.
It is amazing how developed world reacts to security breaches(lot of hue can cry) but in the thirdworld where trust, privacy is not yet widely perceived as tied to the assets such breaches do not receive enough attention. It is time we start valuing security as the leading indicator of prosperity. We do react to physical assault or LoC breaches but economic breaches are just as damaging.

In my parents time it was not possible to do stock transaction, complicated day trades, mutual funds over the phone or electronic means. The number of transactions that i am able to do now in a month would have taken my parents a few years to accomplish. As it would involve enormous paper work and they would never be able to react to the economic changes in the country. The new thirdworld is going to be different. The new generation is going to make more effort to grow the money and online transaction services are very important way of doing that. Any breach of trust in these electronic systems will create loss of assets for all citizens. It is critical that banks adopt this approach in their business.

Concepts like federation of identity in third world can be real money spinners. As young investors come online they are likely to focus on the ease of usage available via the movement of their identity across the a web of loyalty programs. These are common social needs and as the online users in the thirdworld have not yet developed "habits" it is upto the business to cultivate and steer their online programs to provide better one stop shop experience. So far i have not seen any movement in this direction. I do see a number of loyalty programs but the federation experience is not yet available for the consumer.
Federation in government world is even more powerful for the citizens but it will have to wait as a lot of departments need to come online before it is posssible.
In the developed countries because systems keep pace with the economic development the auditing can be hard to do as legislation lags behind. So in the third world right now systems seem to be ahead of the legislation, but not enough tools are deployed to make auditing a computing effort instead of human effort. The human effort is still needed but at the higher level. I would like to see organizations with minimal bad data, and real time audits. It is possible today.

(2005-07-05 00:09:01.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Most technologies are developed to build efficiency for the business. But the advantages of these technologies are not always clear in the begining and yet both business and IT strive to align themselves around these set of technologies. One such technology on the horizon is the SOA paradigm. It will surely add a new dimension to the existing enterprises, thought it is not clear to me whether it will be a disruptive force or a synergetic force at this point.

It is time for business units to demand more than the perceived value from their IT units. Most Business plans succeed by creating products that suit the market place in a timely manner. The ability to launch such time to market, time to scale, time to profit , business services is usually hampered by the inability of the IT units to get different systems to co-operate with each other or to make changes in existing systems on time.

Historically it has been a problem, as linking different services brings down the service level committment for the overall service. On the flip side if there is a clear business benefit, now is the time to ask the IT units to align themselves to the service oriented architectures strategy. I do not want to call it architecture in the conventional sense. There is no ROI by just making existing IT functions to be aligned with the concept if you do not have a business strategy.

+For medium size business it may mean the ability to integrate with larger supply chains, and the extranet environments in a meaningful business way.

+ For large companies with multiple business units it may mean co-operation between busines units to create more value for the business.And to quickly react to the market changes.

+ For small companies it would mean the ability to consume or deliver these services to their customer or the ability to provide a service to the big companies that can be consumed as a service by the middle or large companies. All these paradigms have great advantages in the thirdworld context!

In the third world there are few big companies and a huge number of small and medium enterprises.

For SME's there is now no need to build everything on your own. It is just not worth it to invest in a technology and then work hard to maintain it and take care of the obsolescence factor. A small business for example could subscribe to an office application that is hosted on the service provider without maintaining all this infrastructure yourself. Small business can focus on sending "workproducts" of the office application like invoices, letters and proposal to be dispatched to their customers via a "Printing Web Service" or through an "email web service" and the communications be "Stored" or "archived" by the "consumed" web service in this case - the office application service. This could possibly free up the sme salesman to spend more time with the customer and become more productive as a result. The SME business on the other hand gains from the cost to worry about IT and technology obsolescence.

Simliarly a medium scale enterprise can think in terms of subscribing to a "sales force automation" service and providing an ability to service bigger customers in an "outsourced model".

