In memory of that 'little jig' behind the wicket

He was the name we as kids used to identify with cricket umpiring. And he is definitely one of the game’s best known umpires. The Santa like Shepherd (Do I know Santa?), looking back seems to me as a father figure for cricket.

It is sad to see him go, albeit he was battling the pains of cancerous growth in his body for quite a long time.

Shepherd came through as an umpire respected by the players in a day the officials were not supported much by technology and days when test matches were more common than other forms of the game. And for me, a test match is a skill-endurance test for even the umpire.

He will always be remembered. The small ‘jig’ or the ‘hop’ he does when the score is at Nelsons is unforgettable. Every time we see Nelsons in the scoreboard there is a high chance that we will remember him.

May his soul rest in peace and he be an inspiration to the many who aspire to be just umpires.

(Picture courtesy - BBC)

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On leaving one and taking on another

Having spent a decent period of in corporate organizations, I have come to a few conclusions regarding the current employer and the future employer.

These are not proved concepts in all circumstances, so the caveat is that ‘Don't blame me for any unwanted consequences of your actions based on my writings below'.

I am sure these will be of some help to the employees who resign as well as their managers.

1. To start with one for the manager - If the resignation request from your staff comes as a surprise, you are not doing your job properly. Roll up your socks, there may be other resignations down the corner. A manager however higher up in the system should connect with his staff. Some organizations do the managers a favour in this area by restricting the number of direct reportees to a manageable number.

2. Exit Interviews – Not sure how many organizations do this, and if they do, how many take the feed backs seriously, not withstanding the fact that I doubt the truthfulness of the candidates in giving candid answers. So if you are the interviewee this is probably the easiest interview – no stakes! And if you are the interviewer better do some justice to this.

3. The future employer always wants you to join 'yesterday'.‘Two months notice period, oh ! my God! Can you somehow come on board sooner, like we buying out your notice period?’ These are typical statements you hear during your recruitment process. However, once join, you find that you don’t have enough work to start with. There is a discordance here clearly.

4. The first few days at the new job - These days are clearly the ‘vela’(read free ) time. Work not transitioned. Waiting for your infrastructure from laptop to Id-card to car-parking sticker. So enjoy! Don’t panic and make noise. Honeymoon periods don’t come often.

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The scent of mother earth

It is always good to get away from the city din, drive through the meandering roads laced on either side with greenery, an occasional spurt of drizzle wetting your glasses, moving over the tank bunds, albeit not filled with clear water, and reach a place where you breathe fresh air and smell earth. The reason for this exodus becomes all the more compelling when your kid starts confusing between the odd cow on the city street and the elephant.

We – aadi, remmya and I took this 50 kms journey from Bangalore to Vanashree (www.vanashree.in) on a Sunday morning joined by my friend and family. Vanashree is an 8 acre land owned, managed and taken care of by Srikanth and his small family ably supported by Shanmukha and family at the farm. Vanashree is located near Maralwadi. Maralwadi is close to Harohalli, which is on the Kanakpura main road around 10 kms from Art of Living. Since Srikanth had given good indications on where to take a left and right we were there in 70-80 mins starting from near Jayadeva circle.

At Vanashree, you find an expanse of greenery from the Napier grass to the cosmos flowers, from paddy to sweet potato. The kids were the ones who were enjoying the lot with activities ranging from aimless running around to feeding the cows and their calves.

One thing which amazed me is the way Srikanth has proved, probably mostly to himself, that vegetables could be grown in the wild. I have been used to seeing the vegetable farms neatly lined with the plants with a stipulated distance between them and no weeds and hence the top soil exposed. In Vanashree you don’t find these. Vegetables are grown almost at all places amongst the plants which one would have easily classified as weeds. We could see brinjals, tomatoes, sweet potatoes etc in addition to paddy, plantains and the like. Also found interspersed were trees (most of them in their early part of life) and that included many rare ones too e.g. Rudraksha tree. Srikanth shared some interesting stories on how he managed to get the saplings of these rare species. The entire stuff was grown organically. The fauna includes cows, hens and ducks apart from the millipedes and the birds which are obviously attracted to the place. We could spot and identify a few of them with the help of Srikanth. The other interesting factor that attracted us was that, almost the entire energy requirements were met through the gobar gas plant and solar panels.

