Posts Tagged ‘GlobalLogic’

Venture Capital’s Disconnect with Clean Tech

October 19, 2010

CleanTech Investments

Many entrepreneurs today are focusing on startups associated with CleanTech/Environment. For these entrepreneurs – the following article and review done by Joseph Lassiter, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School, titled -”Venture Capital’s Disconnect with Clean Tech” would be a worthwhile read.

Interestingly, we at GlobalLogic had similar fears on the points raised by Professor Lassiter last year as we were in process of defining our technology services offering. This article certainly does a great job in articulating such fears.

Few key highlights which entrepreneurs trying to focus in this area should take away from this article -

  • Be ready to face and live through the ‘valley of death‘ – the painstaking stage between researching and developing a product and going to the market.
  • Unlike their cousin startups in the area of IT, Software/Internet and Telecom/Communication space, startups in CleanTech typically have a catch-22 challenge – they cannot prove their ability to scale without actually scaling. An absolute must for modern day VCs to be excited about a business.
  • Huge amount of dependency of the CleanTech ideas on the Public Policy. Interests in it tends to change from one political administration to another.
  • Extremely low VC investments (average ratio of one investment for every 100 ideas)

Personally, as mentioned above I had my inhibitions about entrepreneurship in the area of CleanTech – however it would also be of interest to me to hear (possibly from Professor Lassiter himself) as to how the VCs should try to structure their investments in such ideas/companies. In our internal study about a year back – we had seen that the same investors who were making investments in Consumer/Technology/Healthcare related ideas were also making investments in CleanTech. Just felt that this was a odd combination to have in a portfolio considering the differences in mindset required towards such investments.

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The Economics of Building and Selling iPhone Apps

October 15, 2010

About a month back I came across this interesting blog post by Tomi T. Ahonen  which talks about what is the economics of building and selling iPhone Apps? In other words is this a profitable business?

iPhone Economics

iPhone Economics

The title of the blog certainly sounds to be quite depressing to the millions of iPhone App Developers who are are looking at the App Store in the same way as the California Gold Rush – “Full Analysis of iPhone Economics – it is bad news. And then it gets worse“. And it also got a review on NY Times – “Is Investing in iPhone App Development ‘Fool’s Errand’?“

Personally – while I am not sure what is the data source which the author has used – but my gut feeling based on various other readings is that he might be about right on his analysis.

For your convenience, I am summarizing some of my takeaway/summary from the two articles –

  • Increasing number of App Stores – Similar to iPhone App Store there are possibly about 30 new app store in process of getting launched in the mobile industry. IMO, an impending ‘nightmare’ for the content/app providers (their chances of recovering costs of app development will significantly reduce from the current state); but possibly here is where an opportunity for software service providers like GlobalLogic lie.
  • Downloads are increasing; Revenue is not! – On iPhone AppStore – even though the number of downloads have increased more than 100% year-after-year; the average revenue per app download seems to reducing every six months. (decline of about 4-5% per year)
  • Free is good!- Duh, you say! Sure, but look at it from numbers perspective. Per various studies – the average iPhone App cost is around $1.95. Average revenue per app download is around $0.24. Needless to say the traffic of download is more towards free apps. What this means is that downloads is not translating into revenues. (in Sept 2009, Yankee Group surveyed actual iPhone App users and found 18% of their apps they had were paid, 82% were free)
  • Norms around app pricing seems to be setting in – For consumer-oriented apps – the thumb-rule of best bet of pricing an app is between $0.99 – $3.83
  • Expected Revenue/device (not App) – Considering the number of iPhones sold over the last two years and based on total cumulative app revenues – each device generates almost $14 of app revenues per year or nearly $28 over the 2 year period.
  • How much does the average App Developer pocket over two years? – You might have heard of some App Developer hitting a jackpot. But how much does a typical App Developer expect? By rough guesstimates – an ‘average’ typical paid iPhone app for its 2 years of existence on store would have earned about  $1948. Apple typically keeps 30% of the revenues. So from this an average app developer would have earned about $1363 over 2 years ($682/year). (keep in mind though that there is a long tail here)
  • Average Cost of Developing an iPhone App – Two surveys have reported that most apps cost anywhere between $20-$50K to develop. (an update typically cost around $10K) (Mobile web site development costs on WAP or Web is about $3K according to Internet Retailer, on May 1, 2010)
  • When does it break even then? – Considering the above two points – the author says that it would take about 51 yrs to break-even (take this with a pinch of salt)
  • Is iPhone a big market? – Does not seems like. Worldwide there are 80 million iPhone compatible devices today in use. That seems like a big number. Except, that compared to just the installed base of smartphones at the end of 2009, it is 13%
  • iPhone vs Mobile Web Development – This is always a contentious point. Compared to iPhone App Development vs. Mobile Web App Development – development costs for iPhone are 10 times bigger, but the audience reach is 50 times worse

