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.

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

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

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



What is your POV?

… Read More

via The Official OrangeScape Blog

Coincidently, immediately after my post on ‘What the hell is Private Cloud?’, I happen to talk to one of my best friend, ex-CEO of a startup, now CDO (Chief Delivery Officer), in an IT Services firm @ KY, US – Midwest region. After my discussion with him I realized the need for a ‘scale out’ cloud. But, their company is dealing with Insurance customers and no body in that industry (just like every other industry), is yet ready to put their data out in the ‘Public Clouds’. Obviously the word ‘Private Cloud’ was lot more comforting to him.

However, as I mentioned in my earlier post, they are NOT Pfizer or Unilever, neither their custmoers are, to invest in ‘Private Cloud’.  BTW, once could use ‘Cloud.com‘ and build and manage your own ‘Private Cloud’. We can argue on the definitions for ‘Private Clouds’ and till the cows come home, but companies need solutions for their current problems.

‘Virtual Private Cloud’ seem to be a more viable proposition for companies who can’t afford their own ‘Private Clouds’.

Image Credit : Amazon AWS

Virtual Private Clouds (VPC – not VPN), are also called as ‘Hybrid Clouds’.  In the VPC approach, customers and system integrators can have the basic set of deployment infrastructure in their own premise and have a secure VPN access to public cloud / IaaS providers like Amazon AWS or GoGrid and the likes. The diagram above is self describing. Also it is worth to note that, you can also create you own subnet with the VPC and manage it very similar to the way you would manage things in your data centre.

In the VPC model, you would keep your Database within your data center and use the servers on the VPC as compute resources for burst computing. Data does transiently goes out to perform computations but never gets stored outside your company network.

For the case it point (project) we were discussing, we could easily get upto 25 servers for 1 hour crunching every day for 20 days in a month and release them all back into the pool once we are done with crunching. All we pay is for just 1 x 25 CPU hours every day. If we use AWS Extra Large Instance (roughly equal to 2 cpu with Quadcore each i.e. 8 cores in per instance x 25 = 100 EC2 Compute Units) – that is really a lot of compute power. Still, that will cost only US$17 for the 100 Computer Units running for an hour for day, for a month (20 days) it will be US$340 and another $153 assuming we transfer 1 TB (1024 GB) of data over a month. In total it is under US$500 . Isn’t that Amazing!

Sounds like Win-Win to me. What do you say?

PS: At the time of writing this post, it is not clear whether we will go this route. However, I will come back and update this post based on how things pan out.

Here are my comments:

1. First, this is a fantastic effort from Zinnov for bringing an India perspective for ‘Cloud’. Full Credits to Pari Natarajan, Chandramouli, Anand Tatambhotla and the team behind this effort.

2. Second, we weren’t even aware that OrangeScape was part of this report. I remember talking to these folks 9 months ago or something, and I do run into them in panel discussions in cloud conferences but never knew that we are going to be featured. Looks like they have been tracking OrangeScape and thanks a ton for the reference.

3. Slide 16, talks about India having legacy of Jumping Curve. It will be fair to bet on that assumption for Cloud too. Tally CEO Bharat Goenka is not going to like it though !

4. Slide 23, is another interesting transforming that is waiting to explode. Government of India is actively thinking about ‘India Cloud’ for Government Services.

I was on a LinkedIn thread titled ‘How cloud computing is different from SaaS‘ where Rick Chapman who runs SoftLetter and SaaS University went on beating on this question ‘What is a private cloud’? It is definitely worth it given the tremendous amount of confusion in the term ‘Cloud’ in general and ‘Private Cloud’ in particular. The motivation for this post is Rick and supported by a tweet I read around the same time from ‘Carl Brooks‘ who is a technology writer on Cloud at TechTarget.  Let me give it a shot.

Private Cloud Tweet Post by Carl Brooks

I know this is not going to end here. Preparing myself to tackle the attacks…. !

There are quite a few visual development tools that have failed in the past. When I say past, I meant the pre-cloud era. The commercially successful ones are Visual Basic, PowerBuilder (just googled and found out that PowerBuilder still exists under Sybase) and Oracle Forms 4.5. Although, popularity and merits of the language need not co-relate.  :-) !

And, there are quite few that have come up in the current cloud paradigm. Few Examples : Coghead (already in dead pool), VisualForce of Force.com, WaveMaker, Zoho Creator. My POV is on the approach taken to  solve the problem (of visual development) rather than any of the companies/products itself.

If you take a closer look at most of the visual products one subtle but startling similarity is: Most of them take a Top-Down approach for developing the application.

Image Credit: casa.pokayoke @ Flickr.com

In my opinion, the problem lies here! If you want to know why see this Article on Wikipedia and Paul Graham‘s blog post on ‘Programming Bottom Up‘. While Paul’s article goes into a little tangential context of enriching Lisp, leading to a richer dialect – the essence of ‘Bottom Up’ comes out when you read between the lines. Also check out this thread Top Down vs Bottom Up on TheServerSide.com

It is natural for human comprehension to think of a system’s high level design and functional use cases in a ‘Top Down’ style. However, when it comes to implementation, ‘bottom up’ approach has to be followed. The shortcoming with most of the visual development tools is that they have extended the natural human comprehension far too much into the implementation. To the extend that, most of these tools start with a visual canvas where the user starts painting the application by ‘drag and drop’-ing widgets from the palette box. While I understand that this is easy for business users and analysts to start off quickly – there can be no compromise on the abstraction that is required to build good software.