Now, obviously if you are at the cusp of such a massive re-organization of busines and IT it is hard to see all the possibilites. The nearest thing that happened in manufacturing that was similiar to this was the japanese concept of Just in time(JIT). A lot of third world missed that revolution and had to live with high costs and low quality of serives for the products and services. Even today i gather that JIT strategy for manufacturing is not quite easy to develop and adopt. Similiarly for adopting SOA principles in a business will test the leadership, existing readiness, system state, business strategies and a lot of re-thinking, re-tooling to succeed. In the end it might be art and less of science to get it right but as always it is hard to predict who will succeed. What is clear is that this time around technology folks are trying to create tools to solve the problem in a less painful way.

I have been hearing a lot about the utility computing. In the developing world the utility bills for electricity and water cost about $20 a month. Going by the rates that have been published for the utility computing that could buy the household a computing power for about 20 hours a month for one whole single cpu. If one were to invest in a PC about $500 dollars and pay that money over 2 years you could get lot more done. Except that you have wasted a lot of cpu cycles while you were not using the machine.And you need to save money for the depreciation and remove all those viruses yourself.

The place where utility computing could come out a lot cheaper is when you have a utility model for mass consumption for example the universities, mobile phone, eBusiness, Service Provider networks. so that single cpu can then be shared by a number of users at the same time. Assuming tens of users can be served out of a single cpu we could potentially give people now 400 hours a month for about $20. With more multithreading on the chips we could get 1000 hours for $20

In india for example that would mean that if government were to give this to about 100 million households who cannot afford technology at this point, it would cost about $2 Billion a month. At a negotiated infrastructure cost everybody in the developing country can possibly afford it. So what is missing?

What is diffcult of course is the utility computing consumer device(uc2d) and the access network that will be needed to access the utility applications and the apps themselves.To that extent i like the two ideas that have been proposed recently a Hundred Dollar Personal Computer and another a linux based general purpose computer called simputer .

Other things that are still very expensive are the databases, middleware, network and the applications. Commerical databases, and storage etc increase the cost of the proposition drastically. May be Sun DB will rescue that! Network may need to become cost ubiqutous in the economies of scale. ( don'nt know how?)

Based on the above vision, is there still a need for some for the more expensive software companies in the world? I doubt it!

We do have the right idea, now how do we develop the ecosystem around it so that it makes sense. It may run into the same problems that thirdworld generally runs into, not being able take advantage of the good ideas in technology. If we don't use this one for sure the digital divide will continue for ever. More thinking needs to be done..

There must be something about the thick client's evolution, even with the network becoming ubiquitous they are still around and laughing at all of us. Some of the most successful companies are making a lot of money with the thick client approach. If yesterday it was the big fat desktop, today it is the cellphone acquiring the pda features. Server centric computing is all fine for the worlds bigger problems, but when it comes to consumer we still see the success with iPod, blackberry's etc all of them thick client apps designed to do one specific thing exceedingly well.

And so it is in the developing countries that the thick client is still favoured. We are still talking about more than half the world waiting for network computing revolution to happen for them. It is just that the focus had shifted from the thick desktop to the "thick mobile phone". The applications available on the cellphone are driving the server side computing as well. As most people cannot do email from cell so the ISP's in the developing countries are seeing a drop in the email traffic. Plus SMS on the cell are spam free(almost) for now. SMS traffic has grown to huge proportions. Very soon new standards will be needed for example to engage web services over the mobile.

So imagine a situation where your mobile phone can do office productivity work, scan docs, and access the back office enterprise apps. Most people are moving away from just spending time from their computers to doing something purposeful with these special purpose mobile devices and very soon these special purpose devices should converge to one thick device.( then attention will wander again ; )

Having a strategy for both the thick and thin clients mean that one can driver the other. Only one strategy may not be enough.The mobile computing revolution in developing countries is for the real. It is certainly making people in every industry to think more and more about what they can make of this mobile device.

In the holidays i visited my parents house in the north of india, in a somewhat backward area in the terms of adoption of new business practices, technology and governance. So, i was very surprised when my parents invited the grandkids to go to the newly opened mall for snack at the famous american food joint. There it was; famous brand products of the industrial world being lustily enjoyed by all ages. It took sometime for my folks to understand that at xxDonalds do not serve water along with the food. A big minus in the place where water is the first thing that is provided in the common exchange of courtesies.

