Dad, you too ?

After coming from school my son was telling me about his day in the school. He was in excited state (as usual) and he said, “I will tell you a joke”
“Ok”, I said.
” There was one boy and he always used to tell lies”, he continued, without waiting for my ok, “One day his father bought a robot, who would slap anyone every time a person told a lie. So when the boy came home, his father asked him, where had he gone”.
” I had gone to school”, the boy said, and the robot slapped him.
” No.. no.. i had gone…. umm….mmm”, the robot slapped the boy few more times
“Finally the boy told the truth, that he had gone to movie”
The father was very angry and sad.
He said, ” in our days, I was very obedient and truthful boy, not like you”.
And the robot slapped the father very hard. !!!

My son started laughing and went away. I also had a hearty laugh.
But then I became serious.

I thought about this joke and realised it has a potential power both ways – to destroy the little boys’ faith in their parents and also to bring him to the reality.

It is a fact that we are no saints. We have had our share of mistakes and are not perfect. But the little kids think of their parents as the world of paradise. As they grow up they start realising the chinks in the parents’ world. It is better that they come to know about the realities of the world.

Not sure how soon their world of wonderland should be busted.

Show Me the Money

A great deal of activity is happening around opensource – not just in the software but through overall forces of – collaboration, openness, sharing and networking. These principles are not new to the mankind. They have been used in the context of social development, education and research in many ways.

But the key difference this time is that these principles are being leveraged for businesses. Whole new businesses have come up and entirely new concepts of doing businesses are shaping the industry. eg. Wikipedia, social networking, Innovation Exchange, Red Hat etc…

Right in the middle of our own businesses in IT industry, open source software such as Linux, JBoss, KVM, Alfresco, SugarCRM are making impact on the our customer businesses. These software offer great value to the customers at the same time pricing, packaging, promotion are significantly different from what they are used to be with proprietary software.

While on one hand open source software is a growing trend and becoming all pervasive in customer’s infrastructure, it throws up interesting questions for the resellers and solution providers as to how to leverage this opportunity – given that open source is considered free or low cost. Can it increase the % margin, can it help get net new customers, does it need more investments, what kind of skill sets required, are the promoters of these software companies – RH, Novell, IBM doing enough to support the partner eco system. What kind of changes do we have to bring about in our business practices to leverage these trends.

While some questions would require to be dealt in the context of specific software and promoters, the common areas through which partners can leverage open source software are :

Acquire new customers

Acquiring new customers is the most difficult part of the business, more so in the proprietary software space. In the growing market of open source software and solutions there is a great demand for the suppliers. There is a tremendous pull from the market. Grab this opportunity to grow your business. It is relatively low cost way.

Gain customer mindshare :

If you don’t talk about open source software and solutions, some one else is going to. Apart from this, open source software is on customer’s mind. So you better be the first one to acknowledge it and garner customer’s mindshare which leads to garnering wallet share.

Additional opportunities

When customers try one set of open source software (eg. Linux) they are ready to adopt other software also. Partners should proactively tap into these opportunities and get grow its business.

Annuity business

Most commercial open source software are sold on annual subscription basis. It is important to keep in mind that these subscription are not the AMC of proprietary software. The subscription renewal business is a good opportunity in terms of $$ value as well for forging better relationship with the customer.

Uplift your profile

Every partner has an aspiration to move to next step of value chain from box pushers to solutions vendors. You can leverage open source software opportunity to bring about that transformation as the cost of acquiring technology is very low and number of customers are embarking upon the adoption cycle are still growing at a healthy rate.

Tap into services opportunities

Depending upon your plans, tap into the services business opportunity that open source software offers. This is equally true for existing hardware partners as well as software partners. There are many areas of services that each partner can tap into. For example – Hardware provider can get into infrastructure / implementation services of OS, the packaged software provider can get into customisation and implementation of software solutions. But these areas need to be based on individual partner’s plans.

One area to be mindful of :

Expectations about margins :

I have seen many partners take up to selling opensource software just because the margins on selling traditional software are falling. If you look at the $ value of margins on open source software, very often it turns out to be lower. So one must be clear about the expectations of why it is getting into this business. As mentioned above, the advantages are many, one needs right alignment of the business.

Managers and Leaders

“Our leaders have to be admired for their thought leadership and not just competence.”
This is the quote from Mr. Subroto Bagchi’s interview in Economic Times (Nov 30, 2007)

This resonates so well with what Amita and me often discuss about.

Both of us have seen Indian and Global managers at very senior positions.
These are not the celebrity leaders, but these are the managers who are responsible for growing businesses and leading people. These managers, especially in large organisation have to be good leaders. It is not easy for people to join and connect with faceless organisation. For people, their managers are the face of the organisation and most of the time people join or leave their managers. In such cases managers carry enormous responsibility to provide not just the business competency but good people leadership.

