HiPODS

From w3: (Lots of jargon, but such labs basically help large customers simulate an entire solution - consisting of applications and infrastructure software & hardware - before actually sinking in massive amounts of money in them. Just like the GSDC, clients definitely get impressed! Only the 7th such facility for IBM.)

"IBM India unveiled the High Performance On Demand Solutions Lab – a dynamic infrastructure facility with world class servers to develop, test and validate high performance customer solutions. Housed in IBM India Software Lab, Bangalore, this first of its kind lab for IBM in India will bring in specific high-value skills to help clients in India and the surrounding region to enhance and optimize their IT resources to support the growth of their businesses."

Industry material on Communications - Digital Media (IBM NICA)

What we did at The Hindu. (from w3.)
Digital Media SMB solutions. (from w3.)
NICA page. (from w3)
NICA on the web. (from ibm.com)

Industry material from w3

Travel and transportation. (Can be used at ibs.)
Retail. (Can be used at Lulu.)
Consumer products. (Can be used at Medimix?!)

Hospitals - Electronic Medical Records. (from AP)
Retailers embracing technology. (from Mercury News)

What makes GE great?

Read this to find out! (from Fortune)

Interesting read on the server market

Suddenly, servers are hot. (From Mercury News.)

BW on Dell

How the PC maker's once-revolutionary sales strategy may actually be holding it back. (from BW)

HP has narrowed the gap in productivity and price.
Will Dell work with AMD? And let Google put its software on its desktops?

People don't wish to shop the 'old' way:

"The world is clearly changing around Dell. The once-torrid growth in sales of personal computers has slowed, to about 5% a year. More surprising, consumers seem less enamored of buying their tech wares over the Web or phone. According to researcher NPD Group, the percentage of PC sales done via the phone and Web fell last year, and the share of sales through U.S. retail stores rose, as people flocked to shops to fiddle with new gear such as digital-music players, digital cameras, and slick laptops."

"That's a difficult development for Dell. It spends less on research and development ($463 million) than Apple Computer ($534 million), despite being four times Apple's size. "Not investing in R&D works great in the commoditized PC world," says Vinnie Muscolino, general partner with Babson Capital Management. "It doesn't work as well in other areas.""

"Putting more money into R&D. Selling through retail stores. Breaking with Intel. None of these steps sound anything like Dell. The fact that analysts are raising these ideas underscores how dramatically the times are changing. If Rollins and Dell want to keep up the company's image as one of the great stock market performers of all time, they may have to think different."

CREATIVITY!

Reading, writing, and creativity. (From BW)

"the ability to think creatively is essential for students as they seek jobs, companies as they go up against competitors, and nations competing in the global economy."

"Ultimately it's the process of having original ideas, but there are several steps. The first step is imagination, the capacity that we all have to see something in the mind's eye. Creativity is then using that imagination to solve problems -- call it applied imagination. Then innovation is putting that creativity into practice as applied creativity."

"The Renaissance was a flowering on all fronts. It concerns me that this U.S. initiative is focused on a piece of the problem but not the whole thing. A second element is teaching. You can't just give someone a creativity injection. You have to create an environment for curiosity and a way to encourage people and get the best out of them."

"On the corporate level, Pixar is a good example. The company has something called Pixar University, that runs classes, events, workshops and stuff throughout the day. Every employee is entitled to spend four hours a week at Pixar University, and they are encouraged to not take anything job-related. That keeps peoples' minds alive."

"You can't be a creative thinker if you're not stimulating your mind, just as you can't be an Olympic athlete if you don't train regularly."

Windows bumps Unix to #1 spot

From news.com.

#1: Windows
#2: Unix
#3: Linux (Similar to Unix, but runs on the x86 platform)

Windows took longer than expected to do this due to:
1. Solaris' growth during the dot-com boom
2. Linux

IBM set a target to be the top Unix vendor, and got there last year.

Sun trying to reverse its losses in the Unix market; makes Solaris open source, and also available on the x86 platform.

IBM leads the overall server market, but HP and Dell grew faster last year. Sun's been losing share (for years now).

Much of the growth will continue to happen in the lower end (<>

In x86, AMD grew its share from 6% to 14.3%.

Blades posted the strongest growth of all, and IBM leads this space with 41% market share.

IBM in Health Care & Life Sciences

Scripps Research Institute and IBM to collaborate on Pandemic research.

Linux on Sun Niagra

Linux can now run on Sun UltraSparc :: Linux's been running on IBM's Power processors for a few years now.
UltraSparc is now an open source chip :: Power.org has also been around for quite some time now (chip design available here, among other things)

People are skeptical about Linux on Sun.

The ZDNet article covers IBM's, HP's experiences with Power and Itanium respectively.

"Faced with difficulties getting Intel's Sparc rival, Itanium, to catch on, HP is underwriting a large portion of a five-year, $10 billion effort to popularize the chip family."

The largest distributors for Linux, Red Hat and Novell, don't support Sun.

"Red Hat dropped its Sparc support in 2000, and Novell Suse's last supported version was released in 2002."

"The effort is part of Sun's attempt to restore its relevance and financial fortunes by shaking its image as a proprietary technology company. That legacy from the '90s hurt the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company when it missed out on two major growth trends that spanned the rest of the server industry: machines built with x86 processors such as Opteron and Intel's Xeon, and the open-source Linux operating system."

Dravid on Raina

Rahul Dravid's always been my idol. Here's something from him on Suresh Raina that I can relate to right now:


"We would like to win every game and this one is no different. Raina played superbly in the last game and showed what a phenomenal player he can be and it's important to give youngsters different challenges. The only way you can get the best out of players is by giving them chances under pressure. No point in being soft on them or cocooning them. It doesn't get the best out of them."

Kochi!

What did I do today?? Well, I don't know anyone in this city, so I thought I might as well work for some time. Finished a client call in the morning (If you insist on knowing, well, he wanted to negotiate on the rate we've quoted. These purchase managers...), and after comning back late afternoon to office, the only thing to do was check mail.

But surprisingly (or not so surprising, as most of my friends access mail from office, and today being a Saturday...) there weren't too many new messages. I panicked for a moment, and then realized that I could always spend the evening reading a few of the 28.1 million (and growing rapidly!) blogs out there.

So I start with the usual (Lazy Geek), and proceed from his blogroll to my namesake's funny blog. Pretty funny. Only, not funny enough. Which then lead me to this.

The folks at Sulekha and Penguin decided that these were the real funny ones (I only found the 1st and the 4th to be good though):

Manjul Bajaj

S Narayan

Madhulika Liddle (Space on the net.)

Deepanjali Pandey (Managed to locate blog too. Gawd, these Sulekha people could've made it easier. Poor netiqutte I say!)

Three women out of the four winners! (The writing in the above competiton was of the sophisticated -but thoroughly enjoyable- kind. I guess guys are good at slapstick comedy, what with Leno, Letterman, Conan ... even 'Who's line is it anyway?' (1 2) had only the one woman among all the men.) Way to go!!

So that's how I ended up spending this Saturday evening in Kochi. My friend Vijay would've wated me to travel, and explore Kochi's, and some other nearby places' beauty (and I WILL, only not this weekend), and some of my other friends would've said 'Da, get a life!,' but what to do, we are (I am) like this only!

Time well spent I'd think. And now, to worry about Monday's weekly sales review call with the manager from HQ...

Outsourcing is climbing skills ladder

From The NYT.

IBM Software Group (MS related links)

IBM spearheads AJAX tools at Eclipse. (news.com)

Microsoft is losing some of its elbow room. (Washington Post)

Council snubs MS by going in for open-source software. (Blog)

Eclipse rises victorious. (infoworld.com)

Smoother sailing without MS. (Newsweek)

Summary (w3)

3 trends - Linux, Networking, Security

A client once told me that Linux, Networking and Security were going to be the most important things to watch out for in the next few years.

Something covering IBM's portfolio in the security area.

news.com covers a conference on security. (McNealy, Gates et al)

The man behnd Cisco's security. (news.com)

McNealy's top 10 list (of security nightmares!). (news.com)

IBM and the Channel

IBM's glowing report card. (VAR Business)
Hardware and sofware.

Chennai as a manufacturing hub

From the Washington Post:

"This new wave is not about Gap T-shirts or Dell laptops, the poster children for the light industries that already have global supply chains. And it is not about software and/or call centers, the industries for which India is famous. Instead, this new globalization is about heavier manufacturing, particularly cars. Detroit's panicking firms know it."

Chennai's already got Hyundai and Ford. BMW will soon be here. And it seems that VW and GM are interested too.

Mentions: TVS, Rane, Sundaram Fasteners. Jayalalithaa, SEZs, Quality awards our companies are bagging.

A copycat named MS

Another instance of MS being the fast and aggressive copycat - and not the innovator.

Flashback: IE 7 will have tabbed browsing capability (the feature I like the most about Firefox).

Back to the present: MS to challenge the iPod. (news.com)


Now, to the story about the bully:

Flashback: Netscape vs. IE or, 'How the bully killed the start-up'

From the WSJ: "Ten years ago, Microsoft used PC makers' reliance on its operating system to block competition from a browser offered by Netscape Communications. Its tactics led to a landmark antitrust suit against the software giant that eventually restrained Microsoft from using its hold on PC software to close out or limit rivals. The ruling granted PC makers greater freedom to pitch non-Microsoft software on the PC's earliest set-up screens."

What the bully does today: "Still, last summer, executives at Google, H-P, Yahoo and other companies started to worry about Microsoft's continuing influence. Early versions of Microsoft's newest web browser, which is due out this year, featured a built-in box for searching the Internet that automatically directed PCs to Microsoft's MSN search service. They feared Microsoft was using the feature to put rival search companies at a disadvantage."

And at a Google-MS meeting to discuss this issue: "Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Microsoft's browser team, wasn't at the meeting but received a series of text messages from his colleagues who were. "Not sure they're hearing us," read one message describing the Google group, he recalls."

But I guess they're not all bad: "After months of back and forth, Microsoft backed down on some, but not all of the debates. Mr. Hachamovitch recently demonstrated the latest test version of Explorer. The built-in search box features options such as "Get Search Providers" and "Change Search Defaults" that enable users to select search engines from AOL, Ask Jeeves, Google, MSN and Yahoo. "Our overriding principle from the get-go is 'respect user choice,'" he says. "There's no desire to do anything other than that.""

IBM Software Group's point of view

IBM software doesn't play in the 'applications' space. Steve Mills' point of view.

Enterprise applications = SAP, Oracle e-apps, Siebel, Peoplesoft (ISVs). Even after all the so called consolidation in the applications space (Oracle eating up Peoplesoft and Siebel), all these ISVs put together probably hold around 25-30% of market share (??).

That still leaves all the thousands of ISVs in all the different parts of the world. (Including a place called Angamaly near Kochi, where an ISV named 'trescon' has built a 'Hospital Information Management System,' that a hospital named 'Litte Flower,' also in Angamaly, is all too happy to use.)

By not competing with these ISVs, IBM Sofware Group hopes to partner with such ISV and through them, sell its Middleware software stack. (Lets companies build, run and manage their applications.)

Blades (from w3)

Blades are the hottest server market segment, and IBM's BladeCenter family is enjoying the fastest growth in IBM server history. Since its introduction in 2002, IBM is the only vendor to install more than 350,000 blades.

According to market analyst IDC, IBM held 42 percent of worldwide blade revenue share in the third quarter of 2005, the ninth consecutive quarter the company held the leadership position.

In contrast, HP's record includes several failed blade form factor attempts and the company is likely to make further architectural changes this year to try to catch up with IBM.

Dell hasn't faired any better: it's seen its blade platform come and go, and today the company buys its blades from another company.

USES:

• BFSI: Twelve of the world's top 13 investment banks are using BladeCenter, with more than 25,000 blades installed.
• Digital Media: The movies King Kong, Matrix Reloaded and Lord of the Rings were animated using BladeCenter.
• Supercomputing: Fifteen percent of the world's Top 500 supercomputers are BladeCenters, including Europe's largest, Mare Nostrum.
• SMBs are buying: Based on the current pipeline report, 40 percent of BladeCenter revenue comes from small and mid-sized business.
• Server Consolidation: More than 100 U.S. retailers use BladeCenters in their Data Centers, and more than 1,600 are deployed in more than 1600 retail stores for infrastructure consolidation

Power vs. Itanium

Power marches on. Power 6: For IBM, speed rules. (BW) (from w3) (news.com interview)

The Cell chip (co-developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba, and based on the Power architecture), which will power the Play Station 3, will now be available on IBM Blade servers. (w3)

It also has applications in Defense and Medicine. The Cell chip's other life. (BW)

Power chips will also run the latest Xbox 360 from Microsoft, and the GameCube from Nintendo. IBM discovers the power of one. (BW)

Itanium: A cautionary tale. (news.com)
Intel throws good money after a bad chip. (CNN Money from Business 2.0)