Anant Jhingran's Musings

India, Part Deux

I am writing this from Hong Kong, having just finished my India trip, meeting with IBM Labs, and with IBM current and future customers.  I will discuss the labs in my next post, but a few things struck me as I listened to the customers.

1. The scale of the problems to be tackled is enormous.  One of the banks I visited has hundreds of millions of banking customers, yet, a single transaction might be a few dollars only.  One of the telecoms I visited has plans to have similar order of magnitude wireless customers, yet a single transaction (SMS) might be 2.5 cents retail, and even smaller on wholesale rates.  So while solutions born in the West work when it comes to scale, the price consciousness of a business buyer is extreme.
2. Change happens all around.  As I talked about Dr. Nayak in my previous post, this is an example of a change happening (at least) from the top.  Other changes are brought about by dynamic personalities such as Prof. Phatak of IIT Bombay, that are constantly consulted on problems big and small by the private and public sector. And a huge amount of change happens bottom-up.  It is not just that Indian IT community is optimizing around the low cost design point.  Perhaps having missed a lot of the automation phase that happened in the West, there is a chance for them to leapfrog into a different space.  As an example, in talking with my old colleague, Jai Menon, who is now the CIO and also in charge of Innovation at Bharti Airtel, I realized what a game changer cell phones are in India, even affecting, if not the bottom of the pyramid, then a large portion of the population close to it.

Of course, all of this excitement does not take away from the fact that India continues to be a land of contrasts, and the bottom of the pyramid is not rising fast enough.  I visited a slum in Delhi India, where my dad teaches school going kids -- it was sad to see the poverty, but it was amazing to see the excitements in the kids to learn (an amazing young girl took me aside and requested me to arrange for English teacher because she felt that English is the way forward); and how their parents, in spite of being of extremely modest means, still dress their kids well and in spite of all horror stories of girls being discriminated against, the school was full of very bright, very eager girls of all ages.

Doing good

It is often exciting when technology is applied for commercial purposes in novel ways, but it is truly satisfying when it is applied for the betterment of humanity.  I have been visiting India for the last week or so, and the use of technology to human upliftment is apparent everywhere.  And whenever IBM is a part of such technology usage, I feel especially proud.

One such moment came when I visited with the Director of INCOIS, a premier Oceanographic Studies Institute in Hyderabad, a city in Southern India, where I happened to have grown up in too. The Director, Dr. Nayak, walked me through his visions and implementations of Tsunami Early Warning. This is an application that sits on top of DB2, and uses computation and strategic decision making inputs to compute whether or not to issue warnings to Indian Coastal villages. The challenge is of course to make the right call -- too many false calls would lead to ennui, and one wrong call could lead to a disaster. He also walked me through the control room for this, and it is very clear that emerging countries such as India are really using technology for the betterment of the masses. I also got into some detailed discussions with him on the power of information coming together, the power of freeing up of information (he is wanting to link to many many other data sources, and to enable third parties to leverage information that the institute generates by publishing all of it). He could have been giving our information on demand message, except that he was doing it in a governmental, non-commercial contexts. Hats off to him and his colleagues! I will have much more to write on my various visits here, and I have been delinquent in blogging, but this trip will yield a treasure trove of blogs for all of you :)

Popfly and Tim O'Reilly comment

So Sunday NYT had an article on Popfly. Generally a positive article.  However what stuck me was the comment by Tim O'Reilly.  An excerpt from the article: “Popfly shows me that Microsoft still thinks this is all about software, rather than about accumulating data via network effects, which to me is the core of Web 2.0,” said Tim O’Reilly, the founder and chief executive of O’Reilly Media, a print and online publisher. “They are using Popfly to push Silverlight, rather than really trying to get into the mashup game.”

Notwithstanding the obvious diss against software which I will punt on, I think that Tim has it wrong with respect to the network effect of data.  Of course there is network effect of data, but not all data is amenable to be network effect-able out in the great internet cloud.  A huge amount of information is locked within enterprise coffers.  It will never make it to the big cloud to be networked.  So the challenges that Microsoft and us in IBM are trying to solve is how do we create the network effect within an enterprise.  And we have to do it through software and through inside the firewall SaaS models. 

