Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, Bigtable has successfully provided a flexible, high-performance solution for all of these Google products. In this paper we describe the simple data model provided by Bigtable, which gives clients dynamic control over data layout and format, and we describe the design and implementation of Bigtable.

BigTable: Google's Distributed Structured Storage System

• Video on BigTable (from Google Video, by Jeff Dean)
• Video on BigTable (alternative, from University of Washington TV)
• Notes on Google BigTable

India 2007
Black-Swan: The current one that is keeping me up is Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbable. The recent blasts at Lumbini park,Hyderabad were a black swan, it changed the perspective of the city so much ! With in moments the news was every where, some of the IT project managers onsite, I knew of, called their team to check the welfare. It is not only the country economy but the global economy that is at stake due to these terror attacks. The ripple effect of blasts could be expensive and irreversible.

Then there was another crazy incident at Agra, where a mob set the trucks on fire as accidentally a truck ran into a procession killing 4. The chaos resulted in curfew and lot of property destruction.

If Eye for Eye will only leave the world blind- recalling the words of Mahatma, shame and uneventful to see such barbaric and heinous crime. Something needs to be done to get a fundamental change in the way things operate, whats it? another Gandhi?

Recalling the mother Theresa on her 97th birthday,If only each of us cleans our doorfront, the entire country will be cleaner and hygienic, Jai Hind !

Some Collected links for GMAT


http://www.syvum.com/gmat/
http://atheism.about.com/od/logicalfallacies/a/overview.htm
http://daveformba.blogspot.com/
http://richardbowles.tripod.com/gmat/gmatmenu.htm
http://www.test-preps.com/gmat/math_test_sol.php
http://novapress.net/gmat/strategies.html
http://www.novapress.net/gmat/math.html
http://education.kulichki.net/GMAT/math1.html
http://www.gmatbuster.org/
http://novapress.net/gmat/math.html
http://s2s.wharton.upenn.edu/wh-wharton/messages?msg=5423.1
http://geethu.blogspot.com/2004/06/studying-for-gmat.html
http://www.crack-gmat.com/gmat-test.htm
http://www.testmagic.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=11279
http://www.testmagic.com/forum/forum.asp?FORUM_ID=67
http://www.microedu.com/gmattest/freetest.htm
http://mbaleague.blogspot.com/
http://mbawire.blogspot.com/2003_06_29_mbawire_archive.html
http://www.krysstal.com/binomial.html
http://mathforum.org/dr.math/faq/faq.divisibility.html
http://www.gmatclub.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8202
http://gmat.prepedge.com/MBA/GMAT-CAT/questionbank/
http://s2s.wharton.upenn.edu/n/mb/message.asp?webtag=wh-wharton&msg=7849.1
http://education.kulichki.net/GMAT/math.html
http://www.800score.com/gmat-home.html
http://www.800score.com/guidetc.html
http://www.ascenteducation.com/india-mba/iim/cat/questionbank/Archives/April2002/arith1704.shtml
http://www.gmattutor.com/tricks2.html
http://www.800score.com/guidec8bview1a.html
http://www.economist.com/research/StyleGuide/
http://www.sentencecorrection.com/forums/index.php?act=idx
http://novapress.net/gmat/data-sufficiency.html
http://www.deltacourse.com/

There are two Indias in this Country, One India is training at the leash eager to spring forth and live upto all the adjectives the world has been recently shoving upon us,the other India is the leash

One India Says Give me a chance and I will prove my self,the other India says prove yourself first, may be then you will have a chance.
One India lives in the Optimism of our Hearts,the other India lacks in the skepticism of our Minds,

One India wants the other India Hopes,

One India Leads and the other India follows

these Conversions are on the rise, with each passing day, more and more people from the other India are coming over to this side and quietly, while the world is not looking a pulsating dynamic new India is emerging.. an India whose faith in Success is far greater than its fear of failure

an India that no longer boycotts foriegn made Goods but buys out the companies that make them instead.

