CES 2013, Las Vegas

I attended two full days of this year’s CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas. What a show that was! 150,000 people moving about the convention center and the Venetian hotel (venues for all the exhibits).

I used to attend Comdex many years back, but that was replaced by CES and it’s focus has broadened to all kinds of consumer products – TV, Tablets, cameras, audio, smart phones, etc. As expected, we are living in a connected world and smart devices are all over. Whereas the past years centered around the PC and Microsoft, this year’s CES did not even have Microsoft as a participant (remember how Bill Gates used to make major announcements at Comdex?). This year’s keynotes were delivered by Qualcomm, Panasonic, Samsung, and Verizon. Mobile devices were the big thing, as Android phones were on display by all major vendors. There were too many iPhone/iPad accessories on display, so much so that you get tired of it.

Walking the halls of the convention center requires lots of physical strength, as one could walk 10-15 miles in a day. The LG booth was very impressive with 3D Television on a giant curved screen, where objects come to hit your face. The big news was the giant 80 to 100 inch TVs going for $20,000 – all 4k HD technology with unprecedented clarity of pictures. LG even showed 50 inch curved TV (called flexible display). The OLED TV is extremely thin. The real big news is connectivity. From the tablet to the TV to the laptop screen, events can move wirelessly. Apple clearly has changed the landscape with its touch interface in iPhone and iPad and everyone now offers similar tablets coming in all sorts of sizes. Interestingly, Apple does not have a booth nor its executives ever speak at this event.

Marc Benioff was there at a keynote session and he spoke about how the convergence of consumers and business is happening. Several panels talked about cloud contents and regulatory challenges. The FCC chairman Julius Genachowski was there also talking of broadband, spectrum reform, and competition policy matters. I listened to an interesting presentation of the future UI – called NUI (Natural User Interface) based on multi-touch, vocal, gesture and neural modes. It is good to see HTML5′s Touch event spec V2 is being readied for standardization.

For an enterprise software guy like me, this show may look less relevant, but enterprises are impacted in a big way by the consumer devices and technology. Hence we have the phrase “consumerization of IT” and BYOD. The Cloud is blurring the difference between personal software and work software as they have to intermingle and mesh.

It was a worthwhile experience to see all the advancements happening in such a fast pace. I particularly enjoyed the new stuff in robotics and programmable 3-D manufacturing.

Nasscom 2012 – Down the memory lane

I just saw the Nasscom’s (National Association of Software and Services Companies) annual conference program called India Leadership Forum (ILF) 2012. It is an impressive agenda of great topics and speakers that range from the actors (Abhishek Bachhan and Shekhar Kapoor), to political leaders (Kapil Sibal, P. Chidamabram), industry stalwarts (K.M. Birla, Rajendra Pawar, ..) to technical leaders from the software world as well as services world.

The website talks about 20 years of leadership which brings me to this recollection. It was 1992, exactly twenty years back, that I was invited to speak at the Nasscom event in Delhi. I had just left IBM after 16 years of work in developing relational technology products like DB2. I joined Oracle that year in April and the Nasscom event was held in December. The late Dewang Mehta, the founder and first president of Nasscom organized the event, one of the first large forums for those days. Remember, this was one year after the de-regulation of the Indian economy and the beginning of an Indian software outsourcing presence in the global scene. Dewang became a close friend and kept expanding Nasscom until his untimely death few years later.

Mr. N. Vittal was the secretary, DOT who was the inaugural speaker and I had a one-on-one meeting with him the day before. The keynote speakers included known names like Narayan Murthy of Infosys and Fakir Chand Kohli of TCS. When I spoke of the emerging trends in software, the interest was tremendous as I was mobbed by so many people after the talk for the rest of the conference. This was pre-Internet and the focus was all about enterprise computing and how to leverage the client-server computing architecture for cost-performance.

I also spoke at Nasscom back in 2003 in Mumbai. The audience was bigger and the topics were wider. I mentioned of the need for India 2.0 where innovation is to be emphasized besides services. Looking at this agenda, I do not see many new companies with innovative technologies coming out of India. The best ones are copycats such as Flipkart (Amazon like book selling via the web to the Indian market), or several travel sites. Here in Silicon valley, innovation is happening with a vengeance. Many exciting new breakthroughs are reshaping our industry. India seems to live on the “service” focus and slowly moving to product building and innovation.