It was really interesting to chat with Srikanth on how an electronics engineer identified the call of nature in him and more importantly made sure that he walks the path. The passion was visible to each of us and again I think the differentiating factor is that he understands the challenges.

For me, it was soul searching at least during the drive back and I think those searches will die down in no time ending as some Google searches - one amongst the billions of those done every day! But I am sure the smaller ones enjoyed to the very end.

Wishing Srikanth, his family and Vanashree all the best! I hope we’ll be able to retain and reminisce the scenes and the pristine smell of earth.

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The tale of two 'future' healthcare plays?

Two mergers (Xerox-ACS and Dell-Perot) in a short span of time recently, didn't take the IT industy exactly by storm, but triggered some discussions on the M&A market getting more active. I believe that the foreign players(non-indian) have become more realistic on their valuations while the Indian counterparts still believe they are not just cost-arbitrage shops.

The mergers have much less of an overlap compared to the Oracle-Sun deal(I read that Sun is bleeding profusely after this, which was got to happen).

On the surface, the deals look like highly synergistic. Dell getting a services play and Xerox getting a more BPO play(I dont believe that ACS has a strong enough IT services business to threaten the biggies). This is evident to the average observer.

My take is that the bigger play is the growing interest of IT players in the healthcare market has also contributed to these deals happening. May be this is not the primary reason, but surely a strong enough reason.

Dell could expand the portfolio with this acquisition. And Perot is said to have a strong focus and set of clientbase in the vertical - healthcare. Dell's foray into infrastructure management could be further developed with Perot, especially in that vertical. With digitalization of healthcare records getting much attention, Xerox also might want to rope in ACS' clients and leverage their BPO capabilities.

Having said all these, I feel that the American companies should have looked into getting a successful ITO and BPO merger, thus standing up to the challenges posed by the Indian players who are now integrated ITO and BPO players. In those lines ACS - CSC would have made much sense.

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Cloud Computing fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid

The mobile phone growth story in India is widely discussed. On the other side the broadband growth story has been a damp squib with us lagging behind the targets set by the policy by far. This point towards mobile phone becoming the primary medium to access information. This in turn opens up tremendous opportunities for the cloud computing service providers – to tap the increasing number of mobile phone and entice the users to use their cloud computing offerings.

The value proposition is quite evident
• Currently majority of the applications built will run only on handsets which satisfy specified criteria like computing power. This will be done away with when I access the cloud.
• From a developer perspective, he or she needs to write apps which run on different operating systems. Making the app available on the cloud will make life easier for them.

A mobile architecture that is going to support software applications running on cloud will open up massive avenues for the developer and vendor community. ABI research points out that this opportunity is worth $20b by 2014 (www.abiresearch.com)

The path towards this $20b is however with challenges. One of the main challenges, especially in a country like India is the ‘availability’ of network. Again, HTML 5, the new programming language for web should come to the rescue. HTML will be able to perform data caching which will help the application work till the network is restored.

Intel’s Clone Cloud initiative is a right and firm step in this direction of enabling your phones with more computing power.

One can just imagine the potential cloud computing opens up for a country like India when the mobiles can be bereft of the computing power. When more and more people start accessing the cloud through their mobiles, more and more developers will be keen to make apps available on the platform.

To make full use of the opportunities thrown up, the providers (app, service, and network) have to be innovative in their business models. We are set to address a huge population at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Challenges will include making multi-lingual applications available, making it available at the right price points, figuring out a way for instant payment (remember – these people may not have bank accounts leave alone credit cards. These are all in addition to a superior user experience. Distribution is also going to be a key given the geographic spread of the country.

