Android, the growing force

Today, two significant events are happening. Samsung who has been carpet-bombing with ads all over the world on its new smartphone – the New Galaxy, is doing the big announcement in New York. I read that they have outspent everyone, even Apple, on marketing dollars (over $400 million in 2012). In the last month, during my visits to India, Germany, Czech Republic, and Turkey, I have noticed Samsung ads everywhere. Their market share on smartphones have grown dramatically during the last two years.

The second event is the stepping down of Andy Rubin, founder of Android at Google to a new role, as announced yesterday.

Android — which began life as an independent company Rubin co-founded in 2003 — is now a massive and growing force in mobile. Sure, some might grumble about the many forks and flavors, but the software powers more than 750 million devices from scores of different hardware makers. Android accounted for 70 percent of global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC.

The overall criticism seems to be its multiple flavors and incompatibilities. Apple’s chief marketing guy said yesterday that Samsung’s Galaxy users will use an operating system that is at least one year old. Keeping various flavors of Android in sync has been an issue.

Google has been pushing two operating systems – Chrome OS and Android, the former for laptops and tablets and the later for smartphones. By consolidating the Android group under the Chrome division, headed by SVP Sundar Pichai, Google is attempting to bring the two together. This is what Apple has done well with its iOS – it feels the same whether you are using the iPhone or the iPad and even some aspects of Mac laptops.

Steve Jobs was quite upset with Android and made some disparaging remarks during 2011 before his death. However, Apple has a battle as newer devices (hardware seems very much alike – a big shiny glass screen on metal with touch UI) all preferring Android as their OS. It must continue to innovate, mostly in the software, to attract customers as Android becomes a real threat.

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.

Tech thoughts for 2013

Last year, we saw three trends making lots of noise and a fourth one closely following – Cloud Computing, Big Data, Mobility, and Social networking for the enterprise. Let me comment on each one as we enter 2013.

In cloud computing, the focus shifts to Platform as a Service (PaaS) as SaaS is now accepted into the mainstream. CRM and HR applications dominate the space with SalesForce.com and Workday as leaders. Microsoft, for example, is evolving its Windows Azure from a PaaS to Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). Last year, it added persistent-state virtual machine support to Azure, allowing it to accommodate a wider variety of software, including Linux. Microsoft also introduced Hadoop for Azure and support for MapReduce. Amazon’s AWS stack now blurs the boundary between PaaS and IaaS. SalesForce.com wants to be a PaaS player via its Force.com platform for developing any SaaS offering. Besides CRM/HR cloud apps., we have seen emergence of financial apps for midsize companies – Adaptive Planning, Anaplan, Host Analytics, and Tidemark are some example companies.

In Big Data, the focus will shift more to analytics and data visualization. The other key trend is “data in motion”, where capture and analysis can be done for split-second decisions. The post-Hadoop era has started and we see a host of new players offering near-realtime data reduction and analysis. This trend will accelerate. A set of NewSQL players (not NoSQL) are adding scale and performance to Postgres or MySQL, that can also be offered as a cloud service. Relational databases like IBM’s DB2 and Oracle will dominate the enterprise space, given its long years of proven robustness and reliability. However extreme scale in the order of petabytes will attract newer solutions.

Mobility is a given, thanks to the outselling of iPads over PC’s. Last year iPad sales  exceeded Lenovo’s number of PC sales. Cloud computing assumes user devices like iPad, Android, and smart-phones for users. Apple boasts over 700,000 iOS applications. Microsoft has a lot of catching to do with its slow sales of Surface RT. Going forward, every enterprise application must design its UI to the form factors of mobile devices. This will be a price of entry for any vendor. Gone are the drop-down icons on Windows as UI.

Social networking has grown a great deal for consumers, but enterprises are still struggling to figure out the proper usage and business benefits. Social will come into the organization through the back door (much like how PC’s entered the business during the 1980s and 1990s). A communication director may test out a company page on Facebook or customers complaining about or praising your company on their Twitter profiles or traditional enterprise applications being updated with social capabilities, there will be social. Hence it may be worthwhile your company should have some policy around social. I think enterprise applications will integrate more social features. Someone said that Facebook will matter less, but Twitter and Pinterest will be of more significance.