History they say is a Bad motorist, it rarely ever signals its intentions when it is taking a turn. this is that rarely ever moment. History is turning a page. For over half a century our nation has sprung,stumbled,run,fallen,rolled over, caught up and dusted her self, but now, In our 60th year as a free nation the ride has brought us some breathtaking moments.

One India,A tiny little voice at the back of the head is looking down at the bottom of the Ravine and hesitating, the Other India is looking up at the sky is saying it is time to Fly together..

My Dear Fellow Indians, Wishing you a purposeful Independence Day!

*************************JAI HIND***********************************

Some of the Hyderabad's Must sees,I also tagged them to Google Maps, so you can check them on the Google map too! Jai Hind!

Blog Collections

Outsourcing:: The Trade Winds

Most of the global folks have a limited understanding of outsourcing.
Wisdom,maturity and understanding of global economics[limited knowledge, you don't need a Ph.D] are inversely proportional to the understanding of the word "OUTSOURCING".

I randomly asked a mixed audience and following are their understandings of Outsourcing

• Sending work to "cheap" country
• making work happen 24 hours
• You do the thinking job, and some one else will do the acting job

Well the above statements might be good, but not good enough!
"Out" "sourcing" means you are sourcing out the work to a different party- it could be a new department[In sourcing],new company [any where not necessarily in the low cost countries of the world].

• Why should a company outsource?
• Bottomline is to be more profitable
• So why take away my job?
• Well some one else will do the job for almost 60% less of what you are doing[Don't you buy stuff in ThanksGiving and Christmas Sale?]
• It is hurting the US economy
• Bulls*&@#, it is actually helping it big time, the process,workflow based tactical jobs are being outsourced, this makes the population more competitive and people will start focusing, investing time and effort back in education.
  
• For the developing nations, outsourcing will create jobs[even though they are tactical,the young workforce will learn the crux of the process and will graduate to a new job or move up the value chain in the same outsourcing industry]. Economy will boom and more opportunities for retail/consumer markets which is again open to the Global players.
• When economy in the developing nation booms, the life style will go up and the new life style demands will create revenue opportunities in the developed nations like the Boeing case.
  
• Read Boeing Global Strategy Takes Off
• With the economy booming in India, Aviation is seeing bombastic growth. The air carriers of India placed orders with Boeing [Air India placed a whopping $7 B order Whoa!]and this demand is creating Boeing hire workforce in US, this is what I call the "Water Cycle Model"[No No, Not the Software Development Model but the natural water cycle]

A near future trend
The world will very shortly see low paying jobs being created in Developed countries to compete with developing nations. The Business Processes will be out sourced to a company across the street, where folks are ready to do the job for lesser pay[Let us say minimum wage per hour,most of the times these folks are uneducated and/or folks who want to get into "decent" jobs, Ex: Some Janitors,or Part-time employees might be willing to do the job, if you look around there would be a lot of them]. Some of the so called "strategic" parts would be outsourced to the other geographies of the world. I know of a Huge Bank that started operations in SriLanka, but given the poor spoken language[English] skills, the bank outsourced all its data entry work to SriLanka. So innovation lies in mapping the right requirement to the right geography.

Bought a new Fly Mobile[I am going limitedly mobile after 5 months], one heck of a stunning piece!
http://www.fly-phone.com/phones/2040i

Its amazingly sleek and some of it's vital stats:

9.2 mm width

1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 player, video recording
Built-in memory 60 MB + microSD support[Got a 256 MB card FREE!]
MMS, Java, Bluetooth, IRDA, GPRS, WAP, dictophone

My Personal Feedback:

• Battery Back-up: 1.5 hours talk time/72 -96 hours stand-by
• Sound Quality: Very clear
• Number pad: very stylish and painfully small engraved number pad
• Dial-pad needs a little effort
• Camera quality is Okay
• Price - INR 5000/-(US $125)
• Overall a GREAT BUY
  

Overall, You Should NOT go for this, if you plan to spend more than 1 hour on phone.
I personally do not talk more than 15 minutes on mobile.