People in India have enjoyed movies from the time they were invented. The indian movie industries is perhaps the only one not affected by the hollywood mass productions. And now there are theatres in india in which you can sit in your own recliner sofa and relish the movies($13). Amazingly the classic's revival is also behind this. The crowd at the movies on weekends is unbelievable. The indian cinema has advanced to a point that i no longer try to read about the releases of hollywood movies anymore.

I also went to Goa, during the christmas weekend. I was visiting this beautiful sea resort in the west of India after 10 years. So i was curious to take my family to the spots i had found a decade ago. We drove from bangalore. I took a driver. The highway circuit is also fast changing in india and there were times on the road where i felt that i am driving on the US style highway. Goa on the other hand has fast turned in these 10 years as tourist exploiters paradise. The beauty of the place is still there but now commercialization has managed to changed the shoreline. There are more facilities and it is less dangerous but you don't have to build a mall on the beach. Place still attracts millions of european tourists in search of sun during the european winter. I was on the beach when the tsunami hit the eastern coast. In the evening i came to know of it, lost the appetite for the beach for sometime now.

Mangalore is a coastal town about 350 kms from bangalore. Due to a conflict, i had to take the journey by car. For the most part the road was fine except for the "ghats", where the export of the iron ore has caused movement of very heavy trucks; due to which an entire stretch of about 20Kms can't be called "road" anymore.

What is interesting about mangalore is that it has launched many successful banks in india. Their success is akin to saying that "alaskan" banks have take over the bank of america. I was there to meet one of the more successful banks which has been nationalized after their great success. So, even after the nationalization the IT has remained in mangalore.

In my conversations with the folks in mangalore, it was striking that they had realized the importance of IT in banking and now bank has strategies of growing by acquiring other banks. That sort of approach can work wonders if you have the confidence of merging effectively the people, processes, and technology quickly enough without any glitches for the customer. Another striking feature was the desire to compete with foreign banks by making improvements in their IT infrastructure.

I came back convinced that the banks in "mangalore" have discovered the right way to grow quickly. In fact the opportunity for these kind of banks is huge, they enjoy the local advantage, exploit the local conditions better than any one else and if their technology investments allows them to increase the productivity, with right business skills they can bring much better financial services to their customers. I have a feeling that the model should easily be replicable to other smaller countries as well.

Identity Crisis for the developing countries It is no news that most developing countries are looking to adopt a national id card. Amazingly, US does not have a national ID card(http://www.epic.org/privacy/id_cards/). In the US, the government depends on the social security, drivers license, and the passport for delivering the government sponsored programs. But, these identities have been well accepted by the private sector. The post office and the telephone companies plays the role of confirming the legal address of a person. Arguably it is far from perfect but it does work for a large number of business establishments.

As it so happens in the developing countries with huge population's there is always the problem of getting the processes in the right place. Most developing countires have not yet been able to create a process for national identity. They have identities, but nothing is linked to a common denominator. So, there are couple of problems to be solved: One to have a process to acquire these idenities and second to deliver these identities to a device of choice. Third being the problem of monitoring and maintaining the identities, as people change their profiles based on life events. A common problem of course is what to do about the number of identities that are already available? And how to co-ordiante with delivery vehicle for those identities that are held up with different goverment departments.

India for example has census every so years, but the process does not go far enough to explain the rich demographics and relationships which can only be done with collecting rich data. No one department wants to talk to the other department and whose identity is 'sacred' is also not very clear. So, there are huge problems in jumpstarting such a process. A lot of times people hestitate to provide that information if it does not buy them anything. That has been the case with income tax cards at least. But it is a process that has worked because now you cannot have a bank account without a PAN card. So as it stands, the identity is distributed with income tax, voters registration, passport, ration cards, registrar of birth and deaths, pension accouts etc

One arguement that can be put forth is that the existing records of pensioners, tax payers, voters registration, passport can be merged to create a uique national identity. Other processes are also needed to capture the mass of people. The recorded identities may amount to 200 million only, india is a country of billion people. Of course with the kind of per capita income we have here it is important to reduce the price of acquiring such an identity to <$1. With different political governments coming in and out the political will to achieve a national identity also fluctuates. So far no one political party has been able to articulate and sell the idea to the masses. People will gladly accept and co-operate with the initiatives if it provides them with actual tangible benefits, is easy to obtain and will leave them at peace.

