Arun Kottolli

Types of Innovations

2012-01-29T11:44:00.003Z

I have conducted several innovation workshops. Invariably participants in these workshops restrict themselves to incremental innovation (80% of the ideas) and radical innovations (20% of the ideas). Often times these radical ideas are so extreme that most of other participants shake their heads when they hear of it.

In reality, there are four types of innovations:

1. Incremental Innovation

2. Radical Innovation

3. New Business Model

4. Collaborative Venture solutions

Incremental innovations are easy to imagine and implement. These are essentially product extension ideas and are easy to implement. For example: Bajaj designed RE60 - a 4 wheeled auto. (see: Bajaj Innovates with RE60 or Apple iPhone 4S ) Incremental innovations are usually part of continuous development - more on lines of product roadmap, or six sigma projects.

Another form of incremental innovation is imitation. Companies often times imitate their competition and also license technologies needed for it. For example Chevrolet's Volt was essentially a response to Toyota's Prius. Another very good example is Google Andriod is an imitation of iOS, Microsoft Windows was an imitation of PARC GUI system etc. Imitation is a very good way to innovate. See: Innovation by Imitation - Toyota Imitates Segway

Incremental innovations are often seen as low risk with moderate benefits projects and is more preferred.

Radical Innovations are essentially major breakthrough, like Toyota's hybrid technology, or Liquid battery from 24M . Radical innovations are usually tough to understand and accept. Often times, companies reject radical innovations because the top management cannot understand it. For example Xerox corporation did not understand the breakthrough done by their scientists at PARC, and failed to capitalize on the PC revolution.

Radical innovation often needs a new business model and a futuristic vision of how the innovation will help the society. Radical innovation needs much greater management commitment and resources to succeed. If the leadership does not have the right vision, then the breakthrough product will fail - despite its technical superiority. For example, Nokia introduced N770 tablet in 2005 and was way ahead of Apple, yet Nokia could not capitalize on its innovation and failed in the market.

Radical innovations is often associated with high risks and high uncertainties.

Innovations are not limited to new products. New Business Models are also innovations. For example Apple's iTunes was a new business model to sell music over Internet. The technology to deliver MP3 files over Internet was well known, but Apple's innovation was to build a new business model to sell individual songs for 99 cents - instead of selling the entire CD was the real business innovation.

New business models essentially take an existing technology or product and apply in a different business scenario - and thus create new business opportunities.

New business models are also needed to bring radical innovations into market, as existing business models cannot adapt to new technology. For example, in 1960's Xerox's created a new business model of leasing its photo copier instead of selling it outright. The success of Xerox led to a standard business model of leasing expensive equipment. Today, most of medial imaging equipment, industrial machines are leased, and leasing is considered as industry standard.

Google's free distribution of Andriod or Red Hat's free distribution of Linux is an example of business model innovations. Google makes money through selling advertising on its search engine - which users of Andriod phone will use. Red Hat makes money by selling services for Linux.

In general new business model as innovation is seen as moderate risk option. Companies are reluctant to explore new business models - especially when it threatens their current business models.

New Venture as Innovation. Current business venture could be expanded into new markets by creating new ventures. A common example would be to expand an existing business abroad, or forming a joint venture with another company to leverage its current products and generate additional revenue. Though in this case, there is no major product innovation, there will be a need for business model innovations.

For example, GM formed a joint venture with Shanghai Automotive Indistrial corporation to build & sell GM cars in China. New ventures are not just limited to joint ventures, it could be setting up a subsidiary to tap into new markets. For example, McDonalds expansion in India.

New ventures are often seen as low risk options to expand existing business - but there is a need to customize products to suit local needs, else the business will fail.

Closing Thoughts

Innovations are not limited to technical areas or to products alone. Business innovations are just as important. New business models and new business ventures are better in terms of ROI and these must also be pursued.

Innovation and Successful New Product Development

2012-01-29T05:48:00.002Z

Entrepreneurship is full of stories of inventive individuals who toiled for long time and then came out with a very successful product. For example look at Dr. Amar Bose and his music speakers or Tim Leatherman and his multipurpose tools. (see: Developing a Product Brief

Http://arunkottolli.blogspot.com/2011/12/developing-product-brief.html)

These of good examples of Inventor led new product development. But for every success story, there are 100's of failures. The low success rate makes one study the success story and identify the key traits needed to succeed.

When we study their success stories, there is lot of common threads in all the success stories and there is a distinct process for success - which I have documented and presenting it here.

There is a major difference in the approach of entrepreneurs and inventors when compared to large companies. Large companies always start with the market needs - i.e., there must be a sizable market demand for the potential product, before the company starts to develop the product, while inventors often start without knowing the market potential and are usually driven by their own need for the product. Inventors often assume that their need for the product is same as the market need, and start on developing the product.

It is the Process and not the Product

Success of new product development lies with a strong process. A better process leads to a better product, and better product leads to greater market success. The process steps needed for successful product development are:

1. Strategy

2. Product portfolio

3. Research

4. Insight

5. Innovation Development

6. Market Development

7. Selling

These steps are not sequential and can be combined and done in parallel.

Strategy

Why to innovate?

Inventors will always start with at this point. This calls for understanding the problem in depth and start figuring out the solutions.

Answering this question will lead to a strategy for new product development - which gets refined over time. The term strategy involves a broad answers to:

What type of product to develop?
What price points?
When the product will be ready?
What we know and do not know today?
What resources - both internal & external are needed?
How much will the development cost?
Where is the funding for the development?
How & where to develop?

In the early stage of development not all answers will be complete and well defined, but inventors start with trying to address these questions and that leads to the development of the overall invention strategy.

Portfolio

After developing the strategy, the next step in the process is to identify the innovation portfolio. Typically any innovation will not succeed in isolation, it will need a set of other innovations like a portfolio of innovations that are needed for make it a business success.

For example, Amar Bose would not be successful with just one design of speakers. Though the first design of 901 speakers was an invention by itself, the real success was because Bose designed a series of speaker designs that met the original intentions - but in slightly different ways. Similarly Tim Leatherman had to develop a series of hand tools to succeed.

Having a single innovation product will meet only one specific need, but will fail to meet a much broader need. So to make the innovation a success one needs to develop a broader portfolio of innovations.

A portfolio of innovations are necessary in most cases of innovation except in case of incremental innovation or design changes.

In addition to developing a range of products, one may also need additional innovations in other areas associated with the product. Such as packaging or distribution or supply chain, sales, etc..,

A classic case of such a portfolio of Innovation is iPhone. Apple had to develop a series of innovations to make iPhone relevant and successful. Apple had to develop a business innovation of having the carriers provide subsidy for the end customer, and then develop special call/data plans for the iPhones. Apple also had to innovate on the iOS software & iTunes services to enable other developers create Apps that can be sold through iTunes.

Research

Research is the most essential task during the innovation process. Before starting the development, one needs to know what are the exact gaps in our knowledge, what we know and what we know that we don't know.

There will be a gap between what we know today and we will know once these new products and services have been discovered, developed, and applied. We compare our current knowledge with the knowledge we will need, and this shows us where the gaps are; filling them with brilliant new knowledge that leads to insights is the purpose of research.

Research must include both explicit and implicit knowledge, Scientific/Technical knowledge and business knowledge: Finance, Costs, operations, marketing etc.

Insight

Insight is the moment when all the things come together. The "eureka" moment.

With all the research, the hard work, experience has converged into insight - the complete and total solution. The insight is not a process but a landmark event when everything comes together. The insight moment can occur at any moment - while taking a shower or while driving etc., but this is not a random event. Its only though the rigor of research, diligent and persistent efforts - one gets the insight. It is an outcome of a dedicated process of research.

The entire team converges on this insight & then the innovation process moves on to next step of development.

A good example of this insight moment was idea of Tata Nano. Tata group had invested substantial resources/time on business opportunities for "Bottom-of-pyramid" markets, had roped in Dr.. C.K. Prahalad as a consultant and had created an elite team to do the basic research for such opportunities, and then the insight moment happened and the idea of Nano was born.

Product development

At this stage, there is a clear idea on the solution and then the product will have to developed. Now this is a stage where prototypes of completed innovations. This involves design and engineering of prototypes (this could be a product, a service or a business design)

This stage will require an integrated, multi-displinary process that involves multiple teams of researchers, who understand the ideas the best, project managers and people who have deep knowledge of the relevant business domains (finance, manufacturing, marketing, sales etc..)

This stage involves extensive engineering, design, testing, alpa/beta program with select customers to get their feedback, and redesign/modify, test as needed.

Project management is a very important skill in this stage. Product development and the next stage Market development involves coordinating various members and teams. Project management becomes a critical skill to do this coordination effectively.

Market Development

As the product development gets underway, the market development has also be done. This stage is more customer focused activity. In this stage, one needs to work out the marketing plan: pricing, distribution, supply chain development, etc.. This stage is vital for the commercial success.

For example, when Tata launched Nano car, Tata motors had to build a entire supply chain for parts, build a dealership network, create marketing campaigns, build public enthusiasm etc.. And all this was happening while the engineering team was still working on the car designs.

Selling

Selling is the final icing on the cake. By now the product is fully developed, marketing has started, customers are interested, and then comes the sales and after sales activity. The innovative product has to be sold to the customer to get the financial returns for all the hard work.

Closing Thoughts

Successful new product development is the commercialization of an Innovation. Success of the product depends on the process as much as the inventive idea. For every one successful new product, there are tens of failed products and thousands of ideas.

Innovation and new product development requires a rigor and process. As Louis Pasteur's famously said "Luck favors a prepared Mind", there is a lot of hard work needed to get lucky in Innovation and new product development.

Also See:

Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold Leaves Inventor Without Deal

Outdoing the Swiss Army knife

For the love of booze

New Product Development & Projected Users

2012-01-23T08:24:00.005Z

In developing new products it is important to start with customer needs, but understanding user needs is not easy. As there are no single user type, most users have a common need but have different use cases. It is therefore not possible to identify all the user needs and then start developing products to meet those needs. Instead, it is better to create an abstracted class of users - called as "Projected Users" and then list out the product needs in a generic way - which then leads to projected product specifications.

The notion of Projected Users is a very powerful tool especially when developing a new-to-the-world kind of products such as iCloud or iPhone. As the users have never seen or used such a product, identifying the user needs is doubly difficult. The idea of Projected Users helps in a big way.

Projected Users Concept

Developing new products is very expensive. When a company is developing new-to-the-world type of product, the expense for understanding user requirements cannot be easily justified and quantified. In that stage, there are no customers and hence there are no "real" customer use cases. Therefore one cannot really document the customer needs either. To overcome such challenges, it is vital to create an abstract class of users called as "Projected Users" .

The projected users is essentially a vision/view of the product developers/designers on how customers will use the product and why. The early users of this new product will be the product developers themselves. So it is very important that all the developers have a very good understanding of the basic customer needs - i.e, the basic problem and then start visualizing the customer use cases that arise from that need.

For example, while developing the requirements for a secure authentication system, (see: Need for a Central Multi-Factor Authentication as a Service ) there were no real users - but we started with a real need. Once the real necessity for the product is fully understood by all the developers, then one can start visualizing the use cases - which then can lead to real product development.

Defining the Projected User

Once the basic product need is understood, it is very important to define the "project user". It is very important to characterize the "Projected User" - i.e., start giving a personality to the projected user: Age group, Gender, Income, Education, Lifestyle, etc.

Developing a personality of the Projected User has four distinct steps:

Develop a user profile
Define the user demographic/physcographic profile. Understand the user needs in context to the product usage.

Having a deep understanding of users can help development team better understand the wants & needs of the targeted customers. This will help the development team relate better with the target user.
Develop user tasks
Define the physical and cognitive operations done by the user to perform a task with the future product. i.e, How the user will use the product to perform a task.

Understanding user tasks helps in developing design solutions that will ensure that the user expectations are met & avoid design errors and customer frustration.
Develop a focus group
Create a group of real people who match the user profile as closely as possible. The focus group is used to understand the user environment, the use cases and user needs.

This provides an early insight into the product concept acceptance, user behavior, and desired feature sets in the upcoming product.
Market Survey
Market survey is usually done to collect data about target users and customers. This is necessary to validate certain assumptions or to collect actual field data.

This is particularly important when target customers are widely dispersed and rich quantitative data is needed to build accurate business models.

Benefits of Projected Users

Creation of Projected Users requirements is a must in developing any new-to-the-world products. Often times while developing such new products the product design and development gets influenced/driven by inventor's or developer's perception of user requirements - and leading to product disasters.

Creating a projected user models will keep the development team rooted to a realistic user requirements and minimizes user frustration with the real product.

For example, while developing a software product I find that most of the developers are very comfortable using a command line interface, and developers start assuming that all the customers are comfortable with UNIX command line interface, then when the final product reaches a Gen-Y user, the product will fail to excite the customer.

While developing a new "touch screen" phone, Blackberry developers built-in a sliding keyboard in addition to the touch screen - see Blackberry Torch 9800 (http://us.blackberry.com/smartphones/blackberrytorch/). Soon after launch, the product bombed. Critics lashed out at Blackberry for missing out on the real user interface requirements.

On the other hand, Apple's success with iPhone was due to its extensive insights into projected user needs and was based on observations & learning's from Apple Newton, iPod, Palmtop devices - from Palm, HP iPaQ etc.

Dealing with Design Errors

A Projected User is an imaginary user which does not exist in reality. So when the final product come out in the market, the real customers may have few ideas to make the product better and may give suggestions to correct the design faults.

At this stage, it is vital to observe the actual customer behavior, customer use cases and then start redesigning the product to fix the early design errors. Typically it takes 1-2 additional revisions to get the final product. These revisions must be rapid and the final product MUST meet real customer's expectations. Trying to override customer objections will not work. At this stage, there are real customers and real users of the product, so it is time to retire the projected user concept and start working with the "real" customers to improve the product.

Another example is Google Chrome Book. The Chrome Book was developed by engineers using laptops - thus designed a "NET Ready" laptop computer - when the real users wanted an iPad! Google was quick to realize this mistake and worked on Android tablets.

Closing Thoughts

Developing new products is difficult. Developing new-to-the-world products are doubly more difficult, developing a successful new-to-the-world category product is infinitely difficult.

Developing a well defined "Projected User" is the best way to visualize customer requirements, define product requirements and develop new products - when there are no real customers to start with. Once the product is released and real customers exist, then work with customers to enhance/improve the product till it gains wide user acceptance.

Big Legal Risks with Cloud Computing

2012-01-19T07:28:00.007Z

Cloud computing has its benefits in terms of lower costs and greater reliability & flexibility. But storing data in the cloud has several disadvantages and risks. Apart from the obvious risk of unintended breach of security and loss of sensitive data to hackers, (see the case of Sony and Honda) leading to severe losses on privacy and intellectual property.

Cloud computing will also increase legal risks as well. All data stored in US location or stored with an American firm - such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, RackSpace, SAP, Oracle, Salesforce.com, HP, IBM, etc., is subject to Americal laws, thus US government can access your data - and you can do nothing about it and watch as a spectator.

According to Gordon Frazer, the managing director of Microsoft UK, he could not guarantee that data stored on Microsoft servers, wherever located, would not end up in the hands of the US government, because Microsoft, a company based in the United States, is subject to US laws, including the Patriot Act. (Source: http://www.mayerbrown.com/publications/article.asp?id=12057 )

US government can demand access to your company's data under Patriot Act or other acts, and the cloud service provider is bound to provide that data without your consent!

According to the current rules: An entity that is subject to US jurisdiction and is served with a valid subpoena must produce any documents within its "possession, custody, or control."

That means that an entity that is subject to US jurisdiction must produce not only materials located within the United States, but any data or materials it maintains in its branches or offices anywhere in the world. The entity even may be required to produce data stored at a non-US subsidiary. This also implies that, all companies that have a branch office in the US are subjected under US Patriot Act - thus US government can get access to your data even if the data is hosted outside US and by a non-US company - if that company has a branch office in the USA.

This provisions in the US law is a big risk. US Government has the means and ways to decrypt your data and then pursue legal actions or even covertly pass that data to other US competitors.

Risk increases further when you realize the fact that other countries can also pass similar laws in future.

Risk is Amplified with SOPA & PIPA

Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA) are currently being debated in the US congress and Senate. If this bill passes, the legal risks for storing data in a cloud shoots up exponentially. To understand the legal risks, consider this example.

A global company XYZ has stored all its employee emails with Google. One of the employees has sent a pirated picture/MP3/eBook as an attachment - which is now stored with Google.

The company which owns the copy right or the IP for that object can issue a subpoena to Google, get access to the emails and then sue company XYZ for piracy in the US courts - if company XYZ has operations or branch office in the US. The copyright holder can also prevent Google from providing services to company XYZ, and also prevent company XYZ from accessing/moving their data from Google servers. In other words, company XYZ is struck with an expensive law suit and this is a HUGE legal risk.

Since it is impossible to screen all the data for copyright violations while storing data, non-US companies will have to be very careful in terms of choosing when and where to use cloud storage.

What can you do about it?

A simple answer is - Do not store any sensitive data in the cloud!

For other not-so-sensitive data, use a local cloud service provider - who is subject to the local laws only. Ideally the local cloud service provider must not have any international operation - and must operate in a safe haven - far away from all the US/EU/China government rules.

Opportunity for Indian Cloud Service Providers

European companies have not using US companies for cloud services. Shell is using T-Systems in Germany.

Similarly, Indian companies must start using local cloud service providers - who do not have any operations outside India.

The legal risks associated with cloud computing is VERY BERY BIG. Companies and Individuals must consider all the legal risks before storing or even using cloud computing services.

Few questions to ask before choosing the Cloud Service provider

In order to understand the risks and the protection offered by the service provider, one must ask the following questions:

1. Where is the cloud service providing company incorporated? Is the company subject to US/EU or other foreign laws?

The legal status of the cloud service provider is very important. Even if the company is registered in India, but it has branches in other countries, then there is a legal risk. If the company is a subsidiary of a foreign entity - then the legal risks are high.

Also ask for an advance notice from the service provider - if the service provider company plans to expand abroad.

2. Where is the data stored?

The location of the data store also defines your legal rights. If the data is stored in India, then it is subject to Indian laws. The physical location of the data store, including all the backup location. Knowing this information lets you know other risks involved - such as natural disasters, and how that could affect your company's operations.

3. Who owns the data? (including all the back-ups & logs)

If the answer is not the customer (you) than walk away from that vendor.

Often times, the service provider creates the log files on your data. Technically these log files belong to the service provider, but you can ask what they do with the log files, and do they share these log files with others. Knowing what is done with the log files is very important - because log files can also reveal a lot about your operations.

For example, the service provider can use the log data - such as volume of data stored and bandwidth throughput used by you in their marketing campaign. Any use of such data from the log files must have prior permission from the customer.

4. What is the data security Policy?

Ask for the security compliance the service provider adheres to. The encryption standards, multi-tenancy systems information etc. It is important to know how your data is being stored in the cloud, who has access to it, and what protection systems are provided to safeguard your data.

5. How can I get my data back?

This is a very important question to ask and know ahead, before signing the contract. If you choose to close your account and move your data back into your own data center or to another service provider, then how will the current service provider give your data back?

In many cases, the volume of data and the bandwidth constrains create a lock-in with the existing service provider. Also if the service provider provides the data in a unique format - then you as a customer is limited with your options. Knowing how to get your data back - in all details is vital before selecting a service provider.

Closing Thoughts

Today, all the media & IT companies are touting the great benefits of cloud computing. Cloud computing promise lower costs and greater operation flexibility. But cloud computing opens up huge risks as well. Apart from the well known risks of data loss due to hacking , there are additional legal risks. The scale and limitations of these legal risks are yet unknown as the laws are changing and new regulations are being formulated.

It is therefore very important for companies to understand the legal implications before jumping into the cloud bandwagon. Better still, any public cloud usage must be approved by the company's legal advisors. It is better to be safe than be sorry later.

Also See:

Cloud Computing: Identifying and Managing Legal Risks

Challenges with Electric Cars

2012-01-19T05:57:00.003Z

I have closely watched the developments of electric cars for last 5 years. I own a Reva electric car for four years and as an electrical engineer, I am interested in electric cars. As a owner of electric car, I get questions on viability of electric cars and people are curious to know why there is not much choice of electric cars in the market despite the huge buzz and hype in the media.

Every year, in every auto expo, all the major car manufacturers display their concept electric cars, but almost none of them have made it to the market - except for Nissan Leaf & Chevrolet Volt. And there is a good reason for this absymal record. There are several challenges - both technical and economic challenges which are stopping the electric cars from becoming an everyday reality.

The main challenge with electric cars is economics: COST

Today a Reva car costs (on road) about Rs 4 Lakhs (~$8,000) in Bangalore. The operating cost of Reva is ~Rs4.5/Km. (The battery cost os Rs 75000 - which lasts for 25000 Kms - under ideal conditions + Electric charges + Maintanence).

This does not compare favorably with Diesel cars - such as Maruti Swift or Ritz - which costs Rs 6.5 lakhs (approx US $13,000) and with a running cost of ~Rs5/Km. Yes mathematically Electric car Reva is cheaper to buy and run, but Reva can seat only 2 adults. While Ritz/Swift can easily accommodate 4-5 adults. So the cost/seat advantage lies with the diesel cars.

The same economics work with Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt. The electric cars always cost more!

Auto maker, environmental activists and host of influential forward thinkers have lobbied with governments to give tax breaks and subsidies for electric cars. In Europe, governments have exempted electric cars from various charges - such as congestion charge, parking charge, plus free charging points - all this in addition to subsidies. This has led to some level of user acceptance of electric cars in London, Paris & Amsterdam.

Subsidies and user incentives can solve the cost problem for the user, but the basic economic problem of higher cost of battery is a technical challenge that needs to be addressed.

Technical Challenges

Even if one were to overlook the cost disadvantages of an electric car, there is another major disadvantage of range: An electric car has a limited driving range, i.e., the distance one can travel per charge, after which the car battries must be recharged. With lead-acid battries, the recharge time is quite long 8 hours for a full charge. The range essentially limits the usage of electric cars for urban office commute.

I love electic cars for urban commute - as often times, only one or two persons travel in the car and the range of 80 Kms is more than adequate for urban office commute. But I cannot take the electric car for longer distances.

Electric cars have three main components: Battery, Electric power train (motor + controller + gearbox) and the car body (chassis + Passenger cabin). Today we have mastered the technology needed for the car body and the electric power train, but battery remains a stubborn obstacle. Even after several decades of research - reliable, low cost, environment friendly battery technology has remained elusive.

There are four technical challenges with battery for electrical cars.

1. Time for charging the battery

2. Life of the battery

3. Cost of battery

All the four challenges will have to be solved in tandem - and only then electric cars can become viable.

Time for charging the battery

Today there are two main technologies available automotive battery: Lead-Acid battery, Li-Ion battery. Li-Ion battery has a recharge time for 30 minutes to 2 hours, while Lead-Acid battery needs about 8 hours for full charge.

When it comes to charging the battery, there are three possible options:

1. Over night recharge via a wall socket at home.

2. Rapid recharge using 440V charging station - possibly a commercial recharging station.

3. Swapping a fully charged battery for a drained one.

Over night recharge is currently the preferred option - but it is not a comparabe solution to gasoline driven cars.

Even with today's best recharging technology, the charging time of 30 minutes is unacceptable. Adding to the fact that rapid recharge damages the battery reducing the life-span of the battery.

Swapping batteries works only in a controlled environment. Here the problem of battery life span comes into the picture. A fully charged "old" battery is not the same as a "new" battery as we see in the next section.

Life of the battery

Electric batteries have a defnite life span. Li-Ion battery, which is now the preferred battery for electric cars, has a life span of 1000 charge-recharge cycles - which roughly translates to about 3 years of useful life.

Over this life span, the charging and discharging of battery forms deposites inside the electrolyte that diminishes its energy storing capacity and also increases the internal resistance of the battery - which limits the current delivered by the battery. All this implies that the older battery provide lesser range than a new battery. Older battery has higher internal resistance and this translates to a longer time for charging.

Newer Li-Poly batteries have a lifespan of 5000 cycles - but these batteries are yet to reach mass production.

Older battery consumes more power to recharge, stores lesser amount of energy and gives lesser power than new battery. After the rated life span - the battery has to be disposed. Disposing an old battery - both Lead-acid and Li-Ion has huge environmental consequences.

Cost Of Battery

One of the biggest challenge with electric cars is the cost of battery. Li-Ion battery usees rare materials - which are expensive, and thus the overall cost of car is high. For electric cars to succeed in the market, the total cost of ownership (over a period of 5 years) must come down to match that of gasoline or diesel powered cars.

Today, in India, the Total cost of ownership on Reva cars is same as Maruthi Swift VDI (diesel powered). For the average user, Reva sounds expensive - because he gets a much smaller car and with several limitations, while Maruthi Ritz or Swift costs the same and is a bigger car and without limitations.

The same economics is applicable to Nissan Leaf or any other electric cars. Subsidies and other incentives are temporary and can artificially lower costs. For electric cars to be successful, the overall cost must come down drastically and atleast match that of the fossil fuel based cars.

Closing Thoughts

Electric cars still have several challenges to overcome before it becomes accepted by mass market. Today, only the 'early adaptors' and green activists are using electric cars, and this is a niche market. Only when the challenges are overcome, electric cars can hope to become the main stay for the market.

Web App or Cloud App?

2012-01-12T07:17:00.001Z

Today people are writing lots of applications that run on web and call them as cloud apps.

The terms "cloud app" and "web app" are being used almost interchangeably and that is confusing to lot of people.

While all Cloud apps are web apps - i.e., all cloud apps run on web, but not all web apps are cloud apps. There is a huge difference between the two. So I think we should define cloud app and web app.

To begin with, lets take a few examples of applications of cloud apps to understand the basic difference between the two.

Internet Relay Chat, Hotmail.com or Yahoo mail - are the earliest cloud apps. These provided a service through the Internet, scalable and the location from where these applications were running were totally abstracted from the user.

Today there are several other applications: Salesforce.com, Google Docs, Dropbox.com, Zoho.com, Fileshare etc. These applications run on sophisticated systems in the back end - that ensures (almost) 100% uptime, security and scalability.

The two basic characteristics of a cloud apps are:

Inherently Scalable: The application is written in such a way that it takes full advantage of the underlying platform to be scalable. The application must not have limits on number of users or workloads.

Very high Uptime: The application is mirrored in multiple locations so that the application is always available (~100% uptime). This high availability architecture calls for hardware redundancy, data mirroring and rapid data synchronization.

Web Apps on the other hand are generally written for a given platform and is limited by the scalability and availability (uptime). Most of the web apps - online banking, e-ticketing, Flight status checking etc. are really web apps and are limited by scalability & availability.

There is another category of Cloud Apps: Platform Apps.

Platform applications are web enabled application which can host other applications. For example Microsoft Azure, Google Apps, Amazon EC2 are essentially platform applications - on which users can host web or cloud applications.

This leads to another type of differentiating web apps and cloud apps.

Cloud apps are essentially a platform that provides a particular service.

Web apps are essentially services that can be accessed over the Internet from anywhere on any device.

Use Cases for Cloud Storage

2012-01-06T14:32:00.001Z

Cloud data storage brings in a newer perspective for storing and managing enterprise data. Though the concept of storing data in the cloud is as old as world wide web itself, only now, companies have a valid business proposition for cloud storage.

Enterprise IT systems are being drowned with so much data that the cost of data storage has become a leading IT expense item. Companies are hoarding so much digital data owing to business policies and government regulations. Most of the data stored in the enterprise IT storage systems are rarely used - yet they have to be saved and protected.

Cloud storage offers enterprises an opportunity to bring constantly rising file storage costs and reduce data management burden. Adapting cloud storage opens up several benefits to enterprise IT. The main benefits are:

1. Reduces storage costs

2. Increases operational flexibility

Reduced Storage Costs

Cloud storage has a high latency when compared to traditional storage - SAN, NAS or direct attached storage. Cloud storage is also coupled with improved storage management technologies such as data deduplication, compression and better storage utilization. As a result cloud offers lower costs.

Higher Latency

Since the data store occurs in a remote location over the Internet, there is the Internet latency which implies that cloud storage data may not be available in real time.

Having a low cost storage on the cloud albeit with higher latency has its advantages and business use cases. Moreover, most of the data being stored today in enterprise IT data centers are not active data and is rarely stored, the latency for such data is not a factor.

The initial uses cases for cloud data storage are:

1. Backup of user desktops/laptops/mobile devices

Employees use desktops/laptops/mobile devices which contain enterprise data. This data cane be backed up and stored in the cloud on regular basis. When user data is stored with data deduplication, the total volume of data that needs to be stored reduces enormously and thus cloud provides a low cost solution for backing up user device data.

Note that the mobile devices could be also imply any remote device or mobile devices such as embedded systems in automobiles, CNC machines, controllers etc.

2. Warehousing historical data

Various governmental and industry regulations mandates companies to store data. Almost all of this data is rarely used, but enterprises are bound by law to store and maintain it. In addition, most companies today do not have process/policy/procedure in place to discard old data - thus forcing IT departments to store it. Storing such unused data on active IT systems is expensive, it is cheaper to store this data on the cloud. Could storage systems can have is data stored in tiered systems - on disks that are not always ON, thus save on costs and still meet all legal/regulatory requirements.

3. Disaster Recovery plans

Main IT system data can be backed up remotely and routinely such that the cloud system offers a reliable mechanism for data loss prevention in case of natural disasters.

3a. VDI and Business continuity

Cloud storage when coupled with VDI can be a very powerful solution for business continuity. Employees can still continue to work even in a disaster by accessing the VDI from cloud service provider.

4. Enhanced business flexibility

As the company data is stored in the cloud, this data can then be accessed by other cloud services - such as business analytics, data warehousing solutions etc. This provides increased business flexibility in terms of providing new services to business - without an extensive build out of new IT infrastructure. Companies can build cloud based business/data analytics solutions and get higher ROI.

For example, A ATM machine manufacturer can use cloud storage for storing the image of each ATM machine in the network and push any changes to the OS/application on the ATM through the cloud.