Happy Analyzing…

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Understanding the Cloud Computing Vendor Landscape

January 18, 2010

More than six months back, I had written about the tremendous amount of hype surrounding Cloud Computing. Then few months after that I took some clues from the Gartner Hype Cycle Report and said that this hype around Cloud Computing has reached the peak and now has started declining (Ref – “Beyond the hype – can some real work using Cloud Computing start now?“). IMO, real work or usage of any technology typically starts once the products shreds some of the hype or unrealistic expectations around it. As we work with our customers at GlobalLogic in consulting/helping them on various aspects of Cloud, I am now seeing the validation of my prediction.

However, now we have started seeing new challenge facing many who are taking or planning to take their first steps towards the implementation – figuring out which solution or technology does what and which solution to select by going through the mesh of vendors out there. The reason I say this is because Cloud Computing is a paradigm which does not suit itself to home development. Any solutions built up on or using Cloud would have to be built up by using or in partnership with the vendors out there. Deciphering the confusing marketing message sent out by various vendors about their capabilities and how these capabilities fits with the requirements in hand can be an overwhelming task by itself.

Considering the above challenge – recently I came across the vendor taxonomy created by Peter Laird which I thought was an impressive start in terms of laying the lay of the land in Cloud Computing.

Cloud Vendor Taxonomy - 2009

Cloud Vendor Taxonomy - 2009 - By Peter Laird. (Click on image for bigger view)

This blog post from Peter also describes what each of the category stands for. It is worth reading. Although based on our experience here some of the specific vendor classification could be debatable either way – however I am in agreement with the overall structure of the taxonomy. In our business at GlobalLogic in the Consumer-oriented applications side, we have explored solutions provided by the Public Cloud, Business User Platforms, Development Platforms along with Storage and Integration platforms. As we are enhancing our expertise in building applications/products on the Enterprise side – next steps for us would be to explore the Private Cloud side along with Billing and Integration side. Also my feeling is that Infrastructure-related technologies (as listed in the figure) would be mostly seamlessly packaged in by the Private Cloud Vendors.

In any regards, just wanted to share this pretty useful taxonomy created by Peter Laird to the readers of my blog. Thoughts and comments are welcome.

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Software Services Organizations calling Mother Earth – “Houston, We have a Problem!”

October 24, 2009

It is now more than 4 years that I have been part of Software Services Industry (focused on providing IT/Software outsourcing solutions) after all my previous association with mostly product organizations – big and small. It has been an interesting experience for me – especially considering that my job (at GlobalLogic – focused on Outsourced Product Development business) requires me to play a role across Strategy, Business Development, Sales, and Delivery all throughout the years. Compared to many others in the Software Services Business – some might consider me as a relatively late entrant. However, these 4 years itself has given me enough perspective to think sincerely as to where this industry is going, what is working for them and what ails them too.

Now with lots of personal experience, after talking with many who have been part-of or have been associated in various capacities with Software Services companies, and scanning the internet for software/economic trends – I think I have started reaching some core prognosis and hypothesis for the state of software services industry. As one of the crew member in this software services industry spaceship I am now ready to acknowledge -  “Houston, We have a Problem!“.

Before I proceed further, please note that my prognosis is not about a dooms-day scenario but about certain ills which if not addressed soon can possibly adversely affect the long term growth of software services industry.

