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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A nice hotel is a must for any business traveller. A good night at a decent hotel can do good for the business. As a SAP professional constantly on the road, I can associate with this. Just read over at Rajesh Jain’s Emergic about the new hotels from Tata group called indiOne. Rajesh has good things to say about this hotel. From the looks they look pretty decent. Have a dekho yourself

Nice fact about the hotel is that first the price of the rooms was fixed and then the infrastructure was built backwards from there or as Rajesh puts it “bottom-up innovation”. For 1000 bucks a night this is great deal.

Considering SAP India is in the walking distance from there I might just land up there some day. If you are going to SAP TechEd ‘05 Bangalore, this might be the place to spend your nights.

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Just got to know about Placeopedia, a simple site to connect Wikipedia articles about places like Ambala, Chandigarh to their geographical position on google maps. No points for guessing which places I have pin pointed :D

Ambala

Chandigarh

Punjab Engineering College

Please switch to Hybrid view once you are there. While in Ambala - try to find the air force strip, and in Chandigarh you can see the lovely Sukhna Lake. Too many fond memories associated with it. Here is a pic for your eyes

 

Create you places. Let us tag this round planet :D

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In a personal email thread on Gmail the geeks from CELPEC decided to mull over 5 things

1. What 5 things in the last ten years have really made you jump out of your proverbial bath tub and run through the streets all excited?
2. Corollary to (1), What 5 things have really been very useful for you in the last ten years?
   
3. What 5 things you see as absolutely neurotic, or useless in the last ten years which have come about and are just not dying out!
4. What 2-3 ( or more if your heart so desires ) things or innovations would really make a difference to your life?

Being a online community guy I decided to give it a shot on Beta Thoughts :D. So here it goes

Jump out of proverbial bath tub

• Wifi - from the day I started using this, I am in love with this. Now a days I even stream video from my desktop to TV with a notebook on wifi connecting to desktop
• P2P - This is just amazing. Have you ever looked at the Detailed view in Azureus
• Google Earth - While it did make me jump when Guru demoed it to me while it was still keyhole. I used it a lot for doing my apartment search. But now that the novelty has worn off. I am back to Google Maps, if only they would implement A9’s proximity images in it
• DVD Backup - How easy it is these days to do it and once the DVD is in on the harddisk opportunities to modify the content are endless.
• Modern Telecom - just the fact that I can talk, video conference, voip with any one with relatively ease still makes me jump from that damn tub. I talk over cell phone, AD conversion, communication with cell tower, base station, may be sattelite, may be fiber under see, voice reaches India, Ambala exchange, my home. All this in before I can count to 10 I mean wow.

Really Useful

1. All the above except Google Earth which is useful sometimes.
2. Cell phone is mighty useful
3. Gmail Conversations.

Neurotic and Useless

• Didn’t knew about 5 blade Gillette. But would be absolutely useless
• Telemarketing on Cell phones. God save me from them
• Healthcare as a bottomline caring business
• Apple’s stubborn persistence on single button mouse. But it has changed with Might Mouse

What would make difference to my life

• Netflix or someone going true video on demand
• Fiber to my home with at least 1 GBps
• Cheaper Hybrid SUVs with 50 miles/gallon efficiency. Toyota Highlander is a step in that direction
• Better cheaper dental floss devices
• 4GHz Dual CPU 8GB RAM 1 Terrabit HDD System under $500 I will use the home 62″ plasma for the display so don’t care about the monitor :D

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I have always wondered about the idea of Audio Books. I mean one grows up hearing the old adage the books are once best friends and such things. I never had a chance to try any audio book until now. See when you have to do an hour long commute on Highway 101 between San Jose and San Francisco you tend to find better use of that time. Besides many in the valley term the folks doing this kind of thing as having suicidal tendencies :D

Any way to better utilize the time I got myself this very famous book “Good to Great”. There is no question that the book is great (a review will follow some time later) After listening to 2 out of 5 CDs I have made few theories about the audio books

1. I miss the capability to easily read and re-read the passages I like.
2. How do I highlight the stuff I really like.
3. How about doing a very quick revision of what I have read so far
4. The impact of written word is totally missing. This may have to do with the our mind showing more love for the visual input.

Based on the above facts I think if you are a bibliophile AudioCDs are great for story telling books i.e. stories, novels etc but for the serious non fiction work good ol’ treeware books still rule.

Do you have similar experiences? It will be interesting to know..
 

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I am watching a documentary “The Corporation” talking about obviously modern day companies. The chief idea being, how corporations are treated legally as a person and how it is a bad idea. First it was interesting to know that the 14th amendment to the US Constitution which made to ensure equal protection to all persons of life regardless of race is used by corporations to protect their rights as legally they are also person. Quoting Chomsky

“These are special kind of persons which are designed by law to be concerned only for their stock holders and not, say what are stake holders like the community or the workforce”

Also of interest was what would be in ideal corporation and one of the definitions given was

The Eagle, soaring clear eyed competitive prepared to strike but not vulture, noble, visionary, majestic that people can believe in and be inspired by that creates a lift that it soars.

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What a joy it is to see one’s home town as a satellite image. I am sure every blogger worth his salt knows about the Google Earth. Initially it was cool to see Bay Area and see all the locations etc. It also helped me in finding my next apartment. One can see the neighbor hood etc using this. Then Ashish wrote in an email that he was able to get the long/lats for his home in Delhi using it. That got me interested that Ambala not as large as Delhi still be visible. And here is the shot of Ambala. I can find out GT Road, Ambala Chandigarh Highway, Indian Air Force Station and the air strips inside it etc.

My immediate reaction was to kind of draw on top of this image with the names of different roads etc. Too bad that functionality is only available in Google Earth Plus. This functionality would allow easy creation of online maps. I had discussed this with Vishal some time back. It would very cool to have “detailed” street lever online maps of India. May be this will become reality in near future.

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