This is interesting … for US$100,600 per machine (White Goat), you will be able to take shredded office papers and turn them into a 40-sheet roll of toilet paper in 30 minutes. Here, have a look (and be amused) >
Archive for the ‘Business’ Category
White Goat?
Sunday, February 7th, 2010SAP bets on Software for Sustainability
Sunday, February 7th, 2010A recent article on CNET reported that SAP is trying to get ahead of the curve in environmental sustainability. An excerpt of it has been reproduced below.
What’s an enterprise software company doing getting into sustainability? After all, the environmental footprint from software production pales in comparison to resource-intensive industries such as power generation or even running data centers that deliver Web services such as search. (more…)
The Sustainability Consortium
Saturday, February 6th, 2010
It all started last July when Walmart announced it would begin surveying its suppliers on their environmental performance in order to one day rate the sustainability of its products. Since that landmark announcement, academics from the Arizona State University and University of Arkansas launched the Sustainability Consortium, a group representing government, NGO, academics and business interests that would develop the standards to be used to rate the sustainable attributes of products. Today, the consortium is made up of 26 Tier-I members and 6 Tier-II members (for clarity on the distinctions between Tier-I and Tier-II memberships and their costs, refer to the consortium’s application form). (more…)
Goodbye www.sun.com
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010Last week, some of my friends felt a sense of loss when they typed “www.sun.com” into their browsers and wound up on Oracle’s home page. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems took all 9 months to complete – as long as conceiving and delivering a baby – but it did mark the end of an era.
Sun Microsystems, which was founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, was once upon a time a leader in the computing world. During the Internet boom more than two decades ago, Sun made the servers which powered that boom. Those were the good old days. (more…)
High Performance at Massive Scale: Lessons learned at Facebook
Thursday, January 7th, 2010Jeff Rothschild, VP for Technology at Facebook, shared some detailed insights into Facebook architecture. Over the past few years, Facebook has grown into one of the largest sites on the Internet today serving over 200 billion pages per month and with more than 300 million users. The nature of social data makes engineering a site for this level of scale a particularly challenging proposition. In this presentation, Jeff discussed the aspects of social data that present challenges for scalability and the core architectural components and design principles that Facebook has used to address these challenges. He also discussed emerging technologies that offer new opportunities for building cost-effective high performance web architectures.
Tech companies: 2009 in retrospect
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010The year 2009 saw many tech companies, big and small, being sold, acquired or going into extinction. Most of these are / were due to the global economic crisis, diminishing demand for product, or ripple effects of a scandal, mismanagement and strategic missteps.
In the beginning of 2009, Nortel went through a slow and painful dismantling since it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. (more…)
Product Management 101
Monday, November 30th, 2009Generally, a Product Manager’s primary responsibility is to analyze the market, competitors, customers, external environment, lead and plan activities related to a specific product or product line. Product, is usually referring to any form of products or services.
There are too many textbooks available in the market that touches on marketing management, strategy or even business management. But most of what we learned from books as well as from business schools are general introductions to marketing management or high-level strategic concepts, but not the how to perform day-to-day responsibilities of owning and managing a product or product line.
Telcos turning into Cloud Service Providers
Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Over the past years, Telecom carriers and service providers have suffered economic pressures, competition, churn and declining revenue. As they grapple to find ways to improve their ARPU from their core services, many in the Telco industry are attempting to diversify into broader business and consumer value-added services, moving beyond the increasingly commoditized telephone and Internet access. Many of them are planning to or are already expanding aggressively into the “Cloud” space.
How do you lead with all the bad news?
Wednesday, November 11th, 2009This has not been a good year. Numbers aren’t looking good. Weakening demand. Customer churn. Reduction in force. Those who were not affected by layoffs will have a much heavier workload. With the amount of bad news, how does one inspire their workers?
According to staffing, career and crisis communications pros, openness, honesty and empathy are absolutely essential and go a long way.
Curious case of Argleton town
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
Speaking @ Jakarta
Thursday, November 5th, 2009I’m scheduled to speak at a Sun briefing event entitled “Turn Obstacles into Opportunities” in Jakarta on Nov 24th. The agenda will be about achieving efficiency and maximizing ROA (Return on Assets) through future-proofing data centers, consolidation, virtualization of IT environment to maximize utilization and improve efficiency.
In business terms, ROA is defined as an indicator of how profitable a company is in relative to its total assets. In other words, ROA measures how efficient a company’s management is at using its assets to generate earnings.
Taking this into the IT perspective, most of the time, IT is viewed as a cost and most of the time, IT is leveraging on technology assets to enable and support the business. Maximizing efficiency, utilization of technology assets or being able to support the critical business functions with less assets are ways to achieve ROA in the IT context.