A car manufacture can use the customer data stored in the cloud for running analytics to understand user color preferences

Closing Thoughts

Cloud storage is primarily characterized by high latency and low costs. Enterprises can take the cost advantage of cloud storage for all cases that can work with the higher latency. The traditional IT data center applications may not be the right use case for moving to cloud, but as technology evolves and new applications emerge in the cloud, cloud storage will be an added tool.

Bajaj Innovates with RE60

2012-01-05T10:08:00.005Z

On Jan 4th 2012, Bajaj Auto unveiled Bajaj RE60 - a four wheel Auto. Bajaj will not call this vehicle as a car, and it should not be. RE60 is not a car - but it is a 4 wheel contraception designed to supplement/replace their current 3 wheeled autos.

The final product is not a break through innovation, but an evolutionary design change from a 3 wheel auto to a 4 wheel auto, powered by Bajaj's proven 200CC DTSi engine which can run on a range of fuels: Petrol (Gasoline), LPG & CNG. Having a wider fuel options makes this vehicle very attractive for short haul commercial passenger carrier - max range of 30-40 kms.

The design is unique and it is interesting to know how Bajaj will promote RE60 along with their current three wheel autos.

An interesting positionig of RE60 is that, Bajaj has refrained from calling RE60 as a 'car' and is positioned it as an passenger carrier. The primary markets from this will be South Asia and Africa.

By positioning RE60 as a 4-wheel auto and not as a car, Bajaj has managed not to get into direct competition with Tata Nano and has also pre-emptied any move by Tata to push Nano into the 'short haul commercial passenger carrier' - a.k.a 'Auto' space.

Evolutionary Innovation

RE60 represents an evolutionary innovation - a move towards 4 wheels instead of three. A similar move happened in 0.5 Tonne goods carrier market, when Tata Introduced Ace. Competitors in the urban goods carrier makers - Mahindra, Force, Piaggio all moved to a four wheel version from the earlier 3 wheel version of goods carriers.

The evolutionary innovation is not to be taken lightly, it represents significant improvements. Most of the products we use today have evolutionary innovations - where the best of the previous versions are retainedd while adding new or improved features.

Such evolutionary innovations are stable and offer low risk options. In case of Bajaj, company could save Rs 350 Crores by reusing existing facilities. By opting for an evolutionary innovation, Bajaj could lower the cost of product development and develop products that are more likely to be accepted by customers. In the past Bajaj had tried out radical ideas with Bajaj Sunny - which failed miserably in the market. Later Bajaj found success with imitation as innovation Bajaj M80.

Closing Thoughts

Evolutionary Innovation is like kaizen - continious development. The ultimate goal os evolutionay innovation is business success. i.e., maximize returns on investments. It is a low risk approach to product innovation and it is a relentless pursuit towards a better product.

Companies that embrace continious innovation will succeed far better than companies that hope for a breakthrough innovation - which is akin to a lottery ticket. For existing businesses, evolutionary innovation is the way to go. But if one wants to make a big splash and enter a new market then radical innovation provides the best option.

In India both the approaches has been tested. Tata tried with radical innovation with Tata Ace and Tata Nano. While Bajaj is talking the path of evolutionary innovation.

Legal aspects in Product Requirements Identification

2012-01-04T14:35:00.002Z

New Product development starts with a basic product idea (see: Developing New Product Ideas). The next step is to identify all the product requirements. Product requirements should also include legislation requirements set by various governments and also regulations set by trade organizations. Identifying these sets of regulations and legislation's that impact the product is a vital step in defining product requirements.

As the regulations and legal mandates changes with each country, one needs to identify the markets where the product will be sold, and then incorporate those regulations/legislation requirements as part of product requirement.

Legislation

Governments all over the world have specific statutory requirements for various products. For example, in case of cars, each country has specific emission standards, for Electronic goods - there are various rules such as RoHS, Electro Magnetic Radiation levels, etc. In addition to meeting those specific requirements, the end product will have to be certified by proper authorities, and that can create additional requirements. Legal legislation will also specify the labeling and packaging of the products as well. All these legal requirements should be part of product requirements.

Regulations

In addition to legal mandates, there are additional requirements in terms of regulations from trade organizations that has to be met, else the customer may not accept the product. For example ISO 14000, ISO9000 certifications, ITAR - for selling to US military, etc,

These regulations are not mandatory, but customers will not buy the product if it does not adhere to those regulations.

Closing Thoughts

For startups, these legislation and regulations add up to additional development costs and entry barriers to other markets. There are lot of costs, time and efforts needed to pass all the required legal and regulatory requirements. These requirements are not optional and must be fulfilled - else the product can't be sold, no matter how good or how beneficial it is. Often times, start-ups fail to identify the legal and regulatory requirements till the product development is complete and they try to sell the product. Realizing the regulatory and legal requirements after product development is complete is nothing short of a disaster. The product will have to be re-developed & re-tested. All this will mean delay in entering the market and wasted resources.

Software Product Design with User in Mind

2012-01-04T09:36:00.003Z

Too many software product ideas was born on a piece of napkin or on a white board. The software idea is usually conceived by an engineer and is almost always described to other engineers in terms of product functionality. As a result, the software which gets developed has loads of functionality and features - which is often unknown to the user. So when the end user gets confused and calls for support, he is often pointed to the user guide or install guide or troubleshooting guide etc.

The poor user at the other end has to read through several hundreds of pages, sit through training programs - just to know how to use the software!

Even everyday software products such as a simple text editor is made so complex, that it needs a user manual, a training guide, and loads of demonstration videos. (Just google for 'MS Office training guide')

And things get worse. Every time the software gets an update, new sets of guides are published and the users will have to be re-trained!

Imagine if all the products we use today would come with a similar user guides. Everytime Honda releases a new car, you have to learn how to drive all over again!!

This problem is not limited to software, the problem can be seen all across the board in all "engineered" products. But it is most obvious in software.

Why does this happen?

The main reason why companies develop such hard to use products is because the products were not designed to be easily used. In most product development, the user interface is an after thought & The usability of the interface is never tested with real users. Instead the product gets developed by engineers and the UI team (which has no idea on customer usage) develops the User Interface (UI), and the testing team tests the product for functional correctness, but there is no test plan for usability.

Today there are certain "usability" guidelines - published by US Fedral Government (http://www.Usability.gov), but that covers only the web design.

IBM has also published a usability guide for software development (see: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ucd/designconcepts/files/Design_principles_checklist.pdf )

But these guidelines are very general - but it is good start.

Alternate approach

A new way to develop software will be start with customer usage, use cases and acutal usage, and then start developing the user interface, and then develop the product funcationality and features. In short change the order in which we develop products. Start with developing the user experience and end with a product.

Today we start with user needs/requirements - defined by functional requirements, and then put on a user interface on top of those functional features, and then, we give them (customers) the user guides - to train the user.

We need to relook at product development process and make products as user friendly and intutive as possible.

Need for Real Time Networks

2012-01-02T14:55:00.003Z

Cloud Computing in its various forms: SaaS, PaaS, VDI, etc is creating the next inflection point for IT networks. As cloud computing takes center stage for enterprises, IT Network managers will have to redesign and restructure their entire network to meet the new demands of the cloud to provide real-time performance across the network.

The current network is no longer adequate for this task because real-time traffic has special requirements. IT managers will have to redesign the network to build an infrastructure that provides scalable bandwidth with flexibility and simplicity to work in a virtual infrastructure to support the new real-time applications.

The initial real-time application on Internet was VoIP phones which relatively needs small bandwidth. When video conferencing was introduced, IT managers created dedicated networks and video conference stations to support those high bandwidth applications. But such band-aid approach will no longer work for cloud applications such as VDI or cloud storage.

Need for Unified Communication Network

Unified communication Network refers to a network that can handle real-time voice, data and video applications across a range of end user devices in multiple ways: VPN/WAN gateways and LAN networks (10/100 ethernet & Wi-Fi).

The network will have to support multiple device types: Laptop, servers, desktops/workstations, tablets, smart phones, printers, various sensors and controllers - smart meters, HVAC controllers, Video surveillance etc..

The bandwidth demand on the network will increase exponentially - which will make the current network architecture obsolete within next 18-24 months. The need for bandwidth and lack of IPv4 addresses will force companies to build an IPv6 network from scratch.

What's driving the need for real-time network?

In the post PC world, we are seeing an explosion of new network enabled devices: Smart Phones, Tablets, Web connected cameras, range of industrial sensors & controllers. All these devices are bandwidth hogs. An iPad could use 4 Mbps of bandwidth for HD video conferencing, while the VDI running on that iPad could eat up another 5Mbps. Video conferencing, Web meetings over the cloud could consume 12Mbps or more.

As the end-user devices start to demand more bandwidth, the user applications are also multiplying. Cloud computing applications such as VDI, Data-as-a-Service, Cloud data storage, RFID based Real-time ERP systems are all new applications that demand a real-time network.

Virtualization of all Edge Networked devices

VDI brings in virtualization of all edge devices: Virtual desktops, mobile devices: Tablet/smart phones, VoIP phones, video cameras, video conferencing etc..

The edge network contains the largest number of devices and hence presents the greatest network bandwidth demand. Plan for the edge network devices will require 10MB/sec per port.

Core Networking

A virtualized data center designed for high reliability and availability will demand high bandwidth for moving the virtual machines around the physical servers. The SOA applications running on VM's and vMotion - i.e., moving VM's across servers creates enormous traffic between servers (also called East-West traffic).

Applications such as business analytics using Big Data analytics using Hadoop and Business intelligence systems are now being made real time - which calls for moving big data across the network from storage to servers and vice-versa. (North-South traffic)

The need for core network bandwidth is really exploding. Today the data center servers have 40MBps ports and applications are still running out of bandwidth.

WAN Gateways for the cloud

Cloud computing increases the WAN traffic exponentially. As enterprises build out fault resilient private clouds there will be need to seamlessly integrate multiple data centers which demands very high WAN bandwidth.

Deploying VDI and other cloud services will also increase WAN traffic and WAN bandwidth.

Closing Thoughts

Enterprise IT managers will have to deal with this explosion of bandwidth requirements as the business moves towards the cloud and mobile computing devices. Network managers do not have a choice but to redesign and rebuild their networks to meet the new bandwidth demands.

Requirements for Public Storage Clouds

2012-01-02T12:30:00.001Z

Cloud Computing is a major shift in IT delivery paradigm. Today, most enterprises have embraced cloud computing have started on a journey towards moving the entire enterprise IT into the cloud. As we look at the Cloud adaptation in enterprise IT - a major trend can be seen. Almost all enterprises are using the cloud for two things:

1. Data Storage

2. SaaS applications

Data Storage is one of the most expensive items in any enterprise IT systems. Data hoarding has created one of the biggest challenge to enterprise IT management, So IT managers have started to evaluate and embrace cloud computing for data storage. Today, it is not a question of "If" enterprise will embrace cloud storage; it is a matter of 'when'.

Individuals and Small or Medium enterprises have already embraced cloud for emails and collaboration and thus are using cloud for data storage for emails & documents to certain extent. In future, large enterprises will also adapt cloud storage - mostly private cloud storage and some of public cloud storage for non-critical data.

Public Cloud Storage Today

The early web based storage platforms such as Yahoo photos, Image Station, RapidShare were targeted at end consumers and created a negative mindset among enterprise users. There was always the concerns of security, data loss - in case the web service provider goes out of business or shuts down the service (Yahoo photos & Sony Imagestation was closed - forcing users to re-upload the files to a new service provider)

These public data storage clouds was designed for individual consumers who wanted to store the files and occasionally share the files, the loss of the file or non-availability was not a major concern.

The second generation web based data store - Filesanywhere.com, Amazon EC2, Google Docs, Atmos, Picassa, Flickr, DropBox, Zoho, etc., were much better in availability but still suffered from security and performance issues. Stories of outages and suspension of public data store services are often headline news items.

As a result, enterprise users have serious concerns about using Public Clouds for data storage. Only few daring & bold companies have tried using cloud storage for data backups for non-critical data only.

The perception of public data storage clouds are not for enterprises is now deeply engrained in IT manager's minds and will take lot of efforts to change their mindset. (Even when IT managers are looking at public data storage clouds.)

Creating a Public Cloud Storage for Enterprises

Almost all of the public cloud storage services today were initially built for individual end users and then adapted for the enterprise, but this approach to create a public cloud storage will not work. Instead, one should start from ground up understanding the enterprise needs and developing solutions that work for enterprises.

In my opinion there are nine key requirements for a public cloud storage.

1. High availability

2. Security

3. Cost Effective

4. Scalability

5. Configurable

6. Measurable

7. Serviceable

8. Performance

9. Usability

These are high level requirements. Each of these requirements can be further broken down into sub-components that is essential for building the cloud storage system. In this article I am limiting to high level requirements from the customer point of view.

High Availability

100% uptime is the expected norm. Anything less will be treated with contempt. One of the main advantages of cloud is its high availability - even in face of extreme adversities. Enterprises view cloud storage as always ON - irrespective of performance.

Security

Security breach and unauthorized access of data is the biggest fear of all CIOs. In 2011, Sony Online Entertainment systems was hacked two times and about 25Million users data was exposed to hackers. Such headline security failures are a business nightmare.

So enterprises will not trust the cloud storage without proper security. Having a secure VPN connectivity from the customer location to the cloud data store, along with encryption is a must.

Public Storage cloud service providers must match the best possible security that can be offered by the enterprise IT departments to gain their acceptance. The security requirements can be further distilled to Policy based security management, A Data Loss Prevention technology, and Encryption.

Cost Effective

The marketing hype of cloud storage has create a perception that cloud storage is much more cost effective than their current storage implementations. Switching to public cloud storage, enterprises can save on upfront investments, lower manpower costs, and operational costs - in terms of space, power and maintenance.

It is expected that the cloud storage service provider will have better technologies to increase storage efficiency and utilization. Technologies such as tiered storage dedeuplication, thin provisioning, object storage etc will reduce operational costs.

Scalability

Current Peta byte users want storage service to be scalable to Exabyte levels. As data storage increases, the demand on network also increases. So service providers must build out an architecture that has both storage & network scalability built into the system.

Configurable

Enterprise customers want their cloud storage system be configurable for optimum performance to meet their application requirements. As the workloads vary from the peaks to valley, the storage IO and network bandwidth must be monitored and configured to meet customer requirements. In addition, customers want tools to configure their cloud storage for different applications.

Measurable

In cloud storage, customers want to pay for what they use, so all aspects of storage and bandwidth used by the customer must be measured, recorded and billed to customers accordingly. Customers also want to see the network/storage usage statistics, reports for each application type.

Customers want tools to know their current usage and usage trends so that they can plan their operations accordingly.

Serviceable

No matter how many self-service tools are provided to customers, there will be need for technical support personnel. Having a online tech support teams and on-call tech support is very important for enterprise customers so that their business is not affected.

One major complaint people have with Amazon/Google services is the lack of the lack of manned tech support.

Performance

Cloud storage has latency built into the service as it depends on Internet for connectivity. This implies that type of applications that can use the cloud storage will be limited by the network performance.

With increasing Internet speeds and innovative use of customer premises equipment (CPE) drives for caching can improve performance.

In the initial stage of public cloud storage, most enterprises will use cloud as a data store - a place to keep images and documents - which are latency independent. All real time application data are likely to be stored in data centers or stored at the SaaS provider.

But as cloud storage gains acceptance and most applications migrate to SaaS, performance becomes a critical success factor. So it is important to plan for performance in the initial planning of cloud storage usage.

Usability

Usability of cloud storage refers to the User Interface and user experience. Mainly the user experience of IT personnel who will be setting up & managing storage systems for enterprise.

The generation Z who will enter the workforce will not like command line interfaces of the Unix era. Users will expect a graphic, mashable architectures for the Interface that works seamlessly with their data management systems.

Closing Thoughts

Enterprise data storage will evolve to embrace public cloud storage. Initially enterprise customers will add public cloud storage as another tier of storage for user generated files (Documents, spreadsheets, images, emails etc). A typical usage will be in Emails, Filesharing and image storage.

Enterprise IT managers will have seriously look at public clouds for data storage and will evaluate service providers for the nine parameters described in this article.

What ails Innovation in India

2011-12-31T10:37:00.005Z

Recently Shankar Subramanian, a friend and a famous trainer in Bangalore pointed out a not-so-surprising fact that India is steadily increasing the number of patents being filed in India, but India still trails USA, Japan, China, South Korea & France. This is hardly surprising when we consider the basic inputs needed for innovation.

So what are the necessary inputs for innovation?

There are seven basic inputs needed for innovation as listed below in the order of strengths in India

Technically competent people
Technology
Understanding customer Needs
Leadership commitment
Financial resources
Brainstroming or Innovation sessions
Strong patent filing & protection system

When we look at the seven basic inputs, we in India has great strength in top three inputs: People, Technology and Understanding customer needs. But we are weakest in protecting Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Without adequate IPR protection, there will be little motivation to file for patents or even innovate - which effectively affects the leadership commitment to innovate, which then has a casading impact on allocating financial resources and time for innovation.

Innovation is not easy, it takes several inputs to succeed. Having a partial set of inputs will not help. Most Indian companies put their best efforts and talent in operations and spend very little for innovation. But when there is a focus - we have seen rapid innovation happen. Tata Eka - the super computer, Mahindra XUV500, Tata Nano are best examples of low cost innovation.

In India, the biggest missing piece has been a strong patent filing & protection system. The current patent filing system and patent protection in India is still not world class. Without a world class patent filing & protection system, India will lag behind other countries.

Is VDI the killer App for Cloud Computing?

2011-12-30T08:05:00.003Z

Virtual desktop technology has been around for more than a decade, yet it has not found wide user acceptance. Back in 1990's virtual desktops was only means by which a UNIX user could access a Windows application on his workstation or virtual desktops (VNC) was only means by which a Windows user could access a Unix application on his desktop/laptop.

The usage of virtual desktops were limited to small group of users - mainly computer experts and the common man had no use for a virtual desktop.

The early versions of Virtual Desktops was accessible only over the VPN tunnels or on the enterprise network. With the emergence of cloud in 2008, it became possible to access virtual desktops over Internet. Access to Virtual Desktops over Internet had a big implication - Virtual Desktops can now be accesses by a huge percentage of population. But there were still some limitations - people had no use for it. Users still needed a computer to access a remote virtual desktop - it was an absurd idea to have a desktop in order to access another virtual desktop! Most of the computer users had no need for two desktops and VDI still remained a niche technology.

In 2009, introduction of iPad and other Tablet computers started to change things a bit. People rushed in head first to buy the latest gadget. After few weeks, people realized that they now have three gadgets - A Smart Phone, a Laptop, and a Tablet. This meant that there was no real application for the tablet. Users could use a tablet and do nearly everything that they could do on their laptops but not completely. The tablets had one major drawback - Limited storage. Users wanted to access the files they had in their laptops, and started using applications such as "DropBox" or "TeamViewer". The tablets also had other short comings - limited compute power, so if one wanted to download & edit photos/videos - they still need their laptops.

All this created additional complexity for the user.

Users now have some of their data in their phones, some in the tablets and some in laptops. Having multiple devices causes additional baggage to carry around and synchronizing data across multiple devices/platforms is a headache.

Thus the need for a Virtual Desktop has grown beyond the geek world to the common man.

Need for Virtual Desktop is being felt by various users, but the need is yet to be clearly defined. Apple, Microsoft and host of startup are jumping in with their unique solutions in this space. iCloud, Skydrive, Office365, Azure platform, Zoho etc are all trying to address this need for the common user.

As a early adapter of various technologies, I have used iCloud, Office365, Zoho, Google Apps, DropBox etc, and found that none of these applications work seamlessly across all platforms. I need a solution which works across an Android cell phone or Tablet, iPhone & iPad, Blackberry, and Windows XP/7.0. ( I am still on XP and I am waiting for Windows 8.0)

A virtual desktop could be one solution that could work across all platforms. The current VDI solutions from Vmware, Citrix or Microsoft still does not need my basic requirement to work across all platforms.

As the year 2011 ends, I wait to see if a see if a true VDI solution emerges in 2012 - which can work across multiple platforms and makes life easier for the layman. If such a VDI solution is developed, users will embrace tablet computers in large numbers and Cloud computing will have its killer app.

Developing a Product Brief

2011-12-30T06:06:00.005Z

They key to new product development is to have a good product ideas and turn that into an accurate product plan. The product plan defines the way in which the product is designed and developed. The product plan outlines the high level product concept, product requirements, product scope, and constrains - mainly cost and time.

While developing a totally new product , it is best to have a broad & vague product plan. This is done deliberately so that the product can evolve as people start working on developing the product. Starting with specifications that are wide and vaguely defined will lead to creative solutions which can be truly path breaking.

While developing a next version of an existing product, the product plan must the very narrow in terms of requirements, the requirements are very descriptive and specific, and the constrains are sharply defined. This helps to get a better focus on product development - which is aimed at improving the current product and help gain competitive advantage.

Defining Needs

The vague product ideas must be converted into a product plan - to develop a tangible product. The first step in this process is to define the user needs.

Documenting the user needs, the customer use cases, i.e., what the product is supposed to do for the customer or how the customer will use the product is the most important stage in product design.

Defining Needs is an art. There are no predefined ways to do it right. Every product type has it's own set of complications and challenges, so to define needs, one has to blend a certain amount of imagination with that of people's necessity and then come up with the product needs.

Identifying the customer needs is a lot tougher than it sounds. Customers are rarely aware of their needs. So customers often disguise their needs with wants. So identifying the real needs will involve deeper study of customer's problems and/or observing customers very closely - an anthropology study. (see Customer Anthropology)

If one gets this stage wrong, then it results in poorly designed products - that look poorly or work badly. But often times, the mistakes are not obvious and that results in multiple iterations to get the right product. If defining the product needs are wrong - it costs lots of money, time, resources and most importantly lost opportunities.

Examples of successful product designs

Great product designs are born from a deep understanding of product needs. Take a look around for some of the successful products and you can learn how the needs have been met in the product design.

Leatherman Tools

Tim Leatherman came up with a novel idea for a multipurpose tool while traveling across Europe in 1975. Back in 1975, Swiss Army Knife was the gold standard and the only player in multipurpose tools. But Tim Leatherman had a need for pliers, which the Swiss Knife did not have. Tim took that basic need for a multipurpose tool centered around a pair of pliers and developed a range of products by 1983. Today, Leatherman tools are just as popular as Swiss Army Knife.

See:Outdoing the Swiss Army knife (http://money.cnn.com/2007/09/27/smbusiness/100123045.fsb/index.htm)

Bose Speakers

In 1956, Amar C Bose, a student at MIT was disappointed with all the high end audio systems. Bose spend lots of money on high end audio system and in those systems he had to constantly adjust the equalizers to make the sound better every time he changed the room or changed the type of music. Bose spend next eight years understanding the user needs, his search led to the field of psychoacoustics - and that led to break through speaker designs: Bose 901 speakers released in 1968.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose_Corporation

=============

The stories of Tim Leatherman and Amar Bose lead us to ponder why it takes so much time to design new products. Tim Leatherman took nearly 8 years to develop his breakthrough product and Bose took 20 years!

The basic problem in developing product needs is that people do not know where to start or where to stop.

In today's corporate world, No product development project will be allowed to run for so long. Today the need is for fast product development. This is solved by defining the product criteria.

A product criteria is a set of descriptions that define product requirements. Product criteria essentially defines the end state of the product by defining what the product should do in clear and non-ambiguous terms. For example, when defining the size of the speakers - the product requirement should be very specific and avoid terms such as "Small" or "Big". Instead the size for the speakers will be defined as "The size of the speakers must not exceed 24 inches in height, 18 inches in width, 10 inches in depth."

Many of the requirements in product criteria may be contradictory or opposite of each other - thus creating contradictions and a sharper constrain in design. For example, while defining the requirement for a car, the design criteria will call for a fuel efficiency of 30Kms/Litre, while the design criteria will also call for a higher engine power of 150HP. This apparent contradictions in product criteria calls for new thinking and may lead to innovation.

It is therefore very important to establish the product requirement criteria at the beginning of the project and then constantly review the project for meeting the criteria requirements.

In any product development, there will be opposing product criteria and it is important to let the designers know the priority of these criteria. The criteria list must be prioritized from top to bottom, thus allowing engineers to make the appropriate tradeoffs. In our example of car design, there were two criteria which is prioritized as:

1. Fuel Economy of 30 Kms/Litre

2. Engine power of 150HP

3. Total Weight of the car should not exceed 500Kgs

...

Prioritization helps in making design decisions. If the prioritization was done in a way mentioned above, engineers are likely to compromise on other things to meet the fuel economy requirement resulting in car known for its fuel economy. If engine power was the main criteria, then engineers will design a car known for its power and may not have fuel economy.

By prioritizing, designers can put the right emphasis on the most important criteria area and have some clarity for making difficult decisions.

In short:

1. Product Criteria must be descriptive.

2. Sharply define a product's requirements.

3. Must be written down for communicating the requirements to team.

4. Avoid vague or loose descriptions: big, small, strong, etc. Product criteria must be described in standard metrics.

Closing Thoughts

Successful product design starts with a deep understanding of the product needs. The product needs should then be converted into a written product brief which documents the product requirement criteria in a prioritized manner.

Why Mobile Smart devices are yet to gain enterprise acceptance

2011-12-26T18:03:00.004Z

Today users are whole heartedly embracing next-generation smart phones and tablets. Employees are bringing them to work and using these device extensively. But the corporate IT departments are yet to accept these devices. Most IT departments are forced to allow only the corporate emails on these smart devices. At most work places, these smart phones or tablets cannot be connected to the corporate network or even access corporate data thorough VPN.

The main challenge for corporate IT has been security management on these mobile devices. Unlike laptops, the Apple iPhones, Apple iPads, or Google Android devices do not have software functions built for corporate level security management. As a result, these devices cannot be used in a corporate network - as they pose a serious security risks. But then not allowing smart phones or tablets poses a bigger risk to the business. Businesses that do not embrace new technology will become obsolete, and lose its competitive edge. Having mobile smart devices at the hands of employees can create competitive advantages in terms of better customer service, faster response to issues and lower operating costs. So, in other words, the corporate IT departments are forced to look at various solutions to this problem.

There are two possible solutions: Virtual Desktops or Information Security Management (ISM) app on the mobile device.

Virtual desktops is a relatively new technology and is a disruptive technology. VDI forces massive changes in IT management, requires new server hardware, new networks, new storage. In short VDI is expensive and needs lots of planning, staged and carefully planned implementation. In the long run VDI will be a perfect solution, but there is a need for an interim solution.

The interim solution is a simple ISM app running on the smart phone.

In my earlier blog titled "Product Management- How to beat iPad", I had written about creating a tablet with strong built-in security system. In this article, I am taking that idea little further - by defining what the security requirements are for a mobile smart device.

ISM Application Solution

Information Security Management software is an ideal solution for managing mobile smart devices. A similar ISM solution will be needed to manage the Virtual Desktop instances.

Let's take a look at what functions the ISM app is expected to provide.

1. Memory resident software

The application has to be 'Memory Resident' - i.e., the device OS is not permitted to shut down this application. The ISM app is started on boot-up and is shutdown only when the device is shut down.

2. Uses multi-part authentication system & then allocated privileges based on user rights.

A secure multi-part authentication system (as a service) is used to authenticate the user. Once the user is authentication, the user privileges & security settings on the device is set accordingly. ISM software will implement a policy based access control thus allowing a large scale and yet flexible deployments. (Also see: Need for a Central Multi-Factor Authentication as a Service)

3. Repeated Authentication failure (10 times) results in data wipe-off.

If the user fails the authentication checks for a preset number of attempts, the ISM software will wipe out all data on the device. Since the data gets synchronized with a remote server - loss of user data is minimized and securing the corporate data at the same time.

4. Run and manage compliance audits

The ISM app can be configured remotely to run compliance audits and report policy violations, application inventory, compliance status tracking etc. to the remote server.

5. Image lock - users cannot add/delete software programs or apps.

Based on user privilege settings - users can be allowed/dis-allowed to add/delete software programs/apps. For all user types, there will be one golden image which can be pushed remotely to reset the user device to a set configuration.

6. All local data is synchronized automatically when connected.

All user generated data is temporarily stored on the device and is synchronized automatically when the device is connected to Internet. This data synchronization happens in the background without user intervention.

7. All local data on the device is encrypted with AES 256 encryption standards

Data stored in the device: emails, calendar, contacts, documents etc. is encrypted using a secure key generated by the multi-part authentication system. Only the authentication system knows the decryption keys. This is a critical security requirement. Currently, only Blackberry has such a system.

8. Permits remote application management: upgrades & patches, software additions/deletion

Remote device configuration and application management is done in the background without disrupting the user.

9. SMS/MMS, IP traffic supervision

All data traffic on the device is monitored for potentially dangerous threats, the logs are created and uploaded to the central server for analysis. Threat from hackers is too much, so to prevent major hacks, all data traffic is monitored for suspicious behavior and the logs are uploaded to security management solutions such as RSA Envision

10. Location tracking and remote data wipe-off for lost/stolen devices

To prevent data loss in case of a lost/stolen device, the ISM software can be remotely triggered to wipe out all user data. The ISM app can also broadcast its geographic information to the server - when triggered remotely. This functionality currently exists in Blackberry phones

11. Remote administration and control for help desk.

In case the user calls the help desk, the help desk employee must be able to take control of the device and solve the user issue.

12. Internet firewall as per corporate policy

Organizations must be able to protect the users from unauthorized or unsecure websites. The ISM firewall maintains a list of permitted and non-permitted websites, and controls the access to Internet based on the corporate policies.

Control, compliance, and convenience is the key for successful ISM application. The user functions must not be disrupted or hindered, while providing all the security to the user and the organization.

ISM Central server

To monitor & manage the mobile devices, the ISM app connects to the ISM server application over the VPN/Internet. ISM server is essential to help IT admins plan, maintain all the mobile deployments. The administrators can centrally implement management polices, configuration changes, and monitor the mobile devices. The ISM server also provides a user dashboard to help operators manage mobile devices.

