Yacht Design

One of my favorite yacht design and manufacturing companies is italian called CRN yacht. They launched a new web site and just like their yachts the user interface is really cool. Check out their website at http://www.crn-yacht.com/

Check out the 2D schematics of my favorite design in their line up - "Romance"

Employees First, Customers Second - Value Maximizers

I recently read a case study surprisingly coming from a little known (internationally speaking) hardware/software company from India called HCL.  Coming from India I knew HCL from its garage phase and followed its visionary leader Shiv Nader who was instrumental in taking this organization to good heights in spite of bureaucratic controls of the late eighties.

The management philosophy they follow is 'Employees First and Customers Second'. The attempt here was not to emphasize some HR satisfaction or motivate employees to do a better job by giving benefits or even just implementing good HR policies/practices but discover within the company how employees can add value to services. The ethos behind this thinking is brilliant because adding value to existing services or adding value to bring something new into the market encouraged innovation within HCL. Added value meant higher levels of achievement among employees translated directly to the end result being transferred to the market place as a company that brought value and innovation to customers.

'Employees first' was a indeed a revelation to me because I thought customers drive the company but its not that way, a customer will pay for added value, a customer is retained because of added value and employees are the one who are directly responsible to bring that added value.  Vineet Nayar has written a book on this theme and is worth reading and the catch statement is very true - "turning conventional management upside down".

My thoughts for the day.

Sam Kurien

Mind-blowing User Interface

The future of online magazines is here...Check out Time magazine's new iPad App




And btw HTML 5 can do all this...(so says Steve!)

Sam Kurien

Purpose Maximizers

Just saw a fantastic presentation and findings of Dan Pink on what motivates people and how we can build organizations that better serve for the larger purpose of common good. I like the term he uses 'Purpose Maximizers' as they are people who are motivated by challenge, purpose, and are drawn into building something bigger than themselves. For example one of my foremost passions and purposes is to build the kingdom of God and that may translate in my realm & passion  in terms of bringing education and a biblical world view to the customers that I serve. Though this may be the purpose that drives me I still need to pay the bills and provide for my family. But the latter becomes secondary in terms of achieving something great collectively and that really becomes a motivating force/factor when you get people who are like minded in executing this purpose. I follow Bill Gates foundation and at his last speech at Harvard and TED the challenge he has been throwing out to the brightest minds is 'how are we going to solve the biggest problems of the world?' rather than be driven by the objective of a successful career or making money. He propounds that financial success will come but when you are motivated to solve the larger problems, the world becomes a better place by your small contribution which becomes a part of the larger tapestry.

Enjoy the video you will understand the idea I am rambling about.


RSA_Animate from Sam on Vimeo.
Purpose Maximizers real motivation come from challenges, significance, and the drive to put a dent in the universe.

Enjoy!!

Counter arguments on attackers of SAAS!

Recently Information Week came out with an article that SAAS models were not always the best mode to go for enterprises to switch to cloud computing and the arguments that they gave basically were the following. I have marked them in italics and counter argued my point.

Not always cheaper. My colleague John Foley writes how San Jose CIO Steve Ferguson ran the numbers and found his creaky Outlook/Office 2003 costs $1.88 per user per month, compared with about $3 he'd expect to pay for Google Apps. Our recent outsourcing survey finds most people like SaaS and cloud computing: 37% say they perform better at lower cost. But 18% say they perform better at a higher cost. That may be fine, but has any SaaS vendor given you that Cadillac sales pitch lately--that it's not cheaper but better? Even slightly cheaper might not be enough, given the potential compliance and vendor viability risks.

Agreed they are not always cheap and in many scenarios and can become costly if based on per user model but the author ignores the long term return on investments by adopting cloud computing and SAAS models .Upfront implementation costs may be on the higher side but the internet and web give unlimited opportunity to increase your user base, increased user base means more exposure, more revenue, and the ratios normally leaning more favorably to the client side that implements cloud services. One shouldn’t forget the need for business’s today is accessibility of information on both sides of the quadrant be it internally within the organization or externally satisfying customer requirements. Desktop computing and desktop applications provide a bottleneck in the speed of operations.

Every app doesn't fit the SaaS model. There's a bunch of applications that CIOs just aren't thinking about converting to services, such as graphics-intensive apps like computer-aided design and many financial and transactional apps, which tend to be latency-sensitive and hold data that companies prefer to keep on premises. It might seem like every up-and-coming software category is a shoo-in for SaaS, but consider iRise, a growth company that provides application development visualization software--and has no plans for SaaS. Oracle sold $1.7 billion worth of good ol' software licenses last quarter. Microsoft's new Office 2010 includes a substantial Web element, but the core pitch for this multibillion-dollar franchise is still around the client software. In our survey, 39% of companies not using SaaS say there's no business requirement for it. On-premises software is far from a legacy concept.