Innovate 2011 Conference

I attended an one-day event this week hosted by GlobalLogic (a Sequoia funded private company of 6000 employees worldwide focusing on software development for over 200 clients including ISV’s) called Innovate 2011.

The welcome event was at Stanford University Faculty Club and the guest speaker was Salman Khan (not the well-known Bollywood actor). This gentleman is known as Sal Khan of the Khan Academy. He was terrific on what he has done to the world of K-12 education using short clips on YouTube made available for free to anyone across the globe. One of the first ones to discover his work and mention it to a large audience was Bill Gates last year. Bill said that he regularly uses these video modules for his children. Soon after, Sal got donations to his non-profit organization from the Gates Foundation, Google, and John/Ann Doerr. His passion and innovation in the field of school education is nothing less than revolutionary. Talk about non-linear thinking..this is awesome!

The conference keynote speaker was Geoffrey Moore, the well-known author of Crossing The Chasm. Geoffrey highlighted a big disconnect (I have been speaking about for a couple of years) between consumer technology and enterprise IT. The typical new generation worker of today is so powerful as a consumer (using latest tools of social networking and micro-blogging) yet so lame as an employee at an enterprise (where such tools are not deployed, and sometimes even barred). He mentioned “System of Record” (transactional systems in use for years at the enterprise) vs. “Systems of Engagement” for the consumer where a revolution in applications is taking place. He suggested that IT for the middle tier at large enterprises must embrace these systems of engagements. Geoffrey’s session was very meaningful and relevant. He emphasized the “Return on Innovation” as a key outcome of this adoption of the systems of engagements. Enterprises can not just have  “different” products, they must be ‘differentiated” products for success, just like what Apple’s iPhone has done over Nokia’s failure to produce an equivalent one yet after 3 years.

The rest of the conference had several panels, one on medical equipment industry adopting new innovations, mobile platform and what is happening, and finally enterprise application development panel. The last one had members from SAP, HP, SalesForce.com, Citrix, and Yammer. I did not realize that Yammer is the “social networking” company for the enterprise and is doing very well, being founded by ex-Paypal fellow David Sachs.

There were about 150 attendees and the sessions were quite interactive.

Quotable Quotes from D9

There is an interesting list of quotes made by  industry leaders this week at the “All Things Digital” conference. This was organized by Wall Street Journal hosts Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. The focus was mostly consumer brand software and platforms. Here are a few of my favorites.

- Skype has a great engineering team, which I like to describe as ‘all of Estonia.’ (Marc Andreessen)

- Failure isn’t a problem. It’s the fear of failure that’s the limiting factor. You can’t lose your nerve for the big failure, because it’s the exact same nerve you need for the big success. (Regina Dugan, DARPA Director)

- Only two people have been on the cover of Time Magazine in bare feet. I’m one, the other is Gandhi. (Marc Andreessen)

- My friend’s three-year-old walked up to the TV and swiped and nothing happened and he said, ‘Dad, what’s wrong with the TV?’ (Marc Andreessen on the Tablet generation)

- Nothing called the “Gang Of Four” ends well.  (Steven Sinofsky of Microsoft on Google Chairman Eric Schmidt’s “Gang of Four” technology companies, which does not include Microsoft)

- The transformation of Apple is probably the biggest tech story of the last 15 years. (Marc Andreessen)

- Globally local commerce is a $12 to $14 trillion market. If we get 10 percent of that, we’ll be very happy. (Andrew Mason of Groupon)

- Something will eventually replace the Internet. But it’s hard to know what and when it will happen. (Reed Hastings of Netflix)

- Twitter is the world. (Jack Dorsey, Twitter founder)

- This is no longer a battle of devices, it is a war of ecosystems. (Stephen Elop, Nokia CEO)

The Gang of Four

Yesterday at the Wall Street Journal’s “All Things Digital (D9) conference” in Rancho Palos Verdes, Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google was the first to be interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. He made some interesting points which made it clear that Facebook is Google’s number 1 competition now. He admitted that he made a mistake by not taking the Facebook threat seriously four years ago.

