2010 – what’s ahead for IT services in the new decade?

Do you remember the parties back in 1999? It was a time of change. a time when every person alive said farewell to the twentieth century and we all ushered in the twenty-first with new expectations.

Unfortunately, many of the mistakes of the past century have already been repeated. For example, we haven’t seen an end to war as many had hoped. But we have seen a phenomenal change in the possibilities for business to operate internationally.

In 1999 the use of technology was extensive, and most firms were already issuing email addresses as standard to their staff, but the penetration of broadband speeds meant it was still difficult to share large amounts of data internationally. Sending a 70mb file to a colleague might take all night on a dial-up ten years ago, yet it’s now easy to zap files of this size back and forth without a thought.

And with those earlier limitations on data transfer rates, who would have predicted how pervasive mobile technologies are already becoming? Retailers, the media, and airlines are all exploring how to improve customer service or product delivery using mobile devices – the extreme change in airport check-in procedures being a great example.

This single factor, the speed most people can access the Internet, is having a fundamental impact on services today. In the next decade, the debate is going to be far less about where companies are physically located. There will be less of the debate around work being transferred from one country to another, as more and more services will be available online using Software as a Service platforms (SaaS).

SaaS changes the game for many service providers. It will allow more standard products and services to be offered, bypassing a lot of the traditional work on systems integration. Outsourced services will become easier to commission and purchase. For those companies that get it right, it will be a golden era of growth into the clouds.

When will firms start spending for growth?

In the past two years or so, since the initial credit crunch and then global economic slowdown, outsourcing as a business strategy has taken a knock.

It’s not that there is anything wrong with it as a strategy. It’s just that outsourcing usually involves change, some change in processes and the way things are done. That needs planning and transition, so even if the future state saves money, many firms have declined to go through the process of getting there while survival has been the priority.

If you look back a year, most firms were probably focused on budget revisions, retrenching people they cannot justify keeping, and targeting business activities to those that create the most immediate return – completely focusing on getting through the recession.

But talk to most firms today and there is a more interesting and positive picture emerging. The UK is not out of the woods yet and the politicians are taking a great deal of stick over the fact that major Europeans economies, such as France and Germany, have started to grow again while Britain is not. Despite this economic fact, there is certainly a growth in British optimism.

Firms are exploring how best to ride the growth when it comes, and that does involve a large amount of planning how to work with partners. It could be that they are revising how much they pay their existing partners, or how many partners they employ, but in general he focus is now on positioning with a trusted group of partners and aiming for growth in 2010.

The biggest change in behaviour will be the desire to leverage existing assets over the next couple of years. When firms have already sunk cash into developing expertise and systems in-house, they won’t just discard that knowledge overnight.

It’s been a tough time over the past couple of years, but the new decade looks like an exciting place to be.

Mobile App or Mobile Web

Which is more appropriate for the Travel Industry?

Since the launch of Apple’s iPhone the mobile industry has been in a state of flux. It has witnessed lot of innovations since then. Today, more choices are available to the user than ever before which has resulted in a fragmented market. It has complicated matters for every organization which wants to reach out to their consumers through mobile devices. There are too many platforms to be supported and there is no standardization. Some industry segments have not made any significant move to reach out to their consumer through mobile platform and are playing a waiting game – waiting for the technology to mature. However, the travel industry cannot afford to do that.

A mobile phone is a personal device – more personal than the “personal” computer. You might lend your PC to coworker or a friend for few hours but can you imagine lending your mobile phone?

Travel is also a personal activity. Nobody else can do it for you. Unlike retail shopping you cannot get your friend or family member to do it for you. Though you might get somebody to do the planning for you, it is necessary for you to be aware of the logistics when you travel.

So, the match between travel and mobile seems to be a match made in heaven where a personal device meets a personal activity. Naturally, there is a lot of interest in travel industry on reaching out to the customer through the mobile. In this fragmented technology scenario, one of the following two strategies can be followed.

