Uncategorized – Page 6 – Cabot Partners

06Apr 2012

The Taming of Data – On the Value Train from Insights to Knowledge to Wisdom to perhaps Happiness?

Also guilty – contributing to the excess supply of data – is the recent spate of growth of “unstructured” data: images, video, voice, pictures and others. Probably because many believe that “a picture is worth a thousand words”. And a video even more! Every time I hear this oft used cliché, I think REALLY? WHY? Why are we creating all these quantities of image/video data and spending our precious resources (our time) doing so? More importantly, why are we so enamored with transmitting this data to others?

Yes, new social media and the underlying technologies give each and every individual enormous capability for creative expression and even contribute to the overthrow of oppressive regimes e.g. the Arab Spring. But aren’t we collectively trampling on another form of creative expression – the thoughtful reflective kind by drowning each other in all this data? Or aren’t we being distracted by all these images that like fast foods fill us up to sated exhaustion but have very little nutritional value?

FROM MARCH 1979

Sick of those who come with words, words but no language,

I make my way to the snow-covered island.

Wilderness has no words. The unwritten pages

Stretch out in all directions.

I come across this line of deer-slots in the snow: a language,

language without words.

And the great 20th century Mexican poet, Octavio Paz (translated by J. M. Cohen), wrote:

CERTAINTY

If the white light of this lamp

is real, and real

the hand that writes,

are the eyes real

that look at what I write?

One word follows another.

What I saw vanishes.

I know that I am alive,

and living between parentheses.

Distinctive Numbers – God’s Equation Then and Now – Hey It’s All Just Zeros and Ones

Just like profound and wise words, there are some distinctive numbers (data) that also matter: zero and the imaginary number i and those irrationals Pi and e. And then there’s Euler’s God’s Equation of centuries back: e ^ i2π = 1. Thus, the “simplest” and most fundamental of all numbers (Numero Uno) is incredibly complex, made up of irrational, transcendent constants that extend to infinity. Now, the more contemporary version of God’s Equation (circa 2007) is the fourth album by the Norwegian progressive metal band Pagan’s Mind and contains video clips! But hey, today it’s all just digital data which are, at the end of the day, zeros and ones – the two most fundamental numbers. So why are we all making such a hoopla!

Because we must traverse that Divine Manifold from Data to Information to Insights to Knowledge to Wisdom and perhaps Happiness

Data is plentiful (all the data generated today can’t even be stored!), and left untamed is bound to be catastrophic. So we (corporations included) must harmonize all our assets and capabilities (people, process, data, technology, and culture) to navigate through this data onslaught and traverse the Value Train with the help of yet another God’s Equation: This new equation must transform Data to Information to Insights to Knowledge to Wisdom. One recent noteworthy technology asset for this journey to wisdom could be #IBMWatson.

12Mar 2012

Tracking an IT Analyst’s Journey on the Cloud Mobile: My Musings after Attending IBM Pulse 2012.

Very early morning on March/7 at the hotel, after a shower, I turned on the TV news. I heard that Apple planned to announce the iPad3 later in the day probably with the same pricing as the previous iPad2. It was expected that the price for the iPad2 would be reduced. This irked me as I had just bought an iPad2 a few weeks before. But I quickly got over that as I had already obtained significant business value from my iPad2 investment. This iPad2 and my iPhone4 are my most valuable mobile devices. This fact would be further reinforced as that day’s events unfolded. While checking out of my hotel to return home to Connecticut, a train of thoughts on my Cloud Mobile began to evolve in my mind that I want to share with you.

This has greatly advanced innovation and discovery in Mathematics even in such arcane areas as Number Theory that was once the province of individual brilliance. In fact, the famous Fermat’s Last Theorem was finally proved by Andrew Wiles in 1995 after centuries of sustained collaboration and inquiry. And, yes computers were partly used as tools to arrive at this result just as they were largely used to resolve the Four Color Theorem in 1976. With cloud computing, this level of collaboration will only increase. But then, in some sense, Mathematicians have always been on the cloud!