Here are some of the challenges which I am seeing that software services organizations are facing from a global business perspective -

  • Cost arbitrage is no longer the differentiator – Regardless of what many say – ability to help customers bring their costs/expenses down and at the same time scale too is of big value and will continue to remain so. So services organization providing any offering (while maintaining other attributes like quality, reliability, etc. constant) which successfully demonstrates this will always be attractive. However,  there is always a lower limit beyond which the costs cannot be reduced. Entry points for other competitors to claim that they can provide better cost-arbitrage value is relatively very easy. So for organizations for whom cost arbitrage was the only value proposition they could offer for years – world is now catching up fast with them.
  • ‘Cost Arbitrage‘ and ‘Value‘ are like oil in water. They do not mix! – Having realized the above challenge – many services organizations have now seriously putting in efforts to provide their customers value-added offerings beyond just cost-based offerings. Value added offerings are typically based on specialized skills, domains, business partnerships, etc. However, while there might be few cases of successes in this way, my personal opinion is that majority will have a challenge selling ‘value’ to their customers along with cost arbitrage solutions. Providing cost arbitrage and also providing value are inherently conflicting offerings. (Anyone who has read my previous blog post – “Psychology of Consumers During Consumption of Products or Services” and the associated article would probably agree with my view point).
  • Need to shed away inward focus – Considering the nature of the business (especially when the focus is more on Point # 1 which I listed above) – substantial portion of services organizations efforts and energy is increasingly focused internally to manage people, salaries, delivery, costs, lunches, operations, personal aspirations, etc. assuming that this is key to their bread and butter. Very crudely, I would compare this to the day-in-the-life of a shepherd managing his herd of sheep. Ratio of number of people focusing on internal operations to number of people interacting with the external market/business has to reverse in Services Organizations.
  • We cannot keep just consuming, we need to produce too! – Substantial number of Software Services organizations (including where I am employed) have been in business for long period of time and majority of them today can boast of servicing huge number of businesses / products / domains / technologies under one roof. InnovationOver the years majority of the services companies have done this by ‘consuming‘ knowledge / experiences / technologies / best practices produced by someone ‘not‘ under their roof. I am not saying this is wrong or bad. However, I am also assuming that with the years of experience under their belt now (again across domains, technologies, best practices, etc.) – software services organizations should be in much better situation to contribute back new discoveries/inventions/practices, etc. to the industry. We need to ‘produce‘ too! So I will confess here that in the day-to-day tactical efforts to manage points listed above, majority of services organizations are not able to properly concentrate on this count.
  • Surely, we will get recognized by the company we keep; but we will finally get valued by the work we do! – Take a random survey of the Software Services Organization portfolio and look at how many of them claim that they work for a ‘Microsoft’ or a ‘Oracle’ or a ‘Cisco’. More than half of the thousands of Software Services Organizations would (honestly) claim that they do. Without any doubt that is the first big achievement. Now find out how many of these organizations do the Microsofts or the Oracles of the world acknowledge in their products that it was built with these organization’s help. Getting recognized or people knowing about us is one thing, but people acknowledging us as a thought leader is completely different matter. IMHO, majority of the Services Organizations still have to cross that bridge.
  • and finally – focus on building the Taj Mahal, not the number of people billed to build the Taj Mahal – Perhaps slightly related to above point but a different perspective! Almost all of the customers of the Software Services organizations are focused on building something which they strongly believe would be the next Taj Mahal. Special, different, beautiful, strong, ever-lasting, etc.! The focus of organizations like mine should be on that. The number of people or hours billed in a billing cycle – though important – is a temporary thing and will eventually get replaced from the records with the change in the financial cycle, but if we can help an organization to be the next Cisco – the returns are going to be far better.

My intention in this blog post is not to crucify anyone or any particular organization, but to point out few things to correct the course. And this case, I am pointing these things out to the organizations which I am happily part of. Like in any retrospection along with an introspection discussion, I am possibly expecting a polarizing reaction from readers to my blog post. However, the key for me here is to start the debate and hear your view points. So let the comments/feedback/fires flow in.

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Beyond the hype – can some real work using Cloud Computing start now?

October 1, 2009

Few months back in the month of June, I had wailed against the increasing marketing hype and the resulting over-expectations set on Cloud Computing which IMO is a powerful concept but yet is still at its nascent stage. (read my blog post titled “Cloud Computing – Is this the case study for Marketing gone out of hand?“). Then in the very next month of July, Gartner came out with their much anticipated annual “Gartner’s Hype Cycle Special Report for 2009” which in some subtle way examines the maturity of emerging technologies.

(For those unfamiliar with what Hype Cycle means, you may want to refer to this Wikipedia description. Coined by Gartner, the Hype Cycle hypothesizes that any emerging technology typically goes through an initial period of over-enthusiasm and popularity which in some sense results in inflated expectations from the emerging technology. After this initial period, the hype around this emerging technology typically falls possibly because of  disenchantment. Few technologies recover from this phase of disenchantment with a practicality/sanity of usage taking over.)