Folks carrying multiple gizmos like iPOD,PDA + a mobile will truly appreciate the size of the device.

Teaser: Malaika Arora Khan is the Brand Ambassador[Read More] for Fly and truly a reflective one, both Fly and Malaika are very well known for having the right sleeky curves!

Some of the Questions from the Global-Sourcing:Busting the Flat World

1. What is equilibrium, how to get to equal-brium?
2. Survival as the action flows to edge?
3. How is an ecosystem created? How can a clone be done easily?
4. If the world is so flat, how come spikes are becoming more prominent? What will make the spikes rise to the same level?
5. Is adaptation all there is?
6. How to tap into the most relevant information flows and avoid non-candidates?
7. How to measure success in a changing ground?
8. When is self-organizing not enough?
9. What should be the Governance Architecture?
10. How to avoid think global/act local paradigm?

Business Analayst & Outsourcing
Outsourcing has been around for a good time now. It has been successful in the BPO industry, the tech industry is yet to see the success. There are some significant reasons for it , the most being the lost form of Business Analyst being the most important one. With the DotCom bust, many of the business analysts transformed into developers and was a natural evolution, given the struggle for existence. Businesses also thought and pulled out funding and started firing the business analysts as the role was considered to be a redundant. Many developers started jumping into the role of business analyst- the domain expertise column you see in many developer resumes is clear reflection of it. The domains,technologies evolve and change regularly to keep pace with both the race horses is a juggling task, developers cannot keep running at the pace of both changes and expertise in the domain again started hitting rock bottom. Now let us shift the focus to outsouricng.

In the outsourcing, the newbies consider it as sending the "work" to some one,some where,some how to do some specific things. Most of the times the coding happens to be one of a candidate solutions for sourcing out as it is thought to be self-contained and given some compiled documents that list all the requirements, the developers will figure out the implementation. This is big mistake. For projects to be successfully delivered out of offshore, there is a pressing need for Business Analysts- The BA will understand the business context and will be the point of contact for the Offshore, operating out of offshore, he/she will understand the requirements and business context. So far many of the projects,I have seen, across various companies try to establish a tech-bridge between shores to establish project success. Projects have been successful in the past and will be in the future, but most of the times, the teams that deliver the project miss the context and it would show the impact during maintenance or enhancement. IT is time to get the Business Analysts role to enhance the offshore project delivery competency.
Don't agree? Wait and watch the projects falling apart for the wrong reasons- not knowing the business context...

P@

Start-up Experience:

I joined a Quasi-Startup as a Technical Account Manager[TAM]. I am actively roped in to serve Cisco. My boss Bala C Gopalan, one real stud with a great zeal, passion and tonnes of positivity.Shyam, the CEO is an adventure gear in human form. Pretty game for life.

Start-ups are a great learning grounds, Some glaring observations of first week.

• Democratic,Open Access
• Infectious Enthusiasm
• Great Heroic Leaders
• Ever Evolving Processes![Oh my!]
• Constantly Changing Focus[Especially in Tough Times!]
• Un-Equal Customer Focus
• Decision Making with Internal Focus[Bad Idea!]
• Primary Measures of Performance for the Firm Missing or Hidden from Employees!
• Dependency on couple of Biggies, made the situation Risky
• Primary Focus of the company was blurred
  

Open Telephones

BT is creating an open, standards-based platform for which anyone can develop new applications. In other words, the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services.

This is no small thing. Right now, for example, most of the mildly interesting stuff consumers can do with their phones - call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding - is programmed right into the big computers that route calls around the network. That makes it virtually impossible for some entrepreneur in a garage or some teenager tinkering at his computer to develop a new phone service.

Oil Price and Inflation

Mt Friend Rishi wrote an article in ET [http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Repository/ml.asp?Ref=RVRCRy8yMDA2LzA2LzAzI0FyMDE4MDI=&Mode=Gif&Locale=english-skin-custom]

and I am jotting down couple of points on my mind. Read on...