The advantage lies with the existing mobile providers to lead this next phase of revolution.

Probably a good case of cloud computing at the bottom of the pyramid .

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A tribute to the Intellectual

I never imagined in my wildest dreams that i would write an obituary in my blogs. Leave alone two obituaries in a row.

Last week, an early morning mail announced to a group that my friend, Anoop was no more. His body was found in the railway tracks outside Bangalore.

Anoop was not my best friend. Nor I was his. However, i believed we shared some frienship from our engineering days. His careless, or is it carefree, looks made him stand apart from his batchmates. The ease at which he handled quizzes always amazed me.

I still remember the first saturday of December 1997. Next day was CAT for admission into IIMs. I get a call. Anoop at the other end announcing that he was at Kalamassery, 4 kms from my place. Since there was only one center at Kerala, at Kochi, Anoop has travelled the earlier day. It was a surprise - ' Sanjay, I am at kalamassery, Can you pick me up, I am going to stay at your place'. He didnt ask for my permission. His voice always had innocence. My amma was a bit upset, since we had only non-vegetarian food - the Kerala staple food - tapioca and fish (Anoop was a brahmin) and his arrival was unexpected. However Anoop told her calmly that he eats fish.

While in Chennai - 2000 - I had been to his house. We had conversations once in a while over some coffee and tea at TNagar , Pondi Bazaar and nearby areas. I have been always amazed by Anoop's knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. The way he goes deeper into topics.With some amount of envy i used to pride myself that i had him as my friend. Our conversations touched almost every topic - from Latin american authors to Oriya authors. From temples to aethism. In one of our conversations he commented - ' Sanjay, you have become sharper after your MBA'. Coming from some one like him, I will always cherish this.

He was sporadic at his emails. However we were still connected, though at some point 8 hrs of timezone separated us. I helped him with facilitating one of his musician friends' stay at Kerala. In 2005 again out of the blue, i get a call. The typical Anoop, announcing his arrival and plans to visit my place, this time at Bangalore. We rowed ourselves again into subjects - from obscure to the most common. Even after years, Anoop was himself. He told me that he has come upon a unique stream of thought which is to be developed into a novel. I wished him all the best.

Sometimes i felt, this great intellectual treaded the boundaries of sanity. Sometimes i felt, this erudite elevated himself to some higher planes of sensitivity. May be he was not able to isolate himself from some feelings.

I am still unable to come to terms with his untimely death. I know he wanted to do many things. Not sure how many he did finally. I think - may be with some amount of certainity - he probably didn't live life the way he wanted to.

Maybe I will never cross paths with such a brilliant soul ! May your soul rest in peace !

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Cloud Computing and the Curious case of Michael Jackson

The wee hours of Friday morning, the mobile responded to a text from my BIL – Jackson is no more. The pop icon of the generation (or was it a generation before) was HISTORY. Fond memories and incidents of how MJ’s tunes swayed if not rocked some of sleepy towns of Kerala flooded my mind. However some soporific drugs taken the night earlier (to keep cold at bay) and the thought of a very-transactional-non-value typical day at office worked against mind of scribbling an obituary on the genius.

The very same day my four year old son questioned me about this ‘weird looking man’ flashed relentlessly across TV screens and newspapers. Fans across the world and in India tweeted, blogged and ‘byted’ on MJ. As far as India is concerned, probably this incident stands out in its viral spread across the cyber as well as mobile spaces. One reason being the unrivalled popularity of MJ with the netizens and mobile wielding generation and second being the penetration of these media in India. The last case would have been ‘Jessica lal case’ follow up events.

The web creaked under the load of searches on MJ. Some websites thought they are attacked, Twitter had to disable features like searches to meet the spike. Average availability of sites dropped like never before. And as I write this the ‘curious’ case of his death is still being searched.

All these point out to the relevance and probably the inevitability of having a Cloud computing strategy for organizations, at least those which are planning to have a mark in b2c and c2c interactions.

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