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Top technology trends to watch out for February 15, 2008
Today at the Nasscom Summit, I attended an interesting session on the top trends in technology – Bruce Richardson of AMR Research talked about some interesting trends that included the usual suspects like SaaS and 3D Internet ( Second Life etc) and some not so obvious ones such as Data Visualization and “Pedias”. Data Visualization is an area that enables a business to explore and analyze enterprise information in ways that are far beyond what technologies such as search and BI can. Bruce mentioned a company called Endeca, which has strategic investments from SAP and IBM. Endeca uses the concept Guided Summarization and has created a new technology platform – Information Access Platform- to do this. A company worth watching!
Bruce also spoke of web 2.0 applied to the enterprise world, an idea that is gaining ground and was also the theme of the Day 1 Breakaway session.
Another interesting insight from Bruce was on the need, in a country like the US with its aging population demographics, for example have an urgent need to institutionalize knowledge and this will spur the demand for KM systems.
The other speaker David Levin from United Business Media spoke of the concept of Immersive Marketing and Metaverse and showcased some cool apps developed by their company.
I could not listen completely to the 3rd speaker from British Telecom as I had to get into another session. But what I heard from Bruce in particular left with me a lot of thoughts to ponder over.
Three threads: Innovation, the Nano & web 2.0 February 15, 2008
It would’nt be too far off the mark to say that these were the common threads that ran through many sessions. If the speakers at the plenary spoke about the different facets of innovation - be it through gamechanging market play or through a globalised strategy, many speakers - from within and outside India - constantly referred to the Nano. Be it the radical price point (though Anand Mahindra pointed out at the plenary that the car may not actually retail at 100k) or the engineering innovations, suddenly an entire technology industry was looking to a company from the smokestack economy for lessons in strategy!
Other sesssions about customer interaction- be they about deepening customer relationships or transforming enterprises into more customer centric ones, every speaker turned to the new web as a key tool for achieving these objectives.
In the P2P Connect session on web 2.0, the nature of debate clearly reflected a corporate India that is ambiguous to these new technologies. Participants spoke of how companies really wished to “gag” or fire employees who were outspoken; at the other end of the spectrum, the CEO of an online services player, where one employee had posted blogs critical of the content published by his company, often critiquing language and style, said that they reacted by moving the employee to quality control, where he could put his analysis to use! Clearly a mixed bag.
Consensus however on the point that it would be well neigh impossible to regulate this medium - companies were better off adopting transparent and up front communication policies.
Reviewing Tarun Khanna’s Book, ‘Billions of Entrepreneurs’ February 15, 2008
China and India are home to one-third of the world’s population. And they’re undergoing social and economic revolutions that are capturing the best minds–and money–of Western business. In Billions of Entrepreneurs, Tarun Khanna examines the entrepreneurial forces driving China’s and India’s trajectories of development. He shows where these trajectories overlap and complement one another–and where they diverge and compete. He also reveals how Western companies can participate in this development.
Each chapter compares China and India on a broad range of factors in entrepreneurship, including access to capital, freedom and reliability of information, governmental involvement, and infrastructure. Khanna examines the landscape of big, medium, and small entrepreneurship, including rural health-care initiatives and even Bollywood.
He also describes how indigenous and foreign entrepreneurs could get a foothold, how China and India relate to their own diasporas, and how entrepreneurial activity is reshaping both countries for the better.
Engaging and incisive, this book is a critical resource for anyone working in China or India or planning to do business in these two countries.
You can listen to the podcast or read his interview at Harvard’s Working Knowledge website.
Tarun Khanna is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School in the Strategy group. He is a co-editor of the Journal of Economics and Management Strategy and the Journal of International Business Studies. He works with entrepreneurs, companies, and NGOs in emerging markets worldwide. In 2007, he was elected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.
A Mango for their Apple? February 14, 2008
One of the unusual companies at the NASSCOM summit this year is Bangalore-based Mango Technologies. The company has an unusual business strategy forthe over-crowded value -added-services space - enabling low end phones to access richer applications either over an SMS or a packet data carrier. A key constraint right now that prevents lower end phones - the ones that retail between Rd 1,000-4,000 or so - from running an OS like Symbian (that enables rich applications to be run) is the memory requirement. Mango is working on a platform that has one-tenth the memory footprint of current mobile OS’. According to CEO Sunil Maheshwari, who met up with a colleague from Prayag yesterday, the first phones with Mango tech will ship late this year. The company is currently working with chipset companies, device OEMS to bundle its software. Then the challenge will be to create a developer ecosystem to create applications for the new platform and working with telcos to get them to market and support these applications. A huge challenge ahead, but Maheshwari is unfazed. He says his company knows what has to be done to achieve this vision, and that they will get there.