1. Take the shortcut and extend your web site and make it accessible from the browser in the mobile phone
2. Do it the hard way by incurring the cost of developing a native application for multiple mobile platforms

Advantages of Browser Based Mobile Application (Mobile Web)

• The variability across different types of handset is minimal compared to mobile application. You have to take care of only browser specific differences and the difference of screen size – unlike mobile app where the total programming environment including the programming language is different
• No need for the user to download and install any application on the handset – this can be a stumbling block for first time user
• The existing web site with modifications can be extended to the mobile – unlike mobile app where the application has to be develop ground up

Advantages of Native Mobile Application (Mobile App)

• The application can be location aware – unlike a mobile web application which do not have access the location information
• Offline working is possible – availability of internet connection and bandwidth cannot yet be taken for granted, especially for a traveler
• Can access the native mobile functionality like phone book, calendar & camera – for an application to be effective on a device which is personal, it needs to interface with functionalities which gives the device the personal flavor

What about a Hybrid Approach?

There are several possibilities:

1. Invoke the browser for the native application and show a specific web page – the problem is you lose control
2. Make a browser instance within your application and show the page – you have better control but all mobiles do not support this feature

None of these alternatives reduce the headache of having to maintain different applications for different platform.

A way forward in the future may be to access handset specific functionality from the browser through browser plug-in? Please correct me if I am wrong, but to the best of my knowledge it is not possible yet.

What is the Future?

Though predicting the future is always hazardous, the following can be predicted without too much risk.

• Smart phones will become much more powerful
• Network access speeds will become faster
• Touch screen and multi-touch will become standard
• Mobile will remain a personal device and it will become an extension of us

Unlike PC, which can be thought of as a dumb terminal accessing applications in the cloud, mobile phones cannot be treated that way. It already behaves as an extension of our memory and it is also going to act as our identity.

So, the conclusion – I do not see native mobile applications going away – especially when we are on the move!

Seeding the Cloud

Have you ever used a cloud computing service?

Many of you may give a negative answer to this question but in reality if you have ever searched the web using a search engine like Google, you would have used cloud computing service. The search engine takes a set of search terms from you, searches its index of web pages, and returns a list of matches as the search result. The process, which is essentially a piece of software, runs on one or more computers connected to the internet cloud somewhere in the world – you as a user have no idea where it is. This is the essence of cloud computing; one will be able to use a piece of software productively but not know the physical machine that is actually running it.

As you can see cloud computing has been around for more than a decade. Lately, cloud computing services are receiving lot of attention primarily because of advancement of technology in two specific categories:

1. Parallelization: The ability to split a software task across many machines and seamlessly add or remove machines from the task
2. Virtualization: The ability to split one physical machine into multiple virtual machines and ensuring that they run independent of each other

These technologies allow the cloud computing service providers leverage economy of scale and more efficient use of server hardware thereby providing more value for money.

Cloud computing also provides a neat solution to two major hurdles faced by an emerging entrepreneur:

• In the case when an emerging enterprise is small, it may still require access to complex IT solutions to run efficiently. Such solutions are normally very expensive and can only be cost effective for very large enterprises. However, cloud service providers can offer such solutions in shared mode thereby significantly reducing the cost of ownership through a model of pay per usage and not ownership.
• Emerging enterprises that have IT systems as the backbone of their core offering, will always have the dilemma on how much to invest on IT infrastructure. If they invest too little scalability may be a future issue whereas Investing too much upfront may have negative impact on the cash flow and even jeopardize the viability of the venture. With cloud computing it becomes easy to start small and seamlessly grow as much as necessary.

Cloud computing services can be offered in different flavors. Here are the 3 main categories:

IaaS: Infrastructure as a Service	PaaS: Platform as a Service	SaaS: Software as a Service
The proposition:	The proposition:	The proposition:
I will give you a virtual machine in the cloud which you can provision any time you want You pay for what you use You can scale it up or down whenever you wish You continue to use the same set of software	I will give you a software platform which you can use to build and deploy application in the cloud You pay based on usage You do not need to pay for any additional software	I will provide you with ready to use applications You just need to log in and use You do not have to buy anything You have no administrative hassles You pay only for what you use
Questions / doubts:	Questions / doubts:	Questions / doubts:
Will things work exactly the same way it works now? Is my data secure with you? What guarantees do you provide?	Do I have to rewrite my existing applications? Do I have to learn a different platform? I may get locked in to your platform	How do you take care of my needs if it is beyond or different from what you provide? How do I integrate with my existing applications?
Major providers:	Major providers:	Major providers:
Amazon EC2, Rackspace	Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Force.com	SalesForce.com, Google Apps, Zoho

A point to note: A cloud is not a solution to all problems nor is it useless technology and it will take a couple of years to mature.