Welcome to 2013.

Cloud Computing in 2013

Marc Andreesen, said recently that 2012 will be remembered as the year of SaaS. What he meant is that SaaS has been around for a while, but it came off age this year, with examples of successes such as the Workday IPO. No one questions the significance of SaaS any more. But the year 2013 will see a shift to PaaS (Platform as a Service) with “most” new activities. There is already a blurring of the lines between IaaS and PaaS, as seen from Amazon’s AWS stack. But programmatic interface in PaaS will dominate as we move forward, catering to the developer community. The incumbents such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and Adobe (representing “on-premise” software) will have to combat with pure-play cloud players.

I saw a list of cloud pioneers and new cloud tools that should be worth sharing. Among the names (arguably) of cloud pioneers here are the often quoted – Warren Vogel (Amazon CTO), Chris Pinkham (architect of EC2, now head of start-up Nimbula), Randy Bias (CloudScaling, formerly GoGrid), Jonathan Bryce (Rackspace/Openstack), Lew Tucker (CISCO), Rich Wolski (Eucalyptus), Chris Kemp (NASA CTO), Urs Holzle (Google), and Frank Frankovsky (Facebook). You can google their names to see the pioneering work they have done in moving cloud computing forward.

I also saw some new cloud tools as we enter 2013: Evernote (categorize notes, PDF, image, etc.), RightSignature (doc. signing), Expensify (expenses to cloud), Square, Teambox, Backupify, RenewOnDemand. These tools are taking traditional desk-top apps. to the cloud.

Several lists are floating around on winning software startups in 2013: In the Big Data and analytics space – Cloudera, Actian, SiSense, Appranaissance, Appature, and Good Data. In Cloud and Mobile space: many cloud-native startups, CloudPassage, Facebook (new userid and security logon), Xamarian, Sensha, Square, Airbnb, Marian Software and many other HTML5 tools and platform vendors.

One thing for sure – we will see the cloud space getting hotter and hotter in 2013.

Travelog – Bangalore in November 2012

Visiting India is always an interesting experience no matter how frequently one travels there. My first trip to Bangalore was almost 40 years back, as a summer trainee during my undergraduate years. Now the same city looks so different! Concrete jungle is everywhere and the long ride from the airport is a reminder of the growth also. On the flight from London, the Indian gentleman next to me lives in Tampa, but travels to India every 3 months. He runs an empire of Indian companies (distillery, hospitality,..) worth Rupees 6000 Million ($120 Million) with over four thousand employees.

The American lady sitting next to me on the flight back to London says she is with Ernst and Young and will move to Bangalore in January for two years. She grew up in the mid-west and currently lives in Dallas. She will move there with her dog. The rental apartment charges Rs.80,000 per month ($1600) which is exorbitant and higher for foreigners, something I fail to understand. The rental does not include any appliances nor utilities which means it will cost her more than $2000 per month. But she was looking forward to her two years in the E&Y’s Bangalore office. India seems so expensive these days, gone are the cost advantage of hiring programming skills. The ratio used to be 4:1 (four programmers for the cost of one in USA). Now it will be less than 2:1, more like 1.5:1.

I saw iPads and iPhones all over the place. Free wi-fi in hotels is expected and service is quite good. In Bangalore the USA does not feel far. Anyone you see at work, travels frequently to US and Europe. IBM India has over 100,000 employees, more than the number in the USA. During my IBM years in Canada and USA, the company had left India (due to its archaic rule of majority ownership by a local company), subsequently started operating the India business out of Singapore. After the 1991 change of policy, IBM re-entered India and has been growing ever since. Even there is an IBM research unit in New Delhi. Oracle started its India operations in 1993 and has big off-shore development groups in Hyderabad.

I had breakfast with a friend who had moved to Bangalore from the bay area two years back. He complained about small day-to-day hassles of living in that city such as – getting a broadband line at home, or getting a credit card at a local bank. These activities which are simple and straightforward in the US, are non-trivial tasks there. Wherever the government bureaucracy gets involved, inefficiency rises quickly. India continues to struggle between the march towards modernity vs the pullback by the old-school politicians and the bureaucrats. My friend plans to head back to the bay area in a year or two.