I hope to share some of these insights with our Indonesian friends and clients during this event. See you all there!
The Art of War – Laying Plans
Wednesday, November 4th, 2009Sun Tzu’s Art of War is a Chinese military treatise that was written in the 6th century BC, during the Spring and Autumn period. Composed of 13 chapters, each of which is devoted to one aspect of warfare, it is said to be the definitive work on military strategies and tactics of its time, and still one of the basic texts.
This book is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy. It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu suggested the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.
Planning for a new Data Center?
Friday, October 9th, 2009
Every data center project begins with the business plan and business requirements in mind. This is fundamentally the starting point and the first building blocks of a data center project. An enterprise with intention to build a data center facility for their own internal use may have an easier time to establish and understand this starting point. But for a Data Center service provider offering co-location and hosting services, then it gets a little bit complicated.
In reality, regardless of how closely the initial design matches with the business requirements, in the long run, data center facilities rarely achieve the efficiency, capacity and operational targets defined in their initial designs. This is because a data center environment is never static and like a living organism, it is always evolving. In the day to day operations, there will be people / human traffic, periodic changes, expansions, upgrades, introduction of new equipment, de-commissioning of aged equipment, and other external influences. As time goes by, newer technologies, with possibly higher density equipment, requiring substantial incremental power and cooling capacity, will replace aged equipment. Pressures to maximize utilization and reduce costs, will lead towards consolidation of data centers into few locations, adoption of virtualization technologies, causing changes in operational procedures, etc. All these are part and parcel of the evolution of a data center environment, and no matter how you strive to achieve an equilibrium, as soon as you think you have reached an equilibrium, the operating conditions will likely change again.
For Data Center service providers, who are like hotels, they will rarely know when their next customers will be coming through their doors, or what kind of equipment these customers will be hosting at their facility. How do you plan the design of a facility for such requirement when these requirements are not known at present day?
Conducting a BIA (Business Impact Analysis)
Monday, October 5th, 2009Yesterday, I touched on the BCM program and I cautioned about holding the IT department responsible for BCM. Lets pause for a while and zoom into why that is the case.
One of the most important activity in the Business Continuity planning process is the Business Impact Analysis (BIA). Typically, BIA is used to identify, qualify and quantify the exposure and impact of threats to your business. With these impact analyzed and quantified, forming the output of the BIA, you will then be able to justify the reasons and case for a business continuity plan. In a nut shell, BIA can be used to:
- Determine the extent to which critical functional and operational dependencies exists within the organization and how important are these functions to the business,
- Assess the impact of a disruption to identified critical functional area or business operations within the organization,
- Establish the priorities and sequence in which critical data processing applications and key business functions should be restored.
If the BIA is used to determine critical business functions, then it wouldn’t make sense to just let IT handle this on their own. It needs to involve the business units and the rest of the organization, especially with the Executive Management support.
Business Continuity Management
Sunday, October 4th, 2009
According to Gartner, 50% of all businesses fail after experiencing a major disruption. The lack of planning and preparation for these disruptions can cause a major blow to a business, which may include losing its customers, assets, personnel, etc. A business is more likely to recover if it has a plan and has taken into account all the areas on which its business depends on to function normally.
In the past (and probably some organizations are still doing this today), IT Disaster Recovery has been part of the IT department’s responsibility. IT’s primary focus for IT DR was to ensure that they pass their annual audits. Unfortunately, I believe there might still be some confusion on the part of business owners thinking that business continuity management and planning is strictly planning for IT Disaster Recovery and is an IT problem. How unfortunate, because IT Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is merely just a subset of the whole scheme of Business Continuity management. DRI International defines Business Continuity Management as a holistic management process that identifies potential impacts that threaten an organization and provies a framework towards building resilience with the capability for an effective is defined as Today’s business environment is more demanding and complex, compared to the old days. We continuously face challenges in delivering services to our customers in real-time and have less tolerance for disruptions.
The 2009 Data Center Purchasing Survey Report
Friday, October 2nd, 2009
Between June and September of 2009, SearchDataCenter.com conducted the Data Center Decisions 2009 Purchasing Intentions Survey. Subscribers were contacted by email and invited to participate. For this 2009 survey, they had a total of 920 respondents, identifying themselves as IT managers, IT administrators, data center facility managers and IT executives. Respondents were primarily U.S.-based (43%), but the survey also included participants from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East. More than half of respondents’ organizations employ more than 1,000 workers, and more than 25% of the companies have more than 10,000 employees.
