Alter Ego? I guess....

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creatures through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.

For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren; they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth"

basket of thorns.... the beauty beneath...

It’s the troubles, the tribulations, the anxieties and a myriad of other perceived ‘thorns’ of our lives which make our journey all so very stirring, intriguing, agile n never let the moss catch up on your side…. It is the thorns which make the rose so delicate and so vulnerable yet so alluring, as if they were meant to fit in like the jigsaw... perhaps the 'razor blade model'. A rose bud with no thorns would translate to a life with no adversities which eventually means ‘life’ losing its essence, its prick, its sweet pinch which is needed to make you feel that you survive. Its only these rigors and severities of our lives that add meaning to it, just as the thorns add beauty to the basket …. Yep... my new found venture 'capturing' the beauty through the filter- studded lenses... my Canon! My digital experience...

Sector Analysis: IT Infrastructure Services

I.T. Infrastructure Services Offerings:
Broad areas:
Servers and Virtualization
Storage and ILM
Network Management
Data Center Management
Business Continuity
Application Management
Security, Compliance and Risk Management

Trends Influencing Infrastructure Services:
Market Trends:

• High Investments in IT infrastructure in sectors like Banking Finance & Telecom
• Offshoring to play a key role to deliver sustained ROI
• Application outsourcing and remote network monitoring -opportunities for the offshore providers
• Integrated infrastructure support services for high value integrated deals

Technology Trends:

• Information Life Cycle Management
• Emerging Areas –Portable storage Security, DB Activity Monitors, DB Hardware Encryption & Host Activity Monitors/Enforcers
• Increasing emphasis on Security
• Server virtualization and utility computing frameworks for real-time infrastructure

Remote-managed Infrastructure Service: The new wave!
Gartner defines global Remote IT infrastructure services as "the remote support and management of various IT services that are related to infrastructure support from global delivery sites." Indian IT industry body NASSCOM claims that between 60%, to 70% of the IT services surrounding a company's data center can be managed remotely. It estimates that 40% to 60% of the overall infrastructure management services market can be efficiently delivered from an offshore or near-shore location, which adds up to a market potential of $55bn. Wipro Technologies has already won infrastructure management deals with the likes of JP Morgan, Thames Water and travel services firm TUI AG, for whom it manages more than 1,000 desktops and laptops, and 300 servers. The country's fifth-largest player HCL Technologies won a landmark $330m deal with electronics retail chain DSG International in January this year to support its infrastructure and applications in the UK and Ireland. Western infrastructure outsourcing vendors have countered this trend by establishing offshore infrastructure centers of their own in order to remain price competitive. Perot Systems announced last December that it would offer to run clients' mainframes, Intel, messaging, and Unix services, from its facilities in Noida and Bangalore. In November 2005, IBM Global Services acquired Indian infrastructure services vendor Network Solutions Ltd, a company with 1,000 employees that provided remote infrastructure services to clients including HSBC and Citibank. Tata Consultancy Services, India's largest applications services firm, has a dedicated remote infrastructure-management center in Chennai with a capacity of more than 2,500 seats. Wipro Technologies claims to have the largest infrastructure services practice of the Indian majors, with more than 6,500 infrastructure experts supporting over 200 clients in the US, Europe, and Japan, as well as domestic customers.HCL announced 10 major infrastructure management deals in the quarter ending December 31, 2005, seven of which were with existing clients. Clients have already acclimatized to offshore delivery models for applications maintenance work, and they will quickly increase their use of offshore sourcing for infrastructure management if the suppliers can demonstrate robust enough propositions in terms of service delivery and business-continuity planning. Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) services offers all the benefits of managed services coupled with benefits of further reduction in cost of IT Infrastructure support, faster issue resolution time and access to top-notch talent on a round-the-clock basis.

Business Overview: Trends in India and the other Developing countries
India has emerged as the fastest growing technology hub in the world, its growth dominated by IT software and services such as application development and maintenance, system integration, IT consulting, application management, infrastructure management, testing and web services. IT infrastructure outsourcing: Mainframe-related outsourcing is a $29 billion market. Network-related outsourcing is a $7 billion market, while the desktop outsourcing market is a $18 billion market. Add to this the distributed environment related outsourcing market, estimated to be close to $57 billion. Unlike the strategies of global players like IBM, CSC and EDS who have been using the take-over route, taking over assets of their clients and moving infrastructure on to their balance books, Indian players clearly do not have the advantage of size i.e. it sticks to infrastructure management services.

