Enterprise Mobility - Moving an enterprise

We just celebrated July 4th - a day commemorating freedom and independence. To celebrate I attended the San Francisco Symphony special at Shoreline Amphitheater.  The show was exhilarating and the fireworks started early when Makoto Ozone joined the orchestra for a scintillating performance on the Piano. It was mind-blowing and followed by the real fireworks. A great night was upended by a frustrating 1 hour wait stuck in a parking lot. Luckily I got a few work things done on my smartphone while also writing some choice words on social networks about the dismal traffic management at Shoreline Amphitheatre. Most 1star ratings were due to the parking. I guess there is no one at the management reading it.

Loathe about being stuck but happy that I was able to do work,  I felt it was apt that we talk about the emancipating effect of a movement heard across the enterprise world - enterprise mobility.

When you talk about enterprise mobility, it is not an application but a tectonic shift in how an enterprise reengineers itself around a mobile worker. Most enterprises adopted prior enterprise software shifts such as Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management, Business Analytics on a promise and for most,  it took about 3 to 4 years before they were able to retrain the workforce and get some semblance of productivity and ROI.

Enterprise Mobility on the other hand is not something that you can roll and wait for adoption. The need for mobility is there, but nascent. There is a level of evangelization and buy-in that has to be done at different levels of an enterprise. When I talk to employees, I find a mix of interest laced with caution and fear. Some  of the fear hinges on privacy, while others may worry about smashing any barriers left between personal and professional life or ensuing financial implications - shades of this was predicted by Mark Plakias, my ex-colleague and the chief strategist at Orange Silicon Valley in his treatise - the porous enterprise. As in the past,  more mobile a worker, the more eager they are to see what mobility has to offer. Sales and Field service as usual lead the way in clamoring and seeking new mobile technology. I remember the late 90s, when it was not uncommon for a sales person to be seen lugging a heavy laptop or using an unwieldy car phone to be connected to customers and enterprise.

But unlike in the past, where enterprise upgrade meant capital investment and some training, enterprise mobility touches every part from software or service,  delivery, control to manageability. There-in lies the world of choices and determining what is right choice  for the company.  Should we first try to get the security and manageability infrastructure up and then develop the applications or first develop applications that enable new and low risk mobile usages before we bring in high powered applications that require security and manageability. When developing enterprise applications, do we focus on form over function? Can an enterprise application be designed to have the appeal of consumer apps?  What good is use an app, when I have to sometimes use a laptop to get the full experience?  How can an employee get IT to look at their device logs without having to surrender their smartphone?  Are my vendors thinking mobile first or mobile as-well. How can we be proactive by instrumenting analytics? Who among the vendor ecosystem will be a good supplier of technology. How will this will work with cloud applications? Should we wait for the shift to cloud before delivering mobile applications?

These questions have been plenty as I have been helping a multi-billion dollar silicon valley company get its bearings on enterprise mobility. In many ways it has been akin to moving an enterprise. It has been an exciting journey with a few frustrations. If you are at MobileBeat organized by my good friend Matt Marshall, you will hear me talk about my experiences during the afternoon breakout session - Mobile done right: Why choosing a development tool is not enough . Drop me a comment below or contact me via email or text in case you want to meet.

Look forward to hearing from you

Facebook - No Missing Missed Call Economy

When in India, it is quite common for to hear others say - When I reach home, I will give you a missed call … or give me a missed call when you are ready…  When the doodhwala arrives at our apartment complex he notifies us through a missed call…

Given that there are about 700 million individual cell-phone users and about an estimated 550m to 650m of them have engaged in missed call - operators are missing big dollars. So what is the impact to the mobile operators.. If you expect about 10 to 30 missed calls per user annually you can estimate about 5 billion to 15 billion missed calls that were meant as a messaging tool. While India tariff regulation does not charge receiving party for calls, you can imagine the loss of operator revenue from possible text or voice call revenue.

Never to miss an opportunity, Facebook plans to serve ads where its mobile users can make a missed call on their phone with one click of a button on Facebook, resulting in a toll free inbound call from the marketer. A brilliant toll free number scheme for the mobile. While this will not work in countries like U.S that collect tariff from both receiving and calling parties,  it can be beneficial for all parties involved - the Telcos, marketers and of course Facebook. While Facebook is not the first company to look at missed call opportunities, startups such as ZipDial have had a shot at it but none have had great success.