Technologists and Engineers tend to innovate better in groups and through collaboration. In fact, the industrial revolution and the subsequent rise of today’s large corporations depended heavily on this group collaboration. Today, this collaboration extends to other stakeholders including suppliers, customers, investors, and business partners. And Engineering Clouds are being adopted in the Manufacturing industry to improve productivity in design and development. So they too are getting on the cloud!

How on March 7, the Cloud Mobile helped this IT Analyst

Just as I was finishing up my breakfast at the MGM Grand with some of my colleagues, I saw a missed call from one of my key clients responsible for Business Analytics. So as I took the cab to the airport, I called him back. He wanted to get an estimate of the size and growth of data in the financial services industry particularly financial markets. He had a good estimate of the total size and growth across all industries and had tried some internal sources but did not have an estimate for his particular area. I told him that I was on the road and will try to do some investigation and get back to him the following day.

Now my firm, unlike some other major analyst firms, does not routinely provide these types of market estimates. There are other firms that specialize in these studies and make these reports available to their clients. I do not have access to these reports. But often, there is a lot of information on the web that one could often piece together to arrive at an informed estimate to such questions. So after checking in at the airport, I pulled out my iPad2 – fortunately the airport had free Wi Fi access – and began searching the web. After about ½ an hour, I had some relevant pieces of helpful information but was still nowhere near an estimate. I was a little disappointed and was almost planning to give up temporarily.

But then suddenly, I remembered that I had downloaded a very comprehensive Big Data report written by a major Global Think Tank in 2011. This report was on my secure private storage cloud. I had always planned to read it but never got the time to do so. So with my iPad2, I connected to my secure private cloud (protected by two levels of security), and pulled in the report into my iPad2’s iBook format. Then I boarded the plane. And as the plane soared up above the clouds and the flight attendant announced that we could turn on electronic devices, I opened up the iPad2 and began reading the report.

The plane landed at Charlotte, NC where I had to transfer to White Plains, NY. I was keen on composing the email to my Business Analytics client summarizing how I had arrived at the informed estimate and the rationale. But I got hungry. So I had a nice hot and spicy Mexican meal at Tequileria at the Charlotte airport. After the meal, I boarded my next flight and slept through the short flight to my destination. The next morning, I sent the email to my client with the informed estimate and rationale.

The Advantages of a Private Cloud Mobile

IBM’s notion of providing clients capabilities to build and deploy secure private clouds and connect as needed to hybrid clouds should help security (but also very cost) conscious enterprise executives make the transition to the cloud to support their very talented mobile workforce. Beyond, the obvious transactional mobile use cases i.e. procurement, sales force automation, invoicing that improve operational efficiency, the Cloud Mobile can (as depicted in my own personal use case) facilitate a level of analysis, collaboration, productivity and innovation, that can be a source of significant competitive advantage for enterprises while nurturing their talented mobile knowledge workers.

Back to the Cloud Mobile. The Music and the Pulsating Moves at Pulse 2012 and More.

Maroon 5’s concert at Pulse 2012 indeed made the Cloud Mobile move like Jagger! This built on some amazing fluid cloud like dance moves we witnessed earlier in the day by a group called iLuminate. Musicians and performers too are on the cloud! Performers collaborate and rehearse constantly. They are constantly on the road and mobile. And while there are individual superstars, there is nothing like listening to a well-coordinated talented group either at a concert or in your Cloud Mobile (Automobile).

10Mar 2012

Politcs 2012

Online presence is everything. The first hire in today’s political campaigns is the website team, not the campaign manager.

Privacy has become a quaint illusion. Database techniques now make it possible to serve and measure advertising and other messages to increasingly specific market segments. The next step in targeting will be knowing what you think right now. Target is already trying to understand and sell to pregnant women specifically in the 3rd trimester. Credit cards companies can predict divorce rates two years before they happen with 95 percent accuracy. They see changes in consumer patterns.

“We all live in a yellow submarine.” Personalization and digital targeting surround each of us in a membrane of filters so that there is less and less discursive conversation. We each tend to be always talking with like-minded individuals and to be less and less exposed to opposing views.