The functions of the ISM server will be manage the mobile devices. The functional features of the ISM server will be described in a later blog.

Closing Thoughts

Today there is a strong need for a ISM application - which will enable all mobile devices to be used with a corporate network without compromising on safety and security. In this article I have briefly outlined the functionalities of such a software system. The software system has two components, the client app that resides on the mobile device and a server that runs in a data center. I have limited the scope of this article to the client side app and will write about the server functionality in future.

Control, compliance, and convenience is the key for successful ISM application.

Also see:

Product Management- How to beat iPad

Need for a Central Multi-Factor Authentication as a Service

Apple and power of 'i'

2011-12-26T14:37:00.003Z

Apple in the last decade has transformed the computing world into the world of 'i': iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, iCloud, iOS. In this world of computing, 'i' stands for the individual.

Every 'i' product is designed for the single individual. Apple never concentrated on the enterprise, it has a laser sharp focus on the individual, which leads to the next apple product : - iTV

iTV is an individualized TV experience which has 3 main charateristics - all sorrounding the 'i'

1. Internet based content delivery - through 'iTunes. (Wi-Fi or LTE)

2. Individuals can rent/buy viewing rights for the program

3. Individuals can watch any program any time, anywhere at their conveinece.

4. iCloud stores all the videos.

5. Individuals can watch the video programs on the 'i' products: iTV, iMAC, iPad, iPhone, iPod or a PC.

Trends driving iTV

Today TV has become tailored for the "Individual". Families no longer watch TV together, instead each member of the household watch at their convenience. This is the biggest factor driving towards individual entertainment.

Internet is everywhere - High speed wireless broadband - 3G & 4G (IPv6) networks will cover 80% of G12 countries population - which represents 99% of Apple's potential market.

Wasted Content - 80% of content gets wasted, losses in current distribution is causing increasing cost of cable TV. With iTV, cost per user will go down & bring Internet ecomonies to to TV/Video/Movie.

iCloud is a very effeceient way to store videos. Since multiple users will have the same video, iCloud will store one copy and provide links/privileges to all those who have bought the program.

Cable TV has failed to innovate. Cable TV was the creator for Video-on-Demand and the technology was created in 1990's, since then, cable TV companies have not innovated on it and have slacked off. Cable TV companies had good broadband serivces as well - but failed to create a killer IPTV offering. The current opportunity for Apple is actually a missed opportunity by cable TV companies.

Arguments for iTV

1. Why watch the program when the broadcasters puts it. I want to watch it at my convenience and on device of my choice.

2. Why watch new movies only in theater. I want to watch it at my place.

3. I will pay for what I use, and not for the unnecessary bundle of programs

4. Internet will allow the content producer to link directly to the viewer by automatic distribution.

5. The current distribution channels are ineffecient and wasteful. CableTV, Satilitte TV charge too much and are too restricitive.

Major players in the Internet TV era

Internet TV will create new winners. Leaders of cableTV era - Comcast, DishTV, SkyTV etc will have to dramatically change their business models, develop new technologies to compete and survive. My guess is that most of the cableTV companies will die.

Internet TV calls for strong cloud computing capabilities - to deliver videos on demand over high speed Internet. The companies will also need strong relationship with content produces. In view of the two core requirements: Cloud Computing & Access to Content, the clear favorites in the Internet TV era are:

1. Apple

2. Amazon

3. Google/YouTube

Big winners

iTV is focused on the 'individual', therefore users will be the ultimate winners. Internet provide the most effecient distribution system for content producers to reach the consumers. Distribution of video content will no longer be held hostage to TV channels and cable TV companies.

The new content distribution technology will win big. Apple, Amazon & Google are currently position to take full advantage of this shift.

Finally, the other hidden winners will be the Internet service providers and the network/storage equipment makers (Cisco, EMC, Juniper NetApp, Dell, HP etc)

In short the winners are:

1. Individuals

2. Content producers

3. Internet based distributors - Apple, Amazon, Google

4. Network providers - ISP, and Network equipment providers

Death of TV Channels

The term TV Channel - a streaming signal that broadcasts video programs is dead. The new paradigm is programs. People do not watch a channel, people want to watch programs. In the iTV era, people can watch programs of their choice, when they want it, where they want it, and on device of their choice. This leads to an explosion of programs that will be available for viewers on demand. Millions of programs will available in all languages - all on demand.

TV channels of today are like music CD's - each channel has 1or 2 good programs and the rest is filled with junks or re-runs.

Today a basic version of such a iTV system exists with YouTube. But YouTube suffers from several disadvantages:

1. Lack of clear cut organization of content.

2. No uniform quality of content.

3. Too much amature videos etc.

4. Lack of parental controls.

5. Spam content - where the title does not match with the content.

So if Google can get its act together and streamline its video content, it can become a major player in this market.

Biggest Losers

With the death of TC channels, CableTV, SatelliteTV service providers will have a tough time. Television set manufactures will adapt to develop Internet ready Televisions, those manufacturers who refuse to introduce Internet ready TV's will be a Dodo.

iTV creates New opportunities.

Internet will create new markets for creative, Niche content developers. We will see a wave of new content providers. The current distribution system makes it impossible for small and niche content developers to reach out to a wide audience, with iTV can provide.

Closing Thoughts

Apple's iTunes/iTV can change things be organizing video content better and ensuring quality of video programs. By having an Apple's seal of approval, users will be more comfortable with iTunes/iTV - than that of YouTube.

Internet finds the next killer App

2011-12-26T14:03:00.002Z

Companies are rapidly developing new Internet delivery technologies, and as these new technologies reach mainstream users, customers will require new applications that can make use of the increasing Internet speeds.

Looking at the evolution of Internet, Internet evolved in stages, and at each stage there was a killer app -which made customers embrace Internet. Now as 4G wireless Internet gains market acceptance, there is a need for a new killer app.

Looking at the evolution of Internet technology, here is how it evolved:

Rev1: research lab connectivity 2.6Kbps-9.6Kbps

Universities in the US started using Internet as a novel way to share data. The main applications were Archie, Jughead, & Veronica - the first versions of search technology.

Rev2: Early adaptors: 14.4Kbps-33Kbps

With faster dial-up connectivity, techies and early adaptors developed Bulletin Board Service (BBS). BBS became the killer app. It allowed sers to loginto a computer, share files, post information on bulletins.

Rev3: WWW & AOL: 56Kbps, eMail, AOL & WWW

Internet took off big time with the 56Kbps dial-up Internet speeds and AOL eMails. American users embraced Internet in large numbers, and as World Wide Web swept the world. E-commerce was just coming up on the horizon when the next version of Internet was developed.

Rev4: Cable Broadband & DSL. High speed 2-8 Mbps

It the era of broadband Internet. E-commerce was the driving force which made people cancel their AOL accounts and sign-up for DSL or cable broadband. The real killer app for this high speed Internet was Peer-2-Peer networking and MP3. People all over the world embraced high speed Internet for free music and convenience of e-commerce. Google, Amazon and iTunes emerged as the ultimate winners of this technology.

Rev5: 3G/WiMax, GPRS, WiFi. The era of Mobile Internet

Wireless broadband opened the doors for a huge population of the world. People with smart phones could now access Internet anywhere on their mobile devices. The mobility attraced billions of people all around the world & embraced web 2.0 in huge droves. Facebook became the killer app for the mobile Internet. Google estabilished itself as the king of search engines.

Rev6: 4G LTE,100Mbps: The era of ultra broadband Internet.

Year 2011 marks the beginning of the era of ultra broadband Internet. 17Mbps and faster Internet speeds meets iPad & iTV (Apple TV). Cloud computing and Video on Demand will be the killer application for this ultra-broadband Internet. High Definition TV content now has a distribution arm with cloud computing and ultra-broadband Internet.

Internet Technology has been a game changer. Every 36 months, faster Internet speeds are introduced and application developers are quick to capitalize on this bandwidth. Companies that make best use of this will win, others will lose.

Developing New Product Ideas

2011-12-26T12:19:00.000Z

Every year, people all over thw world submit a little over 2 Million patent applications. Most of these patent applications are from companies who are in the business of developing new products and it is essential to the success and survial of these businesses.

These patent applications are just a small tip of the iceberg of ideas. Hardly 1% of the product ideas get converted to patents. So the question is: How to people get ideas?

As a product manager, innovator, engineer and a creative individual, I can share some insights. Essentially there are two distinct paths for getting new ideas.

1. Necessity

2. Imagination

Necessity

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. Only when there is a need, people will think of developing something new, else people are happy using the same old stuff.

The best part is that almost everyone in this planet has a necessity for a something that does not exist. So with 7 Billion people in this planet, one can comeup with atleast 7 Billion ideas!

Necessity or identifying people needs is the easiest way to come up with new product ideas. Just go around and ask people, and you will get ideas. Even a 5 year old child can talk about their needs for a unique type of a toy.

Most product companies (i.e, product managers) go around asking their current customers - what they need in the future. Customers being the main users of the product always have ideas to improve/develop the current products. Collecting a bunch of such ideas and distilling them will lead into new product development.

New products that are developed by identifying people needs are often incremental in functionality and design. These products are also low risk products - as there is a greater chance that customers/users will accept it. Thus in the overall market place, products that are developed to meet specific customer needs have a high value.

Imagination

Imagination is one capability that sets us 'Humans' apart from other animals in the world. We are blessed with the power of imagination. The ability to think of something new - which does not exist is a powerful means to develop new products.

So in a planet of 7 Billion people, every person has imagination can potentially develop new product ideas - i.e., at least 7 Billion ideas!! Yes it can be 7 Billion ideas per day.

People's imagination is often triggered by what they see, feel & experience. Everyone is capable of imagination and can imagine new products.

What triggers human imagination?

There are many things that can trigger human imagination: Personal Experience, Viewing things differently, Playing and exploring, Subversion/Adaptation - taking a regular product and converting it for an unintended use, self-reflection and knowledge of world around us.

There is no specific way that can trigger imagination, imagination just happens only when we put our thoughts into it.

Making an Idea into a product

But to really develop a product, it takes more than imagination - persistence. A designer or artist or inventor can take a raw idea and developing a product out of it. This ability to persist is a only differentiator from people who can just think up of ideas and those who develop products.

Only when persistence is combined with right skills and knowledge can lead to new products.

What's driving Virtualization and cloud computing

2011-12-25T13:22:00.001Z

Every now and then people ask me this question: What's driving Virtualization and cloud computing?

As I have answered this question repeatedly over time, the answer to this question has been changing to accommodate the different reasons and value propositions for virtualization and cloud computing.

The first answer - which was valid four years ago was: Cost saving. The cost saving due to virtualization was a sufficient enough reason to virtualize the IT infrastructure.

Cloud technology was primarily limited to SaaS applications and the value of cloud was mostly in the ease of use, and pay for what you use.

The second answer was GreenIT. A virtualised IT infrastructure resulted in server consolidation and that lowered the power bill. Having all the applications running in a centralized data center lowers the cost while increasing the reliability, thus cloud computing was becoming cheaper than a hosted solution.

As time progressed technology became more affordable and cell phones became smarter. People could now access Internet from their cell phones. This created a need for cloud computing, SaaS applications could now be accessed from anywhere over plethora of mobile devices. That was my third answer. Mobile computing, anywhere, anytime, any device.

As year 2011 ends, I find two more reasons for virtualization & cloud computing.

1. Enormous compute power

2. Intelligent and easy to use mobile compute devices

When I look around my house, I notice that I have enough computer power in my house to meet the elearning needs of 30-50 school kids, but I am barely using a fraction of the installed capacity. The compute power in my quad core desktop, dual core laptops are all wasted. Looking at things in a slightly different perspective, I find that my iPad meets all my computing needs.

In last three years, Intel & AMD has released more powerful CPU's. The 8 core, the 12 core CPU's of today are way too powerful for any individual user. The desktop software applications do not need that amount of compute power. So, in other words, I can do away with all the laptops, desktops and replace them with a simple Tablet computer.

This powerful computers are best utilized when they are virtualized, allowing multiple software to run simultaneously - thus consuming all that enormous compute power. The best way to do that is to have these powerful computers run cloud applications in a virtualized environment, while the end users can use simple & easy to use end devices to access the cloud.

Over last four years, the smart phones have evolved enormously. The initial qwerty keyboard based phones with tiny screens have given way to larger multi-touch screens. The phones today can take voice commands or one can even write using a stylus. The phones can serve as a projector, record videos, edit pictures and even edit videos. This rapid improvement in phone capability has essentially made them the primary computing devices for many people.

In near future, we will see mobile devices that can project a large image on the walls, have 3D videos as well.

Tablet computers & netbooks now have the right form factor and compute power to replace laptops - when used with Web applications. Virtual desktops and with DaaS, users can still have the look/feel of a desktop and security/reliability of the cloud in their mobile devices.

Having access to a virtual computer with unlimited capabilities is a very powerful reason for users to opt for cloud computing.

Challenges in Operations Management of Virtual Infrastructure

2011-12-25T11:26:00.004Z

Corporate IT has embraced virtualization as a means to save on costs, modernize their infrastructure, and offer a greater range of services. Virtualizations resulted in consolidation of resources & workloads - that led to productivity gains, improved efficiency of application performance and IT infrastructure and reduced operating costs.

Virtualization broke the traditional silos of dedicated computing resources for specific applications and also broke the silo's of operations management by forcing IT administrators to look at servers (compute), networks and storage as unified resource pool.

This has created new operations management challenges - which cannot be solved by traditional approaches. The new challenges are mostly in the following areas:

Virtualization eliminated the IT silo boundaries between Applications, network, compute and storage. This has made the IT stack more sensitive to changes in interference to the components in the IT stack. For example changing a network setting could have an adverse impact on the applications, or data store speeds. Changes in storage configuration could result in unresponsive applications etc.
Virtualization can easily push the resource utilization beyond the safe operating boundaries. Thus causing random performance issues or causing random hardware failures.
Applications running in a virtualized environment will see a dynamic changes in resources available for it. As one application starts to consume more resource, the other applications could see a similar reduction in resources available for it. This causes a random performance variations and in many cases disrupt the entire business operations.

Managing Virtualized infrastructure needs new tools and technologies to handle these new factors of complexity. Given the dynamic nature of a virtualized IT Infrastructure, the new management tools must be: Scalable, Unified, Automated, Proactive and User friendly.

It is also very important to ensure that the cost of virtual infrastructure management tools must be lower than the cost of failures. Though this sounds simple, in reality, the cost of infrastructure management can potentially raise to the sky - so one needs to be cautious on choosing the right set of tools.

Traditional Operations Management

Ever since the beginning of IT operations, management of the IT infrastructure has been organized based on resource silos. A dedicated team to manage:

1. Servers - Physical machines & Operating systems
2. Network - LAN, VLAN, WAN
3. Storage - SAN, NAS, Storage Arrays
4. Applications- CRM, ERP, Database, Exchange, Security etc. In large organizations there are teams to manage each application types.

Each of the resource management silos operated independently, had their own operations management: Monitor, analyze, control and change resources. Each team has its own set of tools, processes, procedures to manage the resources that come under their preview.

Since each group had little idea of the needs and requirements of other groups, they often created excessive capacities to handle growing business needs and also for peak loads.

This silo based approach led to inefficiencies and wastage. Virtualization eliminates such wastages and improves efficiency.

Virtualization disrupted Operations Management

Virtualization is a game changer for operations management. Virtualization elements the boundary between compute, storage and network resource silos, and views the entire IT resources as a single pool.

The hypervisor shares the physical resources into Virtual Machines (VM) that can process workloads. This resource sharing architecture dramatically improves resource utilization and allows for flexible scaling of workloads and resources available for those workloads.

Virtualization creates new operations management challenges by:

1. Virtual Machines share the physical resources. So when one VM increases the resource usage, it will impact the performance of applications running on other VM's that share the same resource. This interference can be random & sporadic - leading to complex performance management challenges.

2. Hypervisor has a abstract view of the real physical infrastructure. Often times the real capacity of the underlying infrastructure is not what is viewed by hypervisor, as a result when new VM's are added, it will create under-provisioning of resources and create major performance bottlenecks.

3. Hypervisor allows for consolidation of workload streams to get a higher resource utilization. But if the workloads are correlated, i.e., as increase in one workload creates a corresponding increase on an other workload, then their peaks will become compounded and the system will run out of resources or/and create enormous bottlenecks.

4. VM's need to have dynamic resource allocation in-order for the applications to meet the performance & SLA requirements. This dynamic resource allocation requires an active and automatic resource management.

5. Hypervisor has a abstract view of the real physical infrastructure. As a result, the configuration management appears to be overly simple at the hypervisor layer - but in reality, the configuration changes will have to be coordinated across different resource types (compute, network, storage).

6. Virtualization removes the silo boundaries across the resource types (compute, network & storage). This creates cross-element interference on the applications. So when an application fails to respond, the root cause for the failure cannot be easily identified.

Virtualization creates a new set of operations management challenges, but the solution to these challenges will result in a seamless, cross-domain management solutions will reduce costs by automating various management functions and eliminate the costly cross-silo coordination between different teams. Managing a virtualized infrastructure will need automated solutions that will reduce the need for labor intensive management systems of today.

Virtualization and Utilization

The greatest benefit of Virtualization is in resource optimization. IT administrators were able to retire the old and inefficient servers and move the applications to a virtualized server running on newer hardware. This optimization helped administrators reduce the operating costs, reduce energy utilization, and increase utilization of existing hardware.

Cost saving achieved by server consolidation and higher resource utilization was a prime driver for virtualization. The problem of over-provisioning had led to low server utilization. With virtualization, utilization can be raised to as high as 80%.

The higher utilization rate may sound exciting, it also creates major performance problems.

As virtualization consolidates multiple work loads on a single physical server - thus increasing the utilization of that server. But work loads are never stable - work loads tend to have their peaks and lows. So if one or more work loads hits a peak, utilization can quickly reach 100% and create a grid lock for other work loads. Thus adversely affect performance. Severe congestion can lead to data losses and even hardware failures.

For example, Virtual machines typically use a virtual network: Virtual network interface, subnets, and bridging packages to map the virtual interfaces to the physical interfaces. If multiple VM are running on the server and the server has limited physical network interface, then running multiple VM's that are running network intensive applications can easily choke off the physical interface causing a massive congestion in the system. Similarly, such congestion can occur with CPU, memory or storage I/O resources as well.

The resource congestion problems could be intermittent and random, that makes it even more harder to debug and solve the resource contention issues.

To solve these performance problems, one has to find out the bottle neck for each of the performance problems first.

In a virtualized environment, finding these performance bottlenecks is a big challenge as the symptoms of congestion would show up in one area - while the real congestion could be somewhere else.

In a non-virtualized world, the resource allocation were done in silos, such that each silo must accommodate for all fluctuations of work loads. This led to excessive capacity - by planning to handle the peak work loads. Therefore performance management was never a major issue. But with virtualization, active performance management is critical. The virtual infrastructure must be constantly monitored for performance and corrective actions must be taken as needed - by moving out VM's from a loaded server to another lightly loaded server, or by dynamically provisioning additional resources to absorb the peaks.

Dynamic provisioning requires a deeper understanding of resource utilization: which application is consume what resource and when resources are being used. To understand this better consider this example:

In an enterprise there are several workloads, but few workloads have a marked peak behavior. Sales system has a peak demand between 6PM-9PM, HR systems has a peek demand between 1PM to 5PM, Inventory management system has a peak demand between 9 AM to 1 PM. On further analysis, it is found that the sales system actually has a peak demand on the network and storage IOPS, ERP system has a peak demand on servers and storage, HR systems has a peak demand on servers and storage IOPS.

Knowing this level of detail will help the system administrators to provision additional VM's for ERP by moving VM's allocated to HR between 9 AM to 1PM. While VM's allocated to ERP can be moved to HR between 1PM-5PM.

Solving the sales peak load problem may require additional networking hardware and more bandwidth - which will result in a lower utilization. It is better to have the excess capacity wasted during off-peak times than having performance bottlenecks.

There could be other complex cases: The HR system creates multiple random writes, while the sales system is issuing a series of sequential reads, then in such case the sales application will see a delay or performance degradation even though the workloads are normal. In this case the SAN network gets choked with writes from the HR system and the performance problem will be reported by the sales application administrator.

Resolving such correlated workload performance issues requires special tools that provide deeper insight into the system. Essentially, the IT administrators must be able to map the application to the resources it uses and then monitor the entire data path for performance management.

Fundamental Operations Management Issues with Virtualization

Virtualization creates several basic system management problems. These are new problems and these cannot be solved by silo based management tools.

Fragmented Configuration Management

Configuration & provisioning tools are still silo based, there are separate tools for server configuration, network configuration and storage configuration. In organizations, this has led to fragmented configuration management - which is not dynamic or fast enough to meet the demands of virtualization.
Lack of Scalability in monitoring tools

Fault and performance monitoring tools are still silo based and as the infrastructure gets virtualized, the number of virtual entities increase exponentially. Also the number of virtual entities are dynamic and vary with time. The silo domain based management tools are intrinsically non-scalable for the virtual system.
Hardware Faults due to high utilization

Virtualization leads to higher resource utilization - which often stress the underneath hardware beyond the safe operating limits - which eventually causes hardware failures. Such high utilization cannot be detected by current monitoring systems, and administrators are forced to do breakdown repairs.
Hypervisor complexities

Typical virtualization environment will have multiple virtualization solutions: Vmware, Xen etc. The hypervisor mechanisms itself create management problems. (see: http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-4960 ) Having multi-vendor approach towards virtualization will increase hypervisor management complexity.
Ambiguity

Performance issues arising in a virtualized environment are often ambiguous. Faults or bottleneck seen in one system may have the root cause in another system. This makes it mandatory to have a complete cross-domain (compute, network, storage) management tools to find the root cause issues.
Interference

VM workloads share resources. As a result increasing one workload can create interference to the performance of another workload. These interference problems are very difficult to identify and manage.

Closing Thoughts

Virtualization is great to save costs and improve resource utilization. However, one may have to fundamentally change the way the IT infrastructure is managed with virtualization. New workflows will have to be developed and new management tools will be needed.

Apple’s $500 Million acquisition of Anobit

2011-12-21T09:54:00.003Z

Apple recently announced acquisition of Anobit - a semiconductor design firm in Israel. Anobit is mainly into R&D of better Flash memory chips, which is of great interest to Apple.
Apple is big user of flash memory. All its products: iPod, iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air - all use NAND flash for memory and this acquisition is a clear indication of Apple’s future strategy towards Flash memory as the basic storage for all its products.

Currently, Apple buys lots of NAND Flash memory from a host of suppliers, but these are generic chips. Apple is acquiring Anobit to create unique Intellectual property in terms of NAND flash memory management - which will enhance the performance of Apple’s products.
In 2005, Apple acquired Intrinsity, a CPU design company based in Austin, Texas. Today the A5 CPU designed by folks at Apple’s Austin CPU design center forms the computing core of its iPad and iPhones. Though A5 is based on ARM CPU designs, the Graphic processing capability built into the chip ensures a superior video/graphics quality - a key product differentiator for iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s Future strategy with this acquisition

Today, there are few major performance bottlenecks in iPhones and Ipads - most of them are related to memory latency and memory errors. By acquiring Anobit and leveraging their Flash memory designs and technology, Apple can create unique competitive advantages for itself.

Acquisition of Anobit helps in two ways:

1. Improve the memory latency issues. Apple can integrate Anobit’s memory management technology with its CPU, Apple can create ultra fast chips - that will power the tablets, MacBook Air or other thin clients. Apple can also use the new SoC CPU (CPU + GPU+ Memory Manager) to power the next generation servers.

2. Anobit’s technology helps improve the reliability of Flash Memory chips. By locking in this technology, Apple can build better products than its competition in Smart phones. The current multi-cell flash memory chips used in cell phones suffer from unreliability and short lifespans.

Apple has historically shown the world the advantages of tightly coupling the hardware with its software. So as Apple moves ahead in the post-PC world, Apple is once again announcing to the world that it will control both the hardware and the software, and through that tight coupling - Apple will create unique competitive advantages.

The current generation of iPhones and iPads are built from generic off the shelf products which can be easily copied and Samsung has done that. So Apple intends to create a new breed of hardware - in which Apple owns all the IP and then designs chips which have a tightly integrated CPU, GPU and memory. Apple can then contract the manufacturing to other companies such as TSMC. Apple can then reduce it's dependency on Samsung for memory chips.

Is Apple planning to capture the Data Center?

Apple has long abandoned the server market. Ever since Apple moved to Intel Processors, Apple has steadily moved away from the desktops and servers. In November 2010, Apple announced the End of life to its Xserve rack servers.

But as the Cloud technology enters the main stream, there is a new demand for energy efficient servers - which run the cloud services. Already Apple has a very energy efficient ARM CPU technology and integrating it with efficient memory management technology, Apple can create a rack mounted server cluster - which consists of 16 or 32 or 64 individual servers. Such a cluster will be ideal for hosting web servers.

Today it is widely acknowledged that ARM architecture is ideal for low power super computers (see: http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2011111601_Barcelona_Supercomputer_Center_to_build_ARM_Supercomputer.html )
With Apple already capturing a dominant marketshare in tablets and smart phones, Apple will have to look at other markets to keep Wall Street happy with its hyper growth, and web servers present one such golden opportunity for Apple.

Apple TV Solution

Apple has already announced its entry into TV sets market. Apple will have a unique technology in Televisions - wireless IP streaming of videos with limited storage on TV sets. Such a TV technology will call for high reliability Flash memory chips. TV programs are memory hogs, and TV sets tend to have a long life when compared to computers. In that view, having better technology to create a long lasting Flash memory chips will be key differentiator.

Closing Thoughts

Apple has huge amounts of cash, but it has been very frugal in acquisitions. Apple has always chosen to acquire niche technology in hardware and merged it with its software to create unique products. Acquisition of Anobit is also a step in the same direction, and Apple is telling the world that the future of computing performance gains will come by tightly integrating memory management with CPU and GPU.

How Apple will translate this technologies into exciting products needs to be seen. One obvious benefit from this acquisition will be to create competitive advantages to Apple’s existing product lines, and then leverage the technology to create new products such as TV, Servers etc.

Network Management in VDI

2011-12-20T11:21:00.004Z

Virtual Desktops is poised for prime time in 2012. After several years of feeling the pain of supporting multiple platforms and dealing with all the headaches - IT departments of most of major corporations will adapt VDI in a big way in 2012.

While IT administrators may have tested various aspects of VDI: implementation, integration into legacy applications and data management, there are several network issues that are hidden till VDI is deployed and these issues will have to resolved for successful VDI deployments.

VDI technology essentially changes the network traffic in organizations. As VDI’s are installed in a Datacenters, the WAN traffic to/from the data centers explodes. Since the network and datacenters were designed for PC clients, the network will be inadequate for VDI deployments. Moreover the network problems will not revealed immediately - rather it will be revealed in bits and pieces and that will force an ad-hoc update/upgrade to the networks.

The network issues will crop up and the entire deployment process will not be smooth sailing for enterprise wide VDI deployment.

Managing VDI deployments

From the IT managers perspective, having only one VDI platform will be an ideal solution, but in reality companies will have a heterogeneous (VMWare, Citrix, Microsoft) environment. This adds to the complexity of managing the VDI environments. Having a heterogeneous VDI environments will create a need for a unified Infrastructure manager.
All this means a big need for network Infrastructure management software - such as Ionix ITOI.

Major Network Challenges in VDI deployments

WAN Issues
As VDI would change the data routing within an enterprise in a big way. Currently the individual PC’s connect to the data center servers over the LAN - but with VDI, all end devices will connect to the servers over WAN - as all the virtual desktops are now running on the servers and users are accessing the servers over the WAN gateway. .

As the number of VDI users increase WAN traffic could increase exponentially. The only way to manage the WAN traffic will be opt for WAN optimization technology such as Cisco WAAS, Silver Peak, Blue Coat, F5, Expand Networks, Exinda etc

QoS and bandwidth management can play a significant role in mitigating the WAN contention issues. Screen refresh, for example, is highly interactive and very sensitive to congestion. Video traffic is also very sensitive to congestion. QoS and bandwidth management can ensure that these applications perform well. While file transfer and print jobs are not very sensitive to congestion, they can induce congestion on the WAN and hence impact the other types of applications. QoS and bandwidth management can ensure that these applications do not interfere with applications that are sensitive to congestion.

VDI will help IT departments consolidate and optimize remote desktop management, but they need to spend time focusing on optimizing and controlling the WAN connections between the VDI client and the VDI server between branches. Any bumps in the WAN will translate to a bad user experience for the remote VDI user and a support call to IT.

Major WAN challenges are:

Hidden choke points that only become apparent when stressed

Spikes in network traffic that are hard-to-predict before full roll out

Intermittent network even when average bandwidth is high

WAN optimization in VDI

VDI clients will be mobile. Laptops, Netbooks, Tablets, & even smart phones - will be the typical clients for VDI. This implies that the user’s Internet connection standards cannot be gauranteed. In such cases, users on a low bandwidth connection will experience severe performance degradation.

LAN Issues

VDI could also increase LAN traffic subtle ways. As part of VDI, a virtual machine (VM) on a data center server hosts a complete user desktop including all its applications, configurations, and privileges. The client then accesses the applications via the network with the desktop and application objects delivered on demand over the network from the virtual desktop servers via a remote display protocol, such as Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and/or Citrix’s ICA protocol. The RDP/ICA traffic could spike at times creating choke points within the corporate LAN networks. In general with VDI, the RDP/ICA traffic will be much higher than the average.

LAN traffic in a traditional IT deployments.

In addition to the LAN RDP/ICA traffic, user’s systems could also have other applications (data/music/video/photos that could be running over the LAN network.
So in a nutshell with VDI deployments, one would see rapid increase of LAN traffic and create multiple choke points in the LAN network. The problem will get worse as more seats are added into the system.

Storage Issues

VDI is essentially a hybrid approach, where each end user has a thin client and connects to a private Windows XP or Vista image—a virtual machine hosted on VMware Virtual Infrastructure. This approach allows IT administrators the greater control over the user environment usually provided by Terminal Services or Citrix environments by consolidating the Windows images on server class hardware. It also allows the images to be stored and managed in the datacenter, while giving each user a full personal copy, which requires no introduction or explanation to a normal user.