While Indian vendors would clearly prefer a 100 percent offshore model as margins are better, it has been dominated by global giants and Indian players do not have enough reference customers currently to make a larger impact. The ideal route would be to start with an onsite model and then move the services offshore, as is done in the software services industry. IT infrastructure management services demand the right mix of onsite and offsite models. The nature of the services involved decides this. For instance, helpdesk management and network management works well with remote management mainly because of the customer’s confidence in the same. However, most large companies may not be comfortable outsourcing their network security management needs. In terms of mainframe data centre outsourcing, Indian vendors have limited exposure to mainframe operations. The largest of the Indian IT services providers, TCS, has just 1100 MIPS of mainframe capacity. In the few instances, the work is done wholly onsite. While this reduces the client’s risk, it also reduces savings since Indian vendors are supposed to pay staff prevailing charges onsite. Functional IT outsourcing services (including application management, IS outsourcing/infrastructure, network and desktop management services) sourced from India grew by nearly 28 per cent in FY 2004-05. While application management services remain the mainstay of this segment, increasing traction in remote infrastructure management services is helping Indian companies increase their share of revenue earned from IS outsourcing engagements. At the enterprise side, analysts estimate that Chinese and Indian corporations’ IT infrastructure spending will outpace spending by American firms. In the last year, 69 percent of Indian corporations had an increase in their IT budgets, compared to just 39 percent in North America. Forrester Research estimates that India and China alone will spend close to $1.1 trillion in the coming decade on new infrastructure. Developed countries’ increased outsourcing of IT functions to emerging markets has caused enterprises to make large, continuous investments in emerging economies to augment their IT infrastructure. The increased infrastructure enables the outsourcing and replaces equivalent (higher cost) deployments in the US. Countries such as India and China have growth rates of close to 20 percent in the outsourcing segment, significantly higher than those in developed countries. Moreover, the lack of legacy hardware and software provides opportunities for quickly delivering solutions tuned to the emerging markets’ specific constraints. The speculation on possible areas of innovation in data centers for large enterprises, shared utility-computing services for SMBs that support the developed markets. Emerging economies present a unique green-field opportunity in data-center services and data-center differentiated sales. Several differences exist from equivalent opportunities in developed nations. Existing data centers’ expansion rate and the creation of new data centers are much higher than that in the US. There’s a compelling need for a turnkey-datacenter solution—something that, to our knowledge, no one in the industry offers. This could, for example, involve a data-center synthesis environment that addresses all aspects of the data-center design (including the physical design) as well as the compute, storage, and networking elements. Designing modular data centers that are cost efficient at all points of the data center’s growth while providing the required performance reliability guarantees is a challenge. Another key challenge is in the provisioning and costs of network bandwidth across continents, particularly given the high costs of linking the domestic Internet to the Internet backbone.

The Invitation.....

It doesn't interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart's longing.

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn't interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life's betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own, if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, to be realistic, to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn't interest me if the story you are telling me is true. I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself; if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul; if you can be faithlessand therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it's not pretty, every day,and if you can source your own life from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine, and still stand on the edge of the lake and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes!”

It doesn't interest me to know where you live or how much money you have. I want to know if you can get up, after the night of grief and despair, weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done to feed the children.

It doesn't interest me who you know or how you came to be here. I want to know if you will stand in the center of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn't interest me where or what or with whom you have studied. I want to know what sustains you, from the inside, when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

Kakanostrophe

Its not just about closing the doors precisely at the strike of 8:30am every morning... its not jus about clinging on to that prized 10 marks, which would otherwise dissolve into the void for carrying your laptops into the classroom (inspite of knowing it well that u do NOT need it there in the class, which has also been specified for the umpteenth time!) and its not jus about putting your cell phones in silent (fearing its loud BUZZZZ amidst the lecture) lest you donate it to the admin for the next two business days (the dissolution of the 10 marks still holds true!).... No, its not the “YES YAAR” and its not the confiding in Najgar about the net connectivity (the sans of it, that is!), neither its the patronizing 'HAANJI, AAP BOLIYE!'. It’s the “KAKANOMANIA”, ladies and gentlemen… the stress syndrome, the discipline bug, the Valuation virus, the assignment dysentery, the NPV epidemic and all that jazz!

One of the greatest innovators, one of the greatest bowlers (trust me on this guys… his googlies can spin an entire generation!), one of the highest wicket taker (read: Ds and Fs in the term ends!), that’s Prof. Kakanostrophe for you guys! The only person who would dare to carve out an entire Finance examination question paper from the Financial Times, the only professor in whose dictionary getting a ‘zero’ translates to 'hitting a home run' (in case u r wondering, he starts marking you from minus 11), the only swadeshi question paper for the masses, which makes sure never to ignore the doodh walas, the paan walas, the chai walas… that’s again Sir. Kakanostrophe for you. Ever seen a 'matched question paper' asking you to “match the following”? Damn… and I thought ‘match the following’ is all about criss-crosses ;).