This is where the leadership style and approach differ.

I have seen many competent professionals. They are good at their function and their job. But when it comes to leading people (there is a difference between managing and leading people), they fall awfully short.

I have personally worked with entrepreneurs, professional managers and good leaders. I have worked in corporate sector, have worked in social sector. I have seen different type of people. I have seen the difference between leaders and manager. The ability to inspire, create vision and walk on the chosen path – is the the most important aspect to be successful in being a leader – be it in corporate life or in social sector.

To be a successful leader one needs to have both the capabilities – competency and inspiring people. Just the competency can not take you too far. I have seen some entrepreneurs who had vision (later on I realised that they had only dreams), ability to inspire people but did not have competency in business areas. They simply couldn’t succeed. Some entrepreneurs I have seen who were competent in business areas but did not have the vision. Their businesses did not grow beyond a point. Good professionals did not like to stick around such people for long and hence business did not grow.

When it comes to professional managers leading the people, most manager think that managing people is good enough. They focus on giving right job description, right work to the people under them. They give pep talks so that people can deliver the numbers. The most professional managers follow M-B-O (management by objectives) process to get work done. They think by setting up the objectives people deliver the desired results. It is true to some extent. But it is not the entire truth.
People mostly look up to their managers for direction and inspiration. People like to work for such leaders. The inspired and motivated people tend to give much more than set objectives. They help create more vibrancy in the group. They help create happy and creative atmosphere. In this age of Knowledge economy, the dependency is on people than just the processes.

The good leaders provide this important ingredient – inspiration and vision (thought leadership) – which is so vital for growth than just the straight jacketed MBO or task oriented process.

(Reproduced from my old blog (2007) on different blog site)

Partnering for Success

Why do upstart / small/ medium ISVs find it difficult to establish partnership in new regions ….

ISVs find it difficult to get mindshare of resellers or SI partners specially when they want to expand beyond their geographical region. When you think more deeply you would find few reasons.

When the ISV is entering into new region, a lot of work is needed to be done for the market development. Someone has to do this work – either ISV or the local partner. If partner decides to go ahead with the market development, question is how to get returns on the investments. The traditional partnership model in IT industry works on commission basis. If that is the only form of return the considerations for investment are driven by many factors :

• Cost of the ISV solution and the % margin,
• The absolute value of the margin
• Volume of sales per month
• Potential total gross profit in a given period.

Most of the time the Potential margin itself is not justifiable to make any significant investment. When it is a decent amount, the time frame may take much longer to get the returns.

Such scenario is not new to ISV vendors and hence ISV sticks to selling directly to the customers till the time it reaches certain threshold. When ISV is looking to grow beyond its geographical region (in new territories), setting up office or appointing a sales person is too costly a proposition. And given the above considerations it is difficult to excite the partner to work on purely commission basis and earn decent returns.

What is the alternative ?

Well, ISV can try some age old method of paying the retainer-ship fee to one of the partners in the new region for initial period. I am aware of the question as to how would it work for the ISVs. Well, by paying retainer-ship fee, ISV can insist on performing the tasks of :

• Reaching out to key customers,
• Creating awareness of its products and solution
• Getting the feedback from the customers
• Getting the market feedback (about competition, pricing, solution providers, influencers etc).
• Participate in local relevant events (by paying the participation fees of the event)

It is possible to measure the efforts through weekly activity reports and reviews. The key here is to treat the partner as your extended sales team. You are hiring a sales person on time sharing basis.

The cost of this retainer-ship would vary from 20% to 50% of the cost of one local sales person / local small office. To begin with, this activity can be done only short period 3 to 6 months.

In this process, ISVs get crucial tasks done - market development activities, prospect database and also loyalty and interest of channel partner in the new market.

ISV can build from here. This phase helps it to take further decision about :

• Continue or discontinue this arrangement,
• Enter into the market with direct office
• Put more trust in channel partner
• Focus only on period

Tiger and The King…. New learning

The other day I was telling a story (as usual, making it on the fly) and when I ended the story, I was surprised at the way I ended it.

Once upon a time, there was a King, one day he went for hunting in the jungle. There he saw a tiger. But the tiger was lying down and not moving, his eyes were open. King looked into Tiger’s eyes. King felt that the Tiger was asking for help. So he got down from his horse and went near the Tiger. He found one arrow pierced into Tiger’s body. He went near to him and took out the arrow and cleaned the wound. Tiger started feeling better. When Tiger tried to stand on his feet, King helped him a bit. Tiger stood up, stretched his legs and felt better. King was standing there, looking down upon the tiger, feeling proud that he helped a tiger and was happy with himself. Tiger roared and before King realised jumped upon him, putting him on the ground. King was surprised.
He said ” Hey, I saved your life and now you are going to kill me?”

