All posts by Navin Kabra

PuneTech Event: Storage Technology Trends talk by Ken Boyd, IBM: 28 July

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Ken Boyd, a Distinguished Engineer at IBM, who has been building high end storage products at IBM for over 25 years, is visiting Pune and will talk about his thoughts on the trends in storage technology.

On Saturday July 28, 5pm, at MCCIA, SB Road, Ken will present some of the technology trends that are shaping the design of future storage systems in IBM. Ken will also discuss the opportunities these technology trends are creating for increasing the value of future storage systems. This talk is free and open to all those who’re interested in attending.

Ken is current Chief NAS (Network Attached Storage) Architect at IBM, and leads IBM’s NAS division. He is a Distinguished Engineer at IBM and has been awarded the Master Inventor award, and holds over 40 patents.

Ken recently completed a two year IBM international assignment in Israel where he served as XIV Chief Architect. After IBM acquired XIV, an Israeli start up company, Ken led the XIV team in defining the future architecture and system design of IBM-XIV. Ken also led the technical integration of XIV into IBM.

Ken started his IBM career after graduating from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in with a B.S. degree in Computer Engineering. After beginning as an IBM logic designer, Ken held a variety of engineering and management positions in Poughkeepsie, NY before transferring to Tucson, AZ in 1987. Advancing in IBM’s storage development team in Tucson, Ken led several organizations, including hardware development, microcode development, technical support marketing, and product management. Ken made significant contributions to IBM high end storage products, including the IBM 3990 Storage Controller, the IBM Enterprise Storage Controller (now known as the DS8000 family), and the XIV Storage System. He was promoted to IBM Director in 1993 and was named an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2003. In July 2005 Ken received an IBM Outstanding Innovation Award for significant contributions to developing and protecting IBM Intellectual Property. Ken, named an IBM Master Inventor, holds over 40 patents and has achieved an IBM 12th Plateau Invention Achievement Award. Ken earned a M.B.A. degree from the University of Arizona and he is a Senior Member of the IEEE.

This is a free event, and anybody interested in technology is free to attend.

Registration and Fees

This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Please register here

Event Report: Turing 100 @ Persistent – The Theory of Computation

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This is a liveblog of the Turing 100 @ Persistent Event.

The Turing Awards celebrate the achievements of some of the most influential computer scientists. Unfortunately, a lot of the professionals and students in computer science are not well versed with the work of Turing Award winners, and since this year is the 100th birth anniversary of Alan Turing, the Turing 100 @ Persistent Lecture series has been started with the hope of sparking an interest amongst the computer science and software community in looking at computer science in some depth.

For each lecture, one Turing Award recipient will be picked and a 90-minute talk will be given on the work of that person. One such lecture will happen on every 1st Saturday of every month until June 2013. The schedule can be see here

Today’s event features a talk about Alan Turing himself by Mathai Joseph, Advisor TCS, followed by a talk on Turing’s Theory of Computation by Vivek Kulkarni, a Principal Architect at Persistent Systems.

Alan Turing – by Mathai Joseph

These are some rough notes taken during the talk.

  • Turing was the first person to provide a mathematical model for the concept of “computation” which could be used for mathematically proving things related to computation. This led to the concept of:
    • computability – whether something can be computed by computers
    • decidability – whether it is possible to
    • He did all of this before getting a PhD
  • Church – Turing Thesis
    • Turing went to Princeton to Work with Alonzo Church
    • Church had proved computability result using lambda calculus
    • Church, Kleene, and Rosser had used recursive functions
    • Turing showed that this could be shown much more simply using the Turing machine
  • Did his PhD from Princeton in 1938
    • Mathematical basis for computing
    • intuitively understandable solution
  • After his PhD, Turing went to Bletchley Park, which had the UK government’s main “decryption” center
    • Bletchley Park was involved in cryptanalysis – breaking of codes
    • Huge teams human analysts worked in shifts to break codes
    • Turing joined and became a leader in cryptanalysis
    • Bletchley Park relied on Turing to invent new, better methods for breaking codes
    • He played a key part in deciphering the Enigma code that the Germans used during World War 2.
  • After the war, Turing moved to Manchester to work on:
    • Computer Design
    • AI
    • Program Verification
    • Morphogenesis
  • One of Turing’s lasting legacies is the study of complexity of algorithms
    • There is a long history of interest in this area
    • Ancient Greeks did it. Mathematicians in Kerala did it.
    • Mathematicians did it too: Cantor, Hilbert, Pocklinton, Post, Church, Turing
    • Given a strong base in 1960s – Hartmanis and Stearns formally quantified time & space of a computation in terms of number of steps taken by a Turing machine to complete the computation, and the total number of cells used on the tape. Obviously, Turing machines were key to this analysis. Without it, characterising the problem would have been much more difficult.
  • Computer Science without Turing Machine?
    • Difficult to imagine
    • Something else would have evolved but:
      • Would have taken longer to find
      • Would have been harder to understand
      • Would have been of less practical use
  • Finally
    • Turing was 42 when he died (by cyanide poisoning – unclear whether it was a suicide or an accident)
    • We can only guess what he might have done if he had lived longer
    • A remarkable mind: mathematician, scientist, engineers and 100% genius