VDI relies on central data storage for both block & file type data. VDI must handle both structured and unstructured data.

The following table, adapted from the VMware VDI Server Sizing and Scaling white paper, compares the disk usage of light and heavy users for a large number of VMware VDI virtual machines (approximately 20) on a single VMware SEX host. It suggests that over 90% of the average information worker’s disk I/O consists of read operations.

Before intelligent storage subsystem choices can be made, these throughput values need to be converted to Input/output operations Per Second (IOPS) values used by the SAN/NAS storage industry. A throughput rate can be converted to IOPS by the following formula:
.Throughput (MBtyes / sec)×1024(kbytes/MByte)
IOPS = -----------------------------------------------------------
.Blocksize (kbytes/ IO)

Even though the standard NTFS file system allocation size is 4k, Windows XP uses a 64-Kbyte block size, and Windows Vista uses a 1-MByte block size, for disk I/O. Using the worst case (heavy user) scenario of 7.0 MBytes/sec throughput and the smaller block size of 64kbytes, of a full Windows XP group of machines, the generated IOPS for approximately 20 virtual machines is 112 IOPS.

ESX server supports Fiber Channel Protocol, FCoE, iSCSI, NFS & 10GbE.
As the number of VDI users increase, the storage system will face both capacity and performance issues. This types of VDI workload senario can bring a traditional storage system to its knees.
VDI tends to create a I/O spike which will require complete redesign of storage systems. Storage tiering - ‘tier 0’ along with Flash drives or Solid state drives(SSD) can solve the storage I/O spikes and also improve the performance problems by having the most frequently used data into SSD. VDI deployments are typically read intensive (90% read & 10% write).
In short, VDI creates additional overheads on storage management and administration.

VDI Fault & Performance Management

One of the most common faults that occur in a VDI environment is VMWare losing connection to storage. When a VM losses connection to its datastore, the VM becomes unresponsive. This problem becomes more acute in VDI deployments with uses vMotion.

In case of VDI, as such a case will result in an unresponsive desktops and the subsequent increase to IT tickets.

WAN Management
The basic requirements of WAN management are:
1. Discover the entire WAN gateway network components. Including all WAN optimizing devices (Blue coat, F5, Cisco WAAS, Silver Peak, Exinda, etc.)
2. Fault Management of WAN gateway network devices
3. Performance Monitoring of WAN gateway network devices. Monitor QoS & SLA parameters through SLA & QoS MIBs.
4. Performance Management via vCenter Operations Enterprise for the entire WAN gateway network
5. Remote Configuration management of WAN network for bandwidth/performance optimization.

LAN Management

1. Discover & monitor the entire enterprise LAN - wire & Wi-Fi network for availability & performance.
2. Performance monitoring of Wi-Fi networks as people are increasingly using Wi-Fi for connectivity to corporate network
3. VPN tunnel connection monitoring. Monitor VPN tunnels & VPN gateway for any faults that cause VPN tunnels to go down.
4. Security & Authentication management to detect any unauthorized log-in & intruder detection on LAN.

Storage Mangement
1. Discover & Monitor SAN switches & SAN network
2. Discover Storage array, LUNs & WWN
3. Discover all VM’s for VDI and the WWN associated with the VDI
4. Corrleate unresponsive VM/VDI events to respective storage or network failures

VDI Needs better Storage Managment

VDI creates humungous volumes of data under managment. Since all the user data will be centrally stored, the volume of data that needs to be managed will be HUGE. To understand this, consider this:

Average user today has 100GB of data in their desktops. So for 2000 users, the total volume of data will be 200TB. This translates to a disk space of 1000TB - accounting for RAID-5, and active backups. Note that this is additional data under management, which resides today unmanaged in physical desktops.

Naturally, it makes sense to use data de-duplication technologies and implement rule based data management system to minimize the total volume of data under management and disk requirements.

Closing Thoughts

VDI deployments will create a big need for an automated fault, performance, & configuration management solution that can span across the virtual domain into the physical domain of servers, network and storage.

Successful VDI deployment will rely on automated IT infrastructure management solution that can provide provisioning, Automated root cause analysis and alerts to potential provisioning issues, automatic fault identification and active performance management systems.

In an ideal world, the IT infrastructure management solution should be able to correlate faults in the virtual domain (VDI) to the underlying hardware, network & storage problems and alert users and IT administrators before the faults are detected by the end users.

References:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1009553

VDI sets the stage for DaaS

2011-12-20T11:13:00.002Z

As Virtual Desktop Infrastructure gains user acceptance, a new service will emerge called as DaaS - Desktop as a Service.

Today VDI technology has matured and is ready for prime time, but deploying VDI will require some heavy lifting that involves massive investments into infrastructure. So for medium sized enterprises, DaaS offers an easier option to roll out VDI, and then integrate those DaaS deployments back into the in-house VDI offerings.

DaaS: The Cloud-based virtual desktops

DaaS can be deployed in any location on devices connected to Internet. Having a virtual desktops hosted on a cloud, DaaS service providers can offer the best of VDI and cloud worlds.

Cloud based apps such as Google Apps, Office365 etc have one major disadvantage. All the user created data will reside with the service provider, so over a period of time the volume of data will essentially create a lock on the users, preventing customers from moving to a new service. Also there is a risk of data, stored with the app provider, can be hacked/stolen or lost. In order to overcome such cases or a disaster, it will be better to have a DaaS provider integrate a VDI deployment with cloud Apps and deliver the desktop to the users over Internet.

DaaS helps large organizations

For very large organizations such as government departments, and manufacturing firms are ideal customers for DaaS. Since in these organizations not every employee needs a desktop all the time, the organizations can buy virtual desktops for their employees and then have the data synchronized with their own data centers.

For government departments, having a DaaS will mean greater savings in terms of centralized IT services and eliminate the need for multiple IT departments. Getting a centralized IT for services such as Email, desktop, and data management can result in significant savings.

DaaS helps data management

Desktops can create huge volume of data. Each user will end up having about 100GB of data - which in a large organization can translate to several petabytes of data. Today in traditional desktops this data resides in the hard drives of the user desktops and is not managed. But with VDI this data will have to be managed.

Since most of the user data will be copies of emails or files, having a strong data de-duplication system will help reduce the volumes of user data to a small fraction of the original. Also having all the data in a central repository will mean that rouge programs or data can be deleted and prevented from entering the system.

Since all the user data is stored in a central repository, the loss of user data can be totally prevented.

Large organizations also have a large number of contractors and part time employees or partner employees - who will need some levels of IT access. For such 'floating' employees, DaaS offers an ideal solution to provide a Virtual Desktop - without giving an access to the main corporate IT infrastructure.

DaaS will also attract individual users

In a total cloud enabled world, where all the end user devices are thin clients - such as Chrome Books, Tablets etc, then users will need a traditional desktop to do some of their personal work - such as editing pictures/videos, Creating docs, spreadsheets etc, store contact details, music etc. These services can be done as Web services across multiple sites or have then consolidated into a central VDI.

Just like today, where people have their home PC and Work PC, there is a need for a home VDI and a work VDI. Getting a private VDI from a DaaS provider will perfectly meet that need.

DaaS will create Data-as-a-Service

The most valuable entity in any IT system is Data. Users will consume data to create valuable information, so with VDI, users will need certain types of data to be delivered as service. Today Data-as-a-Service is still in its infancy, but as the cloud system matures, the user created data in a VDI environment will create new opportunities to build new services that takes the user created data and offers it as service to others.

The best example of Data-as-a-Service is Bloomberg's stock information data. Bloomberg provides accurate stock quotes to user desktops for enable users to trade with stocks. With Data-as-a-Service, VDI users will consume data to create information or to make valuable decisions.

Closing thoughts

2012 will see a steady (but slow) roll out of Virtual Desktops. Large organizations will roll out VDI as a service to the business, and new DaaS providers such as Desktone will emerge - who will offer entire VDI as a service.

As the popularity of thin clients grow and employees are encouraged to bring their own PC to work, VDI becomes a very attractive value proposition. The amount of data centralization & simplicity of desktop management & control will drive VDI implementation in organizations. For many organizations trying out VDI, will also try out Desktop-as-a-Service as a stepping stone for a full fledged VDI.

The ideal VDI deployment will be a hybrid of completely private VDI deployment (for 80% of their needs) - along with public DaaS (for 20% of their needs). An hybrid VDI deployment will also work as a buffer space to deal with sudden/seasonal demands.

DaaS will eventually create additional value added services for Data-as-a-Service. Right now, Data-as-a-Service is still in its infancy, but as VDI and cloud services become popular, Data becomes a valuable service.

Need for a Central Multi-Factor Authentication as a Service

2011-12-19T16:59:00.003Z

Today there is a need for a safe and secure authentication system. The current methods of authentication - user ID & Password combination is inadequate and does not offer any security. Already, every user is forced to remember multiple log-in ID and passwords for several on line items - e-mail (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo & Office), Social Networks (Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, & corporate Intranet social networks), Banking, e-Serivices, Internet retail etc. As the number of web services increases, users are finding it tough to remember and maintain all their passwords.

Once cloud computing becomes popular, the number of web sites that need authentication will explode. I already have half a dozen of cloud service sites for which I need to remember by login Ids and password. (Office365, Zoho, Dropbox, Google docs, MegaCloud, Salesforce.com)

Today, every online user has at least 12+ web based services which need a log in authentication services and this number is about to explode.

On the other hand as the number of services that need user authentication increases, the online security is being increasingly compromised. World wide over, hackers are getting even bolder - sitting in safe havens, they hack into secure sites such as Citi Bank, HSBC, etc. Even RSA's servers were hacked.

All this points to a need for a safe and secure and centralized multi-factor authentication as a service offering.

Current gold standard for authentication - RSA's two factor authentication is on its last legs. RSA servers was hacked into in March 2011, and several of its internal secrets were stolen. RSA acknowledged that the hackers went after its Intellectual Property and source codes - but stopped short of reveling the extent of the theft. (see http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/03/rsa-hacked/)

All this indicates that the Two factor authentication - Private key, public key can be broken in near future.

Authentication system today

Today, there is no central authentication system. To an extent, Google and Facebook provide a public authentication service, but this is too weak and is unsecured. So users are forced to remember multiple log-in ID/Passwords for each of the service they use.

LDAP falls way short of the requirement as it does not support multi-part authentication. Kerberos & X.509 supports multi-part authentication - but does not scale for a global web based authentication service. Kerberos was introduced in 2000 and follows DES encryption, which is not suffecient for the cloud era. In addition, Kerberos suffers a major drawback as it needs a clock synchronization - which is not practical in a global web based authentication service.

Need of the hour

There is a need for a safe, secure and single authentication service. The authentication service will be on a cloud and offers Authentication as a global service. The central authentication service can be multi-tiered:
1. A basic authentication service for basic web services - such as log-in to public web sites
2. Geographic authentication service - which provides basic authentication along with locational information for accessing personal information on Internet - such as social network or emails.
3. High security & Encrypted authentication service for eCommerce, Net banking and other high value services. The authentication system can generate encryption keys to encrypt all transactions between the user and the service provider. Thus provide a safe & secure web transactions

The authentication service validates several aspects of the user and confirms the Internet user is really the person who claims he/she is. The authentication service will validate and verify the following:

1. Identity of the person - Age, Sex, Address, etc.
2. Validate the privileges the person is entitled for a particular web service.
3. Provide a history of services the user has used in the past. This will require the web services to update the anuthentication service with user history.

The authentication service may or may not provide personal information to web service providers - based on what the individual user's wish. If a person does not wish to reveal his age to a web service provider, then the web service provider can only check if the user is of legal age or not, and such a service will be provided by the authentication service system.

The authentication system incorporates one or more Unique identification services - such as Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), or Social Security Number etc to establish the person's identity.

The central authentication service can also provide information regarding the user rights - i.e., tell the web service - the extent/level of rights the user has on the system. I.e., the authenticated user has clearances for a given set of functions. This information can be used by the web services to designate the level of authorization for the user and set the user privileges accordingly.

The multi-part authentication service can use:

1. A 6-10 character Private key -only the user knows it
2. User BioMetric or A Unique ID code which is not in human readable format.
3. Dynamic Public Key like RSA FOB or a software FOB system

This multi-part authentication service will be more secure than anything in use today. Creating a 3 part authentication system will provide security against hackers - as the possibility of hacking an individual's ID will be impossible - given the Zillion+ possible combinations - which will make it immune for brute attacks.

The multi-part authentication system will be several time more secure than the current 3DES or AES256 standards

Creating a centralized authentication as a service will enable pooling of resources to create a better identity management and security system as a service. This service will provide the first level of security for all Internet transactions - between user and service providers, and also between various service providers.

Ideally, there can be multiple authentication service providers providing a choice for customers.

Closing Thoughts

There is a need for a safe and secure authentication system. The current methods of authentication - user ID & Password combination is inadequate & broken. As the world moves towards Web/Cloud based services - the need for a strong Identity management, authentication & security system becomes a vital building block for a safe and secure Internet.

In this article, I have just touched upon the basic idea of such a service. The business model and the operational details are yet to be developed.

Product Management - Nokia launches Lumia series

2011-11-16T04:37:00.003Z

November 14th 2011, Nokia announced its new range of Windows Phone 7 Mango enabled cell phone - the Lumia 800 & 710 models in India.

With Nokia's marketshare in doldrums, this product launch is vital for Nokia's survival. Whole lot of loyal Nokia users, industry pundits and analysts were eagerly looking at this launch and Nokia managed to draw out a BIG yawn as a response to this launch.

From a product marketing perspective the actual launch was a nonevent. News media that covered the launch put the event into its back pages, Internet, Twitter, blogsphere and Facebook was not ignited with enthusiasm.

Unlike Apple's famous product launches, Nokia's flagship was launched by D. Shivakumar and Bhaskar Pramanik. If you do not know who they are then you are doing just fine. The entire launch event managed to draw a BIG collective yawn from Indian audience.

I am a loyal Nokia user for last 8 years and was eagerly looking forward for the new Nokia Smartphone to replace my aging E71. I had a my first glimpse of Lumia 800 at London and for me it was a disappointment. The launch event was pathetic, the branding is worse, and the worst was that the new phone has no great features/functions.

In short Nokia has failed in product launch.

Nokia now faces a very very steep uphill climb to regain its old glory and is wearing a shoes dipped in grease.

A Failed Product Launch

Why do I call this as a failed product launch?

Four reasons:

1. Product is launched by no-names (sorry Mr. D.Shivakumar and Mr. Bhaskar Pramanik, no one outside your organization will recognize you. You are no Steve Jobs - whom even people in Somalia will recognize.)

2. No media hype or extensive campaign for the product. Please learn from Shah Rukh Khan - who promoted Ra-One to a record success. Lumia is a make-or-break product for Nokia, and Nokia bungled on the product launch and branding. Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 do not have the same punch as HTC Titan. Nokia should have chosen a better brand name which stands out and which does not confuse customers

3. Product functional features and pricing was too banal. A me-too product for a very high price. Lumia 800 falls terribly short when compared to iPhone 4S. Lumia does not have Siri or Facetime like features. Worst of all, Lumia does not differentiate itself from HTC Titan phones.

4. Over priced. At Rs29000, Lumia is over priced and under powered, and has no real app market. Today's smart phones are all about apps and in that space Window's phones has the least number of apps. From the pricing perspective, Lumia is comparably priced when compared with iPhone, but then there are hundreds of Android phones out there that sell for 1/3rd the price of Lumia.

Good things about Mango

Windows Mango OS brings in a fresh air into mobile space. The new UI is bright, intuitive and interesting. The active tiles is an excellent feature which makes Windows phone differentiate from other smart phones. Office applications Exchange support, ability to view and edit MS Word, MS Excel and MS PowerPoint has been the main selling point of Windows phones.

Xbox live feature is also another feature that will appeal to users of Xbox.

Things that need improvements

Nokia needs to work on improving its Lumia phones by adding the following feature:

1. Laptop/Netbook Adapter: When Lumia is connected wirelessly to a laptop or netbook or chromebook, the laptop monitor/keyboard becomes the input & Output device for the phone. This will enable users to easily edit documents, view videos etc. Essentially this function will enable the cell phone to double as a VDI device.

2. HDMI output: Enable users to plug the cell phone to TV and share/view videos on a bigger screen. With a 8MP camera and HD video recording capability, cell phones becomes a primary camera. So having a HDMI output helps users view the video/photos on big screen.

3. Encryption & Security for data: Security has been a major selling point of Blackberry phones. Microsoft has all the basic security technologies to create a secure windows phone. All e-mail communications and data stored in the phone must be encrypted - preferably a 256 bit encryption - AES256 standard

4. Remote management facility. As cell phones become more complex and doubles as a VDI devices, users will need support to configure/mange their cell phones. Having a remote management facility will help users & corporate IT to manage their smart phones better.

5. Cloud Mobility. Today cell phones are designed to be connected to Internet. Users should have all their data mirrored in a cloud. Apple has the iCloud, Microsoft has skydrive, but to make Window's phones truly different, enable users to sync with any cloud.

6.Better Camera and screen resolution

Current phone needs a front facing camera for video calls and a true 1080p resolution screens. Cell phones have become a primary camera for many folks, and Nokia/Windows needs to be a leader in the pack. In Lumia 800, the camera is very good. The best I have seen on a cell phone till date. Nokia needs to add a front facing camera.

7. Multi-core CPU and expandable memory

While the 1.4 Ghz CPU is adequate for phone applications but as apps grow, there will be a need for more memory and more CPU power. So in the next generation of mobiles, having a multi-core CPU and expandable memory upto 128GB will be a key differentiator.

Can Microsoft Keep up the Pace with Android & Apple?

This is a Billion dollar question. Currently Microsoft has several other business interests that will have to be cannibalized in order to win in the mobile space. The MS Office software will have to migrate to the mobile world and will have to be fragmented as well. One version of office for mobile and a full version for PC. But this approach will eat into the MS office PC market share. Will Microsoft allow that?

As mobile software evolve, soon it will become imperative to create a common platform for mobile and PC software. In other words, the Windows Mobile OS will have to supplant the Windows PC OS products to become a preferred VDI client. Apple has given early indications of its intentions to merge iOS and OS-X, and Microsoft will have to follow suit in order to keep up. This possibility raises lots of thorny questions at Microsoft and how Microsoft resolves this needs to be seen.

As I can foresee things, Microsoft will have no choice but to create three distinct OS platforms:

1. Mobile OS - that powers all end user devices (PC, netbook, cell phones. Tablets etc)

2. Server OS - that powers the back end servers

3. Cloud OS - currently the Azure platform.

If Microsoft can integrate these three platforms for seamless user experience, then Microsoft will have a distinct advantage over Google and Apple.

Xbox live is another feature which Microsoft has and other's don't. Microsoft must develop the Window's Phone OS to make it a personal player and a console for the web based platform.

What will Nokia do?

Apple is able to sell ~20 million cell phones per quarter because it is the only company that makes iPhones. But in Nokia's case, there is competition from Samsung, HTC and others who also make Window's phones. In addition, Microsoft has a tight control over the hardware specifications on the handsets. This implies that Nokia will not have much control on the hardware and hence cannot play much in terms of pricing as a differentiation strategy.

If Windows phones become successful, then it will replicate the PC story in terms of falling prices and lower margins. This means strong supply chain and excellent supply chain management. Nokia has world class factories as a competitive advantage.

Nokia must develop a strong product differentiation in the Windows phone segment in order to be successful in the long run. And to differentiate, Nokia must bring in its OVI store and its OVI platform as a key differentiator and create value with its OVI offerings.

Another advantage Nokia has today is in its Industrial Design. Nokia has the skills to create beautiful designs for cell phones and that is a strong product differentiator. Lumia 800 is a classic design. If Nokia can create exciting designs and beat Apple in industrial design, then Nokia can regain its former glory.

Uphill climb ahead

Nokia needs to prove its relevance in cell phone market by selling 12 Million Lumia handsets before 2011 Christmas, and then manage to sell atleast 22+ million phones every quarter for 2012

To meet such high numbers Nokia will need:

1. Strong App market place, Beef up the OVI store operations

2. Strong product differentiation from other Windows phones

3. Strong Carrier support in Europe & US

4. Big push marketing in Asia.

Can Nokia deliver on all the four? We will have to wait and watch what Nokia does in next 6 months. If Nokia fails to sell more than 10 million Lumia phones by end of 2011, then that may signal the end of the road for Nokia.

Closing Thoughts

In today's brutally competitive market place, Nokia will have to make it big in smart phone market with its Windows phone, else Nokia will be relegated to a secondary player (like Sony Ericcsson, Motorola etc), and that would force a massive downsizing or sell the company off.

To succeed in mobile space, Nokia needs to create next week's opportunity with tomorrow's technology but Lumia phones are designed to solve last weeks problem with yesterday's technology.

Product Positioning of Amazon Kindle Fire

2011-10-31T15:49:00.004Z

Amazon recently released the Andriod based version of Kindle - Kindle Fire.

The world media went on the frenzy about Amazon's competition to Apple iPad. Well in one sense Amazon is a competition to iPad, but it creates a new segment for itself in the tablet space and avoids direct competition with iPad.

I got some questions on how Kindle Fire will fare against iPad2, and that question got me thinking and here is the results.

Amazon Kindle is not a competition to iPad2. (atleast not in the current format).
With a smaller screen & lesser memory, Kindle is more of a competition to iPod Touch than the iPad2.
Kindle Fire is a direct competition to Nook, Kobo and other eBook readers.

Amazon can easily leverage its enormous clout and cloud technology to strike direct deals with authors and kill competition from other standalone ebook readers.
The success of Kindle fire & iPad will force other eBook readers out of business.

Both Apple and Amazon are building a strong cloud platforms to deliver content directly to users. Use of technology to deliver content in multiple ways will create intense competition to Nook, Kobo and other standalone ebook readers and eventually forcing them out.
Amazon will rake in Billions in sales of Music, Books & videos, making Amazon a competition to iTunes & iCloud

Amazon Prime, AppStore & Amazon cloud offer streaming audio/video and data storage. This is a direct competition to Apple's offering in iCloud & iTunes store. For a long time iTune had no real competition & Amazon could easily become a 800 pound gorilla in this space.
Biggest winner in this contest between iPad & Kindle Fire could be Samsung.

Samsung also makes tablet computers, memory chips, CPU's etc. Success of Kindle would invariably create demand for tablet like devices in Asia, Africa & Europe - where Apple & Amazon do not have a strong market position and those markets will be captured by Samsung. In India & China, Samsung is already ahead of Apple in smart phones and tablets. Success of tablets will also bring in other hardware vendors - to whom Samsung can sell its chips and other hardware components. This Samsung could become a winner in this contest between Amazon & Apple

Product Positioning of Kindle

Amazon's Kindle is essentially a device designed for data consumption: Books, Movies, Music, Web and gaming. The Kindle is designed primarily for individual use. Kindle is not a family use device. It panders to individual consumption - just like iPad.

Amazon has cleverly positioned Kindle Fire away from headlong competition with iPad, and tied it tightly to its Amazon store. This is an attempt to create a new market segment for itself. Not that Amazon is afraid of competition, Amazon has taken the competition from Nook and Kobo headlong, but avoided direct competition to iPad. By having a smaller screen at 7 inches and smaller memory with 8 GB, Kindle is not in direct competition to iPad.

Amazon is building an ecosystem centered around its main online store to make Kindle an attractive product. Amazon is building a core cloud offerings to sell streaming audio & video content to Kindle devices (along with eBooks). This makes Amazon Kindle a major competition of every cable TV service company and to a lesser extent to iTunes/iCloud.

As a personal media player, Kindle is solving one big problem with cable TV - i.e., inability to watch any program at any time. Cable TV customers are forced to watch the program at a fixed time. Kindle cuts this time dependency and offers viewers to watch programs at their convenience.

Kindle Fire is also a direct threat to book publishers. The current books & eBooks are outdated. Tablet computers opens up the possibility of having interactive eBooks. Having a strong delivery platform will enable Amazon to become an eBook publisher and strike direct deals with authors for content, and in the process eliminate the traditional publishers and book distributors. Android is an open platform which supports multiple languages. This coupled with Amazon's global delivery with its cloud can create a global platform for publishing books in any language. If Amazon executes on becoming a ePublisher and leverages its cloud computing capabilities to help authors create interactive eBooks, Amazon can becomes a global leader in book publishing.

Amazon Fire, Prime, Appstore, Cloud Drive, and Games Center create an exciting ecosystem for personal entertainment delivery. Amazon has built a complete ecosystem and with that Amazon is now set to dominate a new market on a global scale.

Accelerating Your New Product Development Cycle

2011-10-31T13:35:00.001Z

In today's global market place, there is tremendous pressure to develop new & innovative products quickly and do that with less people. The competitive pressures are driving companies to introduce new products faster. Five years ago, what used to be a two year life cycle for a product is now reduced to less than 12 months. In software world, the average life span of a product is six months before it gets replaced by a newer version. The same is true for food and consumer products as well.

In such a competitive markets delay in developing new products can be fatal. (Just look at Motorola or Sony Erriccson) So delays are not tolerated and there is tremendous pressure to reduce the development time.

To meet this challenge, one has to look at the product development process itself, and the project planing in detail to carve out delays and look at automation to improve efficiencies. Companies are now using 3rd party developers/contractors to speed up new product development.

As a product manager, I have dealt with this pressure to release products quickly, and after 4 years, I decided to write my techniques and methods here that can be used to decrease the time for new product development and stay competitive in the industry.

Why Agile Product Development

Lot has been written about agile product development and I am not going to write all about that here. Here, the basic concept is to switch over to agile project management and release a product (or product enhancements) every 3 months or 6 months. The release frequency is depending on the market demands.

Software development is not a one time affair, it is a continuos development project and the aim of this continuos development is to ensure that the software product meets the customers changing requirements. As the customer requirements constantly change and new requirements constantly arise, and competition also keeps adding new features/functionality, Product development must keep up with the demand - by continuously developing the product.

From a competitive perspective, having a continuos development and frequent releases will send out the right signals to customers and increases pressure on competition. If new product releases are done in a timely manner and with exciting new features, then it will lead to increase in market share. Often times competition will slip on the releases and lose market share.

The product manager maintains a list of backlog items - i.e., new features or functional requirements. The product backlog is always repriortized before the start of every iteration. For all the product requirements, a detailed project plan has to be done - such that the release dates cannot be moved. In a nut shell, product features are flexible but not the release dates.

Now comes the tricky part. Keeping the release dates fixed, you need to determine theimportant features that the product must have. Identifying the feature set, and getting consensus on it is a real challenge. Once this list if finalized, then resources needed to develop the product are identified and committed to the project.

Note that the approach here is:

Step-1: Fix the release dates

Step-2: Identify the feature set the product must have

Step-3: Make a resource plan needed for the project

Step-4: Make a detailed project plan to complete the project on time with all the features

Step-5: Plan for the next release: features & resources

Step-1: Fix the release dates

Fixing the release dates is most important step in new product introductions. Every industry has a cyclical tendency - and there will be time of the year when customers are most likely to buy new products. For example, Christmas time forms the biggest sales for consumer electronics, PC, clothes, etc. While December also the best time for companies to buy capital goods - to take the benefit of depreciation, and also use up the budgets. Summer is a good time to launch new beverages etc. So knowing the best time to introduce new products is the first essential step towards accelerating new product development. It is also a good practice to have fixed release dates for years ahead - at least plan for 2-3 years in advance.

Having a fixed release dates helps in avoiding the quest for perfection. Many companies wait to launch a new product until it is "perfect." The quest for perfection will be never ending - and that pushes out the release date. I would avoid this "analysis paralysis" by going with beta testing or focus group testing. Also allow various stake holders to have multiple opportunities to provide input during the design & development phase and avoid all objections at the release time.

Cadence of releases

How often should one release a new product? The release frequency is actually a function of the industry, product complexity and the maturity of the product. For consumer products, the release frequency can be as high as one per quarter, and in enterprise products it can vary from once every 6 months to once every 18 months or once every 5 years

By fixing the release dates ahead of the time, you are actually accelerating the product development cycle - because everyone knows when the new product will be introduced and delays will not be tolerated - both by customers & stakeholders.

Step-2: Identify the feature set the product must have.

This is the heart of product management, and product manager needs to have a list of features that the product must have for each of the releases for next two years. Call this as feature list backlog, and with each release - the backlog items are burned off, and new backlog items are added. As the product becomes mature, there may not be a lot of new features to add - thus making way for totally new products to be introduced.

Step-3: Make a resource plan needed for the project

Once the release dates are fixed and the feature sets are determined, making a resource plan is the next step. When you are trying to accelerate new product development, resources must not be a constrain. But in reality - resources are always a constrain. So one needs to strike a balance between the feature set and resources - keeping the release dates fixed.

The resource plan must contain the list of resources needed, when it is needed, for what length of period, and the estimated cost of the resources.

A resource plan has several components, and one has to get it right to deliver the product on time.

1. Effort Estimation

2. Resource Identification

3. Lead time to get required resources

4. Cost for the resources required & financial planning

5. Buy-in from all stake holders.

Resource planning is critical. Many times the key stake holders for the project will not be aware of all what it takes to accelerate the product development process and the associated costs. If a detailed resource planning is not done at the beginning, then there is high probability that the project will get dropped or the product will be forced to compromise on features/functionality. So it is vital to get the resource planning done in advance, the costs analyzed and budgeted before starting off the project.

Step-4: Make a detailed project plan to complete the project on time with all the features

The key here is to have timely releases with the planned new features. In agile product development process, it is important to meet the release timelines - even if it means missing out on a minor function feature (provided that this feature will be made available in the next release)

Having a detailed project plan and then executing on that plan is vital. Identify all the critical paths early in the planning stage and also allow for flexibility. Identify key stakeholders and hold them accountable for meeting deadlines.

Product release delays can have adverse impact on revenues - particularly for products that have seasonal demands. Consumer products tend to have high demand during Christmas, Enterprise products have a high demand in the last quarter of the financial year etc. So it is an absolute must to meet the product launch dates.

