CloudBus

Bharat Badal   and   Rural India         Sometime back   I had shared how rural India can benefit by Bharat Badal , here is a check of how these expectations have panned out. Today the cloud is assisted by cognitive and mobility and nation linked by easy data connectivity which has accelerated the adoption and use of technology in rural India.   What can be done for rural India using the cloud - A status check "The cloud will allow information technology to be infused to the smallest hamlet of India and make access to information available to the poorest of the poor to give them a better life by empowering them with knowledge derived through the net book or mobile phone connected to the cloud. The cloud will make the services such as affordable and accessible at a low cost" This has been achieved for rural India by the   Digital India program of the Government. Bharat will benefit by taking the cloud t...

It was a wonderful and fulfilling evening for the business and technology leaders of India at the IBM's Think forum 2018 on 13th February in Mumbai. CEO Speak - Ms. Ginni Rometty - Chairman, President and CEO of IBM's keynote set the tone for the energy packed evening, she stated that business can get smarter by the use of cognitive computing - Leveraging a data platform that learns ; Infusing that learning into systems and processes & Empowering their people to learn faster with AI and the need to usher new technologies with purpose and responsibility;society will judge the right ones which deliver value. She enunciated the three drivers for businesses to get smarter - leveraging a data platform that learns, infusing that learning into systems and procedures and empowering their people to learn fast with AI. She said AI should be called Augmented Intelligence. Ms. Ginni Rometty stated that we are at an inflection point for all businesses is use of data, leverage proc...

This is the text of the keynote delivered at the Project Management Conclave organized by PMI Mumbai Chapter on 10th January 2015. I would  like to thank you very much for having me as part of  your conference and I am sure that the next two days will be rewarding for all of you. Stakeholder Management is key to success of any project; there are primary stakeholders and secondary stakeholders. Primary stakeholders are those who are directly involved in the project and secondary stakeholders are those who are not directly involved buy may be affected by the project. Both Primary and Secondary stake holders may positively or negatively affected by the project, hence stakeholder management calls for good communication and people management skills and many a time political acumen. I would today share with you some instances of stakeholder incidences and how one had to manage them. We once had to pull a cable from under the premises of a particular shop in a large socie...

It is rare to find a Make in India Cyber Security Solution in an exhibition, conference or seminar, as one scans the various forums one finds a few Make In India Cyber Security Solutions. If India wants to be a Digital State then there is an urgent need for Cyber Security Solutions Made in India for Indians and managed in India. We do have a few home grown OEM security solutions but their engines are loaned from foreign security companies.  We claim to be an IT superpower, does it stop with being cyber coolies? or does it go beyond that in making world class solutions to protect our Digital environment.  All our mobile data is stored in a foreign country, we use solutions that we find free or paid from foreign shores, of course the internet is one world but who controls the data controls the digital world. There were enthusiastic Indian entrepreneurs who did try to make Security solutions in India but I have not see any of them making it to the big league. Maybe Indian CIS...

This article was published in Information Week India on 10th October and is reproduced in this blog. India is poised for a digital revolution. With a government pushing digital services, and a huge focus on on empowering every citizen with an identity card, a bank account, insurance and a digital interface, the future is bright for IT in India. With the announcement of opening local data centers in India by Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, Microsoft is well placed to explore the huge opportunities that will be unfolded in the days to come.  The Microsoft India cloud proposes to begin with three data centers and will provide the world's best cloud computing that India needs so desperately to handle the large volume of digital transactions,  need to cut down costs and handle the data that will be generated by digitally enabling a billion Indian citizens. Additionally, Microsoft will be able to offer their cloud services in a number of Indian languages, thus eliminating the need...

India's biggest challenge has been to empower its citizens with financial inclusion by providing banking to its unbanked population to Banking. The government's initiative of opening 15 million accounts in one day sets the tone to make sure that every adult citizen has a bank account in India.  Critics say it cannot be done, but we know from history that carpet bombing is the best way to overcome a challenge. The Indians have set out to a economic transformation in their country, by empowering its unbanked citizens the menace of cash in the system can be overcome thus improving the GDP of India. It is estimated that the cash economy in India is bigger than the legal economy in India, the cash in this system is known as black money in India and has strong parallel network for banking in cash. If you use a credit or debit card with an Indian merchant he will charge you about 2% to 3% extra as the transaction fee for using the card, this encourages customers to pay in cas...

Indian start-ups are high on SMAC and are brimming with ideas and many are working hard on their ideas in a garage somewhere in Bangalore or yonder;  working day and night to bring out the next big winner in the cloud, but can they hit pay dirt like Hewlett & Packard? Many of these start-ups will be driving SAAS solutions on the cloud and Nasscom has added  momentum by leading the charge with a target of 10,000 start-ups a very modest number, India can  do with a million start-ups'  to service the world  and create economic value for India. The first aspect the start-up needs to get right is the domain name,is it "startup.in" or is it startup.com, starup.biz, starup.net,  it is nice to be nationalistic but in the cloud SAAS you are building could be used by anyone in the world and will  need a global address.; also is the start-ups  twitter handles and other social media address available in the proposed name of the start-up? The websi...