Turing’s Theory of Computation – by Vivek Kulkarni

This talk was an in-depth look at the theory of computation, covering:

  • The concept of a state machine
  • Determinism and non-determinism
  • The concept of a Turing Machine
  • Solvable and semi-solvable problems
  • Godel numbering and Turing machine encoding
  • The Universal Turing Machine
  • The Halting Problem
  • Multi-tape Turing Machines

Unfortunately, the talk was quite technical, and it is not easy to blog about it, especially without diagrams (which are quite important when you need to understand state machines and Turing machines, hence unfortunately, this live blog ends here.)

The next talk in this series will be on 4th August where Prof. Sham Navathe, from Georgia Tech University, USA, who is visiting Pune, will talk about the work of Ted Codd, the inventor of relational databases.

SEAP Book Club Report: “Good to Great”

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This is a liveblog of the SEAP Book Club Meeting on 7th July, where Gaurav Mehra, co-founder and MD of Saba Software, talked about the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. The SEAP Book Club meets on the first Saturday of every month at 10:30am in Sungard, Aundh.

This book is the second in a series of books. The first was Built to Last which talked about why some companies survive for more than 100 years – while others die. Good to Great talks about what makes some companies special enough to jump far higher over other successful companies. The 3rd book was How the Mighty Fall – This talked about why some companies, which seem to be doing great, fail. And finally, Great by Choice, their latest book, pulls all these threads together.

Interesting points made during the talk:

  • Good is the enemy of the great. If you’re good enough you will not strive for greatness. Need to be constantly wary of falling into this trap.
  • What you need is disciplined people, followed by disciplined thought, and finally disciplined action which will result in breakthrough greatness
  • This book is based on a study over 30 years of some great companies, deliberately compared against very similar companies which were successful but fell short of greatness. The suggestions on the book are based on what they found empirically.
  • Level 5 Leadership:
    • Personal Humility combined with Professional Will
    • Darwin Smith of Kimberly Clark: “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job”
    • It’s always we not _I_
    • Usually not media heroes – not many articles will be written about them
    • Have ambition for company, not for self
    • 90% of such leaders come from within the company
  • Larger than Life leaders (Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca) are not good for a company at this stage. Characteristics of such leaders:
    • Took existing large/great companies – did not create the greatness
    • Set up successors for failure
    • Personal ambition trumps what’s best for companies
    • Large acquisitions, which might not make sense for the company
    • Note: the names mentioned above are not bad leaders. But they’re not the leaders who can take a good company to greatness.
    • Data shows that bringing a larger than life outsider into a company is negatively correlated with performance
  • Set up successors for success
    • Humble leaders with ambition for company, not self, do this very well
    • Larger than life leaders usually fail at this
    • Henry Singleton, co-founder of Teledyne was a good leader, built and ran Teledyne for a very long time, but the company did not do well after his retirement because he wasn’t able to groom a good successor
  • Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off the bus
    • The great leaders did not focus on what to do. They focused on who should be in charge, and great things happened automatically
    • Having a genius at the top, with a thousand helpers (e.g. Singleton at Teledyne) is a bad idea. When the genius leaves, the helpers don’t know what to do.
    • It’s about whom you pay, not how or how much. The people should be there because they are passionate about what you’re doing, not focused on the salary. “Hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight.” This will lead to a lot of turn over, especially in the early stages, but in the long term, this will work best.
  • When in doubt, dont hire
    • Hire only A+ people. As Steve Jobs pointed out, if you hire B people, they will in turn hire C people and your company will go to the dogs.
  • Give your best people where the opportunities are – not where the problems are
    • The CEO of RJR Nabisco put his best person in charge of the international business, which accounted for 1% of the business – because that’s where the growth was. He went from controlling 99% of the company to 1% of the company. The result – RJR Nabisco became a world leader before becoming the leader in USA.
  • Confront the brutal facts