More money buys more influence than ever before. Super PACS in 2012 are dirtier and more powerful than ever before. They are funded by huge donations - $20 million – from really big donors. They often support shadow campaigns of tweets and viral videos that are user generated but paid for by PACs.

Polls no longer speak truth. Online polls are now skewed because of technological flaws. They’re all misleading. We each live in our own echo chamber (see the bullet before last). Automated polling has under 10 percent response; it’s illegal to call cell phones for research and 35 percent of people have no land lines.

One thing hasn’t changed. TV is still the most effective election all for all demographics, while social media are the most persuasive tools on issues.

Speed counts. The Internet has increased volatility to an unbelievable extent. Being nimble has become more important than planning. How can you anticipate a potential crisis? How can you respond in Internet time?

Two kinds of power. It’s become a bimodal world, where you either have to have the big donors locked up or have huge online broad-based support from celebrities and/or grassroots. That at least provides a ray of hope for the masses!

25Feb 2012

The Strategic Importance of Technical Computing Software

Most mornings when I am in Connecticut and the weather is tolerable, I usually go for a jog or walk in my neighborhood park in the Connecticut Sticks. One recent crisp sunny fall morning, as I was making my usual rounds, I got an email alert indicating that IBM had closed its acquisition of Algorithmics – a Financial Risk Analysis Software Company and this would be integrated into the Business Analytics division of IBM. This along with a recent (at that time) announcement of IBM’s planned acquisition of Platform Computing (www.ibm.com/deepcomputing) sparked a train of thoughts that stuck with me through the holidays and through my to-and-fro travel of over 15,000 miles to India and back in January 2012. Today is February 25, 2012 – another fine day in Connecticut and I just want to finish a gentle jog of three miles but made a personal commitment that I would finish and post this blog today. So here it is before I go away to the Sticks!

Summarizing Personal Observations on Technical Computing Trends in the last Three Decades – The Applications View

My first exposure to HPC /Technical Computing was as a Mechanical Engineering senior at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1980-1981. All students were required to do a project in their last two semesters. The project could be done individually or in groups. Projects required either significant laboratory work (usually in groups) or significant theoretical/computational analysis (usually done individually). Never interested in laboratory work, I decided to work on a computational analysis project in alternate energy. Those were the days of the second major oil crisis. So this was a hot topic!

Simply put, the project was to model the flame propagation in a hybrid fuel (ethanol and gasoline) internal combustion engine using a simple one dimensional (radial) finite-difference model to study this chemically reacting flow over a range of concentration ratios (ethanol/gasoline: air) and determine the optimal concentration ratio to maximize engine efficiency . By using the computed flame velocity, it was possible to algebraically predict the engine efficiency under typical operating conditions. We used an IBM 370 system and those days (1980-1981) and these simulations would run in batch mode in the night using punched cards as input. It took an entire semester (about four months) to finish this highly manual computing task for several reasons:

First, I could run only one job in the night; physically going to the computer center, punching the data deck and the associated job control statements and then looking at the printed output the following morning to see if the job ran to completion. This took many attempts as inadvertent input errors could not be detected till the next morning.
Secondly, the computing resources and performance were severely limited. When the job actually began running, often it would not run to completion in the first attempt and would be held in quiescent (wait) mode as the system was processing other higher priority work. When the computing resources became available again, the quiescent job would be processed and this would continue multiple times until the simulation terminated normally. This back and forth often took several days.
Then, we had to verify that the results made engineering sense. This was again a very cumbersome process as visualization tools were still in their infancy and so the entire process of interpreting the results was very manual and time consuming.
Finally, to determine the optimal concentration ratio to maximize engine efficiency, it was necessary to repeat steps 1-3 over a range of concentration rations.

It makes me constantly appreciate the significant strides made by the IT industry as a whole – dramatically improving the productivity of engineers, scientists, analysts, and other professionals. And innovations in software, particularly applications and middleware have had the most profound impact.

So where are we today in 2012? The fundamental equations of fluid dynamics are still the same but applications benefiting industry and mankind are wide and diverse (for those of you who are mathematically inclined, please see this excellent 1 hour video on the nature and value of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSxqpaCCPvY .

But in reality, there have been many technical advances that have helped reduce some of the complexity.

The continued exponential improvement in computer performance – at least a billion fold or more today over 1981 levels – enables timely calculation.
Many computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques are sufficiently mature and in fact there are commercial applications such as ANSYS FLUENT that do an excellent job of modeling the complex physics and come with very sophisticated pre and post processing capabilities to improve the engineer’s productivity.
These CFD applications can leverage today’s prevalent Technical Computing hardware architecture – clustered multicore systems – and scale very well.
Finally, the emergence of centralized cloud computing (https://www.cabotpartners.com/Downloads/HPC_Cloud_Engineering_June_2011.pdf ) can dramatically improve the economics of computation and reduce entry barriers for small and medium businesses.

One Key Technical Computing Challenge in the Horizon

Today my undergraduate (1981) chemically reacting flow problem can be fully automated and run on a laptop in minutes – perhaps even an iPad. And this would produce a “good” concentration ratio. But a one-dimensional model may not truly reflect the actual operating conditions. For this we would need today’s CFD three dimensional transient capabilities that could run economically on a standard Technical Computing cluster and produce a more “realistic” result. With integrated pre and post processing, engineers’ productivity would be substantially enhanced. This is possible today.

But what if a company wants to concurrently run several of these simulations and perhaps share the results with a broader engineering team who may wish to couple this engine operating information to the drive-chain through the crank shaft using kinematics and then using computational structural dynamics and exterior vehicle aerodynamics model the automobile (Chassis, body, engine, etc.) as a complete system to predict system behavior under typical operating conditions? Let’s further assume that crashworthiness and occupant safety analyses are also required.

This system-wide engineering analysis is typically a collaborative and iterative process and requires the use of several applications that must be integrated in a workflow producing and sharing data. Much of this today is manual and is one of today’s major Technical Computing challenge not just in the manufacturing industry but across most industries that use Technical Computing and leverage data. This is where middleware will provide the “glue” and believe me it will stick if it works! And work it will! The Technical Computing provider ecosystem will head in this direction.

Circling Back to IBM’s Acquisition of Algorithmics and Platform Computing

With the recent Algorthmics and Platform acquisitions, IBM has recognized the strategic importance of software and middleware to increase revenues and margins in Technical Computing; not just for IBM but also for value added resellers worldwide who could develop higher margin services in implementation and customization based on these strategic software assets. IBM and its application software partners can give these channels a significant competitive advantage to expand reach and penetration with small and medium businesses that are increasingly using Technical Computing. When coupled with other middleware such as GPFS and Tivoli Storage Manager and with the anticipated growth of private clouds for Technical Computing, expect IBM’s ecosystem to enhance its value capture. And expect clients to achieve faster time to value!

19Oct 2011

No Apology for High Performance Computing (HPC)

However, while discussing big data and analytics, the speaker made it a point to exclude HPC as an exotic niche area largely of interest to and (implying that it is) restricted to scientists and engineers and other “non-mainstream” analysts who demand “thousands” of processors for their esoteric work in such diverse fields as proteomics, weather/climate prediction, and other scientific endeavors. This immediately made me raise my hand and object to such ill-advised pigeon-holing of HPC practitioners – architects, designers, software engineers, mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

I am guilty of being an HPC bigot. I think these practitioners are some of the most pioneering and innovative folk in the global IT community. I indicated to the speaker (and the audience) that because of the pioneering and path breaking pursuits of the HPC community who are constantly pushing the envelope in IT, the IT community at large has benefited from such mainstream (today) mega IT innovations including Open Source, Cluster/Grid computing, and in fact even the Internet. Many of today’s mainstream Internet technologies emanated from CERN and NCSA – both organizations that continue to push the envelope in HPC today. Even modern day data centers with large clusters and farms of x86 and other industry standard processors owe their meteoric rise to the tireless efforts of HPC practitioners. As early adopters, these HPC practitioners painstakingly devoted their collective energies to building, deploying, and using these early HPC cluster and parallel systems including servers, storage, networks, the software stack and applications – constantly improving their reliability and ease of use. In fact, these systems power most of today’s businesses and organizations globally whether in the cloud or in some secret basement. Big data analytics, cloud computing, and even mobile/social computing (FaceBook and Twitter have gigantic data centers) are trends that sit on top of the shoulders of the HPC community!