He talked about the “Gang of Four” meaning – Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple (hey, no mention of Microsoft). These four have common characteristics in that they are all exploring platform strategies, and they all focus on a consumer brand with aggressive scaling and globalization as key themes. The unique part of Facebook is their hold over the consumer “identity” by connecting to friends and relatives.

Eric  acknowledged that he and other executives failed to take Facebook seriously four years ago when the social networking site had around 20m active users. Today, with more than 500 million users and growing, Facebook has become a magnet for online advertising, and continues to stunt Google’s financial growth.

Mr Schmidt said that Google, with co-founder Larry Page now at the helm, is pushing to develop more ways to connect people with their friends and family. “I think the industry as a whole would benefit from an alternative [to Facebook],” Mr Schmidt said.

He added that attempts by Google to negotiate a partnership with Facebook were repeatedly turned down, with the networking site preferring to partner up with rival Microsoft, which owns a 1.6pc stake in the company. Google also has ties to Facebook. One of its former executives, Sheryl Sandberg, is Facebook’s chief operating officer.

Facebook poses another problem to Google, as much of the information on Facebook’s website cannot be indexed by Google’s search engine. This restriction threatens to make Google less useful as more people form social circles online which could make it more difficult for it to understand a user’s personal preferences, which benefits advertisers.

Apple’s platform tends to be more proprietary, but it has built a huge franchise of developers for its iPad and iPhone applications. Google’s Android is much more open and is rapidly building a huge developer community for tablet applications. Amazon pioneered  the cloud computing infrastructure and hence provides the elaborate AWS (Amazon Web Services) platform for ts infrastructure.

The lack of mention of Microsoft in the Gang of Four is  interesting, as it lags the consumer brand of internet and seems to move more towards enterprise computing. I am sure the leaders at Microsoft would disagree with this characterization.

The answer is “Cloud”, what’s the question?

I attended 2 days of Cloud Expo, organized by Syscon at the Santa Clara convention center here. The expo runs for 4 days, today November 4th. being the last day.  I was also one of many speakers at this conference.

One feels the Cloud computing movement is in full gear after listening to many speakers and walking the exhibit halls. Many booths by known and new vendors – Oracle, SAP, Cisco, Navisite,..the bias seemed more towards infrastructure providers.

Folks who either run hosting services or supply gear to these services were in large numbers. Hence we saw Intel, Cisco, Rackspace, Savvis, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. There were very few SaaS vendors such as SalesForce.com or Netsuite.  The part of Oracle present was, as expected, the former Sun folks displaying the Exacloud server, recently announced at Oracle Open World. Several new vendors such as Abiquo, Navisite displayed their cloud services. These are mostly in the IaaS  (Infrastructure as a Service) space. Neither Google nor IBM was there (except newly acquired Cast Iron Systems).

Overall it was a good place to learn new developments. Several keynotes were good ones and reflected on areas such as performance, management, security, governance, etc. I met many friends from the past, all working on new cloud ventures. I presented BI (Business Intelligence) delivered on private cloud at large enterprises and demonstrated some cool iPad based analytics developed by FCS Inc., a pioneer in this technology.

The caution is to watch out for the use and abuse of the phrase Cloud. Being the latest buzzword, everyone is bending their story to being a cloud offering. Hence confusion abounds. I emphasized that the definition by NIST is the best and we should stick to what constitutes the elements of cloud computing from this work.

Finally the dream of computing as a utility is happening all around us!

Attending Oracle Open World 2010

It has been several years since I left Oracle and I have not attended the OOW during these years. In the past, I have been to all OOW’s during my ten years, both as a speaker and as an attendee. This was fun to see the growth of OOW – forty-one thousand people at this week’s show. It looked like OOW has taken over the city of San Francisco at least around Moscone center (from Folsom between 3rd and 4th. street all the way up to Market).