Compared with last summer, data center budget growth screeched to a halt this year. In 2008, 30% of IT shops said they were increasing budget 5% to 10%, and 26% said they planned to increase budget more than 10%. Less than 15% of respondents were decreasing budget at all.
M&A (part 2) – Unlike marriage, divorce is not an option
Monday, September 21st, 2009London’s Cass Business School recently released a research which highlights the perils facing executives tempted to use the financial crisis to buy struggling rivals, or distressed companies, at apparently bargain prices. The study looked at almost 3,000 acquisitions of distressed or insolvent companies, across various industries, over the past quarter century, from 1984 to 2008. It found acquirers who bought distressed or insolvent companies suffered a lower or deteriorating return on equity (ROE) in the three years after the deal, and the buyers underperformed those who bought healthy firms. The other aspect which the research found was that these deals involving distressed or insolvent companies tends to complete significantly faster, hence putting extra pressure on management teams. The ill-fated acquisitions of imperilled banks Merrill Lynch and HBOS by Bank of America (BAC.N) and Lloyds (LLOY.L), are recent high-profile examples.
As highlighted in my earlier post, M&A drivers could be for expanding customer base, market share, top line growth, new market entry, or to eliminate a competitor. There are also two other reasons that drives M&A, which are to build competence as well as to make a significant changes to the business model. Examples of these are like Scandent, Intelenet (a joint venture of HDFC and Barclays), and Wipro (who acquired Spectramind, Nerve Wire and Quantech to augment their competency).
M&A explained
Saturday, September 19th, 2009The term M&A (short for Merger & Acquisition) is a corporate strategy which envisages management of processes related to selling, buying and combining one or more businesses for a common cause. The common causes could be to aid, finance or assist a business to grow faster or perhaps even for a non-performing business to exit. Regardless of good times or bad times, the demands from stakeholders on businesses are always in one direction – increasing growth. In an economic downturn with declining demands and a competitive landscape, it is becoming increasingly challenging to maintain a consistent growth rate which are expected from businesses. Although not all businesses heading into M&A are in search of an answer to their stakeholders in lieu of organic growth, there are a number which are turning to M&A to grow their market share, revenue, economies of scale, expand their market or customer base or to eliminate the competition.
In H1 of 2009, the European M&A market had 1,530 deals (worth Euro 130 billion), and in North America, M&A activities have picked up in the Pharmaceuticals, Medical & Biotech sector where it has hit the US$174 billion mark (accounting for 42% of overall value of deals in North America). From January to July 2009, Greater China accounted for 42.6% of the total M&A deal in Asia Pacific region, and 34.7% in deal volume, which is a significant increase from the same period in 2008. Asia, ex Japan, recorded at least 250 deals in H1 2009, worth more than US$173 billion. (source: mergermarket) (more…)
Asia Pacific’s IT spend
Friday, September 18th, 2009A recent report from Forrester, which surveyed 774 senior IT executives at enterprises with more than 500 employees across ANZ, Japan, South Korea, India, China, Singapore and Vietnam, shows that generally IT spend in Asia Pacific region is down during this economic downturn, even in the economies witnessing growth. The research focused on trends in current IT spend and cost cutting measures.
The findings shows that almost half of the respondents said their 2009 IT budgets will be down, and only 15% of the respondents expects an increase in their IT budgets. Even in China and India, both of which are expected to register strong economic growth this year, many enterprises are decreasing their IT spend. In this two emerging markets, only those organizations that businesses rely primarily on the local or Asian markets continue to see IT budget growth, while those that have higher exposure to the Western markets will see decrease in their IT budgets.
Cloud service : where do you start?
Saturday, September 12th, 2009“Cloud computing is an operational model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”
- National Institute of Standards and Technology, August 2009
I believe the key words are “operational model“. In my opinion, cloud computing is the transformation of how we traditionally leverage on technology to support the business. A cloud computing strategy is about identifying and distributing specific, suitable business tasks onto the public and/or private network, using attached compute, storage, and network resources to facilitate more cost effective and responsive services to users. Regardless the target deployment is to a public cloud, private cloud (in-house or hosted), or hybrid, moving an enterprise’s IT to be a cloud service is a complex transformation that requires fundamental changes to many IT related processes. Organizations should evolve from a state of multiple, disjoint silos with their associated inefficiencies, through increasingly advanced operational models to the cloud.
It is with this goal in mind that Sun Data Center Efficiency Practice, within our Professional Services arm, launched the Cloud Strategic Planning & Analysis service offering a few months ago. The aim is to help our customers get started..
Feel free to have a look at our Solution Brief.