Europe has blown the War Bugle, they will build their own EU clouds and secure their data and applications within the boundaries of Europe. The Rest of the World will also follow suit in building their own Secure clouds for their business, government and anything else that needs cloud computing. The Gold Rush is on for Secure Clouds built bottom up, it is going to be a bonanza for leaders who offer virtualisation solutions like VMWare and its competition including Microsoft Azure & others, Data Center Equipment hardware providers  IBM, DELL, HP and CISCO and others. The marketing teams in these companies that provide the building material for cloud computing are going to be busy and laughing all the way to the bank. Their fears of the cheap Public Cloud will be history and no longer a challenge to their growth and revenues. Secure Clouds in the Horizon will herald the demise of Public Clouds. The cloud pundits who understand how to put together a cloud computing...

Recently Forrester stated that 70% of "private clouds" aren't really clouds at all http://www.networkworld.com/news/2013/022613-forrester-private-clouds-267108.html Therein lies a tale of deceit, misinformation and false gratification of many organizations believing they have a cloud in place.  To get the facts right we need to revisit the definition of cloud computing as defined by NIST which in may opinion is the final authority on cloud computing standards and is followed by the industry and professionals.  http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-145/SP800-145.pdf Cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared  pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that  can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.  This cloud model is composed of five essential characte...

Today's program on cloud computing for Business at Bangalore was well received and was attended by Senior Business Leaders. Some of the keen observations was the lack of adoption of cloud computing by business in India because of poor internet connectivity in smaller cities and rural areas. There were live examples of challenges in getting reliable internet access and bandwidth and more needs to be done to fix this problem to make cloud computing adoption a reality. The second takeaway was the large  technology  cost to support transactions in Banking sector, almost about Rs. 50 a transaction was the estimated cost. Cloud could substantially lower this technology cost by banks adopting cloud computing. Some banks are there in a nascent stage and some Banks offer their application as a SAAS based core banking solutions in a virtualized environment which is marketed as a cloud. More needs to be done in this area and one solution was to build a dedicated and secure cloud ...

The SME sector in India has been identified as the sector that is ready to adopt cloud computing and also benefit the most because its IT Deployment is limited today. But as one engages with the SME sector we find its leaders are ignorant about IT Management other then using a financial software on a PC the trust factor is abysmally low. The SME is mostly owner run in India and privately held and has been mainly built by entrepreners with an healthy knowledge and specific niche skills. It is a long road for Indian SME to adopt Cloud Computing. Photo Credit : Amitav Thamba The bankers, lenders and government have been spending years to list these SME companies with limited success, I recollect trying to list SME companies in 1991 which was disastrous in the OTC Exchange of India, it is the same fate of the two new SME exchanges started by NSE and BSE the leading stock exchanges of India. To get the SME sector to speed it is important to allow them to deploy t...

The Indian regulator Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has recently agreed to provide licences to a number of new Banks in India with a caveat of serving the under banked population. The promoters of these Banks will be scurrying with their consultants to hire CIO/CTO from other Banks to get off their Core Banking Systems off the ground before they can launch their banks. It will be good for them to pause for a moment and consider Cloud Computing as a vehicle for their technology launch and here are some of the benefits Cloud Computing will be the dawn of a new technology paradigm for Indian Banks.  Time to Market will be in weeks rather then months so they can start their operations ASAP, especially if they adopt a SAAS based Banking solution. (e.g. the cloud based core banking solution offered by NABARD through Wipro and TCS). They will operate in an Opex model, which means capital will not be locked into traditional technology capex investments.  Agility ...

India is a nation which is progressive and has a large middle class population who enjoy the benefits of this fast growing economy. But when it comes to marriage most of India relies on Arranged Marriages which binds communities together with similar traditions, language, dietary preferences, dressing , attitudes and more. In the old days when communities were more local and not widespread Indians had the Matchmaker who would bring families together through marriages. A good description of the matchmaker is the song from the movie Fiddler on the Roof : Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make me a match, Find me a find, catch me a catch Matchmaker, Matchmaker Look through your book, And make me a perfect match (courtesy :  http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/fiddlerontheroof/matchmaker.htm) Indian arranged marriages Wikepedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arranged_marriage_in_the_Indian_subcontinent With an Indian diaspora with global dispersion the Indian a...

It has been a rough patch for Indian IT companies as they struggle to transform themselves in a recessionary world where the old methods of providing bodies for service has changed to service delivery with compensation based on successful completion of projects. The Indian IT industry grew on one great phenomenon of fixing the challenging Y2k problem way back in the years 1999 to 2000. This allowed Indian technology professionals to support and deliver skills to keep the business running into a expected catastrophe in the year 2000 (Y2K). I was in the USA in the months of December 1999 and January 2000 on a holiday and remember the New Year of 2000 being brought in with bated breath. It was a new decade where programmers had forgotten that the century would end when they created digital solutions. Luckily the new year rolled out with no major glitches because of the century transition. Y2K was the catalyst for the growth of the Indian Industry supported by savvy marketing and co...