In a VAS market crowded with “me-too” players, Mango stands out. Not suprising that they made it to the award list of NASSCOM’s IT Innovators.
The 5 Things That I Did Not Know About Egypt February 14, 2008
Last night’s glitzy Leadership Award ceremony was sponored by Egypt’s equivalent of NASSCOM, the ITIDA (Information Technology Industry Development Agency). I got to pick up one of their booklets where they had outlined the advantages that their country has to offer in the realm of IT. Here are 5 points that caught my fancy.
1) Egypt has one of the World’s lowest telecom costs
2) World Bank has named Egypt as the leading global economic reformer in 2007 driven by tax, customs adn financial sector reforms.
3) Egypt has a unique multilingual English, French, German Italian adn Spanish speaking talent pool, thanks to its geographic proximity to Europe.
4) Egypt is emerging as a key partner location for the Indian outsourcing sector. I was surprised to know that Satyam and Wipro have already set up their facilities there. Multinationals like Unilever, Vodafone, IBM, Microsoft, P&G are already there.
5) Egypt has one of the lowest attrition.
And here I am who kept thinking that all that Egypt has to offer is the Spinx and the pyramids!
Web 2.0 in full swing February 14, 2008
Nasscom India Leadership Forum is in full swing at Mumbai. Both the quality of sessions and that of attendees made for time well spent.
Web 2.0 is one of the hotly discussed topics and everyone is keen to see how these tools apply to their own context. Prayag met with a group representing the Pennsylvania Economic Development Group, one of whom had attended the P2P session at Nasscom on this topic. They were really excited to learn about the potential and applicability of these tools for a variety of businesses. My team and I also chatted with marketing folks of various IT companies, including Satyam, Birlasoft, TCS, Symphony Services and Wipro. I saw that there is a clear evolution in thinking around the role of marketing and some of the interesting initiatives that companies are looking at include- implementing web 2.0 based communities, thought leadership programs that map with true capabilities of the organization as well as what the market values. Overall, marketing is looking for “creative and innovative” themes and programs to make a difference to their business.
Innovation is the other theme that is being discussed with interest. In fact, today we have a P2P session on the globalization of innovation and the growing importance of India and China as innovation springs. If you are interested, do drop in at 11 am to the Networking Lounge.
While on the topic of innovation and web2.0, I learnt about a very interesting product called Brightidea(www.brightidea.com) which is an innovation pipeline management software. I ran into Biswas Nair, a long time associate, whose company Proquest Solutions (www.proquestsolutions.com) markets this product in India. The product combines a number of web2.0 ideas into its SaaS platform to provide companies with a systematic way to manage their innovation initiative. I thought this was a great concept and it is no wonder that progressive companies like Cisco, Honeywell and British Telecom are its customers.
I am really looking forward to more fruitful and interesting sessions and interactions today.
Winners of ‘Innovation in IT Awards’ February 14, 2008
NASSCOM, along with Boston Consulting Group benchmarked the Indian innovation ecosystem with leading innovation ecosystems around the world and selected the top innovators in India. While the winners were announced back on 5th Feb, the India Leadership Forum was the fitting platform to felicitate the worthy winners.
Mr.A.Raja, the Hon’ble Minister for IT and Telecommunications gave away the awards to the winners. Here, he is seen giving the award to Raj Datta and N.Krishna Kumar of Mindtree for excellence in innovation in the field of Knowledge Management.
The list of winners are:
- Comat Technologies (P) Ltd
- Financial Technologies India Ltd
- Mango Technologies Pvt Ltd
- MediaLab Asia
- Mindtree Consulting
- Mistral Solutions Pvt Ltd
- MeritTrac Services Private Limited
- Texas Instruments
Click here to download a word doc that has full information about the winners. Read more about the awards here.
A CIO’s Insight on Building and Managing Strategic Partnerships February 14, 2008
Anthony Abbattista is the Vice-President, technology solutions at AllState Insurance company that outsources a lot of work to India. They deal with multiple partners and from his many years of experience here and earlier at Accenture, offers the following advice to corporates looking at managing partnerships. Here are the four points he highlighted as important at the panel discussion on managing partnerships at the Leadership Forum.