The approach of starting from the page or a canvas can accomplish simpler – situational applications (use and throw). However,  it will be close to impossible to build industrial strength SaaS Business Application like an Insurance Underwriting System or an Automobile Dealer Management System. Also, the applications built using these tools will be little more than a ‘data entry’ / ‘book keeping’ system with very little capability to support sophisticated business logic (more on this in Part 2 of this series). In fact, when prospects approach us for simpler situational apps that doesn’t involve heavy duty business logic we have recommended ‘Zoho Creator‘ – another ‘Made In India, Made for the World‘ product. In fact, unlike other products Zoho Creator clearly mentions in their home page ‘Build Your own online Database’.

So, what is the correct approach solution? Just like in OOP, implementation has to be bottom up. You define the object model  for small components and start relating them with other components. An object model or data model, we use both these terms  inter-changeably at OrangeScape, contains how an object is represented in an optimized / co-related fashion in conjunction with other objects in the system. Again, just like in OOP, the object is an encapsulated atomic unit that represent data + business logic (How do we deal with logic in Part 2). Many such fine grained objects together make up the data model of a logical business component. Putting all these logical business component model together in perspective gives the developer the full picture of the software –  I call this macro-model for want of better term.

All of this is not some theoretical rant! One Example. OrangeScape’s SI Partner Wipro – using their development team – with consulting from OrangeScape has implemented a very large ERP for a  government organization where the ERP is being rolled out across 743 office locations in India. Each office location is a Tenant in this huge multi-tenant ERP. This project (I can’t name it yet, due to confidentiality clauses) is a prestigious project similar to the Citizen UID Project. We haven’t gone outside of OrangeScape’s Studio to build anything in this huge ERP implementation. The success of this project is a ‘proof point’  for my argument on ‘bottom-up’ approach supported by the OrangeScape PaaS Platform among many other capabilities.

Finally, in my view, starting from ‘Object Model / Data Model’ is closer to OOP and starting from UI Pages takes us back to days of  ’Procedural Coding’!  After all these advancements in programming, why go back in time?

I see you asking:  ’How does one or OrangeScape for that matter bring out object modeling in a non-intrusive visual manner?” Will talk about that in an another post.

Image Credit - http://www.lumaxart.com

• Need for abstracting business rules for modifying rules separately from rest of the application lead to the creation of the the BRE category with companies like iLog (now with IBM), Selectica (my ex-employer which is no longer in the BRE space – sad!),  Talarian – now with TIBCO (I used Talarian’s RTIE when I was at HP to build Fraud Detection System for Vodafone and interesting to see Tom Laffey of Talarian still at Tibco as EVP of Products & Technology) and the opensource DRools and Jess

• Need for abstrating Workflow, when Workflow logic became a dominant portion of the application, lead to a whole new category called Workflow, which later modified itself to BPM, resulting in companies like Savvion and jBPM

• Similarly, Presentation Layer has seen tremendous innovation that lead  to AJAX that is being  predominately used across the board today.
• When people realized using vanilla -  ODBC / JBDC is making their life complicated (there are friends like Sriram - who will argue the other way) lead to another whole new category leading to companies like TopLink later acquired by Oracle. And, in the opensource world fully dominated by Hibernate . As I write this post, there is another big war on SQL vs NoSQL potentially leading to another innovation in this space.

Now, all of this is great, great, great.  Let me make that clear, first. However, over time all these individual puzzle pieces that are required for building enterprise software have become isolated infrastructure stove pipes. While there has been tremendous amount of talk on eliminating application stove pipes very little has been done in the infrastructure space.

Enterprise Software industry has been successful in solving the individual puzzle pieces on a stand alone basis. However, a unified platform that blends (I am purposefully saying blending instead of integrated – e.g. coffee making is a fine art of blending with chicory – not mixing) all of these puzzle pieces is/was elusive. Today, what industry does is a mega-gluing exercise when building an enterprise application. There is still a great deal of unfinished business in this space. And, Cloud brings in the market momentum for finishing that business.

Just to elaborate with one example, unification is not calling an API from your application to the Workflow / BPM Engine to perform a state transition. That approach would mean passing as much context information as required, to the WF engine to perform the state transition. The application is  a stranger to the WF / BPM engine is concerned. I see many BPM projects fail miserably just because of this.  Unfair to target BPM alone – this applies to other softwares that are part of the puzzle (like BRE, etc).

Some would argue that not all enterprise applications need all these pieces. Yes, I agree. But a vast majority that falls into ‘enterprise business applications’ need all of these pieces preferably in a ready to consume fashion – with no need to build or glue any infrastructure or plumbing code.

Among other capabilities OrangeScape, has solved this piece in a very unique manner (blend???) which I will elaborate in an another post (this post has become big already)!

P.S: This post is dedicated to Robin @ MF (not appropriate to fully quality him, at least as of now) who triggered me to blog this and and helped me prioritize my plunge into the blogging world.