By IT standards, the HPC community is relatively small – about 15,000 or so practitioners attend the annual Supercomputing event. This year’s event is in Seattle and starts on November 12. But HPC practitioners have very broad shoulders and with very keen and incisive minds and a passionate demeanor not unlike pure mathematicians. Godfrey H. Hardy – a famous 20^th century British mathematician – wrote the Mathematician’s Apology – defending the arcane and esoteric art and science of pure mathematics. But we as HPC practitioners need no such Apology! We refuse to be castigated as irrelevant to IT and big IT trends. We are proud to practice our art, science, and engineering. And we have the grit, muscle and determination to continue to ride in front of big IT trends!

I have rambled enough! I wanted to get this “off my chest” over these last few months. But with my dawn-to-dusk day job of thinking, analyzing, writing and creating content on big IT trends for my clients; and with my family and personal commitments, I have had little time till this afternoon. So I decided to blog before getting bogged down with yet another commitment. It’s therapeutic for me to blog about the importance and relevance of HPC for mainstream IT. I know I can write a tome on this subject. But lest my tome goes with me unwritten in a tomb, an unapologetic blog will do for now.

18Oct 2011

The US Healthcare System – One Big Tax on the Economy – Beyond Costs and Operational Efficiencies – Innovation is Critical – Technology Helps.

It’s well known that the US Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Estimates range from 15%-20% of US GDP – greater than any other developed nation in the world. Left unchecked, this will be a big burden that today largely falls on US employers and businesses. And these businesses have to pass on these costs to their customers, making them cost uncompetitive in an increasingly globalized world. I found the following recent articles very illuminating in describing the challenges in US Healthcare and the implications of globalization:

On a recent weekend, on October 1, I attended a talk by Dr. Atul Gawande sponsored by the New Yorker magazine and IBM. This was preceded by an exclusive breakfast meeting with Atul. I was fortunate to be invited and I thank IBM for a very gracious invitation to this event hosted by Dr. Paul Grundy of IBM who is also President of Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative. At breakfast, I also got to spend some quality time with the publisher of the New Yorker and other doctors (all medical – not like the Poor Hungry Doctor (Ph. D.) kind, like yours truly!) who are all facing these challenges of the US Healthcare system.

I encourage everyone interested in this subject to read his recent article in the New Yorker and also his book on checklists. His book also covers other professions beyond surgeons including architects, athletes, etc. It stresses that in-addition to continuous learning throughout one’s life, a coach is an essential partner for continuous self-improvement in any profession particularly those that are knowledge based. This clearly includes mine – an Information Technology (IT) analyst and entrepreneur.

Part of the problem is IT itself. IT in some ways has caused this problem and I think IT is also part of the solution. I constantly ask myself these reflective questions: Is speed a virtue? Is Big Data really that useful? Is constant improvement always better? I think the answer to these questions is the proverbial “Yes and No” which drives me further nuts. Being an engineer, I like the determinism of a precise unambiguous answer. I like the precision of checklists but clearly also appreciate the value of coaching! So it is Yes and No for me now on these philosophical issues.

While IT has made a very positive impact on improving the operational efficiencies of healthcare, also required are process innovations (some IT-enables and others require business incentives). In fact, in response to a question from the audience, Atul gave an example of how a surgeon in his hospital was able to take a standard but lower cost surgical gauze and then cut it so that it would be better fit for purpose or tuned to task rather than using the more expensive pre-cut gauze. This adjusted process was then adopted by several surgeons in the hospital resulting in substantial savings in operational costs while improving patient outcomes. This was clearly a business process innovation!