Do you have an idea worth pursuing?

Why do you want to pursue your idea?

Do you want to make money through your creation? Do you want to see your creation getting used and get recognised? Or, do you want to create just for the joy of creating? If it is for the sheer joy then you need not bother to read the rest of this post. Otherwise, before you start your journey, it may be worth asking three questions. These questions are the starting point irrespective of whether you want to pursue the idea within your organisation or become an entrepreneur.

1. What is really new and different about your idea?
Do not worry if your idea is not truly original. It is very difficult to find an idea that is original – you may be lucky if you have one. Your idea may be a variant of an existing idea, it can be an existing idea applied in a different context or it can be a combination of multiple ideas. Irrespective of what it is, you will need to research and find out for your benefit how new or how different it is. You would not want to be told by somebody else that your idea is not new and what you are trying to do is already done. You should to be ready to point out how your idea is different.

The best way to find the answer is to do a thorough Internet search. It will help you to avoid spending effort on something that already exists. It will also help you refine your idea. If it is a software idea, then do not forget to go through the projects in Source Forge.

2. Who will use what you create?
For any idea to be successful, you need people to use it. You have to be clear on how it can fulfil an unsatisfied need or how it can better satisfy an existing need. Who is that user who will not be able to live without your creation? What do they do now?
People are reluctant to change the way they think and work. You have to work out what will make them switch from what they do now. Will the benefit derived from your outweigh the disruption of change? The only way to find this out is to find such persons and talk to them. You need to talk to them about your idea and listen to what they have to say. It will definitely help you to refine the idea.

3. What strategy will you follow to get the money and help from others to make the idea work?
You may be asking – “why would I need money? I want to work on it on my own.” You have to realise that no idea is fully formed at the beginning …
…it needs to be tinkered
…it needs to improved based on usage
…it takes effort (and also money) to do that

You may not like the idea but you have to sell your idea to other people. You need to convince people that it is worthwhile to back your idea. It can be to people within your organisation or it can be to a funding agency that can finance you to become an entrepreneur

How do you sell that great new idea?

You can follow one of these four strategies to sell a new business idea:

1. Follow the traditional approach – show Return on Investment (ROI).
To follow this approach your chances of success needs to be fairly high. You also should be able to tell how much money you can make from the idea. You have to answer the following questions:
•    What will people be willing to pay for what you make?
•    How many such people can you find?
•    Where will you find such people?
•    Who will help you sell it?
•    How much initial effort will it take before it can be used?
•    How much will it cost to keep making it?
•    What are the chances of success?

2. Look for a Venture Capitalist

Have you ever wondered how does the movie industry function? The majority of movies seem to be flops. The basic principle is that the failures may be many and success may be few but they are big. One success can cover for ten failures. The distributors who buy the movie rights from the producers do not mind losing money on the flops as long as they make it up with one big hit. Since nobody has found a sure formula to predict a hit, the distributors have to spread their bets to many movies of different types. The book publishing industry also works in a similar way.

3. You can try getting a budgeting allocation
Do not think that this method is only followed in government circles? If you do then you will be surprised to know that majority of funding decision in both public and private sector happens this way. It is the normal method of funding in academic research. Even in a typical enterprise, this is the most common funding mechanism. If you consider all this to be too political and you want to work on your own terms, there is still another option available.

4. Make your idea into a crusade and enrol supporters – NGO style
Have you noticed how funds get raised for running Wikipedia? It could raise more than $2m by just putting a notice on the site. There are low budget products that survive on voluntary contribution. Some believe that people only contribute to other people they know, but it is not always true. There are many examples of people donating and volunteering for a cause. Try creating an open source project and make a release and see how unknown people will try out your release. Locate people who find your idea worthwhile and ready to invest effort. You can look for volunteers in your organisation willing to help you. If your idea is interesting enough, you can find people on the web willing to put effort to try out your product.