Getting top-quality skills are as hard there as it is here. The state of Andhra Pradesh produces 200,000 engineers per year, but only 15% get employment. The quality is really bad. It’s mass production without depth of knowledge. Some of these youngsters are without jobs for two years after graduation. There seems to be a general slowdown in hiring. The well known services companies are facing a hard time with growth. The start-up culture is quite feeble compared to what we see here in Silicon Valley. Some friends were not very complimentary in their comments on the local VC’s and their attitude towards funding early-stage product companies.

Still there was lots of interest in the latest trends – cloud computing, big data, and mobility. As the technology and IT world shifts, India seems slow to adopt to changing trends. Young engineers still pay big money to get SAP, Oracle and Java training. Terms like Hadoop, Dremmel, Pregel, Cassandra, Twitter Storm, etc. are unfamiliar to the local techie conversation. Given the trend towards cloud applications such as Workday, the need for customization and services will be much less (Workday claims an 80% reduction in services cost). Hence the future of many Indian services companies will have to change towards a different value proposition as well.

India will continue to fascinate as always. A land of paradoxes with quick adaptability.

Post-Facebook – Micro Social Networks

I am on Facebook, but not an active user at all. Also I am reluctant to share too much personal stuff with friends. Then there are long-lost friends and family members popping up with Facebook requests to connect. I do not feel anxious to connect as it would increase more “gossip” time I want to avoid.

But then, Facebook with 900 million users is heading for it’s much-anticipated IPO in 2 weeks. The prediction is that it will be a $100B valuation on the first day of treading. Now people like me who are less enthusiastic users have some alternative choices appearing. Three such companies have started attracting users – Path, FamilyLeaf, and Pair. These micro-social network sites foster “sharing that is intimate by design”.

Let us talk about the anthropologist Robin Dunbar of Oxford University, who has done research on social behavior of humans. He says, social networks are like concentric circles and 150 seems to be the outer bound, meaning that is the effective neurological limit the human brain can handle. In other words, 150 is the maximum number of “friends” and this is called the “Dunbar Number”. Then he says 50 is the number of “trusted friends”, 15 are “good friends”, and 5 are “best friends”.

An average Facebook user in the US has 245 friends, well above the Dunbar number. Then this number gets mixed up with family members, friends, and workplace colleagues. Users sometimes share stuff to certain friends they did not want to.

This has led to the creation of a new start-up called Path by Dave Morin, ex Facebook employee. He says, “Facebook has made socializing on the Internet normal. But now there is an opportunity to return to intimate socializing.” He started with an upper limit of 50 friends per user and last year increased it to 150. It is available only on smart-phones and boasts over one million users already. Its user has an average of 40 friends.

FamilyLeaf is restricted to family members only and even more restrictive. Pair, started by Canadians just connects to one friend, hence the name. It is available only on smart-phones. These two companies were funded by Y Combinator from Silicon valley.

It is interesting to see how the social networking is entering its next phase.

Apple Market Value exceeds $500B

Wow Apple! The market value exceeded $500B and now everyone is speculating if it will reach One Trillion, which no company has ever aspired. As I look into the valuation this morning, Apple is at $505B. Microsoft is almost at half of that at $266B. Look at the other big ones in technology sector – Oracle ($146B), Amazon($82B), Cisco ($107B), IBM ($229B), Intel ($134B), Google ($201B), and HP($50B). Other stalwarts for comparison are – Wal-Mart($202B), GE($202B), and Exxon Mobile($408B).

Someone commented that if Apple was part of the Dow Jones, then the value would have exceeded 14000 few months back. Apple is an American pride institution that symbolizes great creativity, innovation, and visionary leadership in planning and execution. Once written off as a “has-been”, Apple came back with a vengeance largely due to the dynamic leadership and imagination of the late Steve Jobs. He married liberal arts and computer science into a blend of consumer products that reached the pinnacle of success. It puts the leadership at Microsoft and even Google to the back benches. Let us not even talk about HP.