Again the argument is weak not all business organizations out there are graphic or design focused as these companies fall under specialized service oriented firms whose needs are different.  The business’s that do not recognize the need will fall behind just as Microsoft was slow in catching up on the internet race. Survey respondents saying there is no need haven’t really assessed the environment needs correctly or asked how better serve the customer and more importantly have not asked the question how fast are their latency times reduced in serving those customers.

Security. SaaS vendors get that their existence hinges on rock-solid security. But they're also a bigger target--banks need guards cuz da crooks know da money's there. Our survey finds 39% of companies not using SaaS cite security as the biggest reason (tied with no business requirement as the most-often cited). This one will never entirely go away.

Vulnerability levels are a concern but the same has always been true for desktop applications since the last three decades, a worm can be released to crash any desktop application. A good SAAS model will not only have an advantage of better encryption and security features but it will also be the right venue to offer distributed computing which will synch data back and forth with client and Server applications.

Governance. It's different from security. Even people who trust a SaaS vendor's security might pass for compliance reasons. For example, Global Crossing, a user of Microsoft SharePoint and Exchange for collaboration, doesn't consider SaaS versions because, as a foreign-owned company that has contracts with the U.S. government, it faces a maze of data-handling rules best met on premises. Recruiting firm Manpower, a big customer of Salesforce.com with strong faith in its security, keeps some of its most sensitive client data in-house because of internal governance rules, says CIO Denis Edwards. It will get interesting when companies try to keep the sensitive data on premises while tapping online services to interact with that data to create the end-user experience they want.

One of my favorite topics to address and my comment here is good Governance and Governance practices are as good as their implementers are. Regulations can be followed but the idea is to be flexible enough that you can react to market needs and market conditions and comply with those frameworks and regulations be it for a full fledged SAAS enterprise application or a traditional organization with no big computing needs.

SaaS is winning a lot these days. But it won't win 'em all.

The only point I completely agree with which the authors finally state the obvious making their whole argument weak. The age of true networking has arrived, and its going to stay. The World is Flat and a little bit closer.

My counter arguing rants for the day.

Sam Kurien

Microsoft OSC stomping Google Buzz!: Round 1

Google tends to have an image of being the better design and engineering company than Microsoft, well think again. I just tried the Microsoft Outlook's Social Connector and I think it beats Google Buzz hands-down. Email as the from of communication is recognized as losing its central role with the social networking sits and their integration to our daily lives. So, we see Google/Microsoft camps vying with the ideas like google wave, buzz and now microsoft's outlook connector all eyeing to bridge the gap by allowing their end users to upload and download info from anywhere.  The Outlook Social Connector works with Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010. Google Buzz has received a very underwhelming response, has been confusing in terms of following and unfollowing (Google's lame attempt in trying to catch the twitter idea in email), and privacy concerns which spawned a lawsuit against Google. A mis-step from a company known for its premier engineering.

Contrastingly the Outlook social connector is attempting to turn e-mail as the central hub of communications -  integrating social networking sites and branch notes to push and pull information. Though the beta works only with LinkedIn for the moment, facebook, mySpace and Twitter will follow suit. Though currently it lacks all the feature sets of Xobin add-in for Outlook, I doubt Microsoft will lag behind in turning the heat of the battle.
Is it perfect? Far from it. Right now, communication is one-way, so that you can't update your LinkedIn status from inside Outlook. And the Outlook Social Connector lacks other nifty features that Xobni Outlook add-in has. One of the best feature seems to be  Microsoft's approach to bring all office based softwares integrated centrally in an organization's so solution delivery can be customized easily (scaled up or down) seems to be solid working strategy that business's will adopt. For example the OSC 2010 will conect by default to Sharepoint 2010 and for that matter all MS-Office suites and products and even the live versions of the same.

Check out the following link for more information on Michael Affronti's post @ Microsoft. A solid foundational step from Microsoft in the social networking realm will give Google a run for their money or at least drive their stock down by ten cents.

Cheers,

Sam Kurien

The New Face of Business Computing

Business has a new face: increasing commoditization, globalization, mobility, and collaboration define today's technologies. Enterprise business is conducted without wires, between mobile devices, across social networking sites, and in the virtual environment. IT departments must heed the call: The call is to use socially merging technologies to satisfy users in number of ways and connecting with them at the call and beck of their convenience.

Markets and Customers in those markets will no longer come to you but will access you over the phone, social networks, web pages and the attention span is less than an average of four seconds and in that four seconds business's have to react to get their attention, assess their needs and cater to those needs. The freedom of choice and freedom of accessibility of those choices is delivered through technology. So business's not only have to harness technology as tool and a solution engineered not only as strategy but more importantly as an oiled integrated part of organizational structure and business functions.

My thoughts for the day till I find an organization that does this well.

Sam Kurien