Project planning is of vital importance to meet the deadlines. The project plan must take into consideration of risks and manage risks proactively - to ensure that timelines are not missed.

Step-5: Plan for the next release: features & resources

Not all the planned features/functionality can be developed in a single release. During product development cycle it is common to realize that certain feature is too complex or not viable for the current release - but these features can be deferred to the next release.

As a product development is underway, the product owners should start on planning for the next release and have the requirements, features/funcationality, costs, and timelines worked out. This advance planning will allow for a phased product development and also provides room to accommodate changes and customer feedback.

Software Product development is a continuous process. Having a slew of releases planned out ahead of time helps in developing differentiated superior products. Customers will also be happy to know that the products they bought will be supported and enhanced in future. This also allows company to respond to competitive pressures in timely manner.

Closing thoughts

In today's hyper competitive world, New Product Development is not a one time activity. It is a continuous activity marked with regular releases, increasing functionality & utility.

In today's complex, global business environment demands new product development (NPD) that involves a globally dispersed teams. And this translates to greater pressure on project management in product development cycles. Innovation and timeliness of releases is the key to success.

Avoid the search for "perfect" product - instead plan a slew of releases as path to achieve perfection.

Recommended Reading

Product lines for digital information products by Victor Pankratius
Software Product Lines in Action: The Best Industrial Practice in Product Line Engineering
Fundamentals of Product Design by Richard Morris
Innovation on Demand - New product development from TRIZ
Think Strategically

How to become a Product manager?

2011-07-28T14:17:00.001Z

Recently I got a question from a sales person who wanted to become a product manager. As a product manager for several years, I had to think for a while before I could answer him - and the contents of that e-mail was morphed into this article.

What's Product Management?

The definition of a product manager is not a standard across different industries. In consumer products (FMCG), its called as brand manager, in manufacturing companies its called as product marketing manager, in IT industry the name of product manager is quite common.

Product manager is a unique role in all organizations and there is never a well defined career path to become a product manager - unlike a engineering manager, Account Manager etc.

To begin with, one needs to understand the role of product manager. Its part technical and part marketing, and product manager straddles both the worlds.

Technical skills

A product manager must have the necessary technical skills needed to develop the product, i.e., he needs to understand the technology needed in the domain to design & build the product. This implies deep technical skills: both domain knowledge & tools knowledge.

To illustrate this, start with a simple product and identify 3 improvements that can be done to the product. Then document this in technical terms - telling an engineer what needs to be done and how. If you can do that level of detail, then you will win respect from engineers.

Marketing Skills

Product manager needs to understand the market requirements of the present and in the future. One must have an innate knowledge of the industry, market trends, & business models for the product. Product manager must understand how customer use the product as on today and also determine what additional needs they will have in future.

Communication skills

Communication skills are vital for a product manager. As a product manager in software world, one must be able to " speak geek" - i.e, ability to talk to engineers in engineering terms to describe what the customer needs & give ideas/suggestions on how it should be done (leave the implementation details to engineers). On the other hand when speaking to customers, product managers must be able to speak in terms of Total cost of ownership, customer use case, customer value & benefits. Essentially, product manager must be able to sell the product to customers.

Landing the job

Having mastered these three essential skills, landing a product management job is not easy. One also needs some luck, network and faith. It will take several months of campaigning to transfer from marketing/technical role into product manager role. Many product managers I know have fallen into that role - because they had the skills, so plan to campaign for yourself.

Ideally, start off with a small company which is starting a product manager role, and when the role is just being defined, you have the best chance to make it. It is much easier in smaller companies than in a large one.

Closing Thoughts

Product managers are unique - there is no set career path for product managers, so after getting into that role, you still need to grow by acquiring good project management skills, negotiations skills, having good business fundamentals, and technically well versed - and that sets you up for greater roles in leadership roles.

What's Wrong at Cisco?

2011-07-28T04:52:00.000Z

Recently, July 2011, Cisco announced a major layoff - about 6500 people are being let go. This is a public acknowledgment of things going wrong at Cisco.

Apart from the highly publicized jettisoning of "Flip" video cameras and decision to retreat from consumer markets, there has been other serious problems plaguing Cisco today, and all that is due to faulty strategy & leadership

1. Leadership failure in consumer space products. Flip was a very successful product, but leadership failed to capitalize on this. Becoming No 1. Video camera in the US market is no easy task, and the Flip team achieved this, yet the top leadership of Cisco was not able to capitalize on it.

2. Linksys & Scientific Atlanta: Both the acquisitions have not been able to capitalize on Cisco Brand name, nor Cisco strengths. These two divisions have not been able to take advantage of Cisco brand name nor Cisco is able to take advantage of these two companies distribution chain. Ideally, I expected Cisco to launch low end enterprise switches to compete with Huawei/ZTE under the Linksys brand name, thus protect Cisco brand from competition. Similarly, Scientific Atlanta could have been leveraged to create IPTV solutions for consumer space - a.k.a. Google TV or Apple TV.

3. Stronger competition for its enterprise switch products, and Cisco does not have a good competitive position to compete with Huawei/ZTE in Asian markets.

4. Cisco no longer has the bragging rights for the highest performing, High end routers & switches: Juniper, Force10 have developed superior products.

5. UCS strategy is a high risk strategy. Cisco entering server space has antagonized its major partners - HP & IBM. HP acquired 3Com and developed ProCurve line of switches to compete headlong with Cisco. IBM tied up with Juniper, Dell acquired Force10, Brocade acquired Foundry. All this implied that Cisco will now face increased market disadvantages when dealing with integrated IT infrastructure deals. The gains in UCS is still not sufficient to offset the losses in networking space

6. Cisco product line has become too fragmented and lacks inter operability. Cisco has several versions of firmware (IOS, IOS-XR, NOS, etc), multiple network management tools that do not work well together, causing major hardship for customer who opt for Cisco only network.

7. Cisco failed to innovate. This probably is the biggest fault. In the heydays Cisco was able to buy innovation with its shares and acquire innovative companies, but in the process, Cisco failed to innovate internally. All the Cisco's new products - were from acquisitions. As acquisitions stopped, the new product innovation tap stopped flowing.

8. Cisco products have become too difficult to manage. Within Cisco, there are several standards, tools and methods for managing their networking devices, causing a major headache for the network administrator to manage all the devices. Cisco today supports SNMP in its Catalyst family of switches, while Nexus uses XML/Webservices. While ISR routers also use Webservices - but ISR webservcies format is not compatible with Nexus. The changing nature of network traffic demands that the network configurations & provisioning must be changed dynamically - and today Cisco tools make it tougher to do so. In short, Cisco has fallen behind the market needs for managing networks.

9. Cisco's focus on large government contracts for services diverted management focus away from products towards services. Cisco built a large services organization - but at the cost of product supremacy. IBM was able to move from hardware to services, and in the process, IBM lost its supremacy in hardware - which was OK, as the gains in services was more than losses in hardware.

10. Organizationally, Cisco has become too big and has built up several layers of bureaucracy and is becoming top heavy. This has made the organization less nibble & agile and cannot move as fast as its competition.

Resource Management in Projects

2011-07-27T15:54:00.000Z

Resource management is one of the key corner stones of project management. If a project manager excels in resource management, then I'd say he has 50% of project management challenges solved, and the project manager needs to concentrate on the remaining 50% to get the project completed on time & on budget.

Why am I placing so much importance on resource management? The answer is simple. Resources cost money, and not having the right resources at the right time upsets the schedule. In complex projects - especially non-IT projects, there are several types of resources that needs to be managed: Equipment, supplies, machinery, people, land, clearances etc. These resources cost money to procure. If the lead times are too short, it costs more money to get the resources. So it pays to look ahead in the project planning stage and make proper plans to procure the required resources in a timely manner for the lowest cost. Changes to the cost of the resources has a big impact on the viability of the project, therefore resource management also impacts cost management.

In my extensive experience, I have seen that resource management is the key for successful project completion. Based on this experience, I writing this article on resource management.

Resource management has several components:

1. Effort Estimation

2. Resource Identification

3. Lead time to get required resources

4. Resource Utilization

5. Resource Tracking

Effort Estimation

Effort Estimation is the first step in project planning. Essentially the project has to be broken into smallest possible work packages and a project plan is made based to meet the delivery date.

Project manager needs to know the type of efforts involved & the resources needed for that to start the estimation process. Next step is to prepare the estimates. The best way to get the estimate is to talk to the actual persons who will be doing the work. Talk to the people and ask for three estimates: average, pessimistic & optimistic. An experienced project manager will have a good feel for how reliable these estimates are, and then modify/enter the estimates to the actual project plan. It is essential to add some buffers into the initial estimates - for contingencies such as vacations, unexpected sickness etc.

It is very important to know the accuracy of the estimates in project planning. For example, if you are working on a fixed price project, or if your project is in a critical path of a bigger program, then you need to have a high level of accuracy.

From experience, people know how much actual effort is involved, so taking a review of the estimates from an expert will be useful in determining the accuracy of the estimates.

I would strongly recommend using a software tools to capture the initial estimate for the task - i.e, for each work package, and then comparing with the actual effort/resources consumed for a similar task in the past. This comparison will help in determining the accuracy of the estimates. My suggestion would be to use tools such as Clear Quest or Remedy to create job orders for each work package - and with in each job order, capture the initial estimate, revised estimate and the actual effort taken. If such a system is implemented organization wide, then even a new project manager can query the system and get a comparative data for analyzing the estimates.

Only after finalizing on the accuracy of the estimate, share the upper limit value with customers or any people external to the project team. For the internal project team the aggressive estimate should be used as bench mark. This allows for flexibility within the project execution and helps a great deal in customer satisfaction.

Never reveal the lower end of the estimate to customer or even reveal the ball park figures to the customer before the completing the estimation exercise. Customers often tend to seize the lower end of the estimate and treat that as the final figure. A good project manager takes effort and time to hammer all the caveats and assumptions into customer's mind along with the upper limit of the project estimate.

Summarizing this, the exercise of resource estimation is as follows:

1. Break the project down into smallest possible set of tasks - also called work packages.

2. Talk to the persons who will be doing the work to get a range of estimates

3. Validate the estimate with experts & historical data

4. Determine the way the estimates are recorded and presented to customers & stake holders

5. Roll up all the estimates and present the pessimistic estimate to customers

6. Hammer all the caveats and assumptions into customer's mind along with the estimates

Top Estimating Mistakes to Avoid

1. Bowing to pressure and changing the carefully computed estimates with numbers given by someone senior or from upper management.

2. Not having the estimates for all work packages worked out, and relying on the gut feel for the missing estimates

3. Taking the words of experts as final estimate. An expert will be able to do the work in hours - which for a fresher will take days.

4. Taking the estimates from team as final - without factoring in caution or optimism. Depending on the overall experience of the team, the accuracy of the estimates changes. The estimates given by the team is driven by several of their internal political factors - and the estimates may not reflect reality. So as a good practice, all estimates must be validated.

Resource Identification

Every single work package in the project should have resources identified with. In the initial stage of the project, if resources for each work package is not identified and assigned for that, then that's a major gap in project planning, and the project plan is not complete nor it should be shared outside to customers.

It is the role of the project manager to work with the stake holders to get resources for each work package. In most cases, not all the resources are identified and allocated at the start of project, so from planning perspective this denotes a risk & hence a contingency resource identification must also be done during the planning stage.

Lead Time for Resources

Resources are always scarce and must be carefully used. In most cases, resources will be committed to the project at the beginning of the project, but it is the duty of the project manager to know the lead time needed to get the required resources and plan things accordingly.

With agile projects, resources are not made available to the project till the time it is really needed. In such cases, project managers will have to set timelines and do an early check if the resources are indeed available for the forthcoming iterations, identify the timelines as to when the resources will be made available, who is responsible for the resources, what is the escalation path/plan needed to get the resources, and what is the contingency plan in case the needed resources are not available.

A good project manger should have forward thinking to ensure resources are available when needed. This involves making early bookings, and reconfirming the availability on periodic basis, - particularly reconfirming the availability as the planned state date approaches.

Having a resource schedule as part of the project plan is a good practice. The resource schedule should list the following:

1. Resources needed

2. Duration of the need

3. Lead time for procuring/booking the resources

4. Remainders/reconfirmations schedule for ensuring that resources to be made available.

5. Cost of resources & cost variations of resources.

6. Ramp-up time for the resources - i.e, time needed for the resource to be fully effective

Resource Utilization

Resource utilization refers to the plan on how the allocated/available resources are utilized in the project. Often times people succumb to the pressure and get into over utilization of resources: i.e, make people work overtime to complete the tasks, overload/overuse machinery etc.

Over utilization of a given resource is not a standard plan. No project manger should plan for overloading of resources in the initial project plan. The project plan must account for normal usage of the resource.

A good project manager will not make a plan in with all resources are utilized at full capacity - especially people. This is because resources cannot operate at their full capacity all the time. With people resources, one also needs to account for other overheads such as meetings, training and also plan for holidays, sickness, & vacations. This implies that a 32 man hour task should be planned as a 1 man week task. Ideally 60% of person resource utilization must be factored for project planning.

With equipment or machinery resources, overloading must never be considered in the project plan & in practice it must be followed on ground. If overloading is permitted, then the inevitable happens: the machine breaks down, causing your project schedule go haywire. To eliminate the schedule variance due to breakdowns, resource utilization must be planned at 80% of the machine capacity. This means that on the ground, if a machine breaks down, the other machines can then be loaded at 100% and the project schedule is still unaffected.

Resource Tracking

Once the resource planning, resource schedule is done and the project is under way, the project manager must track the actual usage/consumption of the resources and compare against the plan. The actual usage must be captured into the system and this helps in refinement of future project plans.

During the project estimation time, people have a tendency to tell things which their managers like to hear - thus giving an overtly aggressive estimate or a conservative estimate. But when the actual efforts are tracked against the initial estimate and the variances are discussed openly in the project meetings, people tend to become more realistic in the future projects.

In my experience, I have used tools such as Rational or Remedy to track the actual utilization and then build that into the knowledge base for future use. Also having a centralized tool to track the actual resource utilization will help in project analysis & progress tracking. If the actual resource utilization is much greater than the initial estimate/plan, then it is an indication that the project is likely behind schedule and people are over working to cover up.

Also under utilization of resource is not a good thing. This implies that the initial estimates were over blown or the project is falling behind schedule and things are not starting on time. From my experience a 10% variation from the planned resource utilization is acceptable, anything higher is a leading indicator that something is going wrong in the project.

Note on Completion Tracking

Tracking Resource utilization is not everything for a project manager. One also needs to know how much of work has been completed on the ground. Often times people report that their work is 90% complete - and then it remains at 90% for a long time, with 10% pending and consuming resources. The percentage(%) of resource utilization should be an indicator for the completeness. Of 100% of the allocated resources are consumed then the work should be 100% complete, else the project is said to be behind schedule/plan.

Contingency Planning

Resources are always scarce & hence there is always a possibility of required resources not being available to the project. It is therefore a good practive to add resource contegency into the resource estimates to guard agaist resource scarcity.

Resource contingency is something that's added to the initial estimates to guard against things requiring more work than expected or simply to reflect the fact that the estimate is not reliable. It is good practive to add contingency to individual work packages. In some cases, contingency is added en bloc in form of additional work packages.

In large complex projects, It's common to incorporate contingency at both levels. Understanding how much is already built into individual, detailed estimates is part of deciding how much additional contingency you should allow for the project as a whole.

Closing Thoughts

Project managers are measured primarily on the delivery of projects. To deliver projects on time and on budget, one needs to have a very tight control on the resources and time scales. From experience I know that resource management is the key for successful projects delivery and resource utilization tracking is a key metric in measuring the quality of the project plan, monitoring the project status and this helps in taking any corrective steps.

Resource Commitments in Projects

2011-07-21T18:33:00.004Z

I was reading Robert G. Cooper's book on Product Leadership Creating & Launching Superior New Products. While going through the book, I found a section that resonated with leadership of product management in Projects, and here are my thoughts.

In today's dynamic software development world things are often in a state of flux. As companies are launching several projects every quarter, the project prioritization and resource allocation becomes an ever dynamic component in any project - which can have a tremendous impact on the success or failure of a product. If a project is inadequately staffed, the project will be delayed and/or the final product will be lousy. On the other hand, several highly ambitious projects suck up so much resources that the other products & projects get starved for resources. Often a successful product will get all the resources at the cost of other products, which in other words implies that potentially good products will never see the light of the day.

Fundamentally, there are only four ways to deploy resources to projects.

Resources are infinitely flexible. Resources are added/removed based on business priorities.
Resources are firm only between each stages of the project.
Resources are firmly committed to the project as long as the project meets the timelines & other deliverables.
Resources are fully committed to the project till the project is completed - irrespective of the the project performance.

In today's agile world, Option-1 sounds the best. In theory, this option gives the best utilization of resources, but in reality this dynamic approach kills the team morale & team performance, and eventually it could lead to an substandard product, or the project will eventually get killed and all the resources will get wasted. It may sound attractive to launch new projects, but such a flexible approach will lead to an case where no project ever gets completed.

Option-2 & Option-3 provide the best way to utilize the existing resouces. In product development projects, the project should have several stages for review, and at each stage of the project, the status of the project must the reviewed along with business/finanical goals. If the project meets those objectives/goals, then resources for the next stage will be made available.

Option-4, is the most common form of resource allocation. Usually the product development teams will have an allocated budgets and a long term roadmap. Based on the budget and road map, the project teams will be staffed and the project will continue till completion - irrespective of the delays. If the product is already successful, then there will no resource constrains for the subsequent release of the successful product, and the top management often takes a lenient stand when it comes to reviewing the project status. This leads to wasted resources with

Closing Thoughts

In my opinon, Product managment should provide leadership in such cases by demanding that the product development project teams by adequately staffed as long as the project is meeting the stated objectives. Every project must be reviewed periodically to see if the project is on track, if not, product management should decide on the next course of action: Increase resources or kill the project or put the project on hold. One should not hesitate to take the extreme steps if needed. Often times, the political pressures within the organization will come into play and force the project management leadership to act the other way - which eventually leads to product failures.

Having successful products requires a very strong discipline in project management. The ownership of the project lies with Product management & product management therefore must provide the right leadership in providing the necessary resources for the project.

Apple's Market Positioning

2011-07-11T13:32:00.003Z

In my earlier blog, I had written "How to beat iPad". In that article, I had written primarily about having functional features needed to beat iPad, but having all the right functional features is just not enough to win, it also requires the right positioning.

One person asked me comment on the market position of Apple in today's market and its impact on Apple. This made me think and write this article.

Apple is currently occupying the "white hot center" of converged personal computing & entertainment market, and that's a tough position to beat for any competition. So the best solution in such a case is to lure customers into a different market place - i.e, enterprise market place. e. g Apple, by nature & by business strategy, has never positioned itself in the enterprise space & that opens an opportunity for competitors like HP, Blackberry & others.

What is White Hot Center?

White hot center is a market position where all the customer's attention is on. Its essentially the prime spot of customer attention, and everyone is watching every step the seller makes.

To illustrate this, imagine a market or a Mall with a large central space where seller is selling his wares, and is surrounded by people in all direction, people are hustling to get in front and buy his products, and the crowd is making a huge commotion about it. This commotion and noise will attract other people who have come to the market and they too are watching the action at the center of the market/mall. Now, seller is at the white hot center of the market.

Today, Apple is at the white hot center selling its iPhones, iPads, Mac computer, Apple TV, iTunes, etc., and people are surrounding Apple store in millions, and making all the big noise, and then put yourself in another store at a corner of the market, trying to attract customers for your products. And that's where Apple's competitors are today.

Every market has one white hot center: Starbucks in coffee, BMW in cars, HP in printers, iPhone in Mobile phones, iPad in Tablets, Nike in sport shoes, Tiffany's in Jewelry, Marriot in Hotels, etc.

How did Apple get to the white hot center?

Apple did not get to the white hot center by accident, it was culmination of a decade's hard work and mistakes of its competitors. To understand this journey, imagine a mall of PC sellers. Certainly Apple was one of the early stores in the mall and other joined: IBM, Companq, Dell, HP, Digital, Gateway, Acer, Sony, Toshiba etc. Over a period of time the position of white hot center moved from Apple, to IBM, to Compaq to Dell to HP and back to Apple. During the last 30 years, several things changed in the PC industry. IBM was the early rock star of the PC world - but with time, Compaq was able to win that crown, and then came Dell, but as Dell stumbled & fell on quality issues, HP picked up the crown - and for a brief period of time, there was no one occupying the white hot center.

While the rest of PC manufactures stumbled and made mistakes, Apple has been executing flawlessly. Its not that Apple did not have its share of problems: Apple has faced several manufacturing problems - Imperfections in its transparent iMacs, Failure of toaster like design for PC, Scratches on iPod, dropped call in iPhone 3G, debris in 27" LCD monitors etc. But Apple has been successful in avoiding controversies, and has been very successful in cultivating customer satisfaction, Apple has been open and transparent of its problems and has taken all the necessary steps to fix those issues.

While the competition was entrenched with operational issues that they failed to produce competitive products. The fact that the competition had failed to respond forcefully to Apple's new product introductions - had enabled Apple to gain the white hot center.

Lets take a look on how Apple achieved the white hot center position in the market:

Step-1. iMac: Simple & easy to use PC, designed for style and personal resonance with the customer. At a time when all the PC manufactures was selling white box PC, and Black colored laptops, Apple took a fresh view of things and introduced stylish iMac. It was a bold design with an integrated monitor/CPU & without floppy drive. The boldness in design & style was unmatched till date.

Step-2. iPod: Personal MP3 player - with legitimate MP3 download music site - iTunes. Coming into the market when RIAA was suing Napster out of business, Apple created iTunes where customers could legitimately download music and enjoy it in iPods. The competition till date has not provided a competition to iTunes. Both Sony & Dell introduced MP3 players, but failed to create anything like iTunes

Step-3: OS-X & Intel processors. Apple moved smartly to dump PowerPC processors in favor of Intel, and created OS-X, Apple's version of Linux kernel. With this bold move, Apple was able to throw away tons of legacy code and create a small, nibble & efficient OS for all its MAC computers. Till date, Microsoft has not been able to create a product like OS-X, Windows Vista failed in market as it was loaded with several tons of legacy code, which Microsoft could not throw away.

Step-4: Mac Air Book: Apple reinvented laptops with Air Mac Books. The ultra thin laptops was revolutionary in design and size. Even after 3 years of its introduction, competition has still not produced anything like an Airbook in terms of design. Only recently, Lenovo announced a competitive product & that's 3 years too late.

Step-5: iPhone: Revolution of Touch Screen Phones. Apple redesigned the cell phones with a completely new user experience, and with that Apple created a niche for itself. With a strong position in high end cell phones, Apple changed the business environment for the incumbents - Nokia, Sony-Erricson, Motorola. Apple created a whole new platform for its iPhone, and refused to reuse its OS-X for iPhones thus avoiding Windows CE like blunder.

Step-6. IPad: New paradigm of computing. Apple was not the first to introduce the tablet computer. HP, Nokia, Sony had experimented with that before. But Apple changed the computing paradigm with its multi-touch interface in iPhone & expanded that concept in iPad. Its been about 2 years since the original iPad debuted, but the competition is yet to introduce an strong contender in this space. Nokia is no where near with its Tablet, nor is Dell or Sony. HP & Motorola had a decent product but its not a substitution for iPad.

Market Position

To understand market position of Apple, one needs to look at the basics: Price, Product, Place, Promotion. a.k.a - Fundamentals of marketing.

Price:

Apple in general is positioned as a premium product. Apple products are generally priced higher than competition. This position has helped Apple a lot as it avoids getting into price war. Instead of competing on price, Apple can now compete on innovation and unique value propositions. This is a key element to be in the white hot center. This position of a premium priced superior product was once occupied by IBM and later by Sony.

Premium pricing strategy helps to make big profits without hurting the brand. Apple brand is the most valuable asset, bigger than all the technologies it controls. Having volumes at this premium pricing helps Apple make bold design decisions and force its supply partners to comply with its design decision.

To strengthen its premium pricing, Apple does not do any discounting on its products.

Product:

Apple simply wants to sell the best product in the class. No compromises in quality or performance. Here Apple had its share of manufacturing mistakes: Antennagate, iPod scratches, etc. But every time such problem was identified, Apple moved swiftly to solve it completely.

Apple has taken bold decisions when it comes to product quality: Delay shipments to get quality products out, rather than compromise on quality and get more products out to customers. Apple's positioning on quality has helped build trust & confidence of the market.

As long as Apple maintains its product quality, Apple can continue demanding premium prices and people will line up to buy Apple products.

Another good point of Apple's product positioning is that there are very few variants in each class of products: iPad is available in Black or White, 3G + Wifi or WiFi only in 3 memory sizes: 16GB, 32GB & 64GB, and 3G is available on Verizon or AT&T network. This limits the number of choices the customer has to choose from and it makes it easy for customer to decide and buy.

Similarly in its Mac Pro line as well, there is a spartan range of models to choose from. (see Product Management - Paradox of Choice)

No Substitute Positioning. Apple products are unique and does not have a similar substitute. A Mac can be technically replaced by a PC, but the user will never accept the substitute PC because of the user experience on a PC is totally different than on a Mac. So a replacement for a Mac is another Mac, replacement for an iPad is another iPad, iPhone with an iPhone.

Recently, I swapped a Dell for a Compaq without missing a beat, the user experience was the same on both laptops, but I tried Galaxy Tab - only to get back to iPad.

Place:

In the era of Internet sales, Apple moved boldly in the opposite direction and set up exclusive retail outlets, when its competitors closed retail outlets and moved to Internet based sales. Apple has been very selective in choosing the retail partners, has made big demands on how Apple products must be placed and displayed in stores and in case of company owned retail outlets Apple has gone the whole length to design the store as a boutique store aimed at giving the best customer experience. Apple stores are often located in prime retail places and that augurs well with its premium image.

Promotion:

Apple has been a though leader when to came to advertising, be it the 1984 super bowl advertisement or today's iconic iPhone 4 advertisements, Apple's advertisements have always stood apart from the competition.

Apple has been very careful not to give discounts to promote its product, instead it uses scarcity as a promotion technique, saying only 100 pieces are available & that makes people eagerly wait to get their hands on Apple's products. So when the product becomes available, people are readily exchanging their Dollars to get their iMac/iPad/iPhone.

The judicious mix of 4Ps has led Apple to create the right branding, & market positioning.

Branding

Apple has been building up a very big reputation and a very strong brand, I suppose that Apple is within the most expensive brands on earth. Everybody associates automatically Apple with innovation, design, quality, being different, etc. Apple cannot deliver products that are not innovative, well designed or top-notch quality, they would only destroy their own brand and reduce sales figures dramatically. Innovation and quality are related with high price, the high price guarantees the customer that he is buying an excellent product, this is psychologically as well as from the business side, a typical business model. The human psychology says that the higher the price, the better the product and otherwise. Cheap Apple products would mean low quality which would hurt the Apple brand in good times and maybe in a long term, be more dangerous than just trying to survive the hard times.

Take the case of Dell. Which had serious quality issues and that effectively destroyed the brand, and Dell lost the market leader position.

Positioning

Apple has positioned itself to be a lifestyle product for wealthy people, innovators and people with good jobs. Apple has become a desired product but not easily affordable. This premium positioning helps Apple in the long term. With inflation in wages, affordability, more people can afford Apple products in future, thus increasing sales by reaching out to a larger audience with time, and when people can afford to buy Apple products they do not haggle about price, price would be secondary and the image of having an Apple product is more important.

Four years ago, very few people could afford a smart iPhone in India, but today the situation has changed, iPhone is becoming part of mainstream market as affordability has increased.

Business Environment

Not all things at Apple was deliberately planned and executed by Apple. Few things happened in the business environment that really helped Apple along the way. Failures of Microsoft Vista, limitations of Symbian OS, Fragmentation of Andriod systems and importantly security threats on Windows - all this helped Apple.

Apple was able to pull other developers to develop applications on its iPhone/iOS platform, which led to creating a sustainable ecosystem for its business. With millions of users, third party developers are happy to develop Apple specific products.

In the back end, Apple worked hard with music label companies to create iTunes. Now Apple is building iCloud as well to create a right environment for the future.

Staying in the White Hot Center

Apple is in White hot zone, that it cannot afford to make mistakes. Customers are willing to forgive one rare mistake, but not too many of them. Apple has been able to execute extremely well all through the last decade, and has corrected several glitches, come out openly and admit the mistake and fix them.

Apple products are never positioned to be a low market products, its only in the premium segment mind share. Do not respond to competition in obvious ways, instead make the competition respond to your moves.

Apple works doubly hard to find out what customers want and then delivers on the key requirement. Once in execution, it must be a flawless execution.

How to stay in the white hot center:

1. Move with the customer.

2. Influence the customer to move in that direction. (Best way to be a leader is to find a group of people walking in one direction, and then walking in front of them)

3. Make no mistakes, when you make one, correct it ASAP.

4. Throw yourself at the audience as a thought leader in that field.

5. Always be seen with the winning horse. Always be associated with success and never get associated with controversies or losing propositions

6. Never take customers for granted - get the pulse of the market and move ahead swiftly & flawlessly.

Also See:

Product Management - How to beat the iPad?

Product Management - Paradox of choices

Product Management Lessons in HP TouchPad

2011-07-05T05:55:00.001Z

On July 1st 2011, HP started shipping TouchPad, HP's tablet computer and competitor to Apple's iPad. Congratulation for the launch. Its a bold move by HP, but a necessary one in the present conditions.

In last few days, there has been a dulge of article reviewing & comparing HP TouchPad with similar products. So I won't do any comparison or write a review of TouchPad. Instead I will use HP as an example in identifying lessons on product management and write about that.

Lessons in Product Positioning

Pick any business strategy text book and you will find a chapter on pricing and product positioning. What the text book says about product positioning can be summarised in three points:

To win in a market place a product has to be:

1. Positioned at a lower price than the market leader - but the product must acheive parity in terms of performance/features/functionality.