” Thank you for saving and I appreciate your efforts.” The Tiger said, “saving other’s life is your Dharma (your nature, your duty), you felt good about it, you felt proud about it. You got your returns. My Dharma is to kill and eat. You did you Dharma and now I am doing my Dharma, If I don’t eat you, I would starve and I would die”.
And Tiger killed the King.

Moral this story for me is that before you decide to help someone you should know his “Dharma” or nature and be prepared to face it. Helping with just good heart is not good enough, you need to know that other person/ animal does not have the same heart as yours.

Contrast this with what my grandmother or mother or even I myself would have ended this story just 5 years back. I would have ended up telling that the Tiger and the King became friends forever etc – very similar to Lion and the Mouse story I have heard since childhood.

Obama In My House

After coming home, I was finishing some work on my laptop. My eldest son was sitting next to me generally doing nothing. He was back home, after playing and was tired, hence was just browsing the book and chit chatting with me. I was responding in mono syllables without listening to him. I was actually immersed in doing some work. He said something and I did not respond. He startled me with his next sentence :
“You are doing something that you should not be doing”. I looked up from my laptop. Now I couldn’t ignore him. It was t

My Son

ime to pay attention and understand what he was trying to say.
So I said, “Yeah, I know, I should be listening to you”.
“No”, he said, “You should read what Obama says”.
“What? Oh.. yeah I saw some news about him in today’s newspaper, I must read that”,
I was desperately trying to show that I was on top of the subject and I was miserably failing.
“No”, he continued surprise me and said further, “You should read the Reader’s Digest”.
I asked him to tell me what was it.  He insisted that I should read it and brought the RD, opened the page and gave it to me.
While pointing the 4 lines that he wanted me to read he said “Actually I don’t mean so much, but you read it”.

By now I had stopped guessing and was ready to face whatever it was.
“A study in 16 countries this year found that TV and videogames are drastically reducing playtime among kids one to 12. And parents also are wired to laptops, pagers and Back Berries”

Hmm.. a big lesson for me coming from my son.

I felt guilty of myself and proud of my son.
(RD, June09 carried an article on “8 lessons from the Obamas on Raising Kids”).

Caring for the listeners – human side of Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar

Last week, I had an opportunity to attend Pandit Hridaynath Mangeshkar’s music program once more, this time organised by Maharashtra Mandal Singapore. Listening to him on the stage takes you way above the world of music. His explanations and providing the context of the song or poem makes you truly enjoy the whole experience. He is a gifted singer and composer. Despite remaining very selective about the songs and poems he has made the world of music rich through his 60 years of contribution. He has received many awards not just from the government but from the public, peers and Shankaracharya.

This time I discovered one more noble quality in him as a human being.

It so happened that the program was to start at 5 pm, but it started at 6.10pm. This was not enough, the microphone was found to be not working the moment Panditji started talking. It was such an embarrassment. Then the interval + the sponsor felicitation took almost 40 min and as per the rules of the auditorium Panditji had to stop the program just when it was reaching its peak. This was robbing of music lovers the joy of listening to Panditji.

What I liked in the whole process was Panditji’s attitude. He expressed his grief not just at the state of the organisers, but also the fact that listeners did not get enough value from the program. He showed the sensitivity that not many artist show these days. Mostly the artist are concerned about the fees, stay, travel etc. But caring about the music lovers and thinking from their point of view is the ultimate sign of a great performer and great human being. I salute Panditji for this.

Beyound “Oracle buying Sun” … Into the “Open Source Governement”

Oracle to buy Sun Microsystems is the news getting lot of attention tonight. This is a big news in the industry as once upon a time both were poster boys of the internet boom. A lot is being written and speculated about the impact of this development. A real picture would emerge only after the dust is settled and more is known as to how Oracle deals with hardware, MySQL, middleware and Solaris. This deal has a potential to bring fundamental change in the IT industry landscape depending upon how Oracle approaches it.

While this is happening, I found the article ” An Open Source Government” even more interesting. This article is written by Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat Inc. where I work. The most interesting part that I liked is :

When information is open and individuals have the means to contribute, everyone shares in the responsibility for improvement. Informed citizens become engaged citizens. Engaged citizens contribute opinions, ideas and effort.

and

We must build the structure and culture for participation, from the highest levels of government to municipal town halls. We need to unlock the doors that stand between citizens and information. Both infrastructure and information must be open and easily accessible to all.

I found it to be very important attempt to connect the Governance, Government and Citizen through the principles of open source.

The participation by the citizens is so important to shape the nation that we want. As I am following the elections in the largest democracy of the world – India, I keep wondering how and why would more than 60% of eligible people would come out for voting.

Making people interested in participation, making it easy for them to participate and then making it affordable for the government to reach out to the citizen is a tremendous task.