Steve put together a great leadership team and Apple will continue on its growth for next couple of years. They will announce the new iPad 3 next week on March 7th. I am sure newer versions of iPhone and MacBooks are on the pipeline. Their foray into television should begin to shake up that sector, much like what they did to music, smartphones and tablets. For now, Tim Cook and team seem to charge forward with the same vigor as their departed leader.

At a personal level, I was a user of all Apple products except the laptop, then I bought my first MacBook Air around Thanksgiving time. Now I am in love with my MacBook Air with its SSD and lightning fast boot-up. Every time I go back to my old IBM ThinkPad running Windows, I am in a time-warp of some prehistoric technology.

Hats off to Apple with its great success!

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.

Apple is defying gravity?

Yesterday’s announcement of Apple’s fourth quarter result for 2011 was astounding to say the least. Growth from a year-ago quarter was 118%. Sales for the quarter at $46.3 Billion yielded profit of $13.1B. Wow – that profit is more than 3 times what General Electric earned in its most recent quarter. These figures blew analysts’ projections. Apple’s cash hoard is $97.6B, more than the market capitalizations of all but 52 publicly traded companies.

Today Apple’s shares are up around $450, making its market capitalization surpass Exxon Mobile. So Apple is the most valued corporation in the US and the world. This is significant as the founder and visionary leader of Apple Steve Jobs died last October. The momentum of sales continued even stronger than before. The new iPhone 4S sold briskly contributing to the total sales of 37M iPhones. Even the iPad sold 15.4 Million units. The Amazon Kindle Fire made no dent to iPad as many pundits had speculated. Now the onus is on Apple to continue keeping up with sky-high expectations.

But what a remarkable journey! Tim Cook said yesterday that they could have sold even more if they had enough supplies. He also said new products are in the pipeline later this year including new releases of iPhone and iPad. The Apple TV box for wifi link to the TV has also sold better than expected.

Just see what is happening to RIM, makers of Blackberry with their rapid market erosion forcing the  change of CEO. Also Yahoo reported decline in sales and profit as the new CEO Scott Thompson takes over and Jerry Yang finally steps down. These former market leaders can look with envy at Apple’s tremendous success – a testament to excellent product design and world-class execution by its leadership team.

Apple seems safe for a while executing its product roadmap and plans. One never knows what will happen five years from now. But they have reasons to celebrate now.

Information – Knowledge – Wisdom

As we usher into the new year, one thought keeps haunting me – how many hours are we spending in front of a screen, be it our smart-phone, tablets, laptop, desktop or TV? Gone are the simple joys of life – reading a book quietly, taking a walk without any distractions, or just being quiet.

The average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing). Even more scary - The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month.

Few years back, at a conference, the interviewer asked Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, “what is the first thing you do when you get up in the morning”? Pat came the reply – “check email”. What was considered cool few years back – “Always On”, seems like a real burden now. The constant barrage of emails, Tweets, Facebook, SMS, does not leave us any time to be quiet with ourselves.

I have been saying for years, “we are drowning in information, but starving for knowledge”. Above that is Wisdom and you might as well forget that one. So it is like a pyramid and at the bottom is the flood of information we are bombarded with. Filtering essential nuggets of knowledge is a monumental task. No wonder the emphasis is on business intelligence and meaningful analytics to make the information useful. Wisdom is above that which becomes our guiding light in life.

In a recent thought-provoking article in New York Times, the well known author Pico Iyer said, “In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.”

I have always used the adage – “ease of use equals ease of abuse“. The perfect example currently is the overuse or abuse of Facebook. Over-communication of trivia is happening in the name of social networking. Even in offices, productivity is affected negatively by such distractions of constant email, tweets, etc.

As Pico Iyer says, we need to get back to allocating quiet time to ourselves – set aside a chunk of hours every week with no interruptions. He comically mentions resort hotels charging a premium for rooms with no TV, no Internet, and no phones. People are willing to pay for being away from all these distractions.

I recommend highly to do meditation every day for 30 minutes, preferably in the early morning.  Yoga is another option also.

The new B2B is Back to Basics.