Some things never change. Larry shouting “next slide” at the end of each slide. Larry going into excessive technical detail such as cache coherency, Infiniband inter-process high-speed communication, putting many in the audience yawn and go to sleep, who would later say it was a  great pitch.  Listening to Sunday night’s intro pitch by Larry, I realized how much Oracle has changed since my days. Larry’s teaser to me during my interview was, “you belong to a real software company, what are you doing at a hardware company like IBM?”.  After listening to Larry, Mark Hurd, and John Fowler’s presentations, I was thinking – Oracle is becoming a hardware company as well.

It’s like “back to the future”. Vertical integration was the theme of the 1980s. IBM, Digital, etc. sold the entire stack – from hardware, OS, middleware, to applications. Then came the “democratization” of each layer where customers could pick and choose. That gave rise to many “services” companies who had to glue all the pieces for the client. Now we are back to the vertical stack again. Like the seasons and like in fashion, this is also cyclic.

No wonder then when I saw vendors in the exhibit hall like  Novel, Intel, EMC, Fujitsu, and even a big booth by IBM. Actually I felt the software folks from the database group were like a minority. I listened to a pitch by an Intel executive which was pretty boring. The Fujitsu CEO spoke about their strides in hardware before John Fowler (head of Sun server stuff) talked about the new machines and new version of Solaris. Larry had talked about Exalogic, and compared that to what Amazon is trying to do with EC2. No surprise there, as we have been talking about PaaS (Platform as a Service) or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) as  key components of cloud provisioning. Oracle having bought Sun, has to play that game, just like IBM does.

Having JavaOne combined with OOW, the attendance has grown significantly. But it was fun running into many old friends and colleagues. Oracle after 65 acquisitions (some big ones like Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA, and Sun), is a different company. Having Mark Hurd as the new co-president, it felt like a new “systems” company providing both hardware and software. Even the slogan said – Hardware and Software, engineered to work together.

No one comes close to beating Oracle in putting on a show.

Oracle Open World 2009

Interesting times. Although I did not attend the Oracle Open World 2009 in San Francisco, I watched some of the keynotes in the web. With 37000 attendees and the rain storm, it was a challenge in terms of logistics.

The main highlights are hard to pinpoint, as there were so many sessions, news items, announcements. With $40B worth of acquisitions during last 6 years, one has a hard time keeping up with various products. But one that makes the most noise is “Fusion Applications”. Some people have dubbed it as “ConFusion” before. The main focal point was of course the Oracle, Sun merger that is currently held up by the European Council. But Sun was there in full force – Scott McNealy, James Gosling(father of Java) and many others. There were discussions on NetBeans which was anathema before. Marc Benioff gave a session on SalesForce.com – he is supposed to be competition to Oracle On-Demand and Larry’s other investment NetSuite. But SFDC uses Oracle database for its own operations, so they are partners too. Michael Dell was there extolling the virtue of Oracle technology at its data center. Oracle claimed it runs 20 thousand Dell servers. Again with Sun servers, there is co-opetition (competition + co-operation). Infosys CEO Kris Gopalkrishnan gave a keynote which people twitted as dry and dragging.

The usual buzzwords were there – SOA, Web 2.0, Cloud, SaaS, PaaS, Web Services, BPEL, CEP, etc. Fusion apps are almost ready and will be GA next year, which means much work is yet to be done. The new Data Warehouse appliance Exadata on Sun with fast performance was much bragged about with challenges to IBM to match the run-time performance. Such bravado is good fodder for the media to write about. IBM should be clever to ignore such noise. The image of a barking dog at a calm elephant walking comes to mind.

During my days at Oracle this event used to draw 10 to 15 thousand users. Of course those were the pre-acquisition days at Oracle. Now with all the new users from Peoplesoft, Siebel, BEA, and others, the number gets close to 40 thousand. People come for networking and party. It’s a good escape from the workplace. Oracle does a great job putting this event and this year was no exception. Even the governator Arnold Schwarzenegger made an appearance to add pizzazz.

Web 3.0

At the “D conference” (All things Digital) hosted by the Walls Street Journal last week, there was sudden use of the term Web 3.0. The hosts said, “So what’s the seminal development that’s ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It’s the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services”.