The Hedgehog Concept

The Hedgehog Concept idea is one of the most interesting parts of the book.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows only one thing. Focus on just that one big thing.

What you do, should be an intersection of these:

  • What you are deeply passionate about
  • What you are the best in the world about
  • What drives your economic engine

In other words, something is worth doing only if you can do it, you will enjoy doing it, and someone is willing to pay for it. If one of these is missing, dont do it.

Learn to say “No.” Stay with your Hedgehog principle and do not run after the new hotness. Like you have a ToDo list, you should also have a “Stop Doing” list. Your best returns come from having an undiversified portfolio (when you’re right).

Summary

  • Disciplined People
    • Level 5 Leadership
    • First Who then What
  • Disciplined Thought
    • Confront the Brutal Facts
    • Hedgehog Concept
  • Disciplined Action
    • Culture of Discipline
    • Technology Accelerations

Call for Speakers: ClubHack Security Conference 2012

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ClubHack is one of India’s foremost conferences on Security and is now in its 6th year. As usual, it will be on the first weekend of December (1st to 3rd) in Pune.

However, rather than focusing on just plain security and awareness of security, ClubHack is now changing its focus. Here is the motivation:

ClubHack when started in 2007, dreamt that people in India will wake up and start thinking information security seriously. We even decided our motto as “Making Security a Common Sense”. After 5 long years, today we witness a lot of action around the country in this field, media as well as working professionals are actually looking towards security seriously.

Waking up to an extent that today we see 5-6 similar events in India on the same line. Hence we have now decided to confer the task of rest of the awakening to them and start a new journey.

ClubHack2012 onwards, we will concentrate our energies in empowering innovation & leadership development. Having loved our domain so much, we’d continue to do this in the domain of information security only. And that coins our new motto line “Empowering Innovation & Leadership in Information Security”

With this in mind, this year’s ClubHack is looking for speakers who can emphasize entrepreneurship in this space. So, here is a partial list of suggested topics:

  • Entrepreneurship in infosec product development
  • Research work in infosec
  • Innovation in attack vectors
  • Attacks on Cloud
  • Mobile computing
  • Malware & Botnets
  • Privacy with social networks
  • Telecom Security (3G/4G, SS7, GSM/CDMA, VoIP) and Phone Phreaking
  • Hardware, Embedded Systems and other Electronic Devices Hacking
  • War of handhelds & BYOD
  • Cyber warfare & your role
  • Open Source Intelligence (OSINT)
  • Signal Intelligence (SIGINT) – COMINT, ELINT, etc
  • Critical Infrastructure Protection
  • Security aspects in SCADA and industrial environments and “obscure” networks
  • & the general other infosec domains like web, network, tools & exploits etc.

Those who would like to deliver a workshop at ClubHack2012, please write to cfp@clubhack.com to discuss the details.

Why become a speaker? In addition to helping the community, becoming well known and famous, meeting interesting people in this area, you also get:

  • Travel reimbursement or arrangement of economy return tickets for speakers
  • Accommodation for 2
  • Complementary passes for event & party for 2
  • Gift hampers & freebies

See the CFP link for more details of how to submit a proposal.

Event: Turing’s Theory of Computing – Turing 100 @ Persistent – July 7

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The Turing awards, named after Alan Turing, given every year, are the highest achievement that a computer scientist can earn. And the contributions of each Turing award winner are then, arguably, the most important topics in computer science. This year, the Turing 100 @ Persistent lecture series will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Alan Turing’s birth by having a monthly lecture series. Each lecture will be presented by an eminent personality from the computer science / technology community in India, and will cover the work done by one Turing award winner.