As the 2009 Hype curve shows below – Gartner feels that Cloud Computing has now reached the peak of the hype cycle and based on their theory it many now be entering into the depths of disenchantment.

2009 - Gartner Hype Cycle

2009 - Gartner Hype Cycle (Source: Gartner)

Personally, I usually take any of the Gartner data with lots of salt and many a times also have ended up pondering upon their validity. However in this case I would seriously like to believe (or like to pray) that they are right especially in their assumptions about Cloud Computing. Because if they are – I am betting that the real work with proper practical expectations using Cloud Computing would start now. This is the time when many of its potential users would try to cipher through the confusing hype; take baby and practical steps in its adaptation; and let the top spin to see how its application spans out for their needs.

Going forward beyond the peak of the hype, as I am looking into my crystal ball – I am predicting that the usage/adaption of Cloud Computing across products or IT infrastructure would go through the following five stages (see figure below). My assumption of these five stages are derived from what I have typically seen how many other technologies/business processes (e.g. IP Telephony, Enterprise Automation, etc.) have found their way to mass/mature adaption. Note that in the figure below, the curved blue line in the backdrop indicates the Gartner Hype Curve.

Beyond Hype – Predictions about Cloud Computing Adaptations

Beyond Hype – Predictions about Cloud Computing Adaptations

To describe these stages in more details -

  1. Adaption Phase - This phase (and we are well into this phase from Cloud Computing perspective as we speak) is where organizations would start taking the initial steps in looking at the application of Cloud Computing paradigm within their products or infrastructure. Products/applications hosted on traditional infrastructure are getting moved on Public Cloud. SaaS-enablement of existing products is another example. Using Virtualization to create in-house Cloud environment is another activity which many organizations are seriously looking at or many have also started implementing.
  2. Stabilization Phase - As with the adaption of any new technology, the teething problems would need to be overcomed. This is the phase where the myths/hypes/over-expectations associated with the technology would meet with the real-world realities. Various risks associated with the new adaptation would start cropping up and would need to start getting mitigated. To do this certain applications would have to be re-architected; existing business processes would need to be remodeled to find a win-win situations with the business needs and advantages which the Cloud Computing platforms would possibly bring in. I personally believe that this phase would be the most critical of all. Adaptations of many new technologies have struggled in the past in this phase for a long periods and sometimes resulting in the ball getting completely dropped altogether too. From Cloud Computing perspective, I am predicting that the concept itself is going to evolve a lot as organizations go through this phase.
  3. Measurement Phase - Once the adaptation and implementation of any technology stabilizes within any product or organization – the natural next step is to start measuring the day-to-day health and throughput. This is the stage where the Service Level Agreements (SLA) definitions and its measurements is going to start becoming important (as compared to usage of SLAs in the previous stages). At this stage, the measurements associated with uptime, disaster recovery, scalability, response time, etc. would start giving an idea about how well the implementation of Cloud Computing has gone.
  4. Optimization Phase - Measurements would naturally lead to optimization of the implementation – be it from an architecture perspective or simply from the basic notion of how Cloud Computing should continued to be used. It would be too presumptuous of me (or anyone else for that matter) to start predicting how the optimization would play out for Cloud Computing today. It is just too difficult to predict today. However, like all technologies, cloud computing would evolve heavily (for better) in this particular phase.
  5. Management Phase – This is the final phase where success stories associated with successful Cloud Computing implementations would start becoming a regular norm. At and beyond this stage, the implementations of Cloud Computing would continue to focus on regular Management which would include activities such as coordination, reducing regular expenditure, productivity improvement, improving functional statuses and satisfaction.

Please note that I am not suggesting that the above phases are always going to sequential; however it is more from lines of trying to figure out the order of the stages of implementation or even the maturity of the implementation. For example, it certainly does not make any sense to start measuring SLAs even before the implementation has stabilized. In void of such staged approach, I have seen that many a times many false results can dampen the potential which a new technology or paradigm can possibly bring in. And as I have said it before, Cloud Computing is certainly one such powerful platform. However, as many of you would agree with me that even a powerful platform can render itself ineffective if not implemented in a proper manner.

Would love to hear your thoughts/comments.

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Applying Concepts of “Packs” to Software Development Teams

October 4, 2008

In one of my post couple of months back, I had written about my fascination about the African Wild Dogs. In the same post, I had written that some of their amazing habits as a pack can be translated into some real practices in our real life especially in Software Project Management. This post is about the same.