From a technology perspective it would be great if the identity could be delivered on a java chip, cell-phone, smart card, multi- factor cards, simple paper. So, in my opinion goverment should delink itself of what platform they want to deliver the identity, that should be the choice of the people, and the companies that are going to be utilizing the identity.
I would like to invite comments on any papers or studies in this regard!

(2004-09-27 04:20:24.0) Permalink

From what i am noticing in the developing countries, following kinds of customers are shopping around for software solutions :
* Mobile Operators for launching new services and consolidating and expanding their OSS/BSS systems
* Enterprise Customers of big banking and financial services investing in their infrastructure and getting better organized
* Small and medium enterprise looking for a cost effective operations and a partner who does not bleed them
* Other customers who have lagged behind in IT decisions are investing in their infrastructure for better possibilities for their business
* Government is making purchasing decisions as they are really lagging behind in e-governance
* Scattered individual companies investing in one off projects

Very often solutions from all kinds of companies fall short of the expectations of the customer. Let's look at two such scenarios for marketing in segment such as Small and Medium enterprises (SME).

So, let's look at the scenario when a company that is internally organized to develop products for a SME market pitches a solution versus a company that is organized to develop horizontal technologies for all the markets. Chances are that companies that are organized for thinking on the behalf of SME market will provide integrated solutions and will be able to feel the customers pain and licensing issues even though it may not have the best technical product.
On the hand companies with horizontal products will have the world's greatest technology solution but will fumble to put together an integrated solution, they will also have problems in developing relationships because of not having any empathy for the market they are trying to get in. A management solution often is to try the "Channel partner" sales in these situations make matters only worse as the company even gets cut off from any contact with the real customer and hence looses that "touch" with the customer. Though in the short term it may throw up occasional good numbers.

For companies developing software it is important that they get behind the patterns in the market and organize themselves in a way that they develop synergies between their technology groups and the market demands. Customers in developing countries would rather have a big technology partner provide all the solutions than have 200 little players selling them bits and pieces. IT departments in these companies when they do not see a big emerging partner who can provide a comprehensive solution tend to take a few risks and sometimes even shelve the projects. Because of this reason we notice that in india, big service providers are either Sun or HP or something else, but very rarely we see 40%SUN, 20% HP etc in terms of their hardware and OS platforms.

The stack of middleware software on the other hand wildly fluctuates depending on who is providing local support, big discounts and is more receptive of the customers demands. What is also interesting is that even though middleware stacks are portable, IT still does not want to change them to another vendor. Reason being that every middleware still demands a considerable amount of attention to get it to work optimally, and over the time developers tend to hardwire themselves to a particular product.

Big vendors are also trying to get IT to make long term purchasing decisions to ensure loyalty as they improve their products. Such deals pose threat to the subscription model. Reason for long term deals is the customer's ability to charge depreciation on the software as a capital asset. Subscription on the other hand does not allow the customer to claim that product as an "Asset". In these situations only way to make sure that middleware is controlled by a vendor is to make it a part of the one time sale of the hardware or provide the business with a must have business service by attaching with an ISV.

In the developing countries revenues can be hard to get sometimes based on the economic cycle the country is in, In these situations tie up of vendor revenue both for products and services has to be synched with the customers revenue cycle. It is a calculated risk but may give service providers a chance to rise above the water. This kind of hedging though proved unsuccessful in the days when there was an internet bubble. But otherwise does work if the company has long term viability.

Software selling also involves a lot of handholding in the developing countries. The selling here is more like developing a family relationship. Once you are engaged with the customer, they are likely to test your patience by calling you up in odd hours for everything they cannot figure out. One has to stay engaged, be receptive to gain their trust and slowly win them over. This kind selling requires "customer support" to be given during the pre-sales period both for technical and relationship questions. Current org structure in large companies do not allow such a catch all "emotional pillow" to be offered to the customer, resulting in violent relationship breakdowns.