The lecture series will feature talks on Ted Codd (Relational Databases), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn (Internet), Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (Unix), Jim Gray, Barbara Liskov, and others. Full schedule is here

This is a lecture series that any one in the field of computer science must attend. These lectures will cover the fundamentals of computer science, and all of them are very relevant today.

This lecture series kicks off this Saturday with a talk on the work of Turing himself – Turing’s Theory of Computing, by Vivek Kulkarni, Principal Architect at Persistent Systems. The full schedule of the event is:

  • Welcome Address: Dr. Anand Deshpande, CEO Persistent Systems
  • Keynote: Dr. Mathai Joseph, Advisor TCS
  • Media Presentation: Life of Alan Turing
  • Turing’s Theory of Computation: Vivek Kulkarni, Principal Architect Persistent Systems

The event will be at Dewang Mehta Auditorium, Persistent Systems, SB Road, at from 2pm to 5pm on Saturday 7th July. This event is free and open for anybody to attend. Register here

What NVidia is up to – NVidia Tech Week Open House in Pune

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(This report of an demo/event organized by NVidia in February 2012 was written by Abhijit Athavale, and was originally published on PuneChips.com, a PuneTech sister organization that focuses on semiconductor, eda, embedded design and VLSI technology in Pune. It is reproduced here for the benefit for PuneTech readers.)

I was invited to visit the Nvidia Tech Week this past weekend (February 25-26, 2012) at their facilities in Pune. This is a great concept – getting employees to invite friends and relatives to actually see what their company is all about is very good social outreach and a fantastic marketing initiative. If more tech companies in the area do similar events once or twice a year, it will help lift the shroud of technical opaqueness around them. I think hosting similar events in area colleges will also help students realize that even VLSI/Embedded Systems Design is cool.

I was given a personal tour by Sandeep Sathe, a Sr. Development manager at Nvidia and also met with Jaya Panvalkar, Sr. Director and head of Pune facilities. There was enough to see and do at this event and unfortunately I was a bit short on time. It would have taken a good two hours for a complete walk-through, so I decided to spend more time on the GPU/HPC section though the Tegra based mobile device section was also quite impressive. It’s been a while since I actually installed a new graphics card in a desktop (actually, it’s been a while since I used a desktop), but graphics cards have come a long way! Nvidia is using standard PCI Express form factor cards for the GPU modules with on-board fans and DVI connectors.

The following are key takeaways from the demo stations I visited

GeForce Surround 2-D

Here, Nvidia basically stretches the game graphics from a single monitor to three monitors. Great for gamers as it gives a fantastic feel for peripheral vision. The game actually doesn’t have to support this. The graphics card takes care of it. The setup here is that while the gamer sits in front of the main monitor, he also sees parts of the game in his peripheral vision in two other monitors that are placed at an angle to the main monitor. I played a car rally game and the way roadside trees, objects moved from the main monitor to the peripheral vision monitors was quite fascinating.

GeForce 3-D Vision Surround

This is similar to the above, but with 3D. You can completely immerse yourself in the game. This sort of gaming setup is now forcing monitor manufacturers to develop monitors with ultra small bezel widths. I suppose at some point in the next few years, we will be able to seamlessly merge graphics from different monitors into one continuous collage without gaps.

Powerwall Premium Mosaic

Powerwall is a eight monitor setup driven by the Quadro professional graphics engine. Two Quadro modules fit into one Quadroplex industrial PC to drive four monitors. Projectors can also be used in place of monitors to create a seamless view. The display was absolutely clear and highly detailed. The Powerwall is application transparent. Additional coolness factor – persistence data is saved so you don’t lose the image during video refresh and buffer swaps. This is most certainly a tool intended for professionals who need high quality visuals and computing in their regular work. Examples are automotive, oil and gas, stock trading.

