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இன்று கணித்தமிழ் சங்கம் தனது மாதக்கூட்டத்தை எங்கள் அலுவலகத்தில் (விஷ்வக் ஸொல்யுஷண்ஸில்) நடத்தியது. கூட்டத்தில் தே.மு.தி.க சட்டமன்ற உறுப்பினரும், மாஃபாய் நிறுவனருமான திரு.கே.பாண்டியராஜன் சிறப்புரையாற்றினார். தமிழக மாணவர்களிடம் கணினி தேர்ச்சியின் அவசியத்தை சிறப்பாக எடுத்துரைத்தார். உறுப்பினரின் பலப்பல கேள்விகளுக்கு அழகாகவும் பொறுமையோடும் பதிலளித்தார். அவருக்கு நன்றிகள்.
I have been attending this yearly event by Nasscom – Emergeout Concalve in Chennai. This year it happened today in Hilton, Chennai – this was the first time I am going to this hotel since it was opened few months back. The hotel was nice and functional, but I couldn’t find any character or inspiration in the design. Mr.Som Mittal in his speech mentioned Indian IT products are being recognized slowly, for example Scope International of Standard Chartered Bank worked with NASSCOM in adopting Indian IT technologies. 12 products were showcased and 7 got selected.
Keynote speaker was Mr.Krishnamachari Srikkanth who started slowly in his speech but picked up speed and hit the balls all over Hilton. He over-shadowed everyone else in the panel discussion that followed up, but it was enjoyable and unpretentious. Krish Srikkanth in his speech talked about:
In the panel discussion one of the speaker “Ramki” says currently Cricket fans chase information and websites. Why not the information chase or reach users automatically?. One think I didn’t understand in the panel discussion why have a moderator with a star speaker like Kris. The moderator was completely unable to steer the discussion or add value. The next two panel discussions that followed were not inspiring for me, so I left the event during lunch time. Inviting me to do a Keynote for a workshop beginning on April first, I thought it was an April Fool’s joke. But it turned out Anna University new Department (Information Science and Technology) Professor Dr. S. Sendhilkumar was for real on this. And so yesterday I was honoured to be the Chief Guest for their Mobile Application Development two day Workshop on Mobile and asked to deliver the keynote. The inauguration event was graced by Dr.S.Shanmugavel (Registrar Anna Unviersity) & Dr.G.V.Uma (HOD Dept of IST, Anna University). In my keynote address I talked around two main ideas: The first was how during last decade innovation in Mobile Phones technology happened in Fareast (Japan & South Korea), but now United States is back in the driving seat with iPhone & Android. In India we are being known around the world for second largest user base (~600 Million Mobile subscribers) and for our Government’s bungling on how they handled 2G Spectrum allocation. As the Morgan Stanley reported pointed out in 2009, in last two years 5 trends have converged in the mobile world and they are 3G, Social Media, Video, VoIP & SmartPhones. If Netscape was the inflection point for Internet, then iPhone has become to be known as the inflection point (disruptive technology) for Mobile Internet. Before iPhone an average Cell Phone was being used 70% for Voice, now over 50% of usage in an iPhone is Apps & Data. The second was about Mobile Apps (Mobility software), the potential and importance of it. A simple game from Rovio (Finland) “Angry Birds” has been downloaded over 47 Million in first 15 Months and the company with ~50 Employees is valued at several hundreds of million dollars. If we thought that is out of this world, look at this – a recent game “Tiny Wings” written by a single developer (Andreas Illiger) is the top grossing game in Apple App Store in February 2011. So conventional wisdom of Software Industry and big corporates don’t hold the key to innovation in Mobile Apps. It can be any person with meagre programming skills and a brilliant idea. So students in an academia environment like Anna University are well poised to become the next “Rovio” if they start thinking beyond their books and scores. Good Luck to all the students attending the Mobile Workshop.
Today as part of ACM Chennai Chapter Lectures Dr.David Chaiken, Chief Architect at Yahoo! Inc. delivered a talk on Architecture at internet-scale at the ICSR Auditorium of IIT Madras.
Yesterday NASSCOM Emerge Forum had organized a talk titled “Software Delivery Supply Chain – Achilles’ Heel for India SME Focused Software Product Companies” by Mr.Kumar Vembu, Founder & CEO of GoFrugal Technologies. Brief given by NASSCOM before the talk: Indian SMEs have a huge, unsatiated appetite for IT solutions. But, we are yet to see a large India SME focused success story among the software companies, with the exception of Tally Solutions. Many software companies that attempted to address the Indian SMEs could not succeed. Is software delivery supply chain the Achilles Heel ? Given the extra-mile Indian SMEs expect the software vendor to walk, in order to learn their needs and implement the solutions, software delivery supply chain is a potential landmine. Brief about Mr.Kumar Vembu: Kumar Vembu is the Founder & CEO of GoFrugal Technologies which specializes in retail, retail distribution and supply chain management solutions. In a short span of 6 years, GoFrugal has established itself as the leader in retail business management solutions for the micro, small and medium enterprises in India. Kumar Vembu is a co-founder of Zoho Corporation and was the President & COO of the company from its inception since end of 2004. Earlier in his career, Kumar has worked in the USA for Qualcomm & Intel Corporation and in India for HCL – Hewlett Packard and the TeNet group, IIT Madras. Kumar completed his B.E in Electronics and Communication from A.C. College of Engineering and Technology, Karaikudi. One complaint I always had about NASSCOM was that it was focussed and working only for the IT Biggies, kind of an elite club. Over the last few years with EMERGE Forum and EMERGE Conclave NASSCOM seems to be realizing and addressing the needs of SME’s. This talk in Chennai by Mr.Kumar was certainly beneficial for the participants. In the one hour talk Kumar was down to earth, used no slides and everything he said seemed to came from a man of profound thought & immense experience. Following are from my notes of the talk, so I have left the notes in the same voice of Kumar and so all references to I/We mean Kumar and GoFrugal. I may not be accurate on capturing the facts & figures, so please bear with me. GoFrugal has over 12,000 retailers using it in last six years.We have over 50 people across India on the feet and about 30-40 in support. Overall GoFrugal is over 220 people strong. We acquired RayMedi Pharma Software product company which had 200 customers at the time of acquisition. We are present in thirty cities. Our Software runs on Windows and SQL Server 2008 Express Edition which goes up to 10GB and is free. Though product has user interface in multiple indian languages, many of the users only use English. While selling to India SME’s the relationship and face value of the people interacting with clients are more important than technology. From Day 1 we do agile software development, may be we overdo agile. We do what customers ask, some time customers ask wrong things and we may end up doing wrong things. The retailer first wants you to automate what he is doing then want to look at better ways and industry best practices. Which means even if it is a bad practice our software has to do it, we need to do it. 70% of a retailer’s time is spent on present and past problems and the rest 30% is spent on creating problems for the future. We develop our software faster so we introduce more bugs, so any new problem we are responsible. In this product space in comparison to India market there is Sage which has over six million customers, there is Mind your own business in Australia, Intuit Small business, China has a company that has over 100 million users. In Tamil Nadu there are 3-4 main business communities. Money lending business focuses on distribution and those who have time in their hands take up retail business. Every 50-60 such retail owners form a virtual family/clan/native-place cluster. Everyone in the cluster are all connected very well and they are connected for long. There is one thought leader in each cluster who decides and set the direction. Any new cluster the first few customer is very difficult to get, only after that you you can penetrate rest of the cluster. Companies like TVSE have tried and failed in this space, so the memory is fresh with the cluster. For marketing we participate in many industry events regularly, one time attending is not enough. Traditional marketing, having senior vice presidents who call field people and pushing them doesn’t really work. Indian market is very slow to penetrate. As Software vendor you should service them first without asking money, which comes much later. Even with attrition at their (retailer) end the software should be easy, robust and also software should prevent people from doing mistakes. They want the Software product company’s owner to come in person and attend issues, the owner coming and showing attention is more important than solving the problem. The challenge is to match the cottage industry response but a professional service. Our ‘Assure’ program gives them guaranteed support time. One full time person from our side calls 20-25 existing customers and explains the remote support feature in the software and that you will get 10 times quicker/better service than someone coming to your door. Today only 8% of our Desktop version users use the remote support feature. If they have data connection in their PCs they can chat online for support. We have a 24×7 support centre in the town of Kumbakonam backed by a small Dev centre there. All our field staff use laptop & data card. For FMCG there is a one way channel of distribution. Consumer feedback doesn’t go back to the manufacturer. This model works for Tally as well, because of their training partners and now it is a science. Our Entry level product for a single computer is free, first one is Rs.15,000 and comes with 6 hours of user training. All said from our customer’s point of view we are over priced. Our conversion has been good from free to paid. There are about 1200 configuration settings in the software and so for us the two way feedback is very important. Time is not valued and you can’t expect them to pay Rs.3000 for a days training. The person training from our side has to know business and also the product. Channel is apprehensive on learning and getting trained because they have no brand as brands like Polaris, SIFY or Tally go. Customers are not capable of self learning. We have put up thousands of video on YouTube on how to do things in our software. The time spend on creating the videos is more than what all our customers put together would have spent on seeing it and there are videos on many of the Indian languages. Corporate deals we do with companies like Asian Paints give us the scale, with each deal giving us over thousands of seats. Volume makes it possible to match the costs and pay industry salary. We recruited people who may not have great communication but they are Good IQs. Bigger guys don’t want them due to their lack of great communication. Engineers don’t have appetite to learn business, they can’t do taxes. We have 20-30 entrepreneurs who don’t have engineering degrees. They have developed their own software may be with Visual Basic and they have worked with customers already. (You can read my past post titled “Running a product business in India” here) In support of Lions Blood Bank (Chennai) we had organized a Blood donation camp in our Office at Vishwak Solutions (Chennai). The last time when we had a similar camp in our office I couldn’t donate blood as I was on that day on Anti-Allergic medication. Today I didn’t want to miss the opportunity and volunteered to donate. The first time I donated blood was in college days and then only once or twice after that, so I was a little tense. But the good Samaritans & volunteers from Lions Club helped each of the donor(s) to be at ease and the whole process was nothing more than having two injections (shots). The first injection was to check the hemoglobin level and the second was to collect the blood, all got over in 10 minutes. The camp doctor first checked the blood pressure, weight, enquired whether we had breakfast and then only authorized the donation. After donating I felt good about myself – emotionally and physically. I am making this post to request & encourage each one of you reading this to donate blood whenever you get a chance and safe a life. It is so easy!
The TiECon 2010 conference that happened on 24th November 2010 was a success due to great voluntary effort by all the organizers (incl. myself) involved. TiE Chennai chapter had organized a Celebration dinner for all the organizers today. Venue was Hotel Accord Metropolitan, G.N.Chetty Road, Chennai. It was a nice occasion where we all shared on what went right and what could be improved in next year conference. My thanks to all other organizers, charter members and board of TiEChennai for having me as part of the team.
The last few days were quite eventful for me. As one of the Charter Member of TiEChennai I volunteered to help Raghu Rajagopal who was heading the team for the software (content) for TiECon Chennai 2010. TiE is a Silicon Valley USA based Entrepreneurship fostering association boosting over 11,000 members in 13 Countries and Chennai’s chapter is one of its vibrant. I took on the task of helping to identify and co-ordinate for the Tamil panel, which was a first in TiECon Chennai. It was a panel that show-cased success stories straight from the gut of those fearless entrepreneurs from the state. The journeys covered were path-breaking, across industries, started from scratch but today enveloping across the nation. The panel was moderated by none other than Chennai’s own illustrious star Mr.Y.Gee.Mahendra (YGM).
Mr. Y.Gee. Mahendra kick started the session by saying all the three entrepreneurs met the very basic needs of man – Mr.Isaac of Aachi takes care of stomach, Dr.Arun of Vasan Healthcare takes cares of health, Mr. Kumaravelu of Naturals Saloons satisfies everyone’s ego. Detailed coverage can be seen in this blog. My sincere thanks to all the 3 Panellists and to Mr.YGM for accepting our invitation and sharing their valuable experiences. Rest of TiECon 2010
My blog post on TiECon 2008 here. கடந்த சூன் மாதம் மிகச் சிறப்பாக நடந்த தமிழ் இணைய மாநாடு 2010க்கு உழைத்த அரசு குழுவில் இருந்த அனைவருக்கும் தமிழக அரசின் தகவல் தொழில்நுட்பத்துறை சார்பாக மாண்புமிகு அமைச்சர் அவர்களால் ஒரு மாலை விருந்து கடந்த மாதம் (செப்டம்பர் 28) கொடுக்கப்பட்டது. பணியாற்றிய அனைவருக்கும் ஒரு நினைவுப் பரிசும் கொடுக்கப்பட்டது. நிகழ்ச்சியின் படங்கள் கீழே:
Today I gave a talk in the SharePoint 2010 Productivity Tour that happened in Vani Mahal, Chennai. I have been to Vani Mahal many times in the past for watching Stage plays, Classical Music programs or Dance programs, so being on that stage and doing a technical presentation was a little odd to begin – but once on stage I got used to it. Needless to say, the acoustics and lighting were good and I just wished the LCD projector could have displayed any resolution higher than 800×600! The topic was “The New World of SharePoint 2010 Architecture & Administration”. The product is exciting with new features that I decided to do the talk with minimal slides (to be fair I gave the choice of a 45 slider to the audience). I covered most of the points from the Central Administration screens & some PowerShell scripts. I think to a large extend I succeeded in what I tried – download the deck from Skydrive (or view it below) and leave your comments. You can see the first 30 minutes of the talk from this (amateur) video recording.
1) There were few queries on references for capacity planning especially on Search, I have given below some links on the topic.
2) The PowerShell code to enable Developer Dashboard is as below, replace “OnDemand” with “Off” to turn the feature off: $svc=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]::ContentService $dds=$svc.DeveloperDashboardSettings $dds.DisplayLevel=[Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPDeveloperDashboardLevel]::OnDemand $dds.Update() 3) The free tool I used that provided a GUI with Intellisense for PowerShell scripts was from PowerGUI.ORG. The HP Sizer for SharePoint 2010 can be downloaded from here for free as well. 4) These are some of the books on SharePoint 2010 that I have seen available in Chennai bookshops. (Author Names) Bill English, Todd Klindt, Tom Rizzo, Steve Fox |
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Copyright © 2012 Venkatarangan Blog - All Rights Reserved.
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. |
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_1.jpg "KTS Meeting on 29August2011")
_1.jpg "KTS Meeting on 29August2011 (12)")
.jpg "Dr.G.V.Uma (HOD Dept of IST, Anna University), T.N.C.Venkata Rangan, Dr.S.Shanmugavel (Registrar Anna Unviersity)")
.jpg "T.N.C.Venkata Rangan delivering the keynote address for Mobile Workshop in Anna University on 1April2011")
.jpg "Seen Prof. Dr. S. Sendhilkumar and T.N.C.Venkata Rangan")
_1.jpg "Dr.S.Shanmugavel (Registrar Anna Unviersity, Chennai) presenting a flower bouqet to T.N.C.Venkata Rangan")