On the on-set, let me say that many of you may find my correlation between these dogs and software teams a bit far-fetched or even crazy. Some of you may even feel this post a slightly condescending on my part to compare software teams aka. people and dogs. But please hear me out!

As I had pointed in my post linked above, the whole notion of these animals surviving and succeeding in the extreme wild as a pack is something which got me thinking of what can we learn from them to build effective teams. My experience has been in building software teams so I will limit my conversation in this blog to Software Engineering Teams. However, I am guessing that my thoughts here could apply to building any type of team/s.

Pack animals by nature live in bunches and their survival depends on how they live as a group and interact amongst each other.  Same as these African Wild Dogs, Human Beings are also Pack Animals. In a social sense we are all designed to live as Packs. We need others to interact with and also depend upon. However, IMO, there are many additional things which these animals do much better than us as a pack. Some of these additional things – or let me call it as characteristics – is something I think can be impersonated by us too especially when it comes to building a rock-solid successful Software Development Teams. Here are some of those characteristics -

  • Moving together and hunting together = Certainly Software Teams are not literally hunting anything; however this point does apply to the key point that the team should get on a key new mission collectively rather than individually. A team which is well-gelled together can collectively approach a new mission in a much successful manner.
  • Individuals while they operate in a pack, maintain unique role for themselves, but can play different roles if required = It is important that in a team, each member should have an unique ability individually and have their individual quirks, traits and characteristics that make up their personality. However, the members of the team should also be able to quarterback the other roles if required. Each team member should have the ability to play to other’s strength and complement wherever required for other’s weaknesses.
  • Pack Subordination = This can be slightly tricky if taken literally – because it can imply a hierarchy or weaknesses in the team. I don’t mean this in this manner. By subordination, I mean the team exhibits mutual respect and affection for each other and not fear.
  • Inherent desire to keep harmony in the group = The above point and this is inter-related. This tends to be the sub-conscious behavior of a ‘well-packed‘ team. The team thrives best on companionship.
  • Get driven by Learnings and not just Instincts = As I had mentioned in my previous blog, one of the key characteristics of these African Dogs as compared to other animals was that they typically are not instinctive hunters. It is my opinion that individuals get driven by instincts, but a team needs to get driven by Experience.
  • Cursorial hunting ability  = The team should have a long distance running ability to achieve their goal.
  • Holistic View rather than Individualistic View = The strength and progress personified more by the team rather than individuals.

If it helps in recognizing the value of having pack characteristics in a team – get this! Pack animals have the biggest success rate in their hunts as compared to other animals. We have successfully incorporated imbibed some of these characteristics in our teams (we call them as Velocity Packs) and now has become a key part of our offering in Version 1.0 in GlobalLogic.

Thoughts and comments are most welcome!

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Paidinterviews – For In-demand People

September 9, 2008

It is always a great feeling when someone you work with very closely achieves a big milestone in their endeavors. We, as part of the Version 1.0 team in GlobalLogic, have had the privilege of seeing many of our Clients achieve that on a regular fashion. It is a proud occasion for us as we also get to share that joy of achievement with them.

Today has been one more such day for us. Paidinterviews went Live with their product today. And the icing on the cake was that their product was also showcased at Demo 2008 today! We have been working with Paidinterviews for about 6 months now, partnering with them on their product development. So in some sense this is also very personal to us.

We met with Jim Weaver and Keith Robison, the two co-founders of Paidinterviews,  slightly more than 6 months back. We were impressed by their thought process which finally resulted in the product they have today. When we started working with Jim & Keith, we knew that Paidinterviews is going to operate in a crowded market space of online job portals and online job search. However, we also felt that none of the existing solutions/services did an effective job of holistically matching a job profile with a candidate profile. Profile matching is simply not just about keyword matching in resumes or experience matching. A lots of dynamics come into picture when a candidate looks at a potential job opportunity or in a vice-versa case when an employer is looking at a potential candidate. Also, there are social aspects too which plays a big role into this matching. This is where Paidinterviews wanted to differentiate themselves and now does a great job in doing that today. In addition to this differentiation, Paidinterviews also wanted to incentivize the job seekers for marketing themselves better. We all thought that was a very cool idea.

Along with Jim and Keith, we built this product from concept to Beta in less than 5 months. We spent a lot of time in thinking about different ways of building the best user experience for all types of users. The product has Rich Interfaces and has been built and deployed using Ruby on Rails on commercial enterprise platforms.