Zero.facebook.com -another Facebook service launched in 2010 - a toll free data for mobile subscribers in combination with "missed call" ad-serving would probably be more attractive to mobile operators given that they can participate in direct revenue from those inbound calls.

SenchaCon 2013 is going on in Orlando... Missing the fun but here are the top 10 reasons to use Sencha Touch

Senchacon 2013 has already started and if not for pressing engagements, I most definitely would have headed to Orlando. All is not lost for me as I plan to  follow on twitter and follow blogs of Sencha folks. Before I go into my top 10, I would like to give some history about my love affair on Sencha.

It was early 2012, when I came across Sencha Touch 1.1 framework.  I was at a large operator tasked with finding ways to engage developers and offer them tools to develop for smartphones. I had seen umpteen solutions until then - ranging from a Powerpoint deck full of promises to a whole range of products that did not deliver.

So my skepticism was high when some one claimed Sencha Touch can perform at close to native levels. Instead of a typical powerpoint, I had a walk-through of the Kitchen Sink complete with "rubber band scrolling"  and one by one my my concerns faded just like the fade transition supported by Sencha.

I was concerned about performance - the size of memory and the speed/cpu usage of a sencha app. But quickly my team learnt about the best practices - minify, paging, rescoping, effective memory management, etc and soon we were all fanbois of Sencha. 

When I left Orange, my first step at Silvo was to create a working prototype using RAILS and for the client side coding - it was no surprise that I used Sencha Touch 2.1 framework. If you are developing for  a startup or if you are a big company there are a wide range of reasons to use Sencha Touch. I list my top 10

10.  MVC  - Model View Controller is a proven and pervasive pattern that most of us have used in server side programming. Offering MVC framework in the browser complete with support for routes and event handling at the controller make it easy to organize and sustain code.

9. Model Association - Being able to define models that mimic the associations on server side and reflect these associations of object oriented design to navigate objects is truly a programmer's delight.  

8. Storage, Stores and Jersey Shores.   Okay, there is no Jersey shores, but being able to define stores that sync with servers and keeps track of changes on the client side is truly empowering to developers. Local Storage and caching makes it easy to provide a native like experience

7. Every imaginable view element - When I last counted there were 40+ different view elements in Sencha. If you decide to customize and reuse it, you can do so as well. 

6 Proxy - Communication between servers and clients has never been so easy. I remember using libraries, Message oriented middleware, supporting custom protocol, etc. With REST support and extensibility of JSON and XML you can attach a proxy to a store or a model and rest is easy.

5 Drag queen a.k.a Architect -  As a product marketing professional, I found the thought of learning Sencha daunting. It quickly dissipated when I began to use Sencha Architect dragged a few objects from the pallette to create a "hello world" app.  The code generated was simply pedantic!

4. Works great on Android, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, Playbook and now Tizen. Am sure Microsoft Phone support is on the way! Steve Ballmer probably will be making a call after reading this.

3  Double Sassy - If you are delivering a cloud based solution and you do not have a name draw of a Google, then the best way to get traction is to send HTML5 links as an SMS when consumers interact with a business. That is exactly what I did with Silvo which had a SAAS platform as the core. Sencha HTML5 combined with CSS3 framework helped deliver the consumer experience. And theming was easy thanks to the awesome SASS framework.

2.  Cheaper, Faster and Better. Time taken to develop and support multiple devices is a major concern from time to market and cost perspective. Thanks to the significant javascript talent pool, you can tap just about anyone to code in Sencha.  If anyone is looking for resources give me a shout. @hjdave is awesome

1.  Awesome documentation, Even better samples and community support.  Many developer products fail because of poor documentation. Sencha Touch truly excels in all three.

If you have a differing point of view or have your own favorites about Sencha, please let me know in the comment section.

Scaling Mount Success

With success of a product comes demands on your infrastructure from usage and data associated with it. Invariably you have a mountain of data that you can use to personalize or learn from. The infrastructure needs to do that was exactly the topic of  great discussion with a person from mobile and social gaming industry. His query was - "how would you scale when you have over millions of users and billion plus user records and growing".  In other words, do we need to add servers or should we use cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services. Excellent question and I suspect he already knew the answer. My answer and indeed most startup I know today would have the same answer - move to a cloud based infrastructure, It just makes sense not just from a setup cost perspective, but from a cost benefit analysis and the ability to tune up or down based on demand. His point that game usage  has a fad trajectory - extremely popular for a few months and then gone the next-  reinforced that point.