2. Positioned at a superior product than the market leader - but the product must acheive parity in terms of pricing.

3. Positioned as a premium product, priced very high when compared to the market leader - but it must appeal to market as a luxury premium lifestyle product.

Looking at TouchPad, it seems that the product positioning has failed on all three points.

HP TouchPad is priced on par with iPad, but it falls way short in terms of functionality or features. TouchPad runs on WebOS, which is a new platform and as a result the security, stability of the platform is still untested in the marketplace. As a new platform, HP TouchPad has far too fewer apps - which makes the device less valuable.

HP TouchPad has failed to create a superior positioning in the marketplace - even though it has achieved price parity. This is strike-1.

Few minor design flaws with HP TouchPad are:

1. Its overweight when compared to iPad

2. Poor display quality when compared to iPad

3. No front & back camera

4. Shorter battery life.

5. No smart cover

6. No HDMI out port.

Few good points in HP TouchPad

1. Micro USB for mass storage & charging

2. Better keyboard design

Lessons in Product Line up

HP TouchPad is currently available only with WiFi option, and HP claims that the 4G option will be available later this year.

This is a clear blunder, tablets are seen as totally mobile personal device. I.e, like cellphones customers expect to take their tablets with them to meetings, malls, vacation etc. Not having a 3G and CDMA option makes the product unattractive to most customers.

Also in the global makets, 4G is not yet popular, in most places there is only 3G network, and often 3G is the preferred Internet connectivity (like in India). Lack of 3G connectivity simply means that HP has deliberately chosen to ignore the vast Asian market.

While 4G network offers superior bandwidth, HP TouchPad device itself does not have applications that can make use of the 4G bandwidth (>100Mbps). This to me is a meaningless feature. (Its like a car designed to travel at 400 MPH, while the roads are designed for 100 MPH)

Another minor design fault with HP TouchPad is lack of 64GB memory models and lack of expandable memory.

Lack of Connectivity options is Strike-2

Instead, HP could have opted for 3G and 2.5G connetivity for a wider appeal, and then introduce a 4G model when applications have been developed.

Consumer or Enterprise

Every product must be designed and positioned to an appropriate market position. In case of Apple - its primarily positioned as a lifestyle product aimed at the consumer. HP has not explicitly designed the table for consumer market nor is it positioned for enterprise market. This lack of calrity in positioning will spell doom for the device.

There is no supporting eco-system designed and built to support the TouchPad unlike its main competitors: Apple & Google. Apple had a head start with iPod, iPhone devices, and accordingly built an active ecosystem with iTunes, App Store, and iCloud (coming soon). Similarly, Google has built Google Docs, Google Apps, YouTube and Andriod Apps.

Lack of eco-system is Strike-3.

In short, HP TouchPad is "Dead-On-Arrival" in the tablet market place. Only die hard fans of HP will buy it. (Which can run in several thousands - when you count all the HP employees, Distributors, sales partners, etc)

Next Steps for HP TouchPad

To be fair to HP, TouchPad is like a just born baby, a Version 1.0 product. HP designers should go back to the drawing boards and fix some of the design flaws, HP product management should start building a robust eco-system designed for enterprise markets (see: Product Management - How to beat the iPad?), HP management should figure out the right positioning and pricing for the product, and then release Version 2.0 which has addressed all these issues.

Product Management Leadership

2011-07-04T08:44:00.002Z

As product manager, I face the issue of project executions on daily basis. Today in most companies, there are dedicated Project manager, Engineering manager, QA manager, Program manager and a product manager overseeing various aspects of the project. Having multiple managers overseeing a project of developing new products creates its own set of challenges. The biggest challenge is the project leadership, often times the leadership role is not defined and hence the project wobbles along - leading to cost & time over runs.

Product Development is a multi-displinary activity which involves several departments/group to work together to develop a product. There will be multiple teams working on developing a new product, but often there is no designated project leader. The absence of a designated leader creates multiple power centers that causes the project to wobble & stumble.

Few organizations have created Program Management Office (PMO) to coordinate the activities of various groups and have a common dashboard/reporting structure for project and in absence of a project leader, the leadership role is often given to PMO which often leads to product failures.

Program management office is a conduit between the project teams and upper management, the PMO does not have the right expertise to provide leadership for the projects. The best role for PMO is to provide a platform for leadership building and consensus in project execution.

In a typical product development project there are several moving components. Changing market requirements force changes on the scope of the project. The changes to the project team composition due to attrition or changing engineering priorities can lead to changes in the project schedules. This results in a very dynamic environment which has many moving parts and that leads to changes to both the scope and schedule of the project. In absence of leadership, PMO will be forced to impose strict deadlines and that often leads to shipping inferior/poor products.

In waterfall model, the product manager would sign-off the product requirements to the development team and define the release date. The project team would work on those requirements and release the product when the features are completed. Any changes to the product requirements would have a direct impact on the released dates. This methodology had several disadvantages - mainly the release dates change when the product requirements change or when resources allocated to the project change.

Leadership in project management is often an undiscussed matter, people tend to assume that there will be a project leader who is some else but not them. Even PMI's PMBOK is silent when it comes to leadership in project management.

Leadership and Project Management

In product development projects, the role of leadership in projects fall naturally on product manager. Only if the product manager abdicates this role, the leadership position must be taken by project manager or program manager.

In my experience, the main areas of leadership that a product manager needs to provide are as follows:

1. Vision

2. Good Communication

3. Enthusiasm

4. Team Building

5. Integrity

6. Trust

7. Competence

8. Empathy

9. Problem Solving Skills

10. Manage pressure

Vision

The product owner or the product owner must be a visionary. The leader must have a clear vision of the future and must know how the product fits into that future. Great leaders have the ability to articulate their vision and inspire other to work towards realizing their vision. Visionaries always challenge the status quo and thrive on bringing in a change.

My favorite quote that illustrates leadership comes from Steve Jobs:

"Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?" - Steve Jobs, when is lured John Sculley from Pepsi.

Good Communication

A leader should be able to communicate with people at all levels. Project leader must clearly communicate about goals, responsibility, performance, expectations and feedback at all levels in the team and to all stake holders.

Leaders place a great value on openness and directness. The project leader is also the team's link to the larger organization. The leader must have the ability to effectively negotiate and use persuasion when necessary to ensure the success of the team and project. Through effective communication, project leaders support individual and team achievements by creating explicit guidelines for accomplishing results and for the career advancement of team members.

Enthusiasm

The Project leader always plays the cheer leader for the project team. People do not like leaders who are negative and who keep criticizing others - it brings down the morale. People like to follow leaders who display enthusiasm - who have a bounce in their step, who have a "can-do" attitude. People like leaders who show a challenge and then tell others how it can be achieved, rather than give reasons why something can't be done.

Enthusiastic leaders are confident of reaching the project goals despite all challenges and are a committed to their goals and their enthusiasm will rub on others to share their optimistic expectations. Enthusiasm is contagious and effective leaders know how to use it.

Team Building

Project teams are dynamic. People move in and move out of the project based on their roles and contribution. So in such a dynamic environment, the leader must constantly work towards team building to create comrade between team members. The main goal of the leader is to convert the group of strangers into a single cohesive unit. The leader must control the team building process and dynamics all through the project and provide appropriate leadership during each stage of team building (forming, norming, storming, performing & disbanding).

The leader must also have an understanding of the different team players styles, strengths and know how to capitalize on it. As a project leader, proper provisioning must be done at the project planning stage for all the team building activities. The team building is a continuos process all through the project and even beyond.

Integrity

A great leader is someone who scores high on integrity and people will always remember it by his/her actions. Good leadership demands commitment to, and demonstration of, ethical practices. Creating standards for ethical behavior for oneself and living by these standards, as well as rewarding those who exemplify these practices, are responsibilities of project leaders. Leadership motivated by self-interest does not serve the well being of the team. Leadership based on integrity represents nothing less than a set of values others share, behavior consistent with values and dedication to honesty with self and team members.

In other words the leader "walks the talk" and in the process earns trust.

Trust to Delegate

Project leader often has too many things on his plate. It is not practical to do everything by one

Trust is an essential element in the relationship of a project leader and the team. Leaders demonstrate their trust in others through delegation and then how they check and control their work.

Individuals who are unable to trust other people often fail as leaders and forever remain little more that micro-managers, or end up doing all of the work themselves. I'd say: "A good leader is a little lazy." Remember - its a leaders job to see what's coming ahead and to do that one must not be too busy with work, so delegate to free up your time.

Competence

To be successful project leader, one should earn the teams respect. In a project, team members often look up to the leader to provide necessary technical guidance to overcome key challenges. At such times, the leader must have the necessary technical competence or must be in a position to get the necessary experts to help. Having technical abilities in the core technology areas of the project is a must for a project leader.

In large complex projects, it may not always be feasible to have technical competence in all the areas, and in such condition, leaders must know to delegate such maters to technical experts and monitor to ensure that issues are solved in a timely manner.

Having a successful track record is the surest way to be considered competent. Expertise in leadership skills is another dimension in competence. The ability to challenge, inspire, enable, model and encourage must be demonstrated if leaders are to be seen as capable and competent.

A competent leader earns the team's respect and then only get the right to lead the project.

Problem Solving Skills

All projects run into problems, and when it does, the team looks up to the leader to solve them for the team. Leaders must be able to identify problems and effectively solve them. This often requires involving stake holders and getting necessary resources to solve the problems and keep the project moving forward.

Leaders are not expected to solve the problem themselves, but they must be able to provide the team with inputs (ideas, resources and methods) to solve the problem. Leaders must not delve on how the problem must be solved, instead provide the necessary inputs and see how the team solves the problem.

Manage Pressure

All projects come under pressure to do more, do it faster or do with less. A project leader must be able to deal with all the external pressures on the project and in the process manage the project scope and deliverables. This takes a extraordinary ability in terms of managing pressure. A leader will take these problems in their stride.

When leaders encounter a stressful event, they consider it interesting, they feel they can influence the outcome and they see it as an opportunity.

"Out of the uncertainty and chaos of change, leaders rise up and articulate a new image of the future that pulls the project together." - Bennis 1997.

Good leader should never let others in the team see how stressful he/she is. A good leader must be damn good in hiding the outward symptoms of stress.

Empathy & Emotional Quotient

"It's nice when a project leader acknowledges that we all have a life outside of work."

Great leaders know how to manage their people. Understanding that people have a life beyond work is just the first step. Knowing people's lives will help in getting the best of out them. Leaders must be able to connect to their team at emotional level and empathize with them.

Closing Thoughts

Project Leadership skills is not something that comes in a text book. It must be learned on the field and developed. Being a leader is a great aspiration but it requires charisma, individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, courage, dependability, flexibility, integrity, judgment, and respect for others.

Product managers are ideally positioned to provide that leadership but they cannot demand that their right. Instead they must earn that position.

Documentation in Agile Projects

2011-07-04T03:21:00.001Z

There is a popular misconception that agile projects do not need documentation. But in my experience of product development, I find that documentation is an integral part of the agile teams and the workload on technical writers is actually higher in agile projects than in waterfall projects.

There are two main areas where documentation plays a very important role in agile projects:

1. Backlog list documentation

2. Product documentation in every iteration.

Backlog list documentation

The product owner is responsible for the backlog list. As the backlog list is a documented list of technical requirements, which must be refined to become a techncial functional specification document at the very beginning of the project iteration. I.e., the backlog list item must be developed into the requirement spec before the iteration for that feature can start. It is OK to have a bullet point or a brief description of each requirement in the backlog list at the project planning & project kick off stage, but as the project teams start working on a particular requirement, it bocome necessary to have a detailed product requirement specifications in order to execute faster and develop a superior product.

The product owner is responsible for creating this document and providing it to the project teams on the start date of that iteration. The more detailed the requrement specifications, the better.

Product Documentation during the Iteration

As the iteration starts off, the enginners refer the functional spec, and start their development. During the iteration, the engineers will have to document the implementation details of that feature - this becomes the input to Tech Pubs team or product documentation team to develop the product document the functional behavior of the product.

The documentation and engineers colloborate to finalize the functional specification document before the end of each iteration. At the end of the project, the product documentation will be complete and ready to be published.

A major reason to documenting during the iteration stems from the very nature of agile methodology. As the project teams can change during the project and the members who participated in one iteration may not be involved in the next iteration, there is a need to capture the implementaion details into the functional spec during the interation itself.

In large complex projects that use specialists - who will be used in specific iterations, and after their work is completed, they move out to different projects. In such cases - there is a need to capture the implementaion details into the functional spec during the interation itself.

Role of Product Manager in documentation

Product manager or Product owner must review all the documentation at the end of each iteration and sign it off and send it for review to other stake holders. At the end of the project, the comments of other stake holders can be incoporated before publishing the documents as part of product release.

Product Manager and the Technical Publication team are the joint owners of product documentation. With agile projects - where requirements are changing there is extra demands on documentation - as they have to keep up with changing requirements.

Product owner or product manager must drive the documentation process for the project. The scrum master ensures that the documentation process is followed & documentation is completed in the iteration.

Option of documenting everything at the end of the project

If the project is not very large and is planned to end within 3-4 months, then documentation can be done during the last iteration often called as "Release Sprint". Release Sprint is done so that the remaining work such as system integration, environment testing, system validation etc, are completed. Though in theory of agile methodology - every sprint is supposed to end with a shippable product, a Release sprint will be needed because not all the activities needed for an actual product release will be done for each sprint.

All documentation can be done in the release sprint provided all the members of the project team does not change during the course of the project. Based on my experience, documenting at the end of the project - ie., in release sprint is preferred for small projects - typically incremental releases, patch releases etc.

The product owner must maintain the list of activites that needs to be done in the release sprint - typically, this would be performance, regression, system stability, security & integration testing activities and documentation related activities.

Closing Thoughts

There is a general preception that agile projects can be done with less documentation, but in reality the opposite is true. There is a greated rigor for documentation in agile projects, and for product development projects, documentation is part of every sprint. Agile methodology places greater stress on documentation and documentation resources needs to be committed all through the project.

Doing all the documentation during the release sprint is not a good option therefore it must be used judiciously only in small projects.

Product Management - How to beat the iPad?

2011-06-29T13:31:00.003Z

How to beat the iPad?

This has become a multi-billion dollar question. Several companies are spending billions of dollars to develop tablet computers that can beat iPad. But till date all these alternative offerings have fallen awfully short and iPad still rules the world.

I asked this question to myself, analyzed the issue in depth and found that iPad can be beaten & here is how to do it.

Apple's iPad is a torch bearer for the future of computing. Apple has indeed opened up the doors for the next computing revolution with its iconic iPad - the cloud computing. Ipad with iCloud is the future of computing, where you can store all your files on the cloud, do all the heavy computing on the cloud and use the tablet device as an input/output (I/O) device. The basic premise of iPad is that the user is almost always connected to the Internet, and without Internet the user has limited functionality for the tablet - viewing/editing/creating of documents and entertainment - listen to music or watch videos.

This essentially implies that the iPad is mearly an end user device - more like a dumb terminal type in the main frame era. (The main frame is replaced by the cloud)

Looking at the iPad in this format opens up a lot of opportunity for other players - like HP to develop solutions that can beat Apple in the tablet market as Apple & Android devices has several short comings when it comes to enterprise computing.

Virtual Desktop Initiative

You may have heard the term VDI or Virtual Desktop Initiative. VDI is an initiative to centralize all computing into the enterprise cloud and make all the end user devices a terminal to access all the applications. The users have to login to the enterprise cloud and then they will have their virtual desktop - i.e., applications that they need to do their job.

Till date all the VDI programs were centered around using the esisting desktops or laptops as the end user device. This option was expensive and gave a bad user experience. The corporate IT department still could not control all the data and could not ensure security, and the user had to use a mix of local applications and cloud applications to get the work done. This was not the right approach to begin with as there was no ROI for VDI. The customers still needed Office & Email applications on their local machines - plus the additional cost of desktop/laptop OS, and hardware ensured that this approach to VDI was an expensive & ineffective proposition.

With the tablet computers, VDI takes a completely different meaning & becomes a viable solution if implemented the right way.

This is where others have a chance to beat Apple. Essentially, Apple iPad is not designed for VDI and iPad is not geared for enterprise usage. Current iPad is designed as a consumer device.

So here are my thoughts on how to beat iPad.

1. Create a tablet with a strong built-in security systems.

All data stored in the tablet must be encrypted and connection to the enterprise system is always over invisible VPN. One can make the VPN connection invisible - by using user biometrics as user part authentication, and a private key authentication.

2. Create an enterprise software store portal.

All applications that run on the tablet has to come via the company's software store. Users can install generic general purpose applications - as long as it is pushed through the enterprise software store. Access to other open applications is not permitted. The enterprise software/App store can be a federated store - which integrates open app stores and enterprise app store.

3. Build software solutions on mobile Internet connectivity.

Today, most of the enterprise applications need to be accessed only through the corporate network. These non-web based applications must be rewritten or re-developed to be made accessable on the Internet, preferably through a dedicated apps. For example, the time sheet entry application should be an app on the tablet that uses the Internet/VPN to connect to the enterprise systems.

4. Build better Email client for the tablet

The current email clients on Apple or Andriod or Blackberry still falls short of Outlook or Lotus Notes in terms of functionality and user experience. The webmail interface of Outlook still falls short. Simply put, redesign and rebuild the Email client on the tablet to match or beat Outlook. The current Email clients are severly handicapped when it comes to dealing with attachments from cloud storage services. As users will have multiple cloud storage services, the email client should have capability to attach/link data from any of the cloud services or the local files on the user tablets.

5. Integrate the Office Desk Phone to the Tablet.

Today, employees have a cell phone and a desk phone. This can be replaced by a softphone on the tablet - which moves along with the user. This gives the mobility to the user without the use of cell phones, and empolyees can be connected via phone network.

6. Make Audio/Video Conference Calls & Virtual meetings as an integral part of Tablet.

Today's tablet devices have multiple cameras that can be used for video conferencing as well. To illustrate this problem, look at WebEx, to log into the meeting, I need to log into WebEx client on iPad or on the laptop, while audio conference is on the phone. This locks up both the phone and the Tablet/PC. If the audio conference part can be moved to Tablet, then it will be a big advantage. Video Conference is not very common today - mainly due to its appropriateness. However for company wide meetings, or all hands meetins etc, video conferencing - i.e., video broadcasting can be done through the tablet. In short, make the tablet device a unified communication device.

7. Make the tablets presentation friendly

Apple iPad is not really designed to making presentations, the connector to HDMI is not universal and is unique to Apple. Instead cut the wire and make it wireless connections to projectors - either via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to connect to LCD projectors or Flat Screen TVs

8. Develop a good Docking station

Apple iPad is not optimized for creating rich documents, spreadsheets or presentations. The touch screen user interface is good to browse, but not for extensive typing. There are few docking stations out there that extends the iPad with a keyboard, mouse & graphics tablet. This makes the device more user friendly to type without cramping your hands.

9. Make Databack up a thing of the past.

Since all the applications are designed to work on the cloud, all the user data stored locally on the iPad or tablet must be copied over to the cloud on the backgroud - without any user interaventions. Today there are few applications that do that on the background for the PC/laptops, the same must be implemented for iPads/Tablets. This will ensure that the users will never ever lose data - even if the device breaks down or gets stolen.

10. Enhance the Security.

If the device ever gets stolen or lost, the devices must get disabled & all local data is deleted by remote activation. As mentioned earlier - all the local data in the tablet, and all the communication between the tablet to Internet is always encrypted. But if the device is lost or stolen, then the device must have the capability to self-destruct all data/applications on the tablet when triggered. The triggers can be via Internet or on failed password/biometic access.

Closing Thoughts

The iPad/Tablet revolution is just starting. Apple has taken an early lead, but nibble competitors can beat Apple only if they cater to the enterprise needs - which Apple fails to do. Competition such as Andriod or HP or BlackBerry has to do quickly inorder to beat Apple in the game.

To win in the market place, one needs to integrate the tablets with VDI and create a strong business ecosystem - applications, security, communications & mobility.

If history is any indicator, Apple has in the past and even in the present has ignored the enterprise needs, and this creates an opening for competitor to sneak up from behind and win.

Do Product Companies need CMMi certifications?

2011-06-27T15:50:00.002Z

As a product manager in India, I keep getting questions from my various quarters regarding CMMi certification for software product companies.

"Do software product companies need CMMi certifications?"

The questions are often asked by people whom have worked in software services companies and they have moved to a product company and find it strange that the organisation they are working for does not have CMMi certification, and they want to be the one who will implement CMMi in their new organisation.

The answer to these questions has always been the same: Look from the customer perspective and see if it makes business sense to go for CMMi certification.

Any certification, CMMi including, costs money, time and effort. Investing in CMMi must give adequate returns - in form of increased revenue & increased profits. This means that CMMi processes must help to do one or more of the below:

1. Increase sales of the product.

2. Increase the average selling price of the product.

3. Increase the revenue opportunities for subsequent services/products.

4. Decrease the time/cost to develop the product.

5. Decrease the cost of sales.

Implementing CMMi takes money, so from a business point of view, this investment must be justified. Also one needs to look at the product from customer's point of view:

Do customers prefer to buy products from vendors who have CMMi process in developing the product?
Do customers pay a premium for the product that was developed by CMMi certified team?

If the answers to the above questions is "NO", then there is no need for CMMi certification.

If the answer is yes, then you need to look at the investments needed, and the returns it gets. The return on investments must be inline with the corporate financial requirements.

Today customers do not care about CMMi certifications while buying a product. CMMi is more applicable to services. Customers look for vendors to be CMMi certified while buying IT services.

By the time I go through these questions, answer to the first question is a resounding NO.

The next question that comes up is:

"We offer services built on top of our products, so do we need CMMi certification?"

The answer to is question is not easy, it depends on the size and scale of the services and level of customer's comfort level with the services being offered.

Are the services built only on the products being sold?

If the services are primarily for software integration or system configuration and the business is built on top of the software products, the there is not much competition, therefore there is competitive reasons to go for CMMi. In such cases there is no need to go for CMMi certifications. However if the service organisation wants to improve its competitive position and the service delivery process, then it is good to go for CMMi certification.

How long and how large is the service engagement?

If the service engagement is long and involves complex SLA and multiple deliveries, then it makes sense to opt fir CMMi certification. In such cases, CMMi certification is beneficial to improve delivery process and reduce dependency on key individuals.

Is there specific requirements in RFP/RFQ that specifically calls for CMMi certified vendor?

Does CMMi certification help in winning the business?

Well in such cases there is no option but to go for CMMi certification, as it is necessary to compete in the market place.

Closing Thoughts

The decision to choose CMMi certification should be based on market conditions and return on investments. CMMi certification carries additional overheads in terms of project delivery and implementation and one must invest in this extra processes and procedures only if it makes business sense. The need to go for CMMi certification must be driven by sales requirements and not by engineering.

Product Management - Phenomenon of Dancing Bears

2011-06-20T16:50:00.002Z

On Saturday, my daughter ran up to me and asked me to watch "Super" - A talent show on TV. On that day, there was an act by a person who has lost both the legs and yet he gave a thrilling dance display. My wife, daughter and all people around (me included) was stunned by his display. Needless to say - he was judged as the winner in the show.

As the show proceeded, I began to think critically and analyze the person's dance. His dance itself was ordinary and I'd say that he was no great dancer, but the fact that he danced - as he was born without his legs was amazing. But if any other person with perfect pair of legs were to dance the way he did, no one would have liked it.

What happened in the show was that, the dance by itself was mediocre - but it was performed by a physically challenged person, and that won the audiences & judges.

This phenomenon is called as Dancing Bears. This was first described by Alan Cooper in his book "Inmates are Running the Asylum"

Remember in olden times (its illegal now), few people (mainly from the gypsy community) would roam from town to town with a bear on the tow. He would play a crapy music and the bear would dance for that music. People of all ages would gather around the bear and few would drop a few coins to the person.

Similar act was also done by snake charmers as well.

Today the dancing bears and snakes have disappeard, and has been replaced by software. Yes software such as Facebook, Talking Tom, Angry Brids etc. are today's example of Dancing bears.

When you really look at it, the bear was really a bad dancer. It was not even dancing, but trying to mimic a few human movements - which for our eyes resembles a dance, and hence we were thrilled to know that other animals can also do what humans can do. And for that thill, people were ready to drop their work to see the bear, and even part with some money to feed the bear.

The Dancing bears phenomenon has its advantages & disadvantages. As a product manager and a marketer it is important to know the basic attributes of Dancing bear.

1. Perform a task which is generally deemed impossible by general public.

2. Do not repeat the same act to the same audience within a span of 6 months.

3. Make the best use of all the opportunity and go for maximizing income.

4. The Novelty factor of the act wears out rather fast.

In the software world, we are often hit by this dancing bear problem. When a new software is being developed and making a software do a task - which till then was deemed impossible, makes the developers and the audience go ga-ga, and forget that the the real dance was rather lousy - i.e., the real utility was very little. Developers rush to release the product, customer rush to buy the product and only later after the novelty factor dies down, customers drop the product for another -which has greater utility.

The dancing bear phenomenon makes the developers, product managers and marketers ignore the apparent shortcomings of the product and rush the product to the market, and the initial success of the product makes them totally blind to the lack of utility of the product. Only later after the customers have dumped the product, everyone takes time to conduct a postmortem.

The problem of dancing bears is commonly seen in the products that was first in the market. Friendster.com, Alta-Vista.com, Excite.com etc. But as the novelty died off, so did those products.

Closing Thoughts

While developing new products, one needs to carefully examine the utility value of the product. Do not get overwhelmed by the novelty factor of the dancing bear and rush. Avoid getting dragged down by all the hype of the novelty and keep a level head to develop the utilty value of the product.

Product Management - Paradox of choices

2011-06-19T17:14:00.001Z

Yesterday, I & My wife went out shopping. We wanted to buy few temple jewellery for my daughter. We went to Jayanagar 4th block - a main shopping hub for South Bangalore. Initially, we went to few shops and then finally ended up at 'Bhavani Kangan' - a well known store for fashion products. The shop was filled with people to the brink with hardly any place for me & my wife to stand. Being Indians we managed to get in and buy the stuff we wanted. The store had so many choices in each category that was mind blowing.

First we asked for necklace, and the store had 100s of designs, We started to look at all the designs, and it was taking a long time just to see all the designs he had. The range of choices we had at the store was actually making it tough for making a decision. Finally, I just decided to make a call and choose the one that met my basic needs - design, color and price.

As we stepped out of the shop, me & my wife felt drained - just by shopping. On the way back, my wife made a comment that when she was a kid, she could get nice looking designs than today.

Her comment made me think and write this blog.

The statement - "When we were kids, we used to get nice looking designs" was a loaded one. At the first level, we has humans tend to have nostalgic memory of the past. Nostalgic memory is often not true - but we tend to remember only the good things from the past and also tend to passionately cling on to them.

At the second level, more choices we have, the more confused we become - and hence when compared to the past experience of limited choices we tend to make an assumption that things were better in the past. This can be attributed to Paradox of Choice.

As a product manager and as a marketer, it is important to understand the paradox of choice.

Simply put, having multiple choices confuses customers and at the end customers often end up making a wrong choice, or defer making a decision. In the process of going through all the choices available, the buyer gets exhausted and the whole buying experience becomes painful, killing the joy of shopping.

The paradox of choice is equally applicable to manufactures and sellers. Offering too many choices to customer results in increased selling costs and lower profitability. Increasing the range of choices to customer may end up in lowering sales - as customer gets turned off by the multitude of choices.

The paradox of choice is very well described by Barry Schwartz in his book The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less. Barry Schwartz observed the human behavior of choosing and documented the fundamental reasons for the paradox of choice.

Why More is Less

Having too many choices is actually bad for the consumer. Today consumers are being offered too many choices, consumers are being bombarded with too many marketing messages, and the poor consumer is forced to "think" even for simplest of all buying decisions.

To illustrate it, just walk into a store and look at the choices you have for "drinking water" or soap or shampoo. Even in India there are so many options - that its impossible to determine the best.

Given such a wide range of product choices, the consumer ends up with a choosing one and then the buyer remorse sets in - as the customer now doubts that if he has made the right choice.

Consumers want to feel good by making the best decision or making the right decision. Making the right decision involves getting all the information about all the choices and then choosing the one that best fits his needs. In the world of unlimited choices, the customer will soon be overwhelmed by information and simply cannot analyze all the possible options and is forced to opt for a choice that meets his basic needs - a satisficing option. But with a satisficing option, the buyer is not sure if he has made the right decision and is often left in a state of doubt. This results in a unhappy buying experience.

This has been validated by psychologists David Myers and Robert Lane, who independently concluded that the current abundance of choice often leads to depression and feelings of loneliness.

Analysis paralysis

People want to analyze all the possible options. In case of simple consumer goods of low purchase price, people do not mind making a wrong decision. But when buying a big ticket items, where the buying decision has major ramifications, customer have to analyze all the options. Given a huge range of choices - customers often end up in analysis paralysis.

Missed Opportunities

Another human behavior thats particular importance here is that we tend to fret over missed opportunities. Even after making a decision, people often tend to worry about the missed opportunity. This makes them doubt their decision and hence are less satisfied with the product they bought.

Pressure to Win

In today's hyper- competitive world, people are always under pressure to win. Winning or losing is heavily dependent on making the right decision - i.e., choosing the right products. So when the person does not win, they end up blaming the wrong choice they made. And from that experience, customer are always in self doubt even after purchasing the product.

Examples of this paradox.

There are tonnes of examples of this paradox, and yet companies tend to make the same mistake. The best example of this is General Motors. In 2008, GM had more than 23 brands & 100 models of cars in 20+ variants for each model. Yet, GM was making losses, losing market share.

Another example is Yahoo Vs Google. Yahoo offers a wide range of services in their home page, while Google offers very few choice.

Apple Vs Dell. Walk into an Apple store, there are only few choices of PCs/Laptops available. Log into Dell website and you will be offered such a wide range of options - that is bound to confuse the buyer. No wonder that Apple's profit & sales are growing at such a fast clip.

Closing Thoughts

Having choices is essentialy for the consumer, but having too many choices does not help. Instead understand the customer needs and offer a select range of choices - this increases customer satifaction and greatly increases the pleasure of buying.

