Of Clouds, SOA and 2.0!

Recession has hit everyone in every possible way. Surviving downturn is only possible for those who are strong in their fundamentals. Salt March media obviously knows its basics well. It successfully organized and executed its 2-day business technology summit on Nov 3 and 4 2009 with clinical efficiency and delivered value for the huge 1400+ audience. Companies don't sponsor their employees for conferences these days as it simply doesn't make business sense to them. But, BT Summit was different. Through some innovative marketing (offering discounted prices - Rs. 500 for 2 days is a steal) and intelligent followups, they ensured that a number of technology and business enthusiasts could take part in this event.

However, low conference fees didn't mean poor speakers and inadequate facilities. The conference was held at the seat of scientific learning in India--IISc. The speakers were experts on the topics they were talking about. And the marketing pitch was conspicuously missing in their presentations. What a whiff of fresh air!

Held at the JN Tata Auditorium, the 1400+ particpants savored every moment of this business-technology extravaganza. How appropriate it was for Howard Charney, a member of the Cisco's President's office to talk about the future of smart services as the opening day keynote address. Howard's multi-media presentation drove home the point of how the future would see machine-to-machine communications as well as many-to-many communications. His representation on grid computing and a demonstration of how hologram communication would work in reality were eye openers for the audience.

The second keynote address by Ramkumar Kothandaraman from Microsoft brought us right into the most talked about subject in the conference--Cloud computing. His presentation initiated the audience to Cloud computing, SaaS and utility computing and helped participants get a first hand view of what to expect in the next 2 days.

After the keynote, I got into hall C for a talk on 'making SOA while the economy whines'. Yogesh Devi of Perot Systems made some very pertinent points of how to approach SOA in the economic downturn with a good analogy of 'making hay while the sun shines'. He gave a good introduction to SOA and also explained how to balance the spectrum of JBOWS (Just a bunch of web services) and the technology overload. Eben Hewitt's talk on succeeding with SOA in Hall A gave a 3-stage plan for SOA design involving services, infrastructure and governance. The best presentation of the first half of the day came from Anand Ramakrishnan, GM-cloud computing at Wipro. He took us through a detailed 5-D formula for implementing cloud--Discover, Define, Design, Decide and Deliver--and beautifully explained the Do's and Don'ts of cloud computing.

The afternoon saw a high decibel and highly entertaining keynote address by Som Sarma, the IT Services Head at 3-I Infotech. The most telling part of his presentation was about how companies need to tolerate failures of its employees in order to encourage innovation. The software+services presentation by Sachin V Rathi of Microsoft was another highlight of the first day afternoon. The talk was centred around the accummulation of infarstructure and software services in clouds that can offer scalable, reusable and highly available computing for the enterprises.

The second day had some very interesting presentations. The concept of Web 2.0 and collaboration and its utility for a corporation was explained with examples by Jagadish Vasishta. The next presentation on information overload by Tobias Rueckert was entertaining as well as enlightening. Did you know that you lose almost one whole day of productivity per week, just by checking emails once every 5 minutes?

The afternoon saw the highly relaxed Vivek Khurana giving a clutter-free presentation on enterprise dashboards to a full-house gathering at Hall B. He made very interesting points about what constitutes an enterprise dashboard and the future trends in this arena--like the animated charts, streaming dashboards, collaborative visualization and expressions. This was followed by Udayan Banerjee's practical experience in implementing Enterprise 2.0 at NIIT. He explained the essentials of Web 2.0 as put forward by Harvard McAfee through SLATES and what choices NIIT made in this direction. Later, Alen Pelz-Sharpe's presentation on CMIS was an eye-opener. He also touched upon a number of new standards other than CMIS in ECM (Enterprise content management) that would rule the technology landscape in the near future.

Overall the conference was a knowledge enhancing experience. The speakers were present for their talks without miss and on time.

The conference also had its fair share of negatives. The JN Tata Auditorium gives the occupants a suffocating feeling, maybe due to its inadequate AC and inappropriate exhaust. The halls, other than the main hall, cannot accommodate >100 people, which is a pity for a conference of this size. The participants were literally seen jostling for space during every interchange. And the food was far from satisfactory--a bland fare, that couldn't stimulate the taste buds as much as the talks could stimulate the minds in the conference.

The conference was a big learning experience for me and I could hear, learn and understand the concepts of cloud computing, SOA, Software as a service, utlity computing, collaborating, enterprise 2.0. web 2.0, business intelligence, ECM, CMIS...... phew....thatz a lot of learning in 2 days!!!

Is Sachin Great?

I must confess. I started researching for this blog with a clear bias against Tendulkar. My observation as a cricket buff for the last 20 years has made me believe that Tendulkar somehow plays more for his own records than for his team. Sachin has proved such allegations wrong at various points in his cricketing career. Still, it is but natural for cricket fans like me to feel that Tendulkar somehow falls short of 'greatness' by losing breath just before the finishing line. This discussion has gained currency yet again as Tendulkar got out for 175 yesterday, with India just needing 19 runs to win against Australia. India lost this match.

My feeling has always been that Tendulkar is a master batsman when India bats first, but has always been unsuccessful in winning matches for India while chasing. The true character of a great batsman can be gauged by how often he crosses the finishing line while chasing, when the pressure is at its peak.

In order to check if my feeling of bias towards Tendulkar was not just a negative perception, I checked the cricinfo Website for Sachin's batting records. On the site I found a list of Tendulkar's career high scores. It was truly amazing to see 45 100s and 91 50s from the master blaster. I decided to concentrate only on the 100s Tendulkar had scored, that too, while batting second. As expected, Tendulkar had scored lesser number of hundreds while chasing (17) than while batting first (28). I also wanted to exclude those centuries he had scored against weaker teams like Kenya and Zimbabwe, while batting second. That brought down the number of hundreds to 11 batting second. Out of these I could see a clear distinction between his small hundreds (100-140)and big hundreds (140-190). Almost 90% of his 11 centuries in the 100-140 range were wins for India. On the other hand almost 90% of all hundreds in 140-190 range were losses.

I also observed another piece of statistics. Out of all the high scores in a losing cause, Tendulkar figured prominently. Out of 69 such instances of high scores by various batsmen in the world in a losing cause, Tendulkar's name figures 7 times. The contrast is glaring when you compare this with his other contemporaries like Ponting, Jayasuriya and Dravid, all of whom have one such occurence each in that list. Brian Lara doesn't even figure in the 'highest scores in a losing cause' list. Chris Gayle, with his one-man heroics for WI is a close second with 6 such high scores in a losing cause.

Of course you might argue that Tendulkar has played more matches and has more centuries and therefore has more such instances of failure. That could be partially true. But when a batsman of the calibre of Tendulkar is unable to win matches after scoring 140+ in so many cases, it probably indicates that he hasn't been able to reach the hall of greatness. You could also say that Tendulkar's team-mates have always let him down, making him carry all the burden till the end. Well, that is what great players are expected to do, right?

Does it mean Tendulkar plays more for his own records than for his team? Maybe not. But the records prove otherwise.