Having said that, I do see regulatory requirement particularly around some security and privacy issues, existing investment in infrastructure, have stringent SLA requirements, and need to have full control over the infrastructure as primary factors behind not going to IAAS.

The next question naturally was around scaling data. How would you handle data warehouses which indeed can be unwieldy when your customer base grows. Yes, we can always take for granted HA, FT needs and cluster computing in our architecture. But when it comes today's world, we have to think Big  Data...

I particularly like Hive on Hadoop. Hadoop is already mainstream platform where packaged applications or SAAS applications like Silvo can addresses millions of retail interactions that deliver business value to users and is becoming widely available. Walmart labs in San Bruno is doing amazing things and expect them to be the flag bearer.  I believe Hadoop has gone beyond the first generation of applications primarily around consumer to becoming a core platform to deliver data heavy products for enterprises. Retail Science delivered over a SAAS platform can benefit from its ability to scale.

Yes, Hadoop can be slow but using it with Hive not for live or RT queries, but for preprocessing seems to make sense. I fashion Cassandra for real time live queries. In general, I look for solutions that hide complexity of database partitioning, Federated Tables or sharding, offer high performance and can be scaled. What more, I am seening some elements of support for ORM that will allow me to write Rails App easily


More on that later! Would love to hear your thoughts.

CANbus to Connected Cars

Discussions with friends in the mobile industry led to discussion about the impact of mobile in automobile industry and Connected Cars.   Will the automobile industry drive the  change to get cars connected and open up new services to the driving consumer. Or will it be mobile industry pushing the limits of automobile industry?  Time will tell and I feel companies like BMW, Ford - who hired my good friend John Ellis from Motorola,  Delphi are trying hard to make sure it will be the case. Startups like CloudCar, Carag.es are bound to be on the leading edge.

But it all started with CANBus as long back as in 1980s. A technology that was meant to ensure car diagnostics was easy by ensuring all electronics and mechanical devices in a car send status and alarms on to a bus like architecture, it powers the OBD(On board diagnostics) required for all cars built in U.S since 1996 and in Europe since 2004.

CANBus has evolved as more electronics and onboard computers have crept into the automobile.  OBD, its successor OBDII and the european version eOBD now make it easy for mechanics to figure out the problem in a jiffy!   With the advent of smartphones, it will make life easier for car drivers to figure out even before they go the mechanic but the road to this has not been easy

Case and point,  the Cartrip device from Griffin . A device that plugs into the OBD  and sends information to the phone wirelessly. The technology should be quite simple and at $90 a pop it would have been affordable. However the product has been a no show and looks like it will not see the shelves anytime soon.


Rest assured there are quite a few companies working on this mix. While startups are obviously looking at this space, even the big guys like Delphi are in the game.  Jugal Vijavargiya from Delphi has a group working to make sure technology like this will be available as an aftermarket device or built into a car in the future. Mirrorlink is another exciting standard that could make it easy for cars to interact with applications in smartphones.   Seeing Curiosity  on Mars collecting and analyzing samples with its powerful imaging and computing systems and moving around reminds me of Tesla.

The latest Tesla is not nearly close to Curiosity. It is  an example where a connected car and a life size display can bring in a ecosystem of services and technology that can change the way you think about a car. It is your own personalized infotainment system that also can drive you around.  I envy Amit Rohatagi who was the first among people I know to be allocated the latest Tesla.  Maybe I will get to test drive earth's little curiosity in the near future!

Indelible India

I was in India for 2 weeks for the first part of June 2011. While most of my trip was personal, I was amazed by the progress of this country and dismayed by the scale of chaos, the government corruption and the disparity between the middle class in cities and the poor and suffering rural class. It was two full years since my last visit and the change was shocking and I was awestruck.

The good ...

- Huge investments in infrastructure to support the growth. It is expected that India will spend about $1 trillion in infrastructure over the next 5 years. This is on top of the billions that cities like Bangalore have already spent on metro and road infrastructure.

- Indian companies are flush with capital. They are going on an acquiring spree. From Tata Motors which acquired Jaguar to Manipal Group which acquired Colonial Candles. there has been a resurgence in both the global outlook and risk taking. These acquisitions during the down times of 2008 and 2009 are apparently paying dividends. Tata Motors is over-seeing a stunning turnaround of Jaguar.