Capacity Management for Cloud Services

2011-05-26T17:40:00.005Z

When setting up a cloud infrastructure, it is essential to plan for a desired capacity - how many servers, how much storage and what is the network bandwidth. As cloud services are to be designed for elastic demands - capacity planning becomes quite tricky.

Fundamentally capacity planning is driven by three major parameters:

1. Economics of Cloud Computing: Clouds must be cheaper than hosted environments

2. Performance Requirements: Hosted applications must meet certain performance targets

3. Ability to meet elastic demands: Ability to take on extra work loads without compromising on service quality.

The cloud capacity decision is also influenced by:

1. Security & Reliability Requirements: The DR (Disaster Recovery) strategy has a huge impact on the required capacity. In addition data security also impacts the capacity requirements.

2. Software Requirements: Depending on the type of software that is deployed on the cloud, the underlying capacity of the infrastructure needs to be determined.

3. Time to deploy additional resources: It takes time to bring in additional servers into the cloud. During that time, the existing cloud capacity must be able to handle additional loads. This is also called as buffer capacity.

Capacity Planning: Initial steps

The goal of capacity planning is to ensure that you always have sufficient but not excessive resources to meet customers' needs in a timely fashion.

This requires three main details:

1. Get a measure of what is going on in the cloud. This entails getting information on customers' current workloads.

2. Forecast the future workloads. How many new clients will be added, and their projected work loads.

3. Develop a model that will meet the customer requirements - considering the response times or Salsa; for the lowest possible cost.

The actual capacity planning is an iterative process. In each iteration, you need to validate your assumptions with the actual data and then constantly revalidate your model.

For example, if the current load per customer is (say) 5000 transactions per minute, and the customer's estimate for next year is 10000 transactions per minute, then you need to constantly validate this projections for the next round capacity planning.

As this is a model - based on human intelligence and guess work, one needs to be cautious in making certain assumptions. It is not always possible to get a full measure of all the current workloads of all customers. Therefore a representative sample size of customers must be taken for all calculations.

The model has to be verified over a range of real-life conditions, and become useful for prediction.

Queue Time & Utilization

All capacity planning is based on queuing theory, which was originally developed by Agner Krarup Erland in 1909. This theory explains the powerful relationship between the resource utilization and response times. The theory was originally used to plan the capacity of telephone switches and continues to be used for designing routers in the packet switched networks. The same theory is applicable to the cloud capacity planning as well.

Queues form because resources are limited and demand fluctuates. If there was only one computer and only one workload, then the computer is servicing that workload. Suppose the work load is finished before the next workload arrives, then the computer becomes idle - thus unutilized. On the other hand, if a new work load arrives before the current workload is finished, then the new workload will have to wait in a queue for its turn. In this process the computer is now being utilized, so as the number of workloads exceed the computer gets busier and busier - and the utilization of the resources increases, and the wait time increases exponentially. The classic queue length (response time) versus utilization curve looks like the curve shown in Figure-1.

Now consider this:

Response Time = Waiting Time (Queuing Time) + Processing Time

and

Waiting Time = Time to Service One Request × Queue Length

Now, consider a case where a SQL query takes 100 millisecond to complete. If the queue is empty, then the query will be serviced in 100 milliseconds. But if there are 40 queries ahead in the queue, then it will take 100x40 +100= 4100 milli seconds. The wait time increases exponentially. Suppose there were two servers, then the time drops to 2100 milliseconds, if there were 4 servers then the time drops to 1100 milliseconds. So as you can see increasing the number of resources causes a dramatic reduction in wait times.

In reality, all computers are not serving all the time. There will be times when computers are idle waiting in workloads. Say a computer is busy 98% of the time, then adding another server will make both the servers busy only 49% of the time - i.e., 51% of the time the servers are idle, consuming power and the resources are wasted. Adding resources will definitely decrease the wait times, but it also results in wastage. From the utilization curve, we can see that the kneel point happens at 65% utilization - i.e., increasing utilization above 65% increases wait times exponentially.

In a cloud system there are several resources to be considered - CPU, disks, storage, network latency, bandwidth etc., and there is an associated wait times for each of the resource. Proper planning of a cloud infrastructure will need allocating proper resources for a overall customer experience. Also in a multi-tenancy system, the customer demands are not in sync - therefore service providers can move certain resources from one customer to another customer depending on customer work loads.

Closing Thoughts

Cloud computing is a capacity planner' dream. The beauty of cloud based resources are that you can dynamically and elastically expand and contract the resources reserved for your use, and you only pay for what you have reserved.

Also see:

SaaS Capacity Planning

BASIC REQUIREMENTS OF A CLOUD COMPUTING SERVICE

2011-05-25T06:00:00.002Z

Cloud computing is here to rule. Right now, most of the small, medium enterprises have gone 100% on cloud. I have seen several startups - which are using cloud services for all their computing needs. But large enterprises are reluctant to move to cloud services and rightly so. Many companies are just testing waters and have held back on full scale deployment of cloud IT services.

Today the cloud services have several deficiencies - which from an enterprise prespective are the basic requirements for them to consider cloud services. In this article I have written about about 6 basic requirements for enterprises to adapt cloud services in a big way.

1. Availability - with loss less DR

Customers want their IT services be up and available at all times. But in reality, computers sometimes fail. This implies that the service provider should have implemented a reliable disaster recovery (DR) mechanism - where in the service provider can move the customer from one data center to another seamlessly and the customer does not even have to know about it.

As a cloud service provider, there will be enormous pressure to minimise costs by optimally utilizing all the IT infratrucrture. The traditional Active-Passive DR strategy is very expensive and cost ineffecient. Instead, service providers will have to create an Active-Active disaster recovery mechanism - where more than one data center will be active at all times and ensures that the data and services can be accessed by the customer from either of the data centers seamlessly.

Today, there are several solutions that are available to do just that. EMC VPLEX solution to maintain an Active-Active data center. Another approach will be implement Hadoop/Hive stack for data intensive applications such as emails, messaging, data store, services.

In an ideal senario, the customer on the cloud services should not even notice any change at all and the movement of all his data & applications from one data center to another must be transparent to the end user.

2. Portability of Data & Applications

Customers hate to be locked into a service or a platform. Ideally a cloud offering must be able to allow customers to move out their data & applications from one service provider to another - just like customers can switch from one telephone service provider to another.

As applications are being written on standard platforms - Java, PHP, Python, etc. It should be possible to move the customer owned applications from one service provider to another. Customers should also take care to use only the open standards and tools, and avoid vendor specific tools. Azure or Google services offers several tools/applications/utilities which are valuable - but it also creates a customer lockin - as the customer who uses these vendor specific tools cannot migrate to another service provider without rewriting the applications.

To illustrate this, today in India, customers can move from one cell phone service provider to another without changing thier handsets, but in US, if one were to move from AT&T to Verizon, one needs to pay for the handset - which forms a customer lock in instrument.

With public cloud services, customers should be able to move their data & applications from one cloud to another - without distrupting the end user's IT services. This movement should be transparent to the end user.

The Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) was formed by organizations such as Intel, Sun, and Cisco in order to enable a global cloud computing ecosystem whereby organizations are able to seamlessly work together for the purposes for wider industry adoption of cloud computing

technology. The development of the Unified Cloud Interface (UCI) by CCIF aims at creating a standard programmatic point of access to an entire cloud infrastructure.

Recently in EMC world 2011, EMC demonstrated moving several active VMs & applications from EMC data center to CSC data center without disruption of service. This was just a proof of concept, but to make this a common place, some amount of regulation and business coordination will be required.

However, in their current form, most of cloud computing services and platforms do not employ standard methods of storing user data and applications. Consequently, they do not interoperate and user data are not portable.

3. Data Security

Security is the key concern for all customers - since the applications and the data is reciding in the public cloud, it is the responsibility of the service provider for providing adequate security. In my opinion security for customer data/applications becomes a key differentiator when it comes to selecting the cloud service provider. When it comes to IT security, customers tend to view the cloud service providers like they view banks. The service provider is totally responsible for user security, but there are certain responsibilities that the customer also needs to take.

The service provider must a robust Information Security Risk Management process - which is well understood by the customer, and customer must clearly know his responsibilities as well. As there are several types of cloud offerings (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS etc), there will be different sets of responsibility for the customer and the service provider depending on the cloud service offering.

When it comes to security, the cloud service providers offer better security than what the customer's own data center security. This is a kin to banks - where banks can offer far greater security than any individual or company. The security in cloud is much higher due to: Centralized monitoring, enhanced incidence detection/forencics, logging of all activity, greater security/venerability testing, centralized authentication testing (aka password protection/ssurance), Secure builds & testing patches before deployment and lastly better security software/systems.

Cloud service providers know that the security is the key to their success - and hence invest more on security. The amount of efforts/money invested by cloud service providers will always be greater than the amount an individual company(most) can spend.

Security issues will also be addressed through legal & regulatory systems. Despite the best IT security, breaches can happen and when it happens, the laws and rules of the land - where the data resides play an important role. For example, specific cryptography techniques could not be used because they are not allowed in some countries. Similarly, country laws can impose that sensitive data, such as patient health records, are to be stored within national borders. Therefore customer needs to pay attendtion to Legal and regulatory issues when selecting the service providers.

4. Manageability

Managing the cloud infrastructure from the customer prespective must be under the control of the customer admin. Customers of Cloud services must be able to create new accounts, must be able to provision various services, do all the user account monitoring - monitoring for end user usage, SLA breaches, data usage monitoring etc. The end users would like to see the availability, performance and configuration/provisioning data for the set of infrastructure they are using in the cloud.

Cloud service provider will have various management tools for Availability management, performance mangement, configuration management and security management of applications and infrastructure(storage, servers, and network). Customers want to know how the entire infrastructure is being managed - and if possible can that management information be shared with them, and alert the customer on any outage, slow service, or breach of SLA as it happens. This allows customer to take corrective actions - either move the applications to another cloud or enable their contigency plans.

Sharing the application performance and resource management information will help improve utilization and consequently optimize usage by customers. This will result in improving ROI for the customers and encourage customers to adapt cloud services.

As customers buy cloud services from multiple vendors, it will become a necessity to have a unified management system to manage all the cloud services they have. This implies that cloud service providers must embrace an XML based reporting formats to provide management information to customers and customers then can build their own management dashboards.

5. Elasticity

Customer on Cloud computing have a dynamic computing loads. At times of high load, they need greater amount of computing resources available to them on demand, and when the work loads are low, the computing resources are released back to the cloud pool. Customer expect the service provider to charge them for what they have actually used in the process.

Customers also want a self service on-demand resource provisioning capability from the service provider. This feature enables users to directly obtain services from clouds, such as spawning the creation of a server and tailoring its software, configurations, and security policies, without interacting with a human system administrator. This eliminates the need for more time-consuming, labor-intensive, human driven procurement processes familiar to many in IT.

This implies that the dynamic provisioning system should be the basic part of cloud management software - through which users can easily interact with the system.

To provide an elastic computing resources, the service provider must be able to dynamically provision resources as needed and have adequate charge back systems to bill the customer.

In reality, it may not be possible for any single cloud service provider to build an infinitely scalable infrastructure and hence customers will have to rely on a fedrated system of multiple cloud service providers sharing the customer loads. (Just like a power grid, where the load gets distributed to other power plants during peak loads)

6. Federated System

There are several reasons as to why customers will need a Federated cloud system. Customers may have to buy services from several cloud service providers for various services - email from Google, online sales transaction services from Amazon and ERP from another vendor etc. In such cases customer want their cloud applications to interact with other other services from several vendors to provide a seamless end to end IT services.

This implies that each of the cloud services must have an interface with other cloud services for load sharing & application interoperability.

In a federated environment there is potentially an infinite pool of resources. To build such a system, there should be inter-cloud framework agreements between mupliple service providers, and adequate chargeback systems in place.

Having a federated system helps customers to move their data/applications across different cloud service providers and prevents customer lockin.

Interoperability of applications across different cloud services has led to creations of standard APIs. But these APIs are cumbersome to use and that has led to creation of Cloud Integration Bus - based on Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

As on today, the integration issues are still being worked out, and there is no universal standards for creating interop between different cloud applications.

Closing Thoughts

Cloud services are still in its infancy and if cloud services were to attract large enterprise customers, then they need to do a lot more than today to address data/application portability, federated scalable system, complete end-to-end interoperability and security issues.

Watch this space as I will write more about cloud computing from business and management point of view.

Go Green - Journey towards Green IT

2011-04-18T10:04:00.006Z

To get an understanding of the power saving with virtualization, one needs to start with measuring the power consumed in the current datacenter. The simplest way is to connect an energy meter to the powerline and measure the power being consumed - but that does not help much in planning for a greener data center. Isolating the power supply to data center and connecting an energy meter to the power line is a good step for measuring the power being consumed.

A typical data center

A typical non-virtualized data center usually consists several Industry Standard Servers(ISS) - x32 or x64. These individual servers are so powerful that very few applications can fully utilize the server resources. Most often, only 5-10% of the server capacity will be utilized. So when new applications are brought in, new servers were added - leading to uncontrolled server sprawl.

Measure the power consumed

The first real step is document how much power each of the devices in the datacenter is consuming. This includes servers, networking, storage, lighting, power converters, UPS, & cooling. The power consumed by these devices can be easily found in the product manuals. If you are not able to find the power information in the manuals - or if you do not have time t go through all the manuals, the faster solution will be to use HP Power Calculator or HP Power Advisor Even if you have non-HP servers, you can use HP power calculator to estimate the power consumed by choosing an equivalent HP server. Similar to HP power calculator or HP Power Advisor, other vendors - such as Dell, IBM, Cisco, EMC, Oracle also provide power calculating utilties.

Table below shows a sample of server power & cooling power requirement.

Power calculations

Power consumed by the computer equipment is computed in Watts and in British Thermal Units (BTU) equivalents.

Watt = current x voltage

BTU/hr = Watts x 3.14

Power consumed by the device is dissiapated as heat, which in turn requires cooling. One also needs to determin the cooling power needed for the data center.

Cooling power required is dependent on the total power consumed by all the devices + lighting + the data center room charateristics. As a rule of thumb, 12,000 BTU/hr requires one ton of cooling.

Providing sufficient cooling is essential for running the datacenters reliably. If the cooling systems fail, over heating of servers/devices can cause fires and complete damage to the data center equipment. Therefore early warning systems are usually installed in the data center, and the actual cooling system deployed will be greater than the theoritical requirement. In addition, the local city fire departments also have several guidelines for datacenter cooling & insulation standards.

It is therefore not possible in this article to give an exact calculation of the cooling requirements, however the calculations given below can be used as a rough guide to estimate the cooling needs. For complete accuracy you should consult qualified air conditioning equipment specialist or installer.

Calculating Heat Load

The amount of heat generated is known as the heat gain or heat load. Heat is measured in either British Thermal Units (BTU) or Kilowatts (KW). 1KW is equivalent to 3,412BTUs.

The heat load depends on a number of factors:

The floor area of the room
The size and position of windows, and whether they have blinds or shades
The number of room occupants (if any)
The heat generated by equipment
The heat generated by lighting

Floor Area of Room

You must take into account those factors that apply in your circumstances and adding them together a reasonably accurate measure of the total heat can be calculated.

Room Area

The amount of cooling required depends on the area of the room. To calculate the area in square metres:

Room Area BTU = Length (m) x Width (m) x 337

Window Size and Position

If, as is quite common, your Server Room has no windows, you can ignore this part of the calculation. If, however there are windows you need to take the size and orientation into account.

South facing Window BTU = South Facing window Length (m) x Width (m) x 870

North facing Window BTU = North Facing windows Length (m) x Width (m) x 165

If there are no blinds on the windows multiply the result(s) by 1.5.

Reverse the constant multiplier - if you are living in the southern hemisphere.

Add together all the BTUs for the windows.

Windows BTU = South Window(s) BTU + North Window(s) BTU

Occupants

Purpose built Server Rooms don't normally have people working in them, but if people do regularly work in your Server Room you will have to take that into account. The heat output is around 400 BTU per person.

Total Occupant BTU = Number of occupants x 400

Equipment

Clearly most heat in a Server Room is generated by the equipment. This is trickier to calculate that you might think. The wattage on equipment is the maximum power consumption rating, the actual power consumed may be less. However it is probably safer to overestimate the wattage than underestimate it.

Add together all the wattages for Servers, Switches, Routers and multiply by 3.5.

Equipment BTU = Total wattage for all equipment x 3.5

In our example above - the datacenter will need ~37 tons of cooling capacity - i.e,.442,897 BTUs

Lighting

Take the total wattage of the lighting and multiply by 4.25.

Lighting BTU = Total wattage for all lighting x 4.25

Total Cooling Required = Sum of all BTUs.

Total Heat Load = Room Area BTU + Windows BTU + Total Occupant BTU + Equipment BTU + Lighting BTU

This is the amount of cooling required so you need one or more air conditioning units to handle that amount of heat.

AC capacity is marked in tons - 1 ton of cooling = 12,000 BTUs. So depending on the total BTU of your data center, you can choose the cooling systems.

Go Green - Green IT initiative with Virtualization

2011-04-17T18:25:00.000Z

In the IT industry it is a common knowledge that the Data Centers are a significant consumer of power in the world today. At most of the IT offices more than half the power consumed is at the data center. The data center is critical for the business, but they also energy inefficient, using only 30% for computation, the rest 70% of the electricity lost due to inefficiencies of power and heat dissipation and associated power cooling equipment.

As a result, there is a huge opportunity to reduce power consumption in the data center, but that is not so easy. The business needs is driving up the computing demands, the power consumption by servers is increasing as manufacturers are packing more CPUs per blades, and with smaller blades - more blades into a rack. As a result the power density of a rack has increased 800% in the last decade. The individual tower servers that was popular in year 2000, has now been replaced with 1U blades which can pack 60 blades per rack.

This rapid increase in power density implies higher energy usage to power these racks and that also means more power is needed to cool these racks. In fact about 50% of the power consumed in a data center is used for cooling only, about 10% of power is used for lighting systems and power converters, so means that only about 40% of the power is actually used by the computing devices (servers, network, & storage). Even within the servers, power is consumed by the cooling fans and power supplies - thus only a small fraction of power is really used for actual computing.

In the new green era, people have started to worry about the power usage, the mounting electricity bill and the growing concern about the carbon footprint & the corporate social responsibility initiatives. As a result, companies are looking at several new initiatives to reduce power consumption - such as virtualization & cloud computing.

Virtualization & Cloud computing initiatives can save power consumption by optimizing server utilization. Virtualization allows for server optimization by eliminating old & inefficient servers, increasing the server utilization to 95% and above. This when coupled with higher energy efficiency of newer blade servers and reduced cooling requirements can result in a power saving of 70-80% - for the same workload.

At one data center, the monthly electricity power bill dropped from ~14 Lakhs to 4 Lakhs per month. This saving in power bill alone gave an ROI of 21% on the virtualization project.

VMware vSphere 4.0 has become the preferred platform for data center virtualization, and with vSphere 4.0, x86 based blade servers & Nexus switches it is possible to create a 100% virtualized data centers, where all the work loads are running on virtual machines. A single quad core blade server can support 30-40 virtual machines, thus deliver a flexible, dynamic environment with many additional operational efficiencies, including business continuity, rapid provisioning, automation, and standardized operating procedures.

With increasing oil & energy prices and shareholders demand to lower operating costs, and the public demand to lower energy consumption - Virtualization is no longer an option. It is an absolute necessary. There is a true "green" benefit in setting up a virtual data center - that goes beyond reducing power consumption & reducing the carbon footprint. The other benefits are:

Increase application uptime
Improve customer satisfaction
Improve quality of service
Faster response time to customer requirements
Reduce infrastructure management overheads
Better compliance standards

Closing Thoughts

Virtualization of the data center is just the first step towards a "Green" IT, this can be followed up with several other steps to reduce the carbon footprint. Desktop virtualization, Data Deduplication for Backup & disaster recovery, SQL consolidation, VoIP & integrated media gateways, TelePresence infrastructure etc., can give big dividends in both cost reduction and lowering of carbon foot prints.

Go Green - Start with yourself First

2011-04-17T13:08:00.003Z

'Be the change you wish to see in the world' - Mahatma Gandhi

In the last several years I am noticing a rapid decline in flora & fauna around me. A decade ago, Bangalore had lot more trees, lot more birds, and a lot more wild animals. In the last decade the following animals have gone extinct in Bangalore city - Sparrow, Frogs, Crabs, Vultures, Robin. Several other species are on the verge of disappearing in the city: Crows, Squirrel, Parrots, Crane, Cuckoo, Fishes, Owls, Vultures, honey bees, bats, snakes, etc.

The root of this problem is over exploitation of nature. Human population has exploded in the last decade resulting in exponential increase in air pollution, water shortage, noise pollution, Electromagnetic pollution, soil pollution etc. Today if one looks at the Virshabavathi river that flows in Kengeri, the river is nothing but a toxic soup of all possible pollutants, and the stench is so strong that even stray dogs do not venture near that river. At this rate, the city will grow itself into an Armageddon - resulting in mass extinction of all other animal and plant species.

We are close to wiping out much of the planet's wild life. At the current rate, the India's national animal - Tiger will be extinct in the wild within the next decade, and along with it will go the elephants, leopards, cheetah & lions. At the same time, we are close to wiping out the entire marine life as well. Our forests are being decimated. The once fertile agricultural lands are being converted into barren land. The rivers are being killed with fertilizer & pesticide run-offs.

If we want to avoid this doomsday scenario, we can. We need to change our lifestyle to be more environment conscious ourselves first, and then expect others to do the same. It is relatively easy to green at the first level - small changes in lifestyle will lead to big gains. For example, not using air conditioning in summer, or using a scooter/bike instead of a car has a big impact on the amount of fuels consumed and the consequent drop in CO2 emissions.

To avoid this dooms day, we need to change, and we need to change fast. To begin with, we must reduce our pollution foot print. Irrespective of where you are in the economic ladder, you can reduce the pollution you are creating. A small change in your behavior will have a big impact to the world, much like the little rain drops can form an ocean.

By going green, you can force the companies to become green, force the government to enact laws to discourage pollution and finally become a role model for your children. It all has to start with you as an individual.

The first steps

As individual, you can take few simple easy to do steps to become greener and save the planet. These simple steps can have big impact.

1. Do with less:

Today's biggest environmental problems are due to excessive consumption. People in USA & Europe consume way too much, and this excessive consumption is being promoted as "developed" lifestyle - which people in developing countries are trying to imitate. This excessive consumption will destroy this planet and we need to stop this consumption first.

You can start anywhere. Take a look at your wardrobe and if you are reading this blog, I can take a wild bet that you have more than 7 sets of clothes. In my opinion having more clothes is a sheer waste. Mahatma Gandhi had two sets of clothes, he would wash every day and wear the other set. While this kind of simplicity may be too tough for us, the ordinary folks. But I am sure that we can definitely do with less. In my personal life, I have taken a route to reduce the number of clothes, over the last one year - I have donated/discarded half of my clothes, shoes, & books. The objective was to reduce my cub board/shelf space usage in the house by half.

Making all those new cars, gadgets, clothes etc., eats up raw materials & energy. Instead learn to live with less. Where ever it is possible, try to use secondhand or recycled products. There is no shame is using second hand products - instead be proud of using second hand products as you are saving the planet. For example, at Go Green Works office - All the furniture we used are second hand. The work shed was also build with second hand steel. All the computers & printers are second hand - and we are proud of it.

Remember, minimize buying. Instead try to reuse & recycle. Reducing - living with less is the best and simplest solution.

2. Opt for greener products

The next step is to change your buying habit. When ever you walk into a shop to buy something, look around for alternatives and buy the one which has the least environmental foot print. You can start with groceries.

Opt for local produce

For example, choose the locally grown fruits over the imported ones. I am sure that the apples grown in Himachal Pradesh as just tasty as imported Fuji apples. Similarly opt for vegetables/grains grown in the local area. I am sure we all can live happily with the local food. Similarly the local Nandini butter is just as good as Amul butter, but Amul butter has to be shipped all the way from Gujrat. So its greener to choose Nandini over Amul.

There is really no need for food that has to be transported hundreds of kilometers. Just think of the fuel that is wasted to just transport that food. by choosing local foods over imported or food that has to be transported hundreds of kilometers - you will save tons of pollution.

When buying food, first understand where it is produced, and then choose the one that is produced closer to your house.

Opt for products with less packaging

Industrially produced food products tend to use excessive packaging. For example cookies produced by Danisk uses a Tin box, paper to wrap individual cookies, a box is sealed in a shrinking plastic cover. Compare this with the cookies from neighborhood bakery who uses just a simple plastic cover, and he more than willing to pack the cookies in your box if can carry it to his shop. While shopping carry a reusable cloth bag & avoid plastic bags. Where ever possible take a cloth bag to avoid plastic bags.

When it comes to packaging, note that paper packaging is better than plastic, recycled paper is better than virgin paper, reusable cloth bags (made of Jute/cotton) is better than recycled paper. So at any given moment, always opt for the greener option.

For example, today I was thirsty and for a minute I thought of drinking a soft drink, but then I thought again of the choices I had: Soft drink Vs Packaged Fruit juice Vs Tender coconut Vs Fresh fruit Juice Vs Bottled water Vs Filtered water. I went through the choices - and I knew I could reach home in next 5 minutes, so I opted for filtered water at home. This was the best green solution, not only it was green, it also save money and it was also very healthy. Other choices had calories & chemicals which are harmful for my health.

Make a deliberate attempt to choose products which use less packaging, less transportation when buying.

3. Reduce energy, chemicals, water wastage

At the personal level, going green means consuming less of everything. This includes electricity, fuels, chemicals & water. Use of fuel efficient vehicles. Use a bike or a scooter whenever possible instead of a car, use public transport instead of a scooter, Walk when ever possible. At homes use the most efficient lighting - LED lights or CFL lights, use a lower wattage bulbs where ever possible.

I live in Bangalore & I do not use Air-conditioning at home. At office I don't have a choice - the central AC is always on. I have made a pledge not to use air conditioning or air coolers in my home. I use the fan instead. Even in fans, a table top fan is more energy efficient than roof fan. Back in 2000-2003 when I lived in Texas, I used a table box fan in summer and avoided using AC. It was both being eco friendly and it saved money. It was a little uncomfortable in the heat, but after a while one gets used it.

As a first step, write down the electricity used in the last month & make a pledge to reduce electricity consumption by 10% in one month - without compromising on the quality of lifestyle. Similarly reduce your gas/petrol bill by 10%.

We tend to waste quite a bit of water. Though we Indians consume just 5% of water used by an average Americans, there is still some room to save water. Just look at your life and see how you can reduce the water usage - in particular look at how you can prevent wastage of water - in terms of rain water harvesting, recycling waste water for gardens etc.

At Go Green Works, we set up a rain water harvesting tank into which all the rain water drains into & recharges the water table.

If you are reading this blog on Internet, then I would bet that you are likely to have a car - and that means you have several opportunity to reduce your water/fuel usage.

Another pollutant we use is - Chemicals. Unknowingly we use lots of chemicals in our daily lives - mostly for cleaning purpose. Floor cleaning phenyl, dirt removers, detergents, etc. It may not be easy to reduce chemical usage as it requires deliberate actions to reduce chemical usage.

Start with cleaning things with natural cleaning agents - such as lemon juice, vinegar, baking soda, etc. or other organic cleaning agents.

Natural cleaning products offer environmentally sound, cost-efficient alternatives to the toxic and potentially lethal household cleaning products used in many homes today. Use of these natural options is especially critical as most traditional cleaning products eventually contact the air, water, and/or soil, where they can cause significant and irreparable harm to animals, plants, drinking water, and food supplies.

The green mantra with chemicals goes like this: Avoid, Substitute and Minimize.

First try to avoid using chemicals. There are several chemicals we can avoid using: Room freshners, insect repellents, insecticides. If you can't avoid using a chemical - try using an organic alternative - especially for cleaning. Use of flowers or natural oils instead of room freshners, or use of incense sticks instead of mosquito repellents etc. Search on Internet & you can find lots of organic alternatives to chemical agents.

Finally if you can't avoid using a particular chemical, then minimize its use. Use such chemicals as sparingly as possible. Consuming fewer chemicals will reduce indoor air pollution and give a healthier life - with fewer problems like asthma, allergies, cancer etc.

Go Green & live better

A green lifestyle is a better & healthy lifestyle. By going green, you will notice that you have actually reduced the pollution around you - and that immediately translates to better health. Green lifestyle calls for walking - which is beneficial to your health.

It takes only three weeks to create a new habit. Start today and over the next few weeks - you may find it difficult to be green, but then once you have created this habit of being green - you will feel proud of yourself. Don't fret about things you don't control - i.e., a factory polluting a river. Such things will require a bigger action - which a single individual can feel helpless. Start with taking responsibility of your own pollution, and then you will slowly create a moment that can stop that factory.

Do what you can for the nature. Focus on what you can do, and do not lament on things that you can't. Don't blame on others for not doing your bit, do what you can do now, try and influence other to adapt a greener lifestyle. Even if you are doing it only half the time is better than doing nothing. And once you have successfully built a green habit, be proud of it and talk about it to all your friends and at every possible occasion. Soon they too will join you in the green lifestyle.

Going Green also means saving money & our planet. Most of the green choices you make today actually help you consume less and that saves lots of money. In today's world - we often confuse consumption with lifestyle, but the reality is that excessive consumption is unhealthy and thus leads to a poorer lifestyle. Once you come out of the high consumption treadmill, you will find that your life has become simpler, a lot less stressful and more enjoyable.

It is time to change and you have to change your habits/lifestyle first. There are several things you can do as an individual to help protect nature.

Learn to love nature

As one starts to adapt to a green lifestyle, one will also learn to love nature. You will soon learn how your pollution is killing nature and is also harming you. In the initial stages it may be tough for you to adapt to a greener lifestyle and in such moments - take a walk in the park or in a forest/wooded area. Think about how you can help you children live a better life, how wild animals can survive and flourish, and this simple act will give you the required strength to change for a green lifestyle.