Take this now…

Term 2: same question, same characters (doodhwalas et al.), same marks and again stating “match the following”! What would you do now??? Darn, he got us for the second time!.

Time reads 8:28am: Larger part of the class population still dodging thru the stairways, (straight outta their beds in their stained T-shirts after that agonized assignment-laden night which ended in the wee hrs!) exactly 2mins more to go in Prof. Kakanostrophe’s atom tuned watch!

‘Timing’ has always been a challenge and the techniques of mastering it simply keeps on getting better. The 7 hrs of sleep before joining this B-School is now tailored to 70 minutes ‘power nap’. So what if you have the quiz next day(and they insist in calling it a ‘surprise quiz’!), so what if you have the Kakanostrophic assignments to be uploaded before 9am coupled with a Marketing presentation to be made the next day to which u gotta squeeze in a market research… just remember that the only punch bag you have possibly is your ‘sleeping hrs’. You pause and you are tempted to say, how green was my valley! But the trick lies in making THIS valley greener & accepting what they have to offer! It becomes a challenge initially to stop your sanity from breaking loose. But the fight against time, hours against minutes, it becomes a regime that doesn’t take too long to appreciate… the wrestle against your own body clock and showing ur face with droopy eyes in the morning lecture, getting the attendance punched (your class participation marks depends on it, mate!) surely qualifies for a pat on your shoulders!

Take 2: Temperature control Mechanism during class hours; Drive towards ‘Optimal Temperature Maintenance’, has always been key activity and a major awakening factor during lectures!

“Some like it hot;
some like cold;
some like switched off like a ninety year old!”

The class has 3 zones, defined by the scope of the air-conditioning! At any given time, atleast one odd soul is finding it too hot or too cold. The message travels across the class through Gtalk or Internet Packets (IP) to the other side to “increase” the temperature!

Getting oneself to the control panel, trying to read the class and decipher the sign languages (increasing temperature actually means reducing the degrees, making the room cooler!) almost gives one the feeling of being a rocket scientist, navigating through the upper Andromeda LG Supersystem... 10 different people across the room shout for (read signs) for 20 different temperature setting... finally frustrated, the controller unplugs all the three coolers, only to be seconded by yet another contributor, who would shoot the controller to 18.... and the loop follows... Bottom line… there is never a unanimous temperature, accepted by the class.

Time reads: 8:45am: a quarter of the class still in their extended slumber, just that they are now outta their comfort zone and have now chosen to sleep sitting in the plush reclining chair! Room temperature however remains the same... though the pleasant lullaby has now transformed to an educated baritone, proposing value addition to the dexterous, still groggy listeners! The remaining 1 hr goes in ‘social networking’ (includes Gtalk, Yahoo, MSN, IP, rediff et al), News update, Interesting Articles from Naike (Duh!), Orkuting and the likes of youtube, myspace, twitters.

Jeez, did I forget the NFS or Counter Strike??

Just before the lecture comes to an end, here comes the moment of truth. Ask me about the scope of MS Excel and I would always have one more to add! The pseudo-randomly generated decimal digits decide the fate of 2 broadly categorized student groups… students whose roll nos. end with X and Y, will have their assignments corrected!! THUD! Never underestimate the power of “=RAND()”

Visiting Wisdom (Guest Lecture, 17th July, SPJCM Dubai)

“The Economies of the Middle East” From boom to bust, and back”

As a part of the ongoing ‘Guest Lecture’ series, wherein some of the most prominent and respected names of the industry encompassing several domains, are invited to the campus to share their valuable experience, knowledge and vision with the students. On 17^th of July, SPJCM Dubai was graced with the presence of Dr. Tarik Yousef, a noted economist of the modern times. Our speaker, Dr. Tarik Yousef is currently the Dean of the Dubai School of Government. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University and specializes in development economics and economic history with a particular focus on the Middle East. His research and policy experience includes working as an economist at the Middle East Department of the IMF, Visiting Professor in the Office of the Chief Economist in the Middle East and North Africa Region of the World Bank and Senior Adviser for the Millennium Project at the United Nations.

Dr. Yousef enthralled the audience and captivated the students’ think tank as he took them through the evolution, the stagnation, the development (economic) and finally the growth policy in Arab countries in the last 30 years! He started of by detailing the scenario the Arab world witnessed during the 1950s and era following it, which boasted the transition from the closed protective mindsets of authoritarian government to a more liberal outlook which slowly became instrumental in putting the Middle East economy where it is today.