- Malls and more malls - Indian society has not been known for spending until the last two generations. India's household saving rate is 34.7% (In contrast China is a whopping 38% and U.S a dismal 3.7%. src:BW ). You do not see any evidence of savings if you visit the malls in every other corner. There are teeming crowds through out the day that do not mind dropping Rs. 40,000(approx $10000 on an iPad or Rs 360(approx $9) for a movie ticket. Yes... you get a madras coffee for under $1.00 but you can get premium coffee for well over $5.00 in one of those pricey coffee shops in a mall. Indian consumer has come of age and with willingness to spend cash (Cash still remains the prominent mode of transaction - not credit cards).

The bad...

Congestion: Wow! Accustomed to a 45m commute everyday on Highway 101, you would think I should be able to bear the congestion. Hell no! The congestion was a couple of orders worse in Bangalore. And chaos ruled the roadways as construction of Metro (most major arteries have been dug up), lack of ettiquette and the estimated 4m automobiles that clog the road daily take a toll on productivity and quality of life.

The ugly...

Corruption - Indian government agencies have always been highly corrupt. Underhand deals with baboos(read beaurocrats) and politicians are a way of life in India - you typically get asked to pay underhand for any legitimate need- from getting a driver's license to a permit to build a business. But the scale of scams are reaching billions of dollars and the saying "greed has no limits" rings so true in India. From the recent telco spectrum auction to infrastructure buildout for the commonwealth games there have been corruption leading to billions of loss. The scale of corruption is astounding... One surmises that the trillion dollars marked for the infrastructure in the next 5 years, about a third of that money will be lost due to corruption. In case you did not know how it works here is the skinny on it...

Company A bids to build the infrastructure at inflated price. Mysteriously Company A wins over its other competitors and funnels a major portion of the award to politicians and the beaurocrats. Typically culprits of the scams that are caught go scott free or with a rap on the wrists..

The ravages of growth: Unbridled growth has resulted in paucity of vital resources - water, electricity and clean air. Pollution in Bangalore has grown primarily due to transportation which contributes to 20% of Particulate Matter(PM) 10 and 50% of PM 2.5. This is due to a mix of old polluting automobiles and the rise in automobile ownerships per capita. Power allocation and water supply have seen disproportionate reduction to rural areas to address the needs of cities. All in the name of growth

Inflation: Inflation is at around 9% and GDP growth is around 8%. The impact of inflation due to growth and consumer spending habit have made the have nots suffer even more. The gap between the 350m middle class and an equal number of poor malnourished city and rural class have increased. With no meaninful welfare schemes for the indigent and the old, inflation is worsening the already severe class gap and this could lead to unrest. The lack of value for life is appalling as you walk the streets. The tide of economic growth in India seems to have skipped the lower class and politicians at best have doled out cash during election times but not set long term policies to ensure their progress.

Incredible India is the tag line used in promotions by the Indian government - primarily to promote business and tourism in India to outsiders. While I am not an outsider - but an insider looking from out, I felt India has the promise to be incredible and all VCs and corporate strategists I meet every day agree. However India still has to address her problems - primarily to enforce the rule of law, have social accountability and and have a sustainable growth strategy with infrastructure to support it. Even if India is not incredible yet, my recent vacation left an indelible mark and I came encouraged by the indian entrepreneurship and pschye that overcomes its shortcomings. Stay tuned for some more of my indian vignettes...

Recently I was at the Mobile Meshwalk - http://orange-sf.pbwiki.com . To sum it up in one word - Open.

Open to new creativity - The first part was to meet with different design teams that had a refreshingly different perspective. The design teams we met were Frog Designs, Ruby Red labs and Fuseproject. The most innovative mobile design I saw was Jawbone from Fuseproject

Open people - Among the participants were Orange, Entreprenuers, designers and other people involved in mobile topics. Most were willing to talk about different aspects of design that will solve the problems for mobile devices and services being consumed.

- User interaction - Design thoughts to overcome mobile input and display limitation
- Portal, On-device portal and SMS as a way to reach customers.
- New usages and implication on designing services.
- Community and mobility, Location and mobile

One thing that stuck me is what a participant mentioned - Entering SMS was such a pain until they made text entry through prediction(T9 function).

What will services and content consumption be like if we were to extend such functions for these services. Operators, handset manufacturers and internet players have their work cut out.


Open - format. I have to plug the organizers who seem to have realized that open air discussions with no set agenda allows for a new way of free thinking. I had a nice walk in the bay but the content was enriching.