If you earn more,you ought to be prepared to spend more. I agree to disagree with you. I would certainly spend more no doubt about it. The force-spend is making me spend more with the upshooting Oil prices and therefore the other items, they call quintessentials.

Stay calm,breathe easier, I am taking a different perspective.

With the increasing gas prices, My aunt says the gas price in the US has doubled in the last two years, pay hike being a mere 15 %, the people to panic are the automanfacturers to match up their targets. Automanfacturers are pumping more money into research to find an alternative for Gas . More the research and channelized energies, better are the chances to invent a new source.

Okay, the whole of Last week I was IIM-C campus for the Executive Management Program.
It was one heck of a program where I met so many brilliant chaps. It wasa boutique of skills and talent. I guess it is mainly the networking and Knowledge sharing that enriches all the folks of the executive management. Some were from Finance Domain some from Investing Banking,BPOs,Retail Consultancy, Advertising and ofcourse our very Own IT.
Long walks around the campus through chirping sound of the Birds,Crickets - the cool buddies with their very own idiosyncratic experiences (Blast from the Past)

All said n done - It was a great show- People added lot many perspectives as they do


Pras @ iLabs

Revolution "Cheap"
1. The incredible power of low-priced technology... Google's server farm, Skype's free phone services, etc.

2. Emergent global talent pools, from Eastern Europe to India, from China to Southeast Asia.

3. The Internet, which connects technology to talent at transparent prices.

The Cheap Revolution is good for China and India as well as newer, clever companies in the West, such as Google, Skype and Craigslist.

But is it good for older Western companies with higher cost structures and lots of legacy? That's an open question...

Some Interesting Start-ups
LicketyShip
Flagr
Standpoint
Box.net
Billmonk.com
Skobee.com
InFreeda
NeuroSky
and more…

Source : Grabbed from Rediff
Story Behind GM's Fall
Alfred P Sloan's book on his career at General Motors has inspired generations of managers in industrial enterprises all over the world. He took charge of a disparate group of floundering automobile companies, put them together to form General Motors and built it up to become the largest automobile company in the world.

It has remained so with the Japanese companies hard on its heels. Sloan also was a thinker on the management of larger companies. There has always been a close relationship between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Motors. He endowed the MIT's Alfred Sloan School of Management.

GM's models like Chevolet, Oldesmobile and Cadillac were the most well-known. In the early 1960s GM controlled over 50 per cent of the US car market and set standards for the world's manufacturing industry.

Yet today this giant is on the brink of bankruptcy. Its domestic market share is down to 25 per cent. It has slid back into losses because of high wages and generous healthcare benefits promised to its existing and former employees. These were extended to them in prosperous times.

Another damaging concession made by GM to the United Auto Workers' Union was that it could not close down factories or reduce wages even in straitened circumstances. GM today is like a Gulliver tied down with his own consent.

Plus, GM has lost its flair for innovation and creating new products. Innovation is difficult in a large corporation unless the top management devotes extra attention to this aspect. A company in distress can innovate if the top management is creative and willing to take risks. In the absence of new products, GM now has to resort to price discounts to maintain volumes. It is losing market share to Toyota, Nissan and Honda for normal cars and to BMW and Mercedes for premium models.

Standard & Poor's has downgraded GM's debt to junk status. It has said the company will have to restructure its debt and labour contract. GM lost $4 billion in North America last year and cut 30,000 jobs by closing down 12 plants.

Although the company denies the possibility, analysts believe GM's losses will continue to mount and it may be forced to seek Chapter 11 protection as a case of potential bankruptcy.

And, GM's erstwhile subsidiary Delphi (the auto parts manufacturer which it had spun off as a separate company) has gone into Chapter 11. This may negatively impact GM finances up to $11 billion on account of pension and healthcare coverage for Delphi workers, who are eligible to return to GM under the terms of separation of Delphi from GM. Due to the cutbacks in previous years GM today has to support three retirees for every active worker! This is an unsustainable position for any company.