PhysX Engine

PhysX is a graphics engine that infuses real time physics into games or applications. It is intended to make objects in games or simulations move as they would in real life. To me this was very disruptive, and highlight of the show. You can read more about PhysX here. It is very clear how PhysX would change gaming. The game demo I watched had several outstanding effects: dried leaves moving away from the character as he walks through a corridor, glass breaking into millions of shards as it would in real life. Also running was a PhysX simulation demo that would allow researchers to actually calculate how objects would move in case of a flood. What was stunning was that the objects moved differently every time as they would in real life. PhysX runs on Quadro and Tesla GPUs. It is interesting to note that Ra.One special effects were done using PhysX.

3D photos and movies

Next couple of demos demonstrated 3D TV and photo technology using Sony TVs and a set of desktops/laptops. Notably, the Sony 3D glasses were much more comfortable compared to others. Nvidia is working with manufacturers to create more comfortable glasses. There was also a Toshiba laptop that uses a tracking eye camera to display a 3D image to the viewer regardless of seating position without glasses. It was interesting. However, the whole 3D landscape need a lot of work from the industry before it can become mainstream.

Optimus

What was explained to me was that Optimus allows laptops to shut off GPUs when they are not needed. They can be woken up when high performance work is required. This would be automatic and seamless, similar to how power delivery is in on a Toyota Prius. This sort of a technology is not new to computing – a laptop typically puts a lot of components to sleep/hibernate when not being used, but the GPU is not included.

Quadro Visualizations

This allows 2D/3D visualizations for automotive, architectural and similarly complex systems for up to one thousand users at a time. You can easily change colors, textures, views so everyone can comment and give constructive feedback. I was not sure if the design can be changed on the fly as well. Nvidia is working with ISVs like Maya and Autodesk on this.

Tesla

Tesla GPUs use chips that are used for high performance computing and not rendering, which is different from what Nvidia typically does. The Tesla modules do not have any video ports! It has a heterogeneous GPU/CPU architecture that saves power. In fact, the SAGA-220 supercomputer, dubbed India’s fastest, at ISRO’s Vikram Sarabhai Space Center facility uses 2070 Tesla GPUs along with 400 Intel Xeon processors. In addition to supercomputing, Tesla is very useful in 3D robotic surgery, 3D ultrasound, molecular dynamics, oil and gas, weather forecasting and many more applications.

Tegra Mobile Processor

Next few demos showcased the Tegra mobile applications processor based on ARM Cortex A9 cores. The HD quality graphics and imaging were impressive. It is clear that smartphones and tablets of the day are clearly far more powerful compared to desktops of yesteryear and can support highly impressive video and audio in a very handy form factor.

In all, I had a great time. As I mentioned earlier, Nvidia along with other tech companies in Pune should hold more of these kinds of events to give technology exposure to the larger population in general. I think it is important for people to know that the stuff that makes Facebook run is the real key and that is where the coolness is.

Global Mining Giant to invest $80 million on mining tech innovation center in Pune

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Rio Tinto, one of the biggest mining companies in the world, announced the opening of an innovation center at iGate Patni in Pune, which will work towards developing next-generation technologies for mining. Rio Tinto expects to invest about $80 million on this initiative over the next five years.

Just to be clear, we are talking about real mining, the kind where you dig up the earth and extract minerals – not data mining. Software technology is becoming an increasingly important part of mining, and is used in all aspects of mining, including use of sophisticated data analysis and modeling to locate mining sites, analysis to make mining processes more efficient, and also to to improve mineral recovery, and automation to allow remote mining, underground tunneling.

According to the press release, the mining innovation center in Pune will have about 300 engineers focusing on disciplines such as image processing, advanced data mining and analytics, automation and control systems, human factors design and logistics.

This is just one more development that cements Pune’s position as one of the top destinations for technology development at the intersection of software and the “harder” engineering disciplines like manufacturing, mining, automobiles, computer aided design, and computer aided engineering.

QuickOffice Launches ‘Connect’ – Frontend Developed in Pune

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QuickOffice, the mobile office/documents software company, has recently launched Connect by QuickOffice, which is an ambitious platform which allows users to synchronize their documents across all their devices (multiple mobiles), clouds (Dropbox, Google Docs, Microsoft SkyDrive), and computers (office computer, laptop, home desktop).