Use of open source can help governments to find a way to address the last part at least, which will be a big leap. This would need a good leadership at the highest level. Hope the elections in India would bring a change for betterment.

Side effect of Trust – efficiency

Travelling on a subway/ local trains in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kolkatta, Delhi, Bejing the most common thing that you take for granted is the entry point/ checkpoint automatic doors. They come in different forms – “snap” doors or “lever” doors. Your instinct tells you to tap your pass or push the ticket through, door will open and you go through to the other side. This is the standard operating procedure at almost every subway station and every country I have visited.

Now imagine the contrast. You tap your ticket or pass on the ticket checking point and you look for door to open – either “snap” sound or the levers to push. But there is no door. It it a wide open “Pass through”. This is Tokyo.

You know what. I thought I was busy in tapping the ticket and hence might not have noticed opening of the door. And hence I moved passed the doors and looked back to check if the doors are snapping back to close. But no such thing. I was zapped. Being in a hurry I went and boarded the train. While coming out of the station I decided to keep a closer watch on the doors. Again I realised the doors were open all the time.

I was waiting for the opportunity to know it better and I got it on 3^rd day. My pass had run out of money and I tapped the pass on the entrance of the door. It beeped, flashed red light and doors closed. Oh..so there were doors. And in the instance I understood the logic.

The doors are open all the time and they close only when something goes wrong.

Wow.. I liked the logic, made for efficiency. Faster movement of people in the given time.

While I was admiring this efficient mechanism, I wondered why other cities have not implemented such logic. And that is when I felt that this mechanism or logic is not just the efficiency consideration. I felt that it reflects the social mindset as well. To me “keeping the gates open all time time, till some problem” is reflection of “trust” based society. Can you trust your citizens and design the systems just to stop the offenders? In most places we find the systems are designed keeping in mind that the people are going to cheat and checks are implemented accordingly.

Here in Tokyo I found that the system was ready to trust the people. Probably the society was trustworthy. This has helped to create so much efficiency. Trust has so many benefits.

My respect for that society grew multifold.

Opensource – IT Policy – Impact on the society

I am very happy to note that one of the key political parties in India- BJP – has unveiled a comprehensive IT policy. Reference to the use of open source software is even more noteworthy.

It is very nice to see that a political party acknowledges the role of open source software in innovation. (as it mentions on page 23 of the IT vision document). I am just hoping that BJP’s IT policy making team has much more in mind about the use of open source. I am listing how open source software can be leveraged for building good society and  good governance :

Use of open source software and open standards create the level playing field and helps to bridge the gap between haves and haves not. It also helps to bridge the gap between developed and developing nation by making the knowledge available without boundaries. Today’s era is all about access to knowledge, leading to faster innovation. The era of developing knowledge in a the closed door and then try to use it as an edge over the other part of the society or other nations is gone. It is a matter of faster innovation and access to all.

Use of open source software creates empowerment. Today government can not be seen as the only force that offers jobs. Youths and businesses have to come forward and create employment. Through the use of and encouragement of open source software governments can empower youths and students that would make them ready for the jobs. The empowerment is possible because tools needed in today’s knowledge era are affordable and accessible through open source software.

Use of open source software creates open and proud minds. It is like in the poem of Rabindranath Tagore “Where the mind is without fear and head is held high…”. The use of open source software helps to create “made in my country ” feeling in the globalised economy. By developing more software and more applications in the country, making those applications world class the proud feeling of “made in my country” get bolstered.

Local services industry : The use of open source software leads to creation of local service industry. Open source software commoditises the products and thrives on excellence in services, which is a boon to creating more jobs and more opportunities.

Impact on the education segment : When governments want to make the education and knowledge available to the poorest of poor children through the use of laptops, only the use of open source software can make it affordable. Besides that it is not just giving the laptops or software through the government scheme, but it is also about using the legal software on your home computer. Think of the very real issue. Governments make PCs /Laptops along with  the proprietary software available at the subsidized rates.  When the children want to use the PC at the home, they can not afford to buy the costly proprietary software for it. They end up using pirated software. Is this what we want our children to have the feeling? By encouraging the use of open source software we can give them the feeling of use of legal software. That is the way of developing “Free minds”.

Also one important aspect of digital education is availability of contents in local languages : It is very important to have these contents based on open standards and open source technologies. For the proliferation of contents and lowering of their costs, this is a crucial factor. If these vital contents are based on proprietary and costly software, their use gets restricted or becomes unaffordable.

Going further the impact of open source can be harnessed in developing the right mindset in the society. The open source software is based on the principles of “Collaboration”, “Sharing” and “Community Building”. These are vital ingredients of a good and progressive society.

There is more to write about each of these issues. We all can collaborate to turn them into concrete actions and build stong communities.