My latest read- Has interesting nuggets of information in a lucidly easy read format. The book offers the author’s insights into the revolutionary changes sweeping the Digital Media and Marketing industry.

Some thought provoking concepts that the book touches:
You can catch the kindle version of the book: LIVE on Amazon

*What do you think the next wave on the Internet will be? Hint- it will not be called Web 3.0.
*Do you know about the first blogger ever? This was much before WordPress, Typepad and Blogger.
*What do Bob Dylan and Social Media have in common?
*Extremely rare job openings of the marketing agency of the future- do you want to be a part of it?

In our own little world…how many times do we think of security beyond banks, homes and lockers. Cyber crime is evolving every day and the methods are getting more devious and sophisticated with security vendors claiming to have received 29 billion queries and  blocking 4 billion threats blocked on a daily average in 2009!!

Just the other day I came across a new buzz word….malvertisements (viruses dealing with mobile advertisements!!) This is the new facination that I am getting my brain dig deeper into. Will write more on this in my next few posts.

The article was recently published in a leading Singapore business daily.

Empowering CIO’s make the right Enterprise Data Cloud Decisions

Cloud computing continues to evolve as one of the dominant themes in the ICT industry in 2010.  Rising IT costs, exploding data volumes, and the ever-evolving competitive challenges backed by the dynamic market conditions have catalyzed this thinking with businesses and vendors trying to sieve through options to maximize resources and minimize expenditure. From an enterprise CIO’s perspective, the cloud offers new, more efficient and flexible, ways of sourcing ICT capabilities. Whether cloud services are enterprise-grade’ yet, however, remains a topic of debate. 

The hype around cloud computing is about its scalable and ‘elastic’ capabilities and the belief that that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud. While this is true to an extent, the reality is not as simple or doable- especially when it comes to cloud adoption especially for medium to large enterprises. The article endeavors to touch upon some of these challenges whilst discussing options available and that can hopefully help make the right choices.

1.       Understanding the market environment

The first and the most inherent difference between Asia and the rest of the world are the dynamic market demographics and the massive numbers. The scenario is very unlike the US and UK markets where people deal with almost static and less vulnerable market conditions and lower data volumes.

2. Analysing the Business Data requirements

Data flows in trickles and torrents across our businesses – as transactions, event streams, logs, emails, and in countless other forms. Data volumes are exploding – to the tune of 1.5x to 2.5x a year, and new sources and uses for data appear every day. So, many a times after the initial implementation and mid-way, organizations realize that their data volumes have far exceeded the capabilities of mainstream OLTP-oriented database systems. While these systems can comfortably handle low numbers of TBs (Terabytes) and modestly complex analytics queries, they start to break down or require extraordinary tuning in the low 10s of TBs. In market reality many companies today need to store and analyze 10s or 100s of TBs, or even low numbers of PBs (Petabytes). The technology to support these larger databases exists today, in the form of MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) Share-Nothing DBMS systems. These systems are optimized for the read-mostly analytical processing required by data warehousing and

business intelligence, and utilize 10s or 100s of nodes working in parallel with data automatically partitioned across the nodes to support fully parallel query processing.

3.  Data Storage Vs Data analysis

The next equally important challenge that has remained largely unaddressed until now is the hundreds or thousands of data silos in organisations. A company might have one or more ‘enterprise data warehouses’, hundreds of departmental silos, data spread out in Excel spreadsheets and Access databases, and countless custom applications. This all-too-common story reflects the organic evolution of these systems, and inherent tensions between those responsible for the operation of these systems (usually, but not always, IT) and those that want to use these systems and the data within them (usually analysts within business units).

IT looks at this chaos and sees cost and complexity; while on the other hand business analysts look at these as barriers to getting their jobs done. Each group has perfectly reasonable demands that are inherently in conflict.

A good way of looking at this complexity is centralization of data and ‘Self Service’ – i.e. have IT provide a platform that allows business analysts to serve themselves without IT involvement.

4. Cross border issues  

The cross border issues actually bring up challenges and opportunities when it comes to the strategic questions. ‘If we can do computing anywhere, we can think about placing different parts of our organisation in different geographic locations. We have a lot more flexibility’. So our clients have a lot more flexibility to cross international boundaries with different parts of their operations. That of course has not only HR and taxation implications, but optimisation issues as well.

4. Multiplying Partners and Vendors

A company could very easily double then quadruple and then multiply even further the number of partner relationships they have just for their computing and their applications. And IT Managers often have to manage these relationships and maintain service delivery levels. So there’s this incredibly complex set of questions to be answered around how we do sourcing differently and make smart choices that empower the business without further draining time and resources.

I have in the last few days, had the good opportunity to meet a couple of start-ups and this interestingly also coincided with some posts on LinkedIn and requests on Elance. I have come across some exceptionally bright business ideas which if moulded properly could do wonders. Some of these are proven international successes that are testing waters in select Asian markets.

This post is therefore dedicated to some of these new start-ups and I would consider myself really lucky if many more of such dynamites (if I may call) happen to stumble upon this page.

If you have a great idea and believe in it, we can make you heard amongst the right audience. The power of Public relations lies in the credibility as a medium. Having said that, one often hears things like…’but its too expensive’ and how do I measure it or how do I decide the value for money? Before even reaching out to your publics, you need to know what to do with them. People will see, hear, think and act based on what they initially see of you and how they perceive you to be. It is only much later when they experience your product/service will they be able to analyse and decide your true worth.

Public Relations can get the initial attention that you need from the customer and how you approach them can make or break the relation. To make yourself heard, here’s what you first need to find:

-          Will my idea create a niche? Is it unique?

-          Who will be my target customers?

-          Will this concept create a difference in the life of my target customer?

-          Are my prospect customers/clients looking for a concept such as this? If no, do I have to first create a need?

-          Are there any past successes in other countries that can indicate the market size?

-          If there are past successes, are there any commonalities and differences in the mindset/approach of people vis-a-vis customers in my market?

If you have an answer to these and can convince us about your plan, we will give you all the tools to make it work.  We will partner with you, give you the requisite knowledgebase, training,  media skill sets and even make a communication plan and see you take off… on your own…in a journey to create a difference. Our cost? Well….lets’… say…your commitment, passion and desire to succeed will pay a bulk of the cost. J