QuickOffice has an offshore development center in Pune (in Pune-based Synerzip), and this team has played a significant role in this project. Vishwesh Jirgale, Architect and Delivery Head for the Client-side of Connect by QuickOffice writes:

For past one and half year I led a team of passionate engineers for Quickoffice Pune ODC and finally Quickoffice launching their new product in market, Connect By Quickoffice, which will change the way you work.

The entire client side development (Android + iOS + Windows Desktop + Mac Desktop) happened out of Pune ODC where we had large team of DEV + QA.

For more information, see this article

Pune based RainingClouds (AppSurfer) get 1cr Angel Funding

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Pune based software startup RainingClouds Technologies has just raised Rs. 1cr in angel funding from Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of One97 Communications. RainingClouds makes AppSurfer, which allows people to access any android app from any browser.

The funding happened as part of the Finale of the Super Angels show of ET Now. (We’ll update this post with a link to the video of this show once it appears on YouTube.) RainingClouds got into the Super Angels show as a result of being one of the winners of the PuneConnect 2011 event organized by PuneTech along with Software Exporters Association of Pune (SEAP) and Pune Open Coffee Club. (There, AppSurfer is referred to by its older name, DroidCloud).

Here is a description of DroidCloud from PuneConnect 2011:

DroidCloud allows users to try and use Android apps from any desktop web browser. Normally, applications intended for Android phones cannot be used by people who do not have an Android phone. DroidCloud gives every user a virtual Android phone in the cloud that they can use to run apps. This is useful for app developers to demo apps to clients, app publishers to show demo of apps to potential customers and users, and different teams in large organizations to collaborate on apps.

The DroidCloud team consists of Aniket Awati, Ratnadeep Deshmane, Amit Yadav and Akshay Deo, all techies from Pune.

Event Report: “Innovate or Die” – Suhas Kelkar, CTO-APAC, BMC Software

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(This is a live blog of Suhas Kelkar’s talk at the SEAP Breakfast Meet. Suhas talked about his experience of building an incubator at BMC Software.)

Background

  • Suhas joined BMC Pune and was given the job of creating an innovation incubator within the company.
  • This was the second attempt at creating an incubator in BMC. A previous attempt had failed spectacularly. The previous one had been started with great fanfare, with a 100 people team, and over time, it went down to 80, to 60 to nothing. With this history Suhas started his incubator with zero employees, and minimal fanfare.

On Innovation

  • Suhas defines innovation as “Ideas to Cash.” This is important. The focus on cash, i.e. revenues, was an important difference between this incubator and the previous incubator, and also other research labs in companies around the world. Invention for the sake of invention, research for the sake of research is something that they definitely did not want to do. The wanted to ensure that everything they do has a direct or indirect revenue impact upside for BMC.
  • There actually exists a document called “The Oslo Manual” which is a set of guidelines for how to do innovation. It is a free PDF that anyone can download, and Suhas recommends that to anyone interested in innovation.
  • The Oslo Manual points out that innovation can happen in 4 different areas Product, Process, Marketing and Organization. Suhas adds a 5th category of innovation: “User Experience”

The BMC Incubator

  • Why does a product company need an incubator? Product teams get bogged down by tactical improvements for existing customers, and the larger vision (beyond 12-24 months) does not get attention. Startups innovate all the time, and BMC does buy innovative companies, but then integrating them into the company is a huge overhead, and fraught with risks. It would be much more efficient to do innovation in-house if it could be made to work
  • The incubator is a separate team who can focus on these issues. It is a small team (about 25 people) compared to the 200 people in just one of the product groups that BMC has. And these 25 people try various different innovative ideas, 9 of 10 of which are bound to fail. But even that failure adds value because that means there are 9 things that the 200 people product team does not have to try out – hence they’re shielded from dead ends and unproductive explorations.
  • The mandate for the new incubator (partially based on lessons learnt from the failure of the previous incubator was):
    • Don’t alienate the product teams – you’ll never succeed without their help and blessings
    • Understand the base products thoroughly. Superficial understanding of the issues, toy applications, will not earn the respect of the product team
    • Frequent communication with the business teams
    • File many patents

