Paddy Srinivasan's WebLog

Express Computers - India's leading IT magazine published one of my articles recently

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20050704/technology02.shtml 

“Do or do not—there is no try,” says the Yoda but “doing” software to address the new world order of global supply chains is an inexact science at best! It doesn’t take a visionary to understand that globalisation is changing the two ends of supply chains—the demand and the supply side. Funny guy this Jedi master but it does seem like we have time travelled over the last five years when the world was shrunk, supply chains were flattened and businesses were exposed to the realities of a global resource pool. This article examines how software applications should evolve to be ready for this inevitable tsunami called the global supply chains (GSC).

Top 40 masters of technology and innovation - whatever that means !
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.05/wired40.html

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1066223.cms

I work in this group in Redmond. As the article talks about, it is a position with very unique skills sets. We are trying ot hire in our group now and we find it very hard to get the right person. Passion is something that is really hard to measure. So what is Evangelism in the tech world ? Guy Kawasaki, regarded as the a father of Evangelism from the Apple days talks about it here http://www.creatingcustomerevangelists.com/resources/evangelists/guy_kawasaki.asp 

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1066223.cms

I work in this group in Redmond. As the article talks about, it is a position with very unique skills sets. We are trying ot hire in our group now and we find it very hard to get the right person. Passion is something that is really hard to measure. So what is Evangelism in the tech world ? Guy Kawasaki, regarded as the a father of Evangelism from the Apple days talks about it here http://www.creatingcustomerevangelists.com/resources/evangelists/guy_kawasaki.asp 

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB111196625830690477,00.html?mod=todays_us_page_one 

A must see presentation from the famous KPCB partner behind Amazon.com and Google -

http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/courses/msande472/050202-msande472-100.asx

I am looking to hire a Senior Program Manager in my group with very strong product dev/management experience. Here is a link to the job description

http://www.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=4cbca109-9f9c-4279-b7a6-a7808e6d3105

Here is essentially what I am looking for:

The person should be able to get the second appointment with a CTO of a multi Billion $$ ISV. Essentially that means that the candidate will be very strong technically, should have led dev efforts, shipped a product, should know how to communicate at the CXO level and should command a compelling presence. If you think you fit this persona , dont wait a second to drop me an email - paddys@microsoft.com 
thanks,
paddy

Microsoft is working on this concept called "Software Factories" which is intented to introduce meta data based software development using Domain specific langugages.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/architecture/overview/softwarefactories/ 

I have co authored an article with a colleague of mine, Sanjay Katyal and it was published in this quarter's CRM Project publication. It deals with the re-emergence of CRM and investigates the macro trends that are affecting CRM industry today. Here is a link to the article, you will need free registration to access it.

http://www.crmproject.com/documents.asp?d_ID=2855 

For those hard core CRM heads out there- here is a new test concept from Disney - Pal mickey or “Mickey Me” if they had asked me  to name it. Pal Mickey is a tour guide on steroids - well actually on wi-fi . Providing context sensitive information like ride wait times, trivia etc Pal provides Disney with actual customer patterns and could be a major catalyst for commerical wimax/wifi and social computing. Talking about social computing did anyone see Lili Chang's  research keynote in last year's PDC ? It was awesome stuff much like “mickey me”  

get the formatting right !

Earlier this year, Fortune magazine had an article on the top 10 trends to watch out for.
http://www.brainbox.com.au/brainbox/home.nsf/0/CFD37A9CF4AE405949256E3C002CFD55?opendocument 

My guess is that this might have been an intern project there as there was no positive correlation between some of the points in the list. I agree strongly with atleast two of those. Smart Dust and digital convergence. These are two very definitive trends that are still adopted onyl by a tiny fraction of hte consumers. Smart Dust ( http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile/story/0,10801,79572,00.html ) are < 5 mm MEMS developed initially by the Robotics Lab in Carnegie Mellon University. There is also a start up called Dust Inc or somethign that is attempting to commercialize the technology.  This reminds me of the book “Innovator's Dilemma” that talks about the reason why successful  companies fail and why they often fail to latch on to disruptive trends. So what are the disruptive trends in our industry now ? MEMS based wireless communication is surely one, iPOD like multi use personal devices are one, home entertainment ( like the windows Media Center PCs ) are one, nanoTech is probably one far out on the horizon...Lets see if we can come up with more.

I am working on a web cast for next week ( the 13th ) on Decomposing applications for SOA design. Here is an abstract of the session. Let me know what you would like to hear on this topic.

Application Decomposition for SOA Based Systems
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?EventID=1032254390&Culture=en-US 

Description:  This webcast will deal with the concept of decomposing applications to enable architecting better service oriented applications. Integrating software applications is the new mantra of the Web Services world but in order to achieve this, business services and boundaries should be clearly identified and broken down into autonomous entities Decomposition of applications based on business logic is very critical in maximizing the benefits of a service orientation. This webcast will use a Supply Chain System as the example for illustrating the concept. It will also look into some of the Design Patters and Microsoft® technologies that are applicable.

New book on Network security

http://www.microsoft.com/MSPress/books/6788.asp 

Last week I was in Chicago to attend/speak at a manufacturing conference. I met and talked to many small and medium manufacturers and it was fascinating to hear them talk about the role of MS technologies in their product life cycle. They were all mostly from the IP side of companies who are perhaps one of the most affected by the economic down turn and were having to deal with dwindling budgets for the last couple of years although things have started looking up recently. One of the discussion points were around MRP applications and opening up the data to non users of the application- namely Execs and Casual users. I did a live demo of the new product called IBF - Information bridge framework and it was very well recd.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/ibframework/default.aspx
http://www.officezealot.com/ibframework/ 

The amazing thing is that the audience was not even half technical and it still resonated. the demos was a simple example of retrieving CRM information from Outlook and displaying it in the new “IBF UI“. The resulting information is not only good for casual analytics ( like sales from a particular region or a sales rep etc ) but could also be tied to back end update web methods that can also update live ERP data. the IBF framework also has a client side “Context Action Engine” that can be used to cache local context which can be then propagated to other client side applications. Here is a screen shot from an article on msdn on IBF.  

Details on creating this kind of a user interface can be found in this article . and yes, it is available for free redist once it is released.   If you are an ISV in the Line of Business space then you have to look at this product very carefully as it has the potential to make your app upgrade look very compelling. You can also think about the kinds of business models this enables. For ex: should you have charge a “lite CAL” for a non user who wants to just plug in to your web services to get the data into their email system ?  

Also check out the new ISV section in the MSDN web site http://msdn.microsoft.com/isv/
Check this site ou and give me your feedback on what you think ...

Now you can work on your Siebel Data without leaving Outlook - from the Siebel user week last month...

...... extending Siebel 7.7 functionality to the Microsoft Office System, allowing Siebel customers to seamlessly leverage the capabilities of Microsoft Office Outlook® and providing transparent access to customer relationship management (CRM) data to users of Microsoft Outlook. Siebel 7.7 supports native use of the Outlook calendar within Siebel .........  http://www.siebel.com/about/news_events/press_releases/2004/040421_microsoft.shtm 

This is a huge win for showing the power of SC and will go a long way in prving the feasibility of this technical integration
Also check out the wiki for .net interop - http://www.pinvoke.net/ . awesome if you you want indepth pincoke questions answered.