I like the tone of this description. It’s everything opposite to what we have been doing for years in the computing business. It’s not fat client, not complex, bug-prone, attack-prone software like Windows (origin from QDOS, Quick and Dirty Operating System), not power-hungry and lowly battery-life, not redundancy in data, not closed proprietary systems, and not labor-intensive maintenance.  Just look at Apple iPhone. It has the attributes of a Web 3.0. – elegant touch screen user interface, myriads of applications developed by others, just feels simple and hassle free.

I like this quote from The Wall Street Journal of today,

“…the complete integration of computing into every part of our lives in a way that is seamless, ubiquitous and ideally, dead simple. From using easy gestures to grab any piece of information from the Web to having powerful computers in the palm of your hand to being able to quickly dip into complex social networks to getting real-time information from across the globe as it happens, this is an era when  computing could become as integrated and invisible as electricity and just as important.”

This reminds me of the late Mark Weiser (of Xerox PARC) who predicted back in 1991 (18 years ago!) – The most fundamental technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Some of us never thought we will see that prediction in our life times. But we are there now.

A long march over 50 years – from “big computers”, to “small computers”, to “connected computers”, to finally “invisible computers embedded in every day objects”.

—

–

SaaScon 2009

I attended SaaScon 2009, a conference focusing on Software as a Service and Cloud computing as themes. This was hosted by ComputerWorld at the Santa Clara Convention center.

At the outset, host Jeff Kaplan and Ron Milton said that $6.8B was the SaaS revenue in 2008, according to Gartner group. IDC said 76% of US companies had at least one SaaS deployed. Top five applications in SaaS delivery model are (not surprisingly) – CRM, HR, Collaboration, Travel expenses, and Sales Incentives. Top five drawbacks are – integration with current in-house applications, potential security exposures, offline connectivity, vendor lock-in, and network bandwidth issues. As expected the top five benefits are – fast roll-out, monetary savings from a lack of capital investment, option of plain-vanilla vs. customized implementation, and lower TCO (total cost of ownership).

Under the current economic realities and tight IT budgets, SaaS makes lot of sense. One surprising fact is that 75% of all SaaS deals do not have SLA (Service Level Agreement) according to Gartner. The conference speakers also talked about PaaS (Platform as a Service)  and IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). Examples of SaaS -  SalesForce.com (CRM), and NetSuite. Examples of PaaS – Force.com, and Google App. Engine. Examples of IaaS – Amazon EC2 (elastic computing cloud) and AT&T Synaptic Hosting.

Speakers said PaaS is a stepping stone to Cloud where development environment is offered to build own applications (similar to what Microsoft did 20 years ago, but on their platform). One future scenario could be your own information grid at the center interacting with several clouds such as data services, application services, hardware services, storage services, network services and others. This will include not only interaction with your internal cloud or grid, but also intra-cloud communication, something still at a very nascent stage.

The parallel to the commoditization of electricity was drawn a few times. How that grid (electricity) finally emerged with self-organizing, self-registration, and self-assembly features. Computing will eventually get to that stage – full compliment of services executed in a highly differentiated grid environment.

But the journey has started and there is no looking back to the good old days of huge capital expenditure of building in-house infrastructure with hundreds of humans managing it. We see the beginnings of that already, all of us using our iphones to access mail, calendar, maps, stock prices, airline information, and social networking like facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In.

One CIO explained how he reduced his IT spend from $607K in 2007 to $259K in 2008 by switching to SaaS (Google Apps for gmail, videochat, documents, spreadsheets, charts, etc.). He adopted Netsuite as the core ERP/CRM application and picked other packages        like WorkOasis (facility management), Halogen (performance management), ADP (payroll. HRIS), and admin tools like Webex, Echosign, eFax, Zoomerang, and VisualCV. His staff cost was reduced from $166K in 2007 to zero in 2008. Hardware cost was reduced from $52K to $8K. His is a small size company selling exercise equipments. No wonder the first adopters of Saas are the small to medium size companies.