Follow the leaders and forget the status quo

The UK public sector needs to explore efficiencies, and to previously unseen levels. The Read Operational Efficiency Programme published by HM Treasury this year determined that back office and IT efficiencies might save the government about £7bn. Contrast that to the approximately £150bn borrowed in the last year just to prop up the ailing economy.

It’s enough to make one ask about the role of the government itself in a modern society. If a government should provide a framework for heath care, a police service, a robust capability of defense and the governance ‘of, for and by’ public representation, then should they really be running business services too?

It should be possible for the government to explore how companies that are now in the private sector, but were once public, managed to go about creating new efficiencies.

Take a look at British Airways, British Gas (Centrica), or British Telecom as sterling examples of adopting leading business practices to achieve leadership. For sure, all have issues with the recession at present, but putting the difficulties of the past year aside, the companies have demonstrated how former public sector organisations can operate as a world-leading private sector companies.

After the 2010 general election, the new government will be forced to explore greater efficiencies that involve outsourcing and shared services. Why don’t they turn to these former public sector companies to pick up a few ideas on efficiency? After all, we cannot continue with status quo anyway, as we simply cannot afford it.

The buyer is king

Do you remember the good old pre credit-crunch days? If you are a CIO then you might remember being constantly swamped with sales information from suppliers – all trying to demonstrate their excellence, or at the very least competence in new technology areas. The suppliers had it all, the best brains working for the latest technology in their shops, the newest idea on the block and most of all, the buyer with money to try out (and in some cases ‘surrender’ to constant market ‘noise’) .

It was a time in which the end user community had plenty of discretionary budget available to explore ideas and innovations. They could tolerate some of the ‘noise’ from the suppliers because sometimes those ideas would strike a chord.

Now the world is very different. If a supplier is not offering a relevant service at a relevant price point in a contract, then they will find they are in danger of being quickly discarded or ignored. The balance of power has shifted and this time more than ever before in the favour of the buyer.

This may not come as a surprise, but it’s worth repeating to those suppliers sitting on comfortable multi-year deals. The buyers are reviewing contracts and suppliers, and trying to review services for this tougher environment. If contracts are no longer relevant to this environment, or the suppliers are not offering new ideas, then they are going to find they are no longer needed in this brave new business world. I believe, relevance is becoming more important than relationships. The trick, as a supplier, is to find accord with both.

NIIT is all around

I’ve read in some places that “tier-two” vendors are in trouble.

I don’t really like these tags. It’s not about a tier you occupy in the marketplace, rather than the prices you charge. The reality is, in any business arrangement, it’s not about how much you have done in this sector in the past, it’s about what you are going to do this time – and for me. NIIT is smaller than some of our rival firms, but we punch above our weight.

Here is a fact you might not be aware of. Back in the late 1990s, when many Indian technology firms were falling over themselves to offer low-cost labour to firms desperate to have their systems checked for the notorious ‘Millennium bug’, we stayed away from that business.

Why? The NIIT heritage is actually in technical training. A decade ago, we were focused on training IT engineers before they took up jobs at companies that might now be considered our competitors. We have trained a third of the entire Indian IT industry – and we continue to train more. Back when the millennium bug was big business, our focus was on training and the technologies division has since been split into a separate entity.

We are really proud of that heritage and the fact that in every corner of the Indian technology industry there are experts trained by NIIT.

So when will the English be proud of Fabio?

The England team enjoyed another great victory at Wembley against Belarus just the other day. They have enjoyed an excellent – almost unbeaten – qualifying run to the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

Yet, when I look at the coaches that have guided the England team in recent years, I can’t really see a great leader since the recently deceased Bobby Robson – and he left the job back in 1990.

An Italian, Fabio Capello, currently manages the team and for most of this decade Sven-Göran Eriksson, a Swede, enjoyed the honour of leading England.

England has not had a great English coach since Robson. Why is that? To start with, the players are now a lot more cosmopolitan. They have opportunities to play with best players in the world and there is a global market for talent in football – and this applies to the management as well as the playing staff.

How come we rarely recognise this in the IT market? Why is it that we operate in a global services market in some professions and yet it’s still a discussion point when a non-local IT firm pitches for business somewhere far from their home base?

We take pride in our England football team. They are succeeding with their foreign boss. Local IT is just the same. It can be improved by collaborating and competing with foreign expertise. We are all global now.