Cognos close

Folks, it is official.  They are part of IBM, my division, Information Management.  I am looking forward to deep interactions with Don  Campbell, their CTO, who will now become part of the technical leadership team for Information Management.  Every acquisition brings promise and some angst (technology overlap, new team dynamics etc.) but this one seems to be extremely positive from the get go.  More on our dashboarding, OLAP, streaming, text analytics, performance management and the like over the course of next few months from me...

Meanwhile, we also announced a new family of products, branded Infosphere -- our warehousing and master data management.  Fundamentally, these two, plus our Information Server, now represent the part of our portfolio devoted to comprehensive view of information across the enterprise.  While I try to keep marketing to a minimum in my blog, this product family will represent a critical thrust by us. 

Also, I was quite excited by a series of announcements in Lotusphere -- the annual Lotus conference.  In particular, Lotus mashups -- which will have close affinity with our Info 2.0 initiatives, and Live Text, which among other things contains my favorite Avatar annotation technology.  And yes, some other big events happened this week ($45B big), but let me leave that for a later date.

Damien Katz and CouchDB

So as all of you know, Damien is now an IBM employee, and CouchDB is slated to become an Apache project from now on.  Many people have wondered, why?  I had opined how excited I am, and Damien has posted a Q&A on his blog.  But clearly it was not sufficient, given that I wrote a piece on our acquisitions, at least two people -- Daniel Krook and Steven O'Grady wondered if getting Damien as an employee represents a form of acquisition.

Daniel wrote," Hi Anant,

Would you consider CouchDB an "acquisition," given that Damien Katz was hired into Information Management and the CouchDB project slated to become an Apache project with IBM's help?

Damien's provided his own take on the matter at damienkatz.net, but how do you see it?"

Stephen O'Grady wrote, referencing my acquisition posting, "a good post from Anant on the acquisition strategy from IBM; would also have added the hire of Damien Katz, though obviously he is not a firm."

So here was my answer to Daniel's query (would have been the same to O'Grady if he had posed it in the form of a question :)

Daniel,
No. I hired Damien for the explicit purpose of making sure that the open community can continue this fascinating experiment of CouchDB (and of course, who knows, we might be interested in embedding CouchDB in something we do, but right now it is all about the open experiment). Plus, as you know, we/I believe a lot in the open innovation model, so having some new genes in the form of Damien is always exciting.

In the last sentence, it does have characteristics of one reason why acquire companies, as I stated.  But that is where similairities end, in my opinion.

Why we acquire what we acquire?

In 2007, Information Management announced plans to acquire 4 companies -- though two are yet to close. 

1. Data Mirror -- for change data capture, helping our integration line of business,
2. Princeton Softech -- for data archiving, helping our database line of business
3. Cognos -- for business intelligence, will become its own line of business
4. Solid -- in memory and embedded database, helping our database line of business. 

So why acquire?  Is our own engine of innovation sputtering?  Far from it, though sometimes, a case can be made that we should have had our ducks in a row to do this ourselves (e.g., we had many main memory database activities in research, but were not able to gel them into a coherent project).  But three main points need to made with respect to innovation and acquisition...

1. Acquiring new genes is always good, and acquisition is a good model for new genetic injections.  For example, our client's environments are heterogeneous, as much as we would like them to throw out the bad guys.  So skills such as Princeton's or Data Mirror's are welcome skills.
2. Acquisitions are no substitute for organic innovation, or in general speak, our core products (or products that have reached some age even after acquisitions) need to innovate to grow in the market, so in fact, innovation through acquisition represents a reasonably small fraction in a large portfolio such as IBM's, even if they garner a lot of attention.
3. Sometimes innovations in market and go-to market are also needed, especially in a consolidating industry such as software, and Cognos would be a great example of such a characteristic in an acquisition in addition to all the technical innovation we get alongwith it.

More on each of these acquisitions over time.  I am excited that 99.8% of the shareholders have approved the Cognos acquisition, so we are all looking forward to all the final approvals and have our fingers crossed.
Of course,

The Big Bang

Of course, all the twittering, the facebooking, the email, the instant messaging, the blog reading and writing leaves one with very little time for good reading.  So sometimes, on long flights, that is what i do, and my genre, which my wife finds strange to read on flights, is popular science.  That is how I read the Code Book, and that is how I am 3/4th my way through The Big Bang, about the origin of the universe.  Simon Singh is amazing, but the discoveries he mentions are even more so.  19th century and early 20th century when many of these discoveries came about leading to the big bang theory (the hubble shift, or the discovery of cephids) built upon each other.  I can well imagine how exciting those times would have been for the folks in that area -- today, I lament the fact that we are now engineering driven, so is the next feature of iPod the one that fuels our breathless excitement?  So pedestrian.

A great couple of sentences from the book, refering to Rutherford.  "[H]e once stated: 'All science is either physics or stamp collecting.'  This blinkered comment backfired when the Nobel Committee awarded him the 1908 chemistry prize."

We would do well to remember this -- various science and engineering disciplines are interrelated, and there is no more moral superiority to anyone.

Next posting will be on IM acquisitions, our philosophy, what we have done and why, so do not worry, I am not going to lapse into tangential topics such as this one too frequently.

Happy New Year everyone

The world is getting more dangerous, as many of us from South Asia and Africa felt over the holidays, yet hope springs eternal.  And the pace of technology innovations is relentless, so let me go back to what I am comfortable with, and that is talking about the goods, and sometimes the bads (I will skip the uglies since they are all around us in the non technology world, as I stated just above) in the technology space.

First, the good.  We did some press around IOPES, the IBM's OmniFind Personal Email Search that I have talked about before and there were some good blogs on it, with people finding it very useful to extract information out of their email systems.  I am so happy that the Avatar team that I love is getting its day in the sun -- they have worked their behinds off to get this out. 

Now for another good news.  Damien Katz, couchDB fame is joining my team.  I am very excited, and so is he...  As I said in an earlier post, this whole space is very interesting to me, and to us in IBM.  And open community is very important to me, and to IBM.  So I know this move will be great for everyone involved.  Welcome Damien, and I am looking forward to some "vegetarian" deep fried stuff from you when we get together.

No bads so early in the year!  Again, best wishes for everyone!

My Favorite Blogs -- Part 2

This one will be short.  One blog that I read regularly is Jonathan Schwartz (CEO, Sun, nee JAVA), his competition with IBM notwithstanding.  Amazing for him to not just mouth platitudes, but also to take on controversial topics (with his lawyers probably shuddering).  Such as the  one discussing NetApps.  But what made me write this short installment of blog is his latest post on the CIO/CTO divide.  We all knew some of these divides existed, but such contrast!!!

Simple(r) DB

Well, many many people have been bombarding me with the new paradigms that they claim will leave the traditional SQL engines in the dust.  Hard to believe that, with a 20+B industry, but nonetheless, every week brings a new one...  To name a few, Google's BigTable (internal use), CouchDB, and now, SimpleDB by Amazon.  All promising to simplify persistence, with a simple query model.  I think all are interesting developments, but comparisons to SQL databases are meaningless here. 

I like them all, but for different reasons.  BigTable, of course, as an abstraction for map-reduce class of applications.  CouchDB, which counts on many fans, including IBM's own Pat Mueller and Sam Ruby (and I am becoming one!), written in Erlang, is very elegant in its capability/simplicity tradeoff.  And now, Amazon, perhaps not satisfied by the availability of structured persistence through eco-systems of the like of Gigaspaces, decides to offer SimpleDB, which is not quite Dynamo (at least in my reading), and is also in Erlang (any relationship to CouchDB? -- I will have to do some more reading), for applications in the cloud. 

Watch this space for our moves in this arena...