Man and the Dog

Infrastructure Support and Services is a big business these days. No company wants the headache of running and managing servers when its not core to their business. You need specialists to mantain, upgrade and manage your servers.

HP perhaps is the best in business when it comes to servers and storage solutions. The way in which they support infrastructure is quite interesting too. Not preffering to having servers across various client locations, they move the customers infrastructure to their own hubs called as Data Centers. These Data Centers are essentially centralised platforms from where infrastructure of various clients are hoisted. The idea of the Data Centers is to manage multiple customers from a single location - economies of scale. A new concept that would evolve out of this the shared services model (hoisting different customers on same server). Which means a 200GB server could be utilised by 3 customers at the cost of one. Interesting concept i think, how far it can be achieved is debatable though.

Whats more interesting though is the fact that the datacenters work on a very thin workforce. I am told that going forward - all you need to manage a Data Center is a Man and a Dog.
A dog to keep people away from messing with the servers and a Man to feed the Dog. This level of automation seems quite scary !!
But believe me we are not far from there.

Caffeine,Cocaine and Coffee Talk

Coffee has always been my favorite drink, starting the day with a cup of coffee…I would have guzzled atleast a couple of rounds before dusk. Ever since the shepard who discovered arabicas some where in the deserts (was it brazil?) coffees popularity has reached far and wide...thanks to Star Bucks.

I don’t know whether it is the taste of coffee or the caffeine which keeps us going on and on. I remember when this little café coffee day outlet opened in our campus…it was kind of pseud to have a cup of branded coffee besides you on the desk. Before café coffee days advent we were accustomed to the more subtle tea in plastic cups tea from our coffee shop just around the corner of library or the mess. Here in Cincinnati especially within P&G premises I find innovative usage of coffee. Firstly coffee breaks can be used as an alibi to get out of your seat on slightest pretext. All you do is wait for someone to message you for coffee and you would reply back…I am kinda busy but a cup of coffee would do a lot good. It’s almost as if a coffee would help you fix a code you have been struggling for a week. Secondly all those arduous hours in the office can’t be spent browsing and orkuting alone – you need a break. A more innovative usage is to use coffee in the meetings. Hardly have I seen a meeting without majority of the people carrying a cup of coffee. Apart from acting as a stimulant – which perhaps keep you awake all through the meeting while you are trying out those new pencil sketches. It also brings the sense of seriousness, more like – yeah this guy means business. For instance if the client ask you a question – and you are absolutely clueless…and you just need that additional 1/100th of a second to think and throw some serious jargon…all you need to do is just lift the cup of coffee as if your throat needs to be bribed for your brain to think. In this nanoeth second you would have probably arrived at some answer which would save your day. And yeah having to work in Cincinnati I don’t have access to very many star bucks and I am forced to go for Millstones or Folgers (P&G brands). I don’t consider either of them to be anywhere close to the Bru instants but still it more than makes up with the pseudness coefficient. So my recipe for a successful meeting is a Tall Regular Coffee with lid, a straw to sip and not to forget a pencil along with a scrap book.

Talking of caffeine, Redux Beverages in Las Vegas is offering a new energy drink branded as ‘Cocaine’. It calls the drink a "legal alternative" to the illegal drug in form of an energy drink, hmm..why not?. With a catchy name like this and 5 times the strength of ‘Red Bull’ I am sure that it would do good rounds of business. The drink actually doesn’t have any coke in it, it’s just the excess cocaine which apparently gives that numb sensation of its name sake. Now that’s one hell of a reason for many of us to try it. It’s a different issues that it has the drink itself has run into problems with the conservatives calling it too inappropriate a name. I am not sure how coco-cola manages to survives under the nemesis of coke. Isn’t it the more colloquial name of cocaine or was it cocaine which took the name coke from coco-cola?

