Blog Cloud

Bombay Stock Exchange Launching Separate Exchange for SMEs

The prestigious Bombay Stock exchange is launching a special exchange for Small and Medium Business to raise capital. The idea of this exchange is the enable capital access from public market leading to a number of benefits that include visibility, liquidity and more.

Lakshman Gugulothu is the CEO of this new SME Exchange and become a good friend. We were on a panel together at Proto.in 2011 and we hosted him at the Fridays 2.0 at Nasscom Emerge Forum to meet up with 40+ SME IT CEOs. Lakshman is very bullish about the SME exchange and it is all set to launch – waiting for the final go ahead.

If you want to connect with Lakshman please write to me. He is very approachable and wanting to help genuine companies that need capital.

Please find attached the brochure of BSE – SME Exchange.

http://sureshsambandam.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/bse-sme-stock-exchange-brochure.pdf

Silicon Valley in 10 years – Economic Times Feature Story

The economic times features a cover story on ‘Silicon Valley in 10 years featuring heavy weights Vivek Wadhwa, Vinod Dham, Vinod Khosala, Padmasree Warrior (Cisco CTO) and few other accomplished Indian origins in the Valley. And, interestingly 4 of out those 10 featured are speaking in Nasscom Product Conclave. Hmm, I am proud to be part of the NPC program team!

The happen to download the PDF version of the story and posting it here as is difficult to locate this in ET website. The PDF link below is Economic Times copyright.

http://sureshsambandam.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/economic-times-mumbai-15-sep-2011-sillicon-valley-in-10-years.pdf

Featured on ’60 Seconds Chief’ – Prestigious Column on The Hindu Business Line

I was interviewed by D Murali close to 6 months ago for the ‘60 Seconds Chief‘ when the article on ‘Cloud Computing – Real Promise Despite Cloud Washing‘ was published. While the cloud article got published, this one somehow slipped publishing – until we meet again recently in a seminar on ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ and realized the slip.

As people generally say: It was all for good! Otherwise, I would have not been featured along side of former RBI Governor Y.V. Reddy.  :-) !

The PDF version of the publication is here: Hindu Business Line – 60 Seconds Chief -19th July 2010 Edition

Why old ERP wine can’t be bottled in SaaS

we-make-money-not-art.com

There is a fundamental shift that is happening to ‘enterprise apps’ in the SaaS world when compared to the On-premise ERP world. I tried to google for ERP vs SaaS and found articles like these:

• SaaS vs Traditional ERP : 5 Key Differentiators (http://it.toolbox.com)
• A Tale of Two Software Worlds: Old ERP vs. SaaS (http://www.zdnet.com)
• Impact of SaaS on the enterprise ERP market (http://www.infoworld.com)

While, there is nothing wrong with these articles – I wasn’t able to find one that addressed what I feel is a much more fundamental shift in the way the SaaS applications are / will be built.  This thought has been running in my mind for quite sometime now and I indeed talked about this to Zinnov Research in a long research interview around 4 months ago. They did produce a great slide based on our discussion – more on that later in this blog. So, as I didn’t find much success in locating articles or blogs in the direction of my thoughts,  I decided to blog it myself.

In my view: A piece of enterprise software is defined by the three high level boundaries or dimensions below

1. Application Context
2. Geography / Regional Context
3. Industry / Vertical Context

Let me explain this a bit.  ’Lease Management’ system (Application Context) for ‘Real Estate’ companies (Vertical Context) in ‘Middle East’ (Geographical Context) is fundamentally different from the one that is needed in ‘India’ and surely different from the one that is needed in ‘United States’. And, most certainly ‘Lease Management’ for ‘Automobile Leasing’ is quite different – I don’t have to elaborate this.

ERP Suites such as SAP are fundamentally built on the premise that there is a common super set domain model which encompasses the variations for all  of the 3 different dimensions of described above. These domain models are either configured – for fitment cases and customized -for non-fitment cases which is what happens mostly for large deployments like Unilever et. al. And, it takes for ever in the customization route and many times the ERP implementation fails.

If you have a step back and look at this approach – the fundamental flaw is close to obvious. No wonder there are industry specific templates from the ERP Suite Vendors to manage this mess. Obviously those have be portrayed as additional capabilities and sold to customers rather than fixes for the fundamental issues.

www.theworldwidewine.com

On the other hand, SaaS takes a point solution approach for each combination for Application – Geography – Vertical.  Kishore is CEO of  ImpelCRM and my best friend says that CRM – even though a horizontal application is quite different for ‘Indian’ market and they are winning deals against ‘SalesForce.com’ and other competitors because their software understand the Geography very well.  If this is true for Horizontal Apps such as CRM – the issue around vertical apps is much more.

So, this leads to great opportunity for applications for potentially every combination of Application – Vertical – Geography; leading to potentially a mushroom of SaaS ISV growth. SaaS will lead the transition from an ‘Umbrella Solutions’ to  Specialized – ‘does one thing very well’ type – ‘Point Solution’. This one slide from Zinnov Research sums it all for you – which I mentioned earlier in this post.

www.zinnov.com



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OrangeScape PaaS – Introduction Video (via The Official OrangeScape Blog)

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via The Official OrangeScape Blog