The only places where GM is moderately successful today are Brazil, South Korea, and China, with a slight recovery in Europe. But this will hardly compensate for the debacle in its home base in North America, the largest market in the world. In short, GM is wobbling towards bankruptcy.

It is not that the management of GM is of low calibre. On the contrary, GM has had one of the most admired management teams from the time of Sloan. Therefore, it is worth analysing the causes of such a decline in fortunes at GM.

First, the fundamental mistake made by GM was to underestimate for quite some time the effect of higher oil prices on demand for the cars it made. While GM continued to manufacture its range of gas-guzzling models, its Japanese competitors had designed and launched fuel-efficient vehicles.

The second mistake was while GM concentrated on upgrading sports utility vehicles, its competitors upgraded their range of normal cars and increased their market share in this premium segment.

Third, GM had to pay $2 billion earlier last year to wriggle out of a potential commitment to buy out Fiat, the sick Italian car company in which it had invested $2.4 billion some time ago.

The latest problem confronting GM is the investigation into its accounts by the Securities and Exchange Commission nd a restatement of its accounts for 2001. This has eroded the confidence of investors. It is burning cash at the rate of $5 billion a year.

Who will invest in or lend to such a company? To meet immediate needs of cash it is planning to sell a part of its profitable finance company, General Motors Acceptance Corporation.

It has sold at a loss its stake in the joint venture Subaru to Toyota, which is now emerging as the world's largest carmaker. To make things even more difficult for the GM management, Kirk Kerkorian, the octogenarian nemesis of US companies, has taken a nearly 10 per cent stake in GM and is seeking a seat on the board.

He could make himself visible and active if things do not improve at GM. GM chairman Richard Wagoner is in a most unenviable position not entirely created by him.

What are the lessons to be learnt from this debacle at GM? The first lesson is that size does not make a company immune to decline and even extinction, just as its size did not save the Titanic.

If GM as one of the world's largest companies can be pushed into bankruptcy, what about smaller companies? The second lesson is that while a company and its products are doing well, it should invest even more in innovation to improve product performance and to create new products. It is natural in those fortunate circumstances for a company management to become complacent and over-generous with employees, as GM managers did. This temptation has to be consciously resisted.

The third lesson is that it is sometimes necessary to stand up to excessive demands from trade unions and face the challenge of strikes and disruption rather than mortgage the future of a company, by yielding to extortionist demands, which could ruin the company.

Fourth, it is wise to shift manufacturing operations increasingly to low-cost countries rather than expose a company to the risk of high costs. But this has to be done with a great deal of planning and preparation in a gradual manner, to minimise the risks of discord and disruption. Lastly, a company must avoid the temptation of being misled by its own success (and size) into believing that it is indestructible, as the captain of the Titanic did. Management must cultivate a sense of vulnerability and the potential risk of mortality. That is part of the formula for the survival and growth of a company.

Now Mr Kerkorian may bring in new management, which could negotiate successfully with unions to reduce costs. They could perhaps inspire enough confidence in investors and lenders. If that happens it will be the largest turnaround story in the history of business and there will be many volumes to be written on the recovery of Gulliver!

R3DX

Sometimes the biggest buzzwords in IT aren’t about technology at all. As I work with our clients on the art and the science of gaining business value from IT, the key words have become “business objectives,” “metrics” and “process change.”

The R3DX model is making lot of sense for Delivery First companies. The process,being an incremental and evolutionary Hybrid helps delivering the right product at the right time.

Pras @ iLabs

Value Based Management is the next phenomenon. It is already in after the Enron Crisis. The world blamed the top B-schools. Business ethics got into the prime league. What is Value Based Management ?
Management that Creates 1.Creating Value
2.Managing Value
3.Measuring Value

I am gonna write more about Outsourced Development, Project & Program Management and Value Based Management techniques that help Corporates go to the no man's island in the era of corporate poaching.

Pras @ Devil's Labs