- Whether services or products, strategic partnership requires a culture of commitment.
- Start small and scale fast.
- Choose companies that you feel comfortable working with. Relationship is everything.
- Must be willing to change ourselves and existing practices.
Collaborate or Perish – the new mantra February 14, 2008
The history of management shows that every decade or so comes along a new buzzword that threatens to transform every known paradigm and then slowly becomes just one more fad that fades away into the sunset or gets integrated into the normal processes of a firm. Management by Objectives, Total Quality Management , Business Process Reengineering are all examples of concepts that appeared truly transformational when they arrived and are now no longer seen as radical or revolutionary.
On a different plane, the progress of civilization through the years from the caveman era to the end of the last millennium had witnessed many ethnic and racial groupings leading to sometimes insular and divisive and in most cases emotionally or even physically segregated groups – the targeting of the Jews by the Third Reich and more recently the seething conflict between Shias and Sunnis are examples of such differences between two biologically similar but yet very different categories of the human race.
In the first few years of this century, what started as a small change has begun to assume a transformational form that can change the way human beings interact and collaborate on one hand and the practice of management on the other? The rapid spread of the Internet and the emergence of what is widely recognised as the new Web 2.0 version has spawned global communities integrated by common interests and causes which is moving from the earlier ‘browse and learn’ era to a truly collaborative work ethic. Wander into a cybercafé in virtually any part of the world and there would be at least one individual watching new video on Youtube, one referring to the Wikipedia, a contributory encyclopedia which in a short span has grown to ten times the size of the traditional Encyclopedia Britannica and yet one more making their life’s aspirations come true on Second Life – if you think this is Greek do ask a passing teenager!
Don Tapscott, author of ‘The Digital Economy’ in his latest book titled ‘Wikinomics’ comments that this new cornucopia of participation in the collaborative economy is a threat to the very existence of players who still hide behind the patenting of their first mover products and services and points out that ‘ordinary people and firms are linking up in imaginative new ways to drive innovation and success’. In recent years we have all heard of medical professionals putting out problems on the web to get best advice from practitioners from any corner of the world, but when you bring a researcher’s new option to the board room, the challenge of no organisation recipe being sacrosanct and every idea within the four walls of the firm being challenged by somebody sitting anonymously and providing collaborative suggestions to business problems is something that will have to be understood and embraced by all of us.
How soon will Indian firms explore the power of the community and think collaboration rather than containment – time will tell!
An Unconference on Web 2.0 and Blogging February 13, 2008
It was a refreshing change to see a complete overhaul of the usual conference format. Even if it was just for one session. When Sharad Sharma, CEO of Yahoo R&D, started the session on blogging, he intrigued the audience when he said that there won’t be a speaker. He then proceeded to say that there will be many speakers and promptly pointed his finger to the crowd. He said that the event will follow the Barcamp model where the audience is involved in the flow of the discussion. Everyone has equal right and in-fact encouraged to their points of views.
The success of an unconference likes in the participation of the audience and Sharad made for a great moderator who encouraged the crowd to open up. Understandably, in the beginning, the crowd was a bit reticent and Sharad had to force it across a few folks. That greatly helped break the ice and as the crowd warmed up, there was more points flying across than he could handle…which is always a good sign!
Most of the discussion was on blogging and Sharad started by focusing on internal blogging within an organization. While many agreed that blogging is something that’s important, there were very little corporates in India who embraced it. Amongst the reasons, the most important was the fear of lack of control over what people say. A few corporate examples were discussed and the conclusion was that there should be healthy open culture in the organization and the ability to digest and value critical feedback.
The second reason for internal blogging not taking off was the lack of interest levels amongst the employees in blogging internally. This could be a reflection of the lack of management support. The drive should come from the top and a quick look around shows that the best organizations that embrace internal blogging effectively are the ones where the CEOs or the top management understanding the value of corporate blogging.
There was a discussion if blogging is really that popular in India and is it just a hype? Sharad had a good answer to this. While he agreed that there is an element of hype, blogging will definitely go mainstream and turn out to be an important medium in a couple of years.
An employee from Logica said how the internal blog was very effective when there was a top management change. When a new CEO came on board, there was a lot of questions amongst the rank and file. The CEO, Andy Greene, started a blog to explain his stand and that helped greatly in allaying fears and explaining his vision for the company.
When Sharad pulled the plug after an hour, the crowd was just beginning to warm up and could have gone for a few more hours. The session, in terms of sheer participation, was the best of the event so far.
