Today I have been contemplating another milestone: my Birthday. I’m not going to say which one - losing count these days. However, it did start the thought process into looking back and looking forward. In 1998 the IT landscape look a whole lot different, Broadband Internet to the home was in its early days - 256/512 kb/s was seen as amazing and most people were still using dial up connections. Mobile phone ownership was still mainly for business people and mobile internet was in its infancy with WAP - which was not a good experience. Web fever was not at its height but building up nicely to its peak. So what’s happened since? The web bubble burst – however, the web is very much a part of our lives, in business, personally, socially and in the day to day running of our lives – paying bills, travel, banking etc. Broadband has in excess of 15 million connections in the UK and the speed has increased to 8Mb/s as the normal connectivity (if you can get it!) and increasing by the month. Even still it cannot catch up with the pent up demand. So what is going to happen in the next 10 years and what will be the norm then? Who knows but what we can deduce is that we are going to move forward. So I am going to have a guess that the changes will be greater than the last 10 years. So here are my predictions:

One does all the due diligence of meeting functional requirements and delivering applications on time. No wonder the application gets popular and starts drawing lots of traffic. In a short span, your data and content bases start to fill up and then the next set of challenges begin - application starts slowing down, scalability becomes a concern and there is not much time to react. Does’nt the situation sound all too familiar? Even today, most organizations deal with it reactively by monitoring applications using system and application monitoring utilities and then more often than not adding hardware. Relief is achieved, but its only a temporary fix. What if the problem recurs soon enough? There is a scope for innovation in this space and that’s exactly what TCS’ Performance Engineering Research Center (PERC) tools have done.

I’m in Miami Beach, Florida, for the Accenture Global Convergence Forum. Three days of presentations, debates, discussