CIO-Reinvented Blog - By Prashanth Rai

Cloudy Future of Cloud Computing….

Today i came across this article which talks about the need for companies to modernize their backup infrastructure, while i read this article i was rather surprised at the lack of "Cloud” based options being highlighted.

Then saw this blog post which has the survey results from the CIO 100 Symposium & Awards Ceremony (50+ CIO’s responded) which had the chart:

While about 42% of the survey participants selected “horizontal application,” just over 35% said they have no production cloud use at all.  I’s also very surprised that cloud storage is so poorly utilized.  It is simple to use, measure and its cost model is clear.  Granted, cloud storage doesn’t make as much sense for a secure production database, but there has to be more out there just in the way of backups, file storage, etc. that could justify easy re-platforming in the cloud.

And some other interesting stats from the survey are:

• Forty percent are most concerned about security, while 37% are overwhelmed by a presumed complexity.
• On the question of When will the majority of your infrastructure be in the cloud? - Fifty-nine percent of those answering said “Never.”

These stats paint a very abysmal picture of the future of Cloud computing, particularly for infrastructure as a service providers. But more i think about it, more i am inclined to think that its probably best that these CIO’s prepare themselves for some big changes in their IT landscape and in their mindset. Cloud computing is the next evolution of computing and is here to stay.

I am reminded about a conversation i had with a couple of CIO’s / IT leaders a couple of years ago, in which they found the whole concept of leveraging cloud or cloud based services funny and felt they were unlikely to use it in their respective enterprises, but over the last two years i have seen them change their opinions and have become more comfortable with the concept and are looking to leverage it more.

Will need to wait and see how / when it happens to these 50 CIO’s or if it ever will happen?

Prashanth Rai

Source: 1

mKrishi – Unwired Innovation for the “Farmer”

These days there is a lot of talk about mobile or unwired applications, iPhone App Store and Android Market have some really interesting and useful / productive apps. But only recently did i come across the mKrishi project by TCS, this initiative has the potential of being truly transformative for India in general and more specifically for the Indian farmer - Who at this time is having a very challenging time in most parts of India.

It addresses one of the key challenges of the farmers - "lack of information". Getting information to the remote corners of India to the farmer has been hard in the past with the lack of communication infrastructure and irregular electricity. Companies have been trying to do improve this for some time now with efforts by companies like ITC - eCoupal, the initiative was covered in great detail in CK Prahalad’s book Fortune at the bottom of the Pyramid. But i believe that leveraging the mobile / wireless communication infrastructure is the step in the right direction.

In India mobile phones have become extremely pervasive, India has about 635 million Wireless connections at this point of time and is expected to grow at 15 million per month. the overall tele-density per 100 people is around 51% – Meaning 51 out of 100 people have either a mobile or telephone connection. The remaining population, mostly situated in rural areas, is still to be connected. Both the service providers and the phone manufacturers are working on addressing this space and have & are making good progress in this space.

 Here is a link to the presentation detailing how mKrishi works.

mKRISHI, a platform developed by Tata Consultancy Services to provide personalized advice to Indian farmers on low-end mobile phones. The mKrishi team spent two years studying farming patterns in rural India and developing methods to connect farmers to agricultural experts, with the belief that technology could jump-start some of India's seemingly ancient agricultural practices.

"It appears that there is a last-mile gap between farmers and agricultural experts," said Arun Pande, the head of TCS Innovation Labs and the leader behind mKRISHI. "In the absence of correct information and advice which is specific to him, the farmer relies on what other farmers do—or on his traditional wisdom."

TCS Mobile Agro Advisory System (mKrishi) connects farmers with an ecosystem that empowers them to make sound decisions about agriculture, drive profits, and conserve the environment.

Farmers require information on weather, soil, fertilizer and pesticide that are specific to their plot of land. They need information on the type of seeds, crops available in the market and local market prices.

TCS Mobile Agro Advisory System addresses all these issues. Farmers can receive information on microclimate, local market price and other subjects of relevance to them on a mobile phone. It also enables farmers to send queries specific to their land and crop to receive personalized replies from agricultural experts, on their phones. More details

This seems to be part of the innovation lab program within TCS, which is headed by CTO of TCS Ananth Krishnan.

Prashanth Rai

Source:1 

Image Source: 1

SAP’s use of AWS ….

One of my often repeated complaints lack of sufficient focus on the use cases & case studies for “enterprise” both large & SMB. If you go to the case studies section in the AWS site you can see that the bulk of them are startups or ISV’s very few are “Enterprise” and even those are not the the most useful / relevant cases studies.

In this regard, today AWS hosted slides from their “AWS Enterprise events” hosted in several cities this year. Don't see too many “Enterprise” case studies. But the presentation by SAP – was pretty interesting. Below are some excerpts from the slides:

SAP

Here are some excerpts

1. Top 3 consuming departments got an average cost saving rate of 77%
2. SAP AWS Footprint
   1. 1100 new SAP Systems
   2. 42086 EC2 instance Hours
   3. 39 TB EBS storage
   4. 3 TB S3 Storage
3. Primary use cases
   1. Workshops
   2. Trainings
   3. Demo’s / Sandboxes
   4. Testing
   5. Development
4. Plan for Extended Clouds for SAP Customer – POTENTIAL >2000000 Systems
   1. Certification by SAP
   2. Support by SAP
   3. Tools & Solutions by SAP & Partners
   4. Services by SAP & Partners

Prashanth Rai

2010 the year of SME @ SAP

2010 is going to be an important year for SAP in the SME space. SAP is working hard on putting the different pieces of the puzzle together to make it successful in the very competed /discussed about SME space. Key pieces of the puzzle

1. Product Portfolio
2. Channel
3. Enablement

Product Portfolio

SAP has a 3 product strategy for the SME space. The one that is most talked about / awaited is Business By Design. BBD is still only on a limited availability mode from SAP. But they seemed to have made a lot of progress on the product & addressed most of the technical issues & related operational cost issues. It is expected to go into general availability later this year, with the latest version of the product. The other products SAP business one & SAP business all in one fill out the rest of the suite.

Channel

SAP has built out a strong channel organization to reach out & scale the SME business. SAP currently has 5400 partners (VARs, resellers etc) – 2700 are Partners & 2700 Extended Business Partners. In my conversation with some of the partners, they seem to be having a really good relationship & successes with SAP.

The partner channel already accounts for 85% of SME deals, but according to Pat Hume (SVP of Global SME Partner Channel) the goal is to have partners account for 100% of SME sales.

Enablement

Programs like Fast Track – Which is a “packaged” solution by SAP & their partner to implement a solution in 80 days flat - seemed to have achieved its share of success. During the SAP Summit, there were customers cases discussed / presented, whose implementations were done between 4 – 12 weeks. Example - Green Blue Auto SME Customer (Canada) – Green field Implementation was done in 4 weeks flat.

Also SAP is enabling their customers through a variety of models like offering on-demand, Subscription pricing for their All-in-one solution etc.

Below are some data points on the SAP SME front:

• SAP defines SME as customers with revenues lower than 500 Million $
• 75% of SAP’s 92000 customers are SME
• SAP Acquires >35 new SME customer per working day
• 70500 SME Customers in total
• 50500 SME Channel based customers
• Tripled the SME customer base in 3 years
• SAP has 25000 B1 Customers
• SAP SME Number further broken down:
  • Upper ME = 11%
  • Lower ME = 42%
  • SE = 47%

Prashanth Rai

Tags: sap - sme - bbd - sap+summit - b1 - all+in+one - a1

Interesting data / statistics about SAP ....(SAP Influencer Summit)

During the last couple of days at the SAP Influencer Summit, There were a lot of interesting discussions / sessions. I will post about them over the next couple of days. To start off, I wanted to just list out some of the interesting data points / stats that I heard.

• By 2011 - 12% of world wide software market will go to cloud computing / on demand route(Merrill Lynch)
• 60-70% of the world's population have mobile devices
  • 4.1 billion phone, 35m iphone, 20+ smartpone types
• 350m FB users, 2m SCN users, ~1m blogs updated / day
• 14 Billion devices will be connected to the Internet, ~1Trillion events
• Business By Design currently has 100 customers.
• To reach a market audience of 50 Million
  • Radio - 38 years
  • TV - 13 years
  • Internet - 4 years
  • Ipod - 3 Years
  • FB - 2 years
• SAP ERP 6.0 productive systems - 18721 in Nov'09 vs 11804 in OCT'08 - Half installed base using the latest version
• Transaction On these systems:
  • 3200 car engines per day
  • 50 million bank accounts
  • Processing 2.5 billion utility bills
  • Retail outlets - $330 million worth of transaction per day
• In Memory technology - Provides 1000x+ performance gain - Extreme advantage enables brand new value creation
• SAP Summit Attended by 275 People in attendance / 20 + Customer & Partners
• SAP has 8000 people in Goto Market division & 10000 in the services organization
• Newell Rubbermaid - SAP / BCone (Sap partner) Supply chain Project executed in 90 days, Sales process took 37 days.
• Business By Design - lot of work done by R&d for the suite, factor  20 reduction in TCO for SAP
• Johnson Products implemented Business By Design in 30days (Start to finish)
• SAP EcoHub - 400 partner solution on the hub / 10000 demos off the hub - Most available online from within the hub.
• SAP has 12 centers inside sales centers
• SAP has 5400 partners (VARs, resellers etc) - 2700 are Partners & 2700 Extended Business Partners
• In 2007 SME was setup as a separate service line within SAP
• 75% of SAPS 92000 customers are SME
  • SAP Acquire >35 new SME customer per working day
  • 70500 SME Customers in total
  • 50500 SME Channel customers
  • Tripled the SME customer base in 3 years
  • SAP SME Number further broken down:
    • Upper ME = 11%
    • Lower ME = 42%
    • SE = 47%
  • SAP has 25000 B1 Customers
• Green Blue Auto SME Customer (Canada) - Implementation in 4 Weeks

Tags: sapsummit - sap - sap+sme - erp - ecohub - sap+erp

Prashanth Rai

Application management services - Outsourcing / Interesting stats - Forrester

Saw this really interesting chart at a Forrester report

Couple of points that stood out:

The significant interest in Managed hosting services, it will be interesting to see how the Cloud computing trend impacts these stats.

• Currently outsourcing - 6%
• Will outsource to a 3rd part in the next 12 months - 17%
• People Interested & considering it - 44%

Another surprising insight is the low % of adoption of outsourcing in low value addition / undifferentiated heaving lifting type tasks / Summarized in Chart below:

This just emphasizes the opportunity size for outsourcing services.

Tags: outsourcing - appsupport - forrester

Prashanth Rai

Trends / Facts / Stats / Thoughts about the Mobile "Data" space....

Below are a list of points / trends / Thoughts about the Mobile space from various sources that I have been reading over the last couple of days:

Forrester Outlook of 2014 - United States

• By the end of 2009, 234 million US consumers — 76% of the population — will have a mobile phone subscription, and the total number of phone subscriptions will approach 270 million, representing 88% of the country’s population
• Most subscriber growth will be prepaid. Those without a mobile phone are less likely to be able to afford a postpaid option: 37% of those without mobile service have a household income of less than $25,000.
• Laptop or netbook — these connected PCs will account for nearly 11 million subscriptions by 2013
• A dizzying array of devices from cars to home alarm systems to eReaders to navigation devices are available today with a cellular connection, and new options such as health monitors and connected cameras are on the way. This diversity of connected devices will result in a proliferation of wireless subscriptions beyond the traditional mobile phone.
• Mobile Internet usage will boom. As 2008 drew to a close, more than 34 million US mobile subscribers accessed the mobile Internet on their phones at least once a month. That number will grow at an impressive 52% rate in 2009 to 52 million, and mobile Net users will continue to exhibit double-digit growth through 2014, when 106 million users, or a full 39% of all wireless subscribers, will become regular mobile Net users.
• Operators’ shift from metered to unlimited data plans has been one of the critical drivers for mobile Internet and data adoption, but these plans have a downside in that they limit future data revenues while encouraging wanton usage. To manage this risk, carriers will introduce new service tiers at lower  price points — with concomitantly lower data limits — that will reduce the barrier to entry for those subscribers not yet convinced that they get their money’s worth.
• Messaging +data services - these growth engines have only served to balance the concomitant decline in voice revenues — keeping ARPU nearly flat over the past few years. This trend will continue, as the growth in data subscriptions will be tempered by the introduction of lower-price voice offerings designed to maintain growth
• Data access revenues will approach $20 billion in 2014, the rate of growth will slow as the average monthly price of a data bundle decreases from $17.34 per month in 2009 to $16.64 in 2014
• Today, nearly one-third of active handsets are 3G; by 2014, more than four in five handsets will use 3G technology — whether that’s UMTS, a flavor of HSPA, or CDMA2000 — or its successor, LTE.
• Today, even the most recalcitrant voice-centric customer isn’t able to buy a new handset in this category, and these devices constitute a paltry 3% of active phones in the US market (see Figure 3). By 2014, this number will have fallen to less than 1% of all active handsets, confined to the remaining “glove box” users and those served by remote rural providers.

Economy + Internet Trends - Morgan Stanley

• Mobile Consumer - 10billion + Units

India - An interesting article in the Wallstreet journal

• Radio Via Phone - With the more than $200 million in revenues phone company executives expect this year, the radio via phone business already makes almost as
• much as consultants at KPMG estimate all the regular FM stations in India will make.
• ......requires tailored services that are delivered simply and can work even on a $20 phone.
• Monthly ARPU, Q4-2006 - 300+ Rs, Q2-2009 - <200Rs, The biggest phone companies have also started charging per second rather than per minute, further crimping the number of rupees they get from calls.
• The mobile value-added service business, which also includes standard nonvoice services like texting, will rise close to 70% in the next year to 165 billion rupees ($3.6 billion), according estimates by the Internet and Mobile Association of India.
• So far these types of services make up only about 10% of cellular companies' revenues, analysts say. But in the next five years the portion of revenue generated by these services could rise to as much as 25%, they estimate. Telephone Revenue from Non Voice Cellphone Services - 2006 - 25 Billion Rs, 2008 - 75 Billion Rs, (Estimated) 2009 - 100 Billion, (Estimated) 2010 - 160 billion Rs.
• New revenues won't come anytime soon from so-called 3G services. India has yet to even decide which private companies will be allowed to offer 3G services, though an auction of spectrum is expected early next year.
• many of India's 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators

Source : 1,  2, 3

Tags: mobile - data - mobile+trends - ms - morgan+stanley - forrester - india - US - japan

Prashanth Rai

In conversation with Zia Yusuf - SAP TechEd 09

Yesterday we had a great conversation with Zia Yusuf. Zia  is the Executive Vice President, responsible for Global Ecosystem & Partner Group at SAP AG. It was an interesting conversation touching upon various dimensions of community, partners, SI's and social media. Zia & his team have a really tough job moving forward trying to change the perception and or reality of SAP in many areas like

1. the lack of trained quality consultants,
2. of being seen as a "innovation" laggard,
3. changes required in the services partners to deliver to the SME and deliver around solutions like BBD.
4. it being "white elephant" to implement & support,
5. ....etc

What was promising to see was that they seem to be moving slowly but steadily in that direction but they have a lot of work in front of them and they are open to collaborating and discussing on ways to achieve these results. Below are the key / interesting points or thoughts from the discussion that came up during this conversation:

• The community initiatives are thriving, it has reached 2 million now. And its also evident with the growing popularity of the SAP mentors and the initiatives they seem to be taking. The "Blue Jerseys" are great guys.
• The inclusion of SI (System integrators) into the Eco hub. This is a big move. . I think there seems to be a broad set of initiatives that SAP is taking to make the system integrators play nice. They seem to be taking small but progressive steps towards reducing that 1:7 (license cost :implementation cost) ratio, without ruffling too many feathers at the SI's end. Strangely I think a lot of enabling of this will be dependent on the customers and how much they are willing to adopt these changes & enforce some of these things with their SI's & service providers. On the question of SAP Ecohub or SDN becoming a services market place its an interesting discussion for sometime in the future.
• Enabling the Smaller partners - As a part of the ecosystem organization , there seem to be a set of Partner service advisor's that are looking at enabling partners particularly the small / mid sized ones by providing them access to the SAP product technology road map etc etc. This seems to be the only side of the SAP organization that has grown in headcount.
• Factoid - There seems to be a total of 400k SAP consultants globally with 250K of them being in large or in the organized sector the other 150k are typically independent contractors.
• Zia's thoughts on characteristics of great SAP SI firms:
  • Deeply involved with the evolution of the SAP Roadmap
  • Training & certification,
  • Dynamic in models offered,
  • customer service-value driven,
  • Ability to have a longer term relationship.
• A chance to collaborate - Zia is asking for "Use cases" that we can think of where "Social Media" will connect or interact with "Core business processes" that are a part of the Enterprise business processes. Specifically around crowdsourcing etc - Which will change the way business is done! Ideas welcome
• Community contribution into the product, the SDN / communities framework that was created for communities (SDN/BPX) is now a product called Collaborative Workspace and now has 1400 installations.
• SAP Safegaurding - Recently it has been communicated to all the SI's that they need to include / push safegaurding as a part of their implementations etc
• Job board has now been included in SAP Communities / SDN. First couple of days 180 jobs posted on it

Zia is now on twitter and you can follow him @ZiaYusuf

Tags: communities - sap - sapteched09 - zia+yusuf - sdn - bpx - partner

Prashanth Rai

Update: Looks like this would be the last event for Zia with SAP, All the very best to him for all his future ventures.

Disclosure: SAP paid T&E to TechEd.

IDC’s New IT Cloud Services Forecast: 2009-2013

New Cloud Services Forecast Publised by IDC - The new forecast, segmented by offering category, for 2009 and 2013:

Excerpts:

1. The five year growth outlook remains strong, with a five-year annual growth rate of 26% – over six times the rate of traditional IT offerings.
2. The revised figures are still in the same ballpark as last year’s forecast, although they reflect about a six month revenue knock back from what would have been expected from last year’s forecast, due largely to the global recession and, to a lesser degree, to better market tracking and tightened definitions.
3. This year, cloud services will total only about 5% of IT revenue. Even with a compound annual growth rate of 26% – over six times that of traditional IT – they will account for just 10% in 2013. Some might look at this, and conclude that cloud services are not very important – after all, in 2013, 90% of IT will NOT be from public clouds.
4. IT cloud services for the industry - $17B in 2009 and $44B in 2013
5. Of the $27 billion in net new IT revenue in 2013, 27% will come from IT cloud services. Given the 6X growth advantage of cloud services offerings over traditional ones, that percentage will grow very quickly in subsequent years – meaning that suppliers who don’t position themselves as IT cloud services leaders over the next several years, will forfeit larger and larger portions of the highest-growth markets.

Source: IDC

Some Global Mobile Stats - Nielsen Company

Some interesting excerpts / statistics from a post by Nielsen Company:

Web visitors using a mobile device increased 34 percent year-over-year, from 42.5 million mobile Web visitors in July 2008 to 56.9 million in July 2009 according to The Nielsen Company.

Year-over-year growth among the 13-17 and 65+ age groups outpaced the growth of the total mobile Web audience, with a youth increase of 45 percent and seniors surging upwards 67 percent in July.

While men continue to make up a larger portion of mobile Web users versus women, comprising 53 percent of the audience in July, the growth of female visitors outpaced the growth of male visitors during the month, with women increasing 43 percent YOY as compared to a 26 percent growth among men.

Source: Nielsen Company