I agree that the monetization story of Eka will be very interesting to watch. I’m guessing that they are making some money off Yahoo! in the cloud computing research initiative. Also, there are some hints to the directions that this could go in in the Applications section. However, I think the bottomline really is that even they don’t really know how this will pan out and whether they will recover their money. Which is why I think that the investment is visionary.

While it is true that there aren’t lots of products out of India that have captured the imagination of the world, I think there are lots that are just bubbling under the popular consciousness and just need some more visibility. To take an example off the top of my head – the Zoho suite continues to garner accolades. In addition, the startup culture is really beginning to take off in India, and I think it will result in products sometime soon.

Finally, the point about electricity was brought up during after the presentation by one of the audience members, and pretty much Dr. Lagu waffled on the answer. (“We might build a new facility near a dam.”) And Eka is pretty low on the Green500 list of supercomputers.

Evergrid’s work in this area is certainly very interesting and timely. I loved Srinidhi’s talk on this topic in Pune last year. It would be great to have an article about Evergrid on Punetech (either the green stuff, or the load balancing work that you are doing in Pune). That is somewhere on my to-do list, but would get done much faster if you volunteer to write it

Kudos for PuneTech!

I enjoyed reading this post, well written.

Got to know about EKA last year just before the SC07 Reno conference when it was announced. Its a laudable achievement. Tata’s are visionary no doubt. What I am intrigued about is how this will get monetized from a business perspective? Does anyone remember Param? It was red taped probably and EKA is not under goverenment control so that is certainly different.

Tata is on a roll – right from EKA to Nano to Jaguar. I am waiting for some big announcements in the computing and software space. At this moment there are hardly any ‘innovative’ software products which are ‘created and delivered’ right out of India – there are so many ‘me-toos’ . There once was tally which captured Indian market – I am yet to learn about other such softwares for India and for the world. Other than those there is the huge service industry with China at their toes.

On a lighter note, after reading about the electricity consumed by EKA, and about the impending power cuts in Pune starting this Saturday, i wish we had more people using Green IT datacentre optimization products such as the ones created by Evergrid