It has been a privilege working with Jim and Keith on this endeavor and our congratulations to both of them on achieving an unique milestone in their long journey.

Read more about Paidinterviews at -

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Product Development – From Idea to Reality…

August 24, 2008

It has been some time since I have blogged. As usual, hectic work schedule over the last month took the toll on my blogging habits. Not that I am complaining about the same. The last month went into some wonderful work. On a personal front, it was an enriching experience for me to work in a high profile environment and to look at things from a completely different perspective. It also was a big validation of the GlobalLogic Version 1.0 Offering which we have put together recently and now have taken it to a completely different level. The ability of the entire team to come together to understand, comb through the issues, and deliver was very fulfilling to see.

While I will not go through the details of the project, the key challenge for us as a team was to help a high profile client of ours to go through a series of planning activities to convert an idea to a product and then take the product to form the base of a successful new organization. Envisioning a concept getting converted into a real enterprise product is not a simple task. IMO, almost most of the times how well one executes the tasks associated with product development supersedes the brilliance of the idea itself. Product Development today is an ardent task in daily-changing business scenarios and tough competition. In addition to that one has to hash through the combinatorics of available go-to-market options, product visualization, technologies, competition, risks, and partnerships and come up with a clear strategy. This requires broad and experienced heads to come together and work around evolving the best plan forward. This is where my team comes in. Our work starts with understanding what is driving our client to his/her vision; go through the multiple dimensions of issues; and come up with a prospective plan. There is typically no one single perfect plan to build a product. However, simply putting things in proper context and perspective can be of great value. Almost all our clients vouch for that. The main questions which we help them answer are -

  • What are we trying to build?
  • How will we build it?
  • What is it going to take to build it?

It is not easy to answer these three questions to the highest degree of correctness. One has to put the past experience to work a great deal here. However, the biggest criterion here is how to make the plan Agile and Adaptive. That is the key.

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Developer Productivity vs. Runtime Performance of Programming Languages

June 16, 2008

Although we have been playing around with it for more than year and half now, over the last few quarters my company (GlobalLogic) has invested heavily in and adapted the new generation development platforms like Ruby-on-Rails (RoR), Adobe AIR, etc. One might term it to be slightly slow in comparision with the industry adaption trend. However, our adaption was also driven by the needs of our clients. In the recent few quarters, we have suddenly observed that these platforms have now become main-stream. RoR/PHP is becoming a popular option in building the modern web apps whereas AIR seems to be the current ‘cool kid’ on the desktop side.

Adapting a development platform at the early stages of its evolution is always a challenging decision which an Engineering Head has to take for the product. I have always believed that adaption of any new technology is driven a lot by the herd mentality. Just because of the notion that many others are also using the platform, many a times the selection of a development platform becomes a blind decision. On the flip side, if a choice is about selecting a new platform – the same ‘herd’ mentality also comes in. The onus is more on the Head to prove his/her choice criteria rather than simply using the regular proven and established ones. Also, it is one thing to build up an experimental system using the new platform. However, the decision to adapt the same platform for engineering commercial products can be a hair-pulling one. Many a times in the end one has to finally depend on the two G’s – guts and gamble. Also the decision-maker will have to be continuously ready to answer questions associated with the hypothesis as and when any bad news associated with the platform (e.g. Twitter’s challenges attributed to RoR) or the product (e.g. initial breakdowns of the product) trickles in.

Because of the nature of the products we have been developing in my group, we felt that RoR was a very good platform choice for the same. So far (and I am knocking the wood here) our choice of the platform seems to have been validated based on the results we are seeing. It is amazing that how much dramatic productivity-related improvements these new platforms have made over the years as compared to some of the older generation-ones. I have myself observed this in my teams. Probably one of the big reason for this improvement is that these new platforms have started becoming very specific (e.g. web in the case of RoR) rather than the general purpose language platforms like C/C++, Java, etc. Dion Hinchcliffe in his posting “Creating Open Web APIs: Exploring REST and WOA in Rails 2.0” refers to productivity improvement numbers in the range of 10 to 20 times. Considering that programming time (or the development time) is the biggest cost of product development, the savings because of these improvements can be enormous. The built-in practices associated with Unit Testing, Agile, Reusability, etc. also seems to have aided in the aspects of building a more quality product.