Finally working in HP Americas has its own positives, one of them being the ‘Coffee Talks’. Coffee Talks within HP are held at various locations within US and graced by the biggies of HP; two of the more prolific Coffee Talks that I have attended were hosted by Mark Hurd (CEO), and the other by Carly Fiorina (erstwhile CEO). Now ‘Coffee Talks’ are also webcasted for the benefit of larger audience within world wide HP. Due to differences in time zone and pure laziness I never used to attend these talks. Ever since I am here I hardly have missed any of these ‘Coffee Talks’. Apart from getting to interact with the gurus of Silicon Valley you get to know the quarterly results, strategy over the next quarter and occasionally my bonus.
Now you might ask me what the heck, its some thing which is done across many organizations and just that HP calls it ‘Tea Talk’ instead of ‘Coffee Talk’. If it were an Infosys they would come up more innovative name like ‘Namma Filter Coffee Talk’ or a ‘4G Coffee Talk’. Hang on here is the interesting part; I was always under the impression that I would be served coffee & cookies to-go since the program itself is called ‘Coffee Talk’. After being a veteran of two Coffee Talks – it stuck me that the term ‘Coffee Talk’ is actually a misnomer - for there ain’t no coffee being served (On, before or after the talk). On the third occasion, I did a little bit of investigation while in the auditorium and results were no different. No coffee served again. It needed a much closer observation to figure – that the meetings are usually conducted in the noon (around 2pm) and most people in the audience carried their own cup of Folgers. Voila Code cracked.

The Alchemist - Featuring Bops

We formed quite a trio, me bops and my ‘other buddy’. I am not dwelling into the details of my ‘other buddy’ - one feature is too little to talk about his escapades. Besides he is too busy running a big consulting firm from some where in Hong Kong or Macau.

There were two things common to the three of us,

One - like most boys from South (I mean South of Bangalore) we had never been North (beyond White Field) of the country.

The other – none of us fancied an IT job. I ofcourse crib and do nothing about it. But Bops wasn’t the one who would sit around whine about it and do nothing. After a not so convincing stint at an IT company, he left for an MBA. Come summers Bops finds himself in the same company where he is used to work earlier (call it destiny). Still Bops held his convictions of breaking away from the mundane world of IT. Finally he left many a cushy offers from IT companies, the lure of green bills and lost frequent flier miles. Bops made it to Airtel, with it came a trip to Delhi…farthest North he had been all life.

Like I said - Bops followed his dreams …. Yours truly and the ‘other buddy’ will always be proud of this. There are very few people that I have come across who have the courage to follow their dream. You need some nerve to do it, don’t you ?

For all his positives bops has some shades of grey, he is an ardent follower of Hindutva (the sena kind). Since his early childhood he had developed this strange animosity towards fellow Muslims. So much so that he had a grid on which he could scale his animosity. To give you an idea he had enemies at various levels

National Level – Pakistan Bangladesh and rest of the middle east
State Level – TN, KL, WB (and the list goes most states in India minus KA)

Bops is currently headed to Murshidabad for a sales stint, his attitude to walk the talk has now landed him 20 miles away from the border. When Bops called me early today to tell me he was off to murshidabad, my first question was – Is this in Bangladesh?

A little research on Murshidabad* tells me that the place is geographically proximate to Bangladesh. A district with a population of 5.8 million, which is classified as a muslim majority (64% muslims) within West Bengal. An urban population of less than 11%, so effectively we have 638,000 potential customers who would be demographically targeted by Airtel . Bops effectively has around 229000 as his customer base (his strong religious convictions forbid him from selling connections to Muslims). Add to this Hutch is the dominant player around, which leaves bops with less than 100000 subscribers.

Bops faces the biggest challenge of his life – whether to follow his dreams or to break his strong religious convictions. I don’t have any answers to his dilemma for I know - not only he pursued his dreams but also pursued his boss to give him a challenging assignment in sales. I mean what can be more challenging than selling a Refrigerator to an Eskimo. Kudos Bops, I am proud of you. If you ever need a bigger challenge – you should probably try selling Hair Oil in PoK.

I only hope that you don’t come back with a Begum Khalida Zia…For the last time i wished*** something you kicked my butt whenever Kapil Dev was on TV telling "Palmolive ka jawab nahi"

Good Luck Dude!!

*38.5% growing muslim population base making it the fastest growing district as far as muslim growth is considered, i am told the degenerating population growth in Bangladesh is attributed to a generous murshidabad

* * I am making this assumption that Airtel would being a premium brand would restrict its market segment to urban murshidabad

***This one is a little secret between the two of us, sorry strictly confidential.

Bombay Blues

Here is a nice post by guy kawasaki on his first impression about India more specifically Mumbai.

Dont forget to check pics, some of them are really good. For the iimb junta - look out for chachi in one of the pics (i think its her).

Rajni makes it to the wild west

Rajni with his impeccable style has swept audience across japan, Singapore and most parts of east asia. So far he had not quite made it big in the west. Not now, this video has been making rounds on the web and some TV channels in the US.



Vh1 says 'well this is the kind of video that should been seen for a good laughter. But at the same time this is the video that you would not want your kids to stay away from'. What ever the channel has to say Rajni has made it to the west, in this case with some help from little superstar.