Post 1950s, the economy saw the emergence of a very specific development marvel, a model centered to redistribution, invention and massive deregulation, which was consolidated over a 30-40 year period. Some reasons for the spread-out growth model may be attributed to the consistent interventions in the form of coups and espionages. Strong dictators and military dictators at that emerged, providing a sense of safety that countered an external threat, which was again over exaggerated. Another factor, more than anything else which affected the ME, Saudi Arabia and the gulf, was OIL. The availability of oil wells in the 50s – 70s catalyzed he massive flow of funds, money that one didn’t have to work for. Hence the single monarchies ran the show and won the support by delivering free healthcare, free food, medical services, infrastructure, education and taking away taxation. As the countries became more prosperous, the political gurus thought the model is delivering and no need to open up a space. On the other hand, in exchange of welfare with the other nations, they had to give up their political rights and the dictators would become more powerful, legitimate in the eyes of the population. No right to vote, no political party but people seemed quite satisfied saying “I have a job, a career, a car, my kids go to school, and I don’t have anything to worry about”.

As goes the age old saying, all good things come to an end and nothing of the bonanza of the 70s n 80s could last. Please welcome ‘1997 – The East Asian Financial Crisis’. The Middle East went from a boom to a bust. They were doing really well till now, but post 1985 till the early 21^st century they not only touched the lowest trench of all times in history, they even faired worse than all countries, except from Sub Saharan Africa. Reason – OIL PRICES! Suddenly all the welfare programs become very expensive! What was needed was a recalibration of the development model. The resistance to new liberal policies was coming from the fact that this model created a lot of vested interests associated.

Just like Nehru capitalized on the strength of personality and a wide acceptance of the intellect; he also clearly defined that the country needed ‘States’. The idea came from EU and NA to develop economic prosperity and the Arab world is a by product of this intellectual potential. The 1990s – the era of private sector development, trade liberalization, economic deregulation, this in turn gave way to a new phenomena – Globalization!

But nationals in UAE don’t think of the private sector as their first job. Not because they don’t want to work, not because they’ve been programmed but because they have created societies and education systems that did nothing but employed public sector workers for a very long time! Public sector offers job security, benefits and wage increments more competitive than the private sector for all UAE nationals and complemented to this, the degree they get is a perfect for a public sector job and only that! This isn’t a religion, but the way the societies have been created and engineered if one doesn’t have an open political system and allow people to voice concerns, practice constraints and if one doesn’t have such a political process, the reform process is going to be very difficult. Unfortunately many failed to embark on the reforms as because the existing political system didn’t help any space as they thought they would become illegitimate in the eyes of their population. THIS is the story of Dubai!!

Dr. Yousef also drew upon the shifts in economic thinking right from the neo classical era to Keynesian economics when he recited the famous quote of Keynes “In the long run we are all dead.” From where we have come right from the State Controlled era where even the prices of bread that we bought was determined by the state, to the free market economy where the forces of invisible hands interact to form a price-demand-supply mechanism. Finally Dr. Yousef mentioned that the way for the future would be Knowledge Economies. Knowledge driven societies would emerge as the new parlance and would lead the crowd further into the era of globalization. The move in that direction can be witnessed with Dubai placing a strong emphasis on education, a result of which is the Knowledge Village and the Academic City. Thus we ended with the opening question that was posted to us “Dubai, from boom to bust and back?” still unanswered as only time and the macro forces would be able to tell.

It was actually an honor to be a part of this seminar, especially when an issue of such immense gravity was dealt with an equally lucid clarity and an easy transparency, such that all of us could relate to it effortlessly. Dr. Yousef’s intellect, his vision and his critic captivated the audience for over an hour. Dr. Tarikh addressed the questions and the doubts, which the students came up with at the end of his session. Here are some concluding words from and food for thought, enough to keep us ticking for quite some time now…

“The ultimate lesson form the East Asian crisis is the knowledge that a crisis would happen. The real lesson was the speed with which the countries recovered and the path of sustained prosperity that they took. That is the challenge facing Dubai; in order for Dubai to keep propelling upwards, those with skilled degrees, with high value added talent, more voice and more stakes in the system will have to exist and sustain. The key to moving ahead is through research and development and nurturing advancements and innovations across all domains. The battle for talent in Asia is intense and skilled people are going to be in high demand Not only in this part of Asia, but everywhere. Give it more space.”

Joydeb Mukherjee