Nope the Beta I am talking about is not the Beta from Beta Thoughts but the Beta of financial markets. Few years or may be months back, see in the first few years of marriage time doesn’t matter :D but I am digressing. So few months back a longtime friend started discussing in his inimitable style yaar, what is this beta my collegues keep talking about.  I didn’t knew a iota about this beta.

Then I started reading A Random Walk down Wall Street in July when I quoted the author about Madness of the Crowds. Books like Random Walk take its own sweet time to get digested. I was only able to finish five chapters in the first go. I picked it again in this month of Oktoberfest while flying for work. I finally saw the light and now I know what is Beta. From the book

Beta is the numerical description of systematic risk. Despite the mathematical manipulations involved, the basic idea behind the beta measurement is one of putting some precise numbers on the subjective feelings money managers have had for years
…
The calculation begin by assigning a beta of 1 to a broad market index, such as NYSE index or the S&P 500. If a stock has a beta of 2, then on average it swings twice as far as the market. If the market rises by 10 percent, the stock rises by 20 percent. If a stock has a beta of 0.5, it tends to be more stable than the market (it will go up or down 5 percent when the market rises or declines by 10 percent).

Isn’t it easy.
 

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Enterprise software has been of great interest to me since the college days. Sadgopan who heads eBusiness and Consulting for Satyam has written an excellent article on evolution of enterprise software and the direction it is going to take in future. He is musing

With globalization and a flat world increasingly beginning to force enterprises to become more competitive the business climate began to slowly change - the new rule of the game demanded agility as the key driver for success in general - the game changed and began to favor the fast moving against the slower one and big size did not necessarily confer advantages on business entities by default.

Do read it over here at sandhill.com. He concludes that the enterprise software is moving towards composite applications made from mash-up of existing apps. My own take on the software evolution can be summarized in very few words -

First there were custom apps,
Then came COTS^[1]
Now is the age of the composite applications

What is more motivating in the story is validation of SAP’s Netweaver Intiative. Being a Netweaver professional it makes me smile. Quoting Sadgopan

SAP is said to be devoting as much as a third of its overall R&D efforts towards building composites & its roadmap promises to provide its customers with the ability to create new business processes on the fly & avoid any rebuilds

[1] Commercial Off The Shelf

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Read over at Silicon Beat about the new Big Picture feature of New.com. It tells you about the related stories, companies and concepts related to the present story. Immediately went and checked this story. See what the big picture is.

Isn’t it interesting how SAP has Micorsoft, Oracle in its vicinity.

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