Lately, the news about Twitter performance/uptime related challenges seem to have raised a lot of speculation on the run-time performance capabilities of RoR. While nothing has been proven as yet, such questions associated with newer platforms is enough to keep one awake in the night. Before jumping into RoR, I had in my mind that the run-time capabilities of these new frameworks would be weak in comparision with the compiled software platforms like Java, C++, etc. The above post by Dion has a good explanation about the same -

One is that the more popular, older programming languages tend to be relatively low level and general purpose and were designed for a different, older set of constraints. This has given us baggage that is often not very applicable to the modern Web-based world. Second, we’ve become very good at understanding the idioms and “syntactic sugar” that makes developers more productive for Web development and we’ve put that into the latest generation of programming languages and Web frameworks. Unfortunately, the combined newness of these new Web development platforms and their preference for coding time efficiency in favor of run-time efficiency has conspired to make the results they produce relatively slow and resource inefficient compared to what is potentially possible. Newness in this case is also a kind of performance tax since we just haven’t had enough time learning how to make these new platforms perform well at run-time, similar to early versions of Java before the advent of the Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler.

Based on the above and my experience until this stage – I am more comfortable in recommending these modern languages towards Consumer/B2B products as compared to telephony/banking transactional products. For the preferred products, many a times it seems like the advantages associated with improved developer productivity far over-weighs the slight runtime performance disadvantage these modern languages bring in.

Also my opinion is that it is too early to start comparing the modern development platforms with the older programming environments. Increased usage will drive the initiatives associated with the strategies targeted towards improving their weaknesses.

Thoughts, comments, and suggestions are welcome.

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Evolution of Workstreamr

March 27, 2008

Although few of us have been referring to Workstreamr in our blogs in the recent few weeks, the mystery around Workstreamr is now slightly clearing up. Stowe Boyd, one of the founder of Workstreamr, opened a curtain a bit more after he blogged about it yesterday. (Link – Workstreamr: Work Made Social)

I had started talking with Stowe Boyd, Sam Huleatt and Ben Schippers – the three co-founders of Workstreamr around the time of Diwali last year. (I will refer to the trio as SSB going forward in this blog). The first few weeks were spent in understanding the vision and the motivation which was driving these three guys. After about a month around the Thanksgiving time, my group – Version 1.0 – in GlobalLogic became the Engineering partner of Workstreamr and the actual implementation work started. It has been an amazing experience ever since.

One of the key focuses of SSB was to see how the social aspects of Web 2.0 can be used for fulfilling the needs of project-based work. Their argument (and I agree) was that the traditional project management mechanisms and tools in use today were built on older approaches which had an extremely linear thinking. For the sake of discussion here, let me call it “Microsoft Office” approach. In the Microsoft Office approach, Work items gets created in the Project first; they are distributed and assigned to individuals; individuals work and complete the work items. When all the work items are completed, the project is assumed to be completed. If things go wrong or unexpected, the whole process of re-calibration starts again. There is a ‘robotic’ feeling in this approach. IMO this approach simply fails in projects being completed by distributed teams.

As an organization, GlobalLogic traditionally has always been ahead of its time in adapting the modern practices in collaboration (especially associated with Web 2.0) within the organization. Tools like Wikis, Trackers, Instant Messaging, Bloggers, etc. are a common part of our day-to-day operations. (On the side note – I recently realized that everyone in my team is following everyone else’s work on Twitter). We call these as the “Productivity Enhancement Tools”. So in a sense we very quickly found ourselves aligning very closely with SSB‘s ideas. Also, having been in the Global/Distributed Product Development business for a long time now, we know that the needs for a platform like Workstreamr which facilitated the social aspects of collaboration and project management exists. IMO, I think this was a key ingredient for our successful collaboration till-date.

One of the powerful mechanisms which Workstreamr uses is the concept of ‘Streams’. Rather than one-on-one or one-to-many direct communication, Workstreamr pushes the concept of collaboration over ‘stream’ of information which individuals can subscribe, filter, or ignore based on their needs. Having said this, I understand that there are many other tools that are introducing the concept of streams in some or the other manner. Atlassian JiRA is one such example. However, the concept of ‘typed post’ which Stowe talks about in his blog is one of the big differentiator for Workstreamr.

For anyone interested in trying out Workstreamr, Workstreamr is taking in requests for registration for Beta at www.workstreamr.com (it is on a first-come-first-serve basis).

Along with SSB, my team and I are also very excited about how Workstreamr is shaping up.

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