  • The Process

    • The incubator takes inputs from:
      • The office of the CTO, which strategizes and puts together a vision. Before the incubator team, the office of the CTO would hand over the long term vision and strategy to the product team, which was ill equipped to handle it. Now, the incubator fits this gap
      • Product Business Units
      • Customers and Partners
      • Academia (what is the latest in research)
    • The idea backlog is looked at by these three teams:
      • The governance team which meets once in 6 months
      • The alignment team which meets once a quarter
      • The execution team which meets once a month
    • The output of the incubator are:
      • White Papers
      • Prototypes
      • Delivery
      • Patents
      • Innovation Culture
  • Challenges for an Incubator
    • How to measure innovation? Number of patents is not a good enough metric.
    • Motivation: the motivation for the incubator and the people on the team must come from within. Creating the motivation, and staying motivated, in the face of 9 failures out of every 10 ideas tried, is difficult.
    • Difficult skill set: the team needs people who are smart, intelligent architects, but also hands on developers, with ability to switch context frequently, understanding the overall BMC vision, ability to sell/market ideas internally, and most importantly they need to be technology as well as business savvy. Finding people like this is a tall order.
  • The incubator only does small projects. There are two kinds of projects: “research” and “prototype”.
    • Research projects which are just 1 person 1 week, where that person is supposed to study something for a week and come back with a report.
    • Prototype projects are just 2 or 3 people working for a maximum of 2 months to build a prototype – not necessarily a shipping product. The prototype should prove or disprove some specific hypothesis, and there is a tricky balance to be made in deciding which parts of the prototype will be “real” and which parts will be simple mocked up.

Future Directions

  • From technology incubation, they want to move to co-innovation, where they work in conjunction with product teams, and customers to innovate.
  • After that they would even like to do business incubation – where the product team is not interested in looking at an adjacent business, in which case the incubator would like to have the ability to go after that market themselves.
  • The Indian IT industry, from humble beginnings, is moving up the value chain.
    • First we were doing cost arbitrage (1990s)
    • Now we have process maturity (2000s)
    • The next step would be to get product ownership, and product management here (2010s)
    • Finally, in the 2020s we’ll be able to do innovation, incubation, entrepreneurship
    • The bottomline is that Indian IT industry should be focusing on taking on more and more Product Management responsibilities

Questions from Audience

  • Q: The incubator needs people who understand the current products thoroughly. Which means that you need to steal the stars from each product team, because you cannot really hire from outside. And obviously the product team is not willing to give up their stars. How do you solve this problem?
    • A: In general, trying to get stars from the product teams is not possible. You wont get them, and you sour the relationship with the product teams. Instead, what works is to hire the smartest outside people you can hire and then make them learn the product. These people are then teamed up with the right people in the product team during the ‘learning’ process. The learning process is still a bit ad hoc and we haven’t yet formalized it, but at the very least it involves doing some work hands-on.
  • Q: What do you answer when a product team asks what is the value you are adding?
    • A: We constantly worry about the value we are adding, and we keep pro-actively stay in touch with the product teams and constantly keep reminding them of the value we add. If it ever happens that a product team asks what value you are bringing, you are already too late
  • Q: How are you engaging in academia, and what else would you like to do?
    • A: Currently, we get interns from academia. This allows them to do look at projects that would not get “approved” as regular projects, because “it’s just an intern project.”
  • Q: Customers are in the US. Product Managers are in the US. And you cannot innovate unless you understand customers and have close ties with the Product Managers. How do you do that sitting in India?
    • The head of the incubator must be the ultimate product manager, and more. First, s/he must have almost as much understanding of the market and the customers as the product manager of the actual product. In addition s/he must have a vision beyond just what customers want, so that they are able to generate innovative ideas. Successful engagement and understanding of Product Management is key to success of an incubator.
  • Q: How do you ensure that the output of an incubator prototype is actually accepted by a product team, and how does the process work
    • All prototype projects require buy-in from the product team and other stakeholders, agreeing tentatively that if the prototype is successful, the product team will actually put that project onto the release schedule. Once the prototype is completed, it is incorporated into the release schedule, and the 2/3 people who worked on the prototype transition into the product team temporarily.