But IT must itself be tuned to task and fit for purpose. In short IT must become Smarter. It’s what IBM calls Smarter Computing. With Watson and other related Smart IBM efforts and with fostering collaboration the healthcare ecosystem (Dr. Grundy’s efforts), IBM is providing the incentive and impetus needed to help address the challenges with the US Healthcare system. With events such as the one on Oct/1, IBM and its partners are providing the mentoring and coaching for everyone touched by the healthcare system!

26Jun 2011

It Takes Two To Tango!

10Jun 2011

Software Everyware – Hungry or Happy?

So during one of the round tables when an IBM executive painted an analogy of integrated software solutions with being Hungry and wanting food, it resonated very well with me. The scenario he painted went as follows: Imagine you are driving and you want to stop to get some food. Then using Yelp on your smart phone, you get a list of nearby restaurants serving close to what you are yearning for and you read the reviews, etc. Then using Groupon, you can check if there are any coupons that could be used, then using the GPS you arrive at this restaurant and have a good meal that makes you Happy and sated! This is great but can be better!

Now, taking this further, he said, imagine if all of this was integrated, and all you do is press a Hungry button – similar to the Staples Easy button. And voila, you get all these processes and applications integrated and you arrive at the restaurant with less manual action on your part. Perhaps with a meal ordering system integrated, you could start munching your delicious meal as soon as you arrive at the restaurant – a classic Just in Time (JIT) system! This could make you even more Happy!

02Jun 2011

OPEN VIRTUALIZATION ecosystem continues to gather momentum – New KVM Alliance

The benefits of KVM (https://www.cabotpartners.com/Downloads/IBM_Linux_KVM_Paper.pdf) include outstanding performance on industry standard benchmarks, excellent security and reliability, powerful memory management, and a very broad support for hardware devices including storage. Further, since KVM is part of Linux, clients can benefit from the numerous advantages of Linux including lower TCO, more versatility, and support for the widest range of architectures and hardware devices. Moreover, Linux performs, scales, is modular and energy-efficient, is easy-to-manage, and supports an extensive and growing ecosystem of ISV applications.

While we believe that OPEN VIRTUALIZATION holds great promise to address the crises in today’s centers and is a key enabling technology for clients contemplating a transition to cloud computing, its success – and those of the alliance members – will largely depend largely how this new alliance grows and how alliance members can:

Build a more complete and robust IT ecosystem that includes Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), Systems Integrators (SIs), and other data center/cloud solution providers.
Provide a MEASURED MIGRATION http://cabotdatacenters.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/measured-migration-is-smart-for-the-datacenter-and-clouds/ path to existing clients who have substantial IT investments on proprietary virtualization technologies.
Deliver differentiated offerings (systems, complementary software, and services) that best address the growing client workloads and data center crises now and in the future.

27May 2011

MEASURED MIGRATION is Smart for the Datacenter and Clouds

Numerous surveys suggest that cloud computing will be over a $100 billion opportunity by 2015 and a large fraction of IT solutions will be delivered over the cloud in the next few years. While we could debate on the precise estimates, we believe that:

The market opportunity is large with growth rates much faster than the overall IT industry,
Private and hybrid clouds will become the dominant cloud delivery models as enterprise workloads begin to leverage the promise of clouds and security concerns persist with public clouds,
Before making substantial new cloud investments, businesses will carefully examine the business case that will be primarily driven by their current and future workload needs, and lastly,
Customers will rely on cloud providers who have the deepest insights into their workloads and can deliver a broad portfolio of cloud software, services, and systems optimized to these workloads with a MEASURED MIGRATION strategy.

IBM in its Systems Software Division which is part of the Systems and Technology Group (STG) is one such large solution provider with an impressive array of over 16 cloud enabling IaaS technologies ranging from virtualization, systems management, to scalable file systems, to high availability and disaster recovery. But more importantly, in recent briefings, we were impressed by the strategy and vision articulated by the leaders of these IBM units. These leaders consistently emphasized the need to build end-to-end solutions and staged engagement methodologies that not only deliver the best in class technology solutions but also help clients with MEASURED MIGRATION as they modernize their datacenters or embark on the transition to cloud computing.

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