When I look at my life and compare that with my father's life and compare with my grandfather's lifestyle, I find that in last 10-15 years I have created more pollution than what my grandfather did in his entire lifetime. My father consumes half as much as me and lives a better life than me. To me, this means only one thing. I still have a long way to go in terms of fully embracing a green lifestyle.

Be happy with less

We, as consumers have been constantly being bombarded with marketing messages to consume more and that consumption is also being seen a necessity and a symbol of wealth. But what many people do not realize is that most of this consumption is wasteful consumption which makes people poorer and leaves them worse off both economically and ecologically.

It takes a lifestyle change to get used to living with less and you can still have the same quality of life - but you are now being ecologically friendly.

Once you get off the high consumption treadmill, you will feel relived of all the stress that comes with the high consumption. This will lead to a happier and a better life.

Ecological Footprint

The ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. It compares human demand with planet Earth's ecological capacity to regenerate. It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate the resources a human population consumes and to absorb and render harmless the corresponding waste. Using this assessment, it is possible to estimate how much of the Earth (or how many planet Earths) it would take to support humanity if everybody lived a given lifestyle. For 2006, humanity's total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.4 planet Earths – in other words, humanity uses ecological services 1.4 times as fast as Earth can renew them.

India's ecological footprint is 0.91 - i.e., it takes 0.91 hectares of land per individual to sustain his lifestyle. Given India's huge population and limited land availability translates to a deficit of 0.50 hectares per person. i.e., each one of us are consuming more than what the land (available per person) can produce - this in essence we are borrowing from our future generation so that we can consume today - leaving our children with a huge ecological deficit and a depleted land. See: Ecological Footprint of countries

Closing Thoughts

Going Green is not a government initiative. The responsibility for a sustainable planet lies with every individual. If everyone starts to have a green lifestyle, it will naturally change the government and corporate companies. It is our responsibility to save and protect this planet for our children and for generations to come. So you too can start now and change your life for the better by embracing a green lifestyle.

Entrepreneurship - Avoid the following hiring mistakes

2011-01-28T16:55:00.001Z

In last 3 years I have seen several startups set up shop in Bangalore. Over this period of time, I have seen several hiring disasters. These hiring mistakes are specific to Indian culture and are common in many startups. But these disasters could have been avoided. I am therefore documenting them here.

1. Hiring from big name organizations for experience

Business was expanding rapidly, the company had lots of orders and to deliver them, there was great need for experienced project managers. The company hired three experienced project managers. These new employees had the right credentials and experience on working on complex projects at IBM, Accenture & Philips. The new employees had no experience working in a start up, the start up lacked systems to support its new employees - as a result the new project managers quit within few weeks putting the project in jeopardy. The founder had to scramble in the end to get the projects completed.
Experienced project managers were used to working in large well established organizations and could not adjust to the new working environment. As a result new project managers and the start up never got along. Project managers wanted a lot in terms of systems and reports to monitor the project which the company could not provide. There was absolute mismatch between the new project managers style of functioning and the company.
Hiring people based only on their past experience will not work for startups. It is essential to hire people who have experience working in startups or in a startup like environments, and there should be a cultural fit between the founders and experienced employees.

2. Hiring friends and family members

Founder of one company had hired his friend after two years of operations. By then the company was doing quite well, and was cash flow positive. He was hired on social pressure - to help his friend. The new employee often flaunted his friendship with the founder, would often bypass the organization hierarchy, and soon began to boss over other employees. This led to fall in morale and productivity in the organization. Over a period of time, the company started loosing its existing customers and only then the founder woke up to the reality. He now had to make a difficult decision of firing his friend to save the company.
Hiring friends or relatives is acceptable only if they can perform. In a startup, the hiring costs have to be minimized and founders like to hire people whom they know. But when these friends/relatives do not perform, then the founder must take swift action - either to correct the errant employee or by firing.

3. Hiring some one to please others

In India, there can be lot of undesired political advances on any organizations. One of the common tactics is to request a startup to hire persons recommended by the local politician. This leads to an uncomfortable situation for the entrepreneur. He cannot afford to antagonize the politician & often succumbs to hiring the "recommended" candidate. This new hire soon becomes a liability to the organization - thus bleeding the company of its valuable resources. Startups which have faced this problem eventually will end up firing the errant employee and thereby facing the wrath of the local politician or end up creating a constant drain on their resources.

Founders must make a clear decision on the terms of hiring such "recommended" employees - and workout an agreement with various stake holders - including the "recommended" employee & his sponsor on the terms of employment and termination criteria. Smart entrepreneurs turn this bad situation into an advantage - by seeking out favors from the politician/sponsor to grow their business.

4. Hiring house wives or students to cut costs

Many people are willing to take a lower salary in return for having the flexibility or opportunity to work from home. For a startup, this represents a significant cost savings - but such savings typically come with several hidden costs.

In India, housewives & students seek part time or full time employment - for tasks that they can do from their homes. Hiring such employees creates lots of management overheads and introduces risks to projects - in terms of delivery timelines and quality. Often times house wives and students are driven by different priorities and may not be in a position to complete their tasks in a timely manner. This could potentially upset the delivery timelines and project schedules. So for critical projects, such part time or work-from-home employees are best avoided.

Hiring house wives or students is not necessarily a bad thing. But for a startup, it can create several overheads in terms of management - that the cost savings are often washed out by management overheads. Once the company has established a process to manage house wives or students, then only it makes sense to use such resources. But this takes both time and management expertise - which many startups do not possess.

5. Hiring rapidly to scale up operations

A startup got an order to setup a media BPO operations. This project required getting 20 people hired and trained in screening cable TV channels for particular advertisements and creating reports in a predefined format. The task was simple enough for high school graduates. So the company put out advertisements in local paper and hired the first 20 people who accepted the offer. Many of the new hires had no experience working in a regular 9AM-5PM job. As a result many of the new employees quit within few weeks. Company was now desperate to staff up the operations to avoid slippage on delivery. Again the company hired few others - who too were fresh out of school, and they too quit. After a few cycles of hiring, company learnt its lesson and in next hiring cycle, the company hired the right set of employees. In the process, company wasted money, and time - but could prevent loss of customer.
Hiring rapidly for a project is mandatory, but do not cut short on the required due diligence - do not trade quality of hires for lack of time.

Closing thoughts

Hiring is a critical activity in a startup - which can make or break the company. Startups should be very careful in hiring. Getting a wrong hire can cost a lot for the startup and if the mistakes are not corrected quickly, the business can be severely damaged.

Entrepreneurship & Size of the Business - Story of Reva

2011-01-22T06:30:00.002Z

Over the weekend I was reading the book "Connecting the Dots" by Rashmi Bansal. In that book, there was the story of Chetan Maini & his "Reva Electric Car" . My wife owns a Reva car, and I am an adherent fan of Reva car. The story of Chetan Maini as mentioned in the book had to be read with the fact that Chetan Maini sold the controlling share of the company to Mahindra & Mahindra.

For many Reva fans, this was a good news. For Reva Electric Car Company, this was a major step towards becoming a success in the global stage. From a business & leadership point of view, Chetan Maini did the right thing by getting Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd as an investor in his nascent electric car company. Reva is the largest selling electric car in the world in terms of volume - but when compared to the scale of automobile industry, Reva cars account of less than 0.01% of the market.

As a business, Reva electric cars was operating at a sub-optimal scale and to be successful commercially, they needed to expand on production capacity and on dealership networks - but all this needs huge investments which Chetan Maini could not raise internally. This implied that he had to get an investment partner with automobile background and that partner happened to be Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd. With this move, Reva electric car company (now renamed as Mahindra-Reva Electric Car company) is on the move to become a large company.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs

In the world of business, it is common to see large companies buying out smaller ones. Here in this blog, I want to talk about the fundamentals of entrepreneurship & leadership needed to take a small startup on the path of becoming a big company.

Startups are of two types:

1) Lifestyle Startups: which cannot grow big - typically ends up as a Small or medium scale enterprise.

2) Enterprise Startups: Ones that can grow into a big business (say revenues of more than $100Million/year)

Small/medium business are typically run by individuals and the business is their sole source of income. These businesses are called as "lifestyle" business - as the venture is designed/built to support the lifestyle of the promoters/owners. These lifestyle startups typically start by serving a known set of customers and offer a known set of products/services. Once the business model is worked out, the business becomes profitable and the profits are used to maintain the lifestyle of the promoters. About 80% of all business fall in this category.

In case of Reva, it was not designed to be a small scale business. Reva is an enterprise startup - the one with a potential to grow into a Multi-Billion Dollar Business!

All startups have the potential to grow into a big business. Even simple sandwich shop can grow into multi-billion dollar venture - provided the leaders have the right vision and management skills.

In case of Reva, the founders had done all the right things to position the company on the path of becoming a big business. Let me explain little more about this.

Reva was started when the concept of commercially viable - street worthy electric cars was not viable. Reva was started at a stage when there were two major unknowns: unknown customer base, unknown features/functionality. Over a period of time, Reva worked on these two unknowns over 12 years to produce a car that would appeal to certain market segment. In order to do that, Reva had to:

1. Invent a business model - i.e. get vendors, channel partners etc.

2. Develop the product that meets the market requirement.

3. Develop a repeatable sales model

4. Build a team of capable managers.

It takes a high risk appetite to invest in a company that is yet to develop a business model. In other words - the startup at this stage needs a significant amount of risk capital. Reva managed to raise this "risk-capital" by raising debt financing of ~$3million in year 2000. With this funds and vision, Reva started off as a "startup".

Over the period of next six years, Reva managed to identify a small segment of customers - mainly in UK & Bangalore. Reva managed to sell ~1000 cars in Europe. By this time, Reva had to build the infrastructure that set Reva on path of becoming a large company. This involved setting up marketing systems, accounting systems, IT systems, and business measurement systems to manage the business. In the process Reva achieved a major milestone - Reva managed to validate market for electric cars through customer discovery, customer validation, get features/price trade-off worked out.

At this point, Reva was ready for its first major infliction point to start its journey to become a large company. This transition needed more capital, and Reva managed to raise a venture capital of $20 million in December 2006 from VCs.

Reva now had to build a scalable business - which implied setting up a new factory, identifying distribution & supply partners, implemented enterprise class ERP/IT, develop next generation technologies that were needed to address the needs of a much larger customer base. Reva invested in a new factory with a planned capacity of 30,000 cars per year (up from 3000 cars/year), developed a new model "Reva i" which was a major enhancement over its predecessor.

By 2009, Reva had set up a professional management in place, sales was taking off, and was ready for the big step. That big moment happened in September 2009 when General Motors licensed its technology for developing Chevy Spark.

At this stage, Reva was ready to transition from a "startup" to becoming a "large company". This transition needed a major change - the company had to join hands with a big player who could invest $200 million or more into the venture to make Reva Electric car company into a global player.

Mahindra & Mahindra was that partner who could invest big money needed to take Reva cars on the big stage & launch Reva cars all over the world. Typically during the transition, it is time for the founders to move out of management and let the company be managed by professionals. Here again, Reva founder - Chetan Maini did the right thing by handing over leadership to G.P. Goenka, who is the new Chairman of the board, and making Chandramouli as COO.

Now Reva Electric Car Company is ready for big time & is on firm path to become a large successful enterprise.

The new leadership has its job cutout: Make the company profitable, launch new products to widen the customer base, achieve rapid scale, hire more people and expand the business.

Closing Thoughts

Entrepreneurs typically start a company and set the company on the path of becoming a large business. Becoming a large company is a long arduous journey which many startups fail to complete. It takes capable leadership, excellent execution and above all sheer guts to go through the journey. And at the end, the founders must have the confidence to pass on the leadership to professional team and step aside for the new team to make their startup a truly large company. The story of Reva Electric Car is a text book case of entrepreneurship and management.

Note: I got the details of investments numbers from the book "Connecting the Dots" by Rashmi Bansal.

Product Management in Startups

2011-01-04T07:45:00.000Z

India has seen several great success stories in the technology world - particularly in computer software. But almost all the success stories has been in services and very few - a handful of success in software products. In last 3+ years I have seen about 200+ startups in Bangalore region alone. Many of these startups died along the way and those that survived had transformed to IT services companies.

What ails Indian Startups?

There are two main reasons for death of Indian startups: Lack of funding and lack of product management capabilities. In many cases, the lack of product management capabilities has led to cash burn - which in turn leads to lack of funds & inability to raise funds - thus killing the venture.

The eco-system needed for a successful startups in India is still evolving. The main deficit in the eco-system has been lack of product management discipline. In Indian startups, most founding are from services background - as a result, the organization gets built on a services mindset - which in a product world turns fatal.

Startups are often centered around an idea - usually this idea comes from the founders - who will form the company, get some funding and hire people to develop that idea into a finished product. But along the way, other stake holders jump in with their own additions to the orginal idea. And at this point, the company ususally makes the fatal mistake of adding new ideas/features/functionality into the product which results in a grandiose product that will never see the light of the day. The product requirements would have bloated - and engineering teams are burning cash trying to implement all the features before they can launch the product. The product launch gets delayed which causes more cash burn. And finally, if the product is finally released, customers don't like it as it has too many features that they do not need and that would often be the final nail in the coffin.

To understand the importance of product management in startups, one needs to understand the basis of a start up: I got a "Great Idea" & "I am the end user"

Great Idea Syndrome

The most common trigger for starting a venture is an idea. Founders of the company develop an idea for a business, and have a strong itch to make it happen. Founder(s), jump on the idea and start off a business. Here in lies the first fundamental flaw of the start up - they started the company without validating their "Great Idea".

The business has been started without proper validation of the real customer use cases and without validating the idea. In their eagerness to start the venture fail to check with the actual customers.

The fundamental aspects of product management - What are the basic business life cycles in this business? Who are the actual users? Who will pay for this product? What are the real life problems customers have? When, Where & who will buy the product? What is their buying process?

These basic aspects of product management must be answered before starting the venture. Though these things looks like basic common sense, it is shocking to find out that many startups do not have answers to these questions.

The basic process of validating the product idea is a must for any venture. The process of validating the product idea is not an one time affair either - it needs to be constantly revisited during the course of product development just as check to see if the product development is on the right track and the external market conditions are still conducive for the product.

I am the end user syndrome

As the founders are often hypnotized by their great idea - they begin to think "I am the end user" and start developing the product in a world seperated from reality. Having a proper product mangement discipline will ensure that the real customer needs are being addressed in the product development process.

This problem of not understanding the customer is more acute in start up where the founders have deep technical expertise in their field. The founders are so deeply aware of the technical issues and often make an assumption that the problem they are seeing is what everybody sees, and hence end up developing a solution that solved the problem envisioned by the founders - but failed to solve the real customer problems.

In case of high tech product startups, the most common product failure happens with the product usability. (This happens more in software companies than in other areas.). Since the founders are experts in their area, they tend to think that if they can use the product, then the whole world can use it in the same way.

Founders fail to understand that the rest of the world are not as knowledgeable as assumed, and customers really do not want to memorize a 20 different options in a command line to use the product.

The end result of not developing a product that customers can't use and that kills the product.

Real hard nosed product management discipline is needed here to avoid "If I can use it, the whole world can" attitude in the startups. Product must be designed with the average end user in mind and there must be strong will to over come the "I am the end user syndrome"

Discipline of Product Development

Once the decision to develop a new product is taken, the next step is to have a product devleopment plan - starting with a product feature prioritization for various releases, project planning, writing up a product requirement document, developing product design specifications, project execution etc. All these activities need strong product mangement skills to address the challenges of product development:

1. Write up a market requirement document which documents the customer requirements over a period of time - typically a 2-3 year time frame.

2. Convert the market requirements into product roadmap which is a phased approach to meet the market requirements through series of releases.

3. Product roadmap then drives project plans. Project plan is a time bound activity to implement the prioritized features for the planned releases.

4. Continiously scout the market to study the market needs - and identify any changes in the customer requirements. Conduct market research to ensure that the product being developed is actually what the customers really want.

5. Product roadmap and a phased release mechanisms will will help manage sales pressure - by developing the important features first and avoiding scope creep.

6. Run alpha/beta programs at customer sites - to evaluate the product acceptance.

7. Direct the creation of product documentation and marketing collateral required for product launch.

8. Gauge the product's acceptance in the market, and make changes to roadmap accordingly to make the subsequent releases better accepted in the market.

Closing Thoughts

Startups ecosystem in India are still evolving & as of today there is a general lack of product management discipline in startups. In any startup the first order of the day is to figure out the market requirements. The need for product management is needed for both small & large companies. Large companies can afford to a few mis-steps in product development cycle & can wait around for few versions, but a startups cannot afford to get it wrong. Startups need a much greater discipline when it comes to product management inorder to be successful in the market place.

Entrepreneurship as Core Competence

2010-10-17T17:30:00.003Z

Google recently announced a massive investment of $1.5 Billion into a new venture - to build an offshore wind power farm powerline transmission project. Google has also invested $38.8 Million in two wind farms in Dakota. Google said it is making the investment because it thinks it will offer a solid financial return while being good for the environment. As Google's cash pile crosses $30 billion, the company is expanding beyond its traditional Internet business to diversify into other promising areas - such as green energy.

This is an interesting development that other cash rich companies should take note of.
In every business, once a company reaches a point of saturation - where the business starts to generate more cash than what the company can invest profitably, then the company must look at diversification or give out dividends to reward investors. Having a huge cash hoarding is a clear sign of management failure - both the management & the board has failed.

Companies such as Microsoft, GE, Intel and several other technology companies are guilty of such gross management failures. In my opinion, having a huge cash hoard which earns 1-2% interest is a crime. Such an action can only indicate that the management has run out entrepreneural spirit and have big insecurity that is forcing them to hoard cash. Instead it is best to invest the cash into new business ventures or give it out as dividends.

Looking at this problem from Indian point of view, I would like to point out at Indian entrepreneurs - Ratan Tata, Mukesh Ambani, Anil Agrawal, Kumaramangalam Birla, Azim Premji, Laxmi Mittal, Venugopal Dooth, Anand Mahindra and host of others.
These Indian entrepreneurs have built multiple businesses which are highly diversified, they have invested in multiple ventures and all these companies are not sitting on huge pile of cash.

Take Dhurubhai Ambani for example, he has invested the cash from Textiles business and invested in polyester plants. Later he invested the cash coming from textiles and polyester business into petrochemicals, and petroleum - oil/gas extraction & refining business. Mukesh Ambhani - who succeeded Dhurubhai Ambani continued to diversify into retail, telecom, power, real estate sectors. Similarly Anand Mahindra has diversified Mahindra & Mahindra Company - which was traditionally into automobiles into Software services, Banking and Financial services.
Indian business leaders have displayed higher levels of entrepreneurship and have invested the cash generated by their business into other ventures that has given investors a higher rate of return. The end result, the shareholders have been richly rewarded. Just look at the Indian stock market returns in last 10 years & you will see an average of 500% return on investments for these companies.

This is in sharp contrast to the returns earned by shareholders of Intel*(-62.5%), GE*(-51%), Cisco*(-63%), EMC* (-66%) & Microsoft* (-51%).

On the other hand US companies that have invested their cash and expanded their business have given a better return to the investors : Coca Cola* (27%), Oracle* (20%), HP** (90%), Amazon* (250%), Google* (310%), Berkshire Hathway (270%) & Apple* (1000%)

Entrepreneurship Failure

The cash hoard is a clear symbol of entrepreneurship failure of the leaders of these companies. The CEO & the board of Microsoft, Intel, GE & others have failed in terms of being entrepreneurial and have failed to invest & launch new businesses, instead they have become trustees. I must admit that they have done a very good job as trustees.

In the long run, the shareholders will force the company to give out its cash as dividends or as share buy backs. Once the cash hoard is emptied, and if the business environment changes, these companies become weak and steadily decline into irrelevance. (Take the case of GM or Chrysler or ICI or Polaroid)

The only thing that can keep a business organization in constant investments and expansion - which allows companies to reinvent itself and flourish. GE was once a great company which expanded from its core base of electric appliances and light bulbs to Finance, Aero engines, plastics & chemicals, entertainment. But in the last two decades GE has lost its entrepreneurial skills.

Intel & Microsoft can be seen as classic examples of being limited to their core business, semiconductors and software. Both the companies have never invested in other business areas beyond their narrowly defined areas of core competence.

Entrepreneurship is the key.

Entrepreneurship is a key skill that keeps the business organization growing and healthy. Any successful business organization has tremendous resources at its disposal in terms of capital, management skills, business processes and people. The top leadership should be able to channel these resources into new ventures - be it in chemicals or wind farm or solar energy or wherever there are business opportunities.

In comparison, Indian & Asian companies tend to be highly entrepreneurial. The Asian business giants have succeeded in business because of their entrepreneural spirit and their risk taking ability. Tata group, Samsung, Hyundai, Reliance group, Wipro, ITC, Videocon, Airtel and several other business houses in Asia are thriving today because of their entrepreneurship coupled with their investment capital & management skills.

Closing Thoughts

The concept of core competence has limited several businesses investment options and has effectively killed entrepreneurship in several companies. In such companies stewardship - i.e., ability to preserve the company's wealth is a highly valued skill. It is noble to protect the existing wealth, and manage the current business to generate huge amounts of free cash flows. The current management thought of leaving the decision of diversification to share holders - in form of investing in different types of businesses, may not be the right approach towards wealth creation. Instead it is more efficient to leverage the current capability & capital of a cash rich business and create new business ventures - i.e., grow by diversification.
Google is showing the way ahead by investing in Wind energy, while Reliance is investing in retail, and Tata's are investing in construction, communications, and consumer products. These companies have redefined their core competence - their core competence is entrepreneurship and management skills.
Note:
* These are 10 year stock market returns
** This is for a 5 year stock market return.

Creating Intellectual Property & Projects

2009-10-30T04:14:00.001Z

Creating intellectual property (IP) is the key for success in technology industry. While this statement is taken as to the heart and is preached like a Bible, but not all companies follow it to the core. Even the greatest technology gaints - Cisco, Microsoft, Oracle, GE, EMC, Intel, have pockets of IP inefficiency - where several million dollars are spent on R&D projects which does not produce enough IP.

It is not that people in those projects did not work or were not creative. Engineers who work on R&D projects are inherently creative (though few would admit to be creative), but people in these projects are worried about operational issues such as deadlines, features, project costs, staffing, talent management etc and they ignore protection of intellectual property that they created or they have failed to create substantial IP.

Projects that have spent several million dollars and spread over an year must product substantial IP. If not there is an IP inefficiency in the project, and the project must have an IP audit to identify & protect IP.

Projects that have consumed so much resources must have solved a major problem and therefore the project team has created IP in form of solutions, and that IP must be protected. The other way to look at things is to review the IP created or used in the project and ensure that there has not been any inadvertent violation of other companies/peoples IP. Often times engineers search the Internet looking for similiar solutions and could have copied a patented design. If such a violation had taken place, the company is at risk for all legal liabilities emerging from the IP litigation.

Role of management

In a typical R&D project there will be several managers: engineering manager, project manager, product manager etc. I would recommend that the managers sit down with key stake holders at the very begining of the project and ask the questions:

What major problem is this project solving?
What competitive advantage we get with this project?
What are the opportunities for IP creation exists in this project?
Can we create white papers based on the solutions we are implementing?
How do we protect the IP rights once the product/solution is released?

Asking these questions before the project starts ensures that all managers and stakeholders are made aware of the IP being created and the need to protect the IP. Once there is a general awareness of the IP involved in the project, it is a good practice to review the answers & questions periodically to see the progress and take steps to protect the IP.

Asking those questions & having answers to them will help in a big way to create & protect intellectual properties - which is vital to gain competitive advantage in the market and enhance shareholder value.

Entreprenurship - Always create customer references

2009-10-29T16:31:00.002Z

My friend is an entrepreneur and he quit his day job at Accenture to start Purple Frame. As a startup, it is always an uphill climb to get customers in B2B world. With hard work, every startup gets a few customers in the initial days - many of these customers are also startups.

Being a startup is not easy when it comes to sales as customers do not want to risk with a new vendor. So one has to rely on contacts/friends to get that elusive first order. Once the initial orders get exhausted, the next ones are even tougher to get, and at this stage one needs to use different marketing techniques such as referrals, customer endorsements, white papers etc.

As a seller it is important to understand buyers psychology. All buyers want to feel safe & secure before placing the first order, feel comfortable during the subsequent orders, and lower costs in the long run. Once the buyer priorities are understood, buyers can take advantage of it. Buyers feel safe if they know the supplier is reliable. The importance of safety in the minds of the buyers was played upon by established players - "You wont get fired for buying IBM". Persons who make the purchase decision for the company are employees and for employees job security is important. As Robert T Kiosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, puts it "employees feel safe when they have a good paying job with benefits."

Buyers are often very reluctant to buy from unknown or new vendors. This poses the first big challenge to any startup as buyers are reluctant to do business with a new player. So the first task of the seller is to make the buyer feel safe & secure while buying from a new vendor. For established companies, approaching a new client is relatively easy. As the seller has the brand name and company reputation behind him, and he only has to deal with educating the buyer about the new company and the buying process to make the buyer feel comfortable buying from a new firm.

For a startup, the problem is more acute - as he has to deal with the twin challenges of making the buyer feel safe, secure and comfortable in order to compete with an established players.

So what should entrepreneurs do?
Entrepreneurs have to overcome this challenge to succeed in business. There are two ways:
1. Sell to a niche market and avoid competition
2. Make customers feel comfortable buying from them.

Selling to a niche market or a Blue Ocean strategy is preferred route for most startups, unfortunately the market size is also small in the niche segment. So when the market grows larger, big players jump in to spoil the party. As Geoffrey A. Moore puts it in his book - "Crossing the chasm", entrepreneurs must concentrate on the early adapters first, and then comes the chasm between early adapters & majority markets where majority of startup fail to cross over.

Companies that cross over from the niche early adapter market to the majority market are the ones who have successfully addressed the buyer needs in the majority market - i.e., have learnt how to make customers feel comfortable while buying from them.

How to make customers feel comfortable?

First, understand buyers psychology. The first need of the customer is to feel safe while buying from a new vendor, and then feel comfortable while buying. So when a vendor approaches the buyer with solid credentials & referrals (from a known/trusted source) customer will feel safe to order from a new vendor.

Corporate buyers want to feel safe and secure before buying from new vendors. The best way to make the buyers feel safe & comfortable is to approach them through referrals from people whom they know and trust.

I have always noted that satisfied customers are often willing to give references to others.
Satisfied customers willing to serve as references for your new prospects. For a startup, getting successful referrals makes a big difference between winning & losing the sale. It is therefore very important to build a system in place to get referrals, follow up in referrals and maintain the referrals.

There are six steps involved in implementing a successful referral system as part of marketing process:

Ask for referrals
Set proper expectations
Appreciate customer referrals
Avoid overuse of referrals
Stay in touch with customers
Build a referral champion

Step-1: Ask for referrals

Satisfied customers are often willing to give referrals - only if you ask for it. So make it a point to ask for referrals during the final stages of the sales process. Ideally you must pander to the customer ego and let customer talk about his/her expertise & experience in using your product. If necessary help the customer with references - work with customer to setup a meeting with a referred party etc. Satisfied customers are often eager to refer other potential customers to you. So ask for references & ask your customer's permission before you contact the referrals.

Step-2: Set proper expectations

Once you have asked for reference, make it a point to set what you expect from him/her. Please inform the customer on how you plan to use the references. i.e., do you plan to use the references in your web site, or do you intend to use it in marketing campaign, how do yo plan to approach the referred prospects etc.

If you want your customer to talk to his referral or other prospects, let the customer know in advance & set his expectations accordingly.

Also learn & understand the customer company's policies on references. Some companies need explicit approvals for its employees to give referrals. If there is process in place at the customer site, then respect the process & set expectations accordingly.

Step-3: Appreciate customer references

As a startup (and in all businesses), it is very important to keep the customer happy even after the sale. When you are asking for references, then it is even more important to keep the customer happy after the sale. Customers who give references will feel better when you really appreciate their references. Appreciation can be as simple as calling him/her up and thanking for his/her references which helped you in your venture, or giving a simple gift (please follow the laws/rules on receiving gifts at your customer company) etc.

In one case, the customer was asked to come for an all expenses paid trip to Florida and attend a conference where your product was being showcased.

Step-4: Avoid customer burnout

It is good to ask for references but don't over do it. Set a limit on how many references you can ask from any customer. Ideally 2-6 is a good number, but asking for more than 6 references will surely burnout your customer that he may stop buying from you.

Step-5: Stay in touch with customers

Customers who have given you business are customers for life. So keep in touch with the customer on continual basis even if they do not respond or communicate back. For example, if there was a new product launch, invite all your old customers. Send any news item which is of relevance to your product & of customer benefit, keep customer posted on your progress - by sending them a summary of your annual financial statements etc.

Keeping in constant touch with customers will help in getting new orders or getting new referrals. In today's world, you can use social networking sites such as linkedin, facebook etc to keep in constant touch.

Step-6: Groom & Build customer champion

Customers who give you good references can be groomed into becoming your customer champion. For example, offering free samples of the new product before it is released in the market, offer training on use/benefits of new products, Invite customer to new product launches, or invite customer to speak in conferences, invite customers to co-author white papers etc. In this process ensure that the customer learns more about your products and your company.
Actively seek feedback & other inputs from your customer champions. Incorporate their ideas/suggestions in the next version of the product/services.

Having customer champions is the best approach to marketing. Your prospects are more receptive to the messages coming from your customer than the same message coming from your sales team. So make a plan to groom & build customer champions

Closing Thoughts

Customer references is the best way to lower the resistance to buying from a new vendor. It also helps to build a solid sales pipeline and lower your marketing costs. Having a formalized process to handle customer referrals is a must - else it will just slip between the cracks. Once you have acquired the customer, treat the customer with the total value of customer in mind. Having a customer champions will help you win big deals. If you do not have customer champions then treat it like a red flag - an early warning of things going wrong.
Startups often lack a formal marketing program, so the onus of developing the customer referrals falls on sales & company leadership. Use the referral program wisely & it will give you rich dividends.