Hysea Cloud Computing Workshop

Yesterday’s HYSEA event on Cloud Computing (CC) at Google office was very successful. I have presented a few academic perspectives on the usage of cloud computing as well as some research challenges in this area.

For me, there are a few interesting takeaways from this workshop:

• The importance of this area is clear from the very fact that Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, HP, Sun investing heavily into this and the pace at which tools, products, services and applications are being built.
• It appears that the landscape is being filled with various players focusing on their own specific sub-area. For example, Google App Engine serving the developer/programmer community, Amazon EC2 and S3 serving the application development infrastructure, and Microsoft Live Mesh focusing on consumer solutions.
• The need to create new progamming paradigms in cloud computing area is apparent, which includes creation of libraries to adopt existing programming languages to suite the CC style programming and creation of new languages for service descriptions and for monitoring (at the Service Level Agreements and beyond).

I have used the term “Cloud Sourcing” to describe the trend of delegating the software development, production and maintenance beyond the boundaries of an enterprise. It is clear that the CC playground is wide open and it will be interesting to see who will emerge as a winner. Like India emerged as a superpower in outsourcing, someone (country/region/company/…) will become a super power in Cloud Sourcing.

BTW, Hyderabad is buzzing with cloud computing activities – including a barcamp on August 30th at Amazon.com Development Center. Check it out if you are interested.

Inner Game of Innovation – 2nd Part

Most people think that disruptive innovation is the only significant type of innovation and all other types of innovation cannot be treated at par with this one as they are somewhat inferior. I would have agreed with this view had I not come across “Dealing with Darwin” (by Geoffrey Moore), the book I talked about in the previous blog with the same title.

When I learnt that there are several types of innovations categorized into various zones in the life cycle of a product or a technology. These zones include: Product leadership (birth and early struggle of the product/technology), Customer Intimacy (where the product is making into the heart of the customer, making its space in the customer mind and life), Operation excellence (build the same product better, faster and cheaper - here is the zone where Indian software service companies showed a lot of innovation) and finally Category renewal (where you know when, where and how to stop the technology and move all the lessons learnt into something new which takes you to the next level). In these four zones there are about 15 types of innovations.

I have focused mostly on these aspects when I finally gave my talkon Innovation at CA (on 29th January). It was a great learning experience for me as I thoroughly enjoyed my preparation for this talk.

If some one is interested in learning more about these concepts they should buy and read this book AND refer to Geff’s website:

www.dealingwithdarwin.com 

The Inner game of Innovation

These are some random thoughts as I am preparing for a talk on Innovation that I am supposed to give in CA. This talk got postponed to some time in January but I am unable to stop thinking about it – So, would like to share with you some of these things:

•   As I am looking at Innovation, there are three categories of them that come to my mind:Innovation is synonymous with start-ups – there is lot of excitement new ideas and zeal to transform these ideas to real, robust, scalable and useful products. Norm Meyrowitz of NKM Advisors and formally CEO/Chairman of Macromedia gave a great talk about looking at these innovations and asking twenty questions to validate your ideas, products, future prospects and health of your start-up. If you want to watch this you can contact me or Prasad.

• Innovation that happens at Great Companies: Geoffrey Moore is a best-selling author (Crossing the Chasm, Dealing with Darwin), …, Managing Director at TCG Advisors and a venture partner at MDV talks in his Darwin book about how great companies keep innovating at various stages of their existence. He talks about product/service/application innovation, process innovation and operational innovation besides popularly known disruptive innovation. This is a great resource.

• Academic Innovation: This is where we have a lot of scope for putting our thoughts together and creating ideas, methods and material that can be used by others. In one sense SIEL is a good example of academic innovation.

1. Choosing problems that are relevant now, and continue to be relevant for at-least next 3-5 years and are challenging from research point of view.

2. Creating complimentary skills, groups, owners, partners, strategy for growth and success

3. Continue to dream BIG and infect others with this virus.

Of-course there is a lot of scope for improvement and we need every one to start thinking towards the great difference we can make as a team and the way we can change the information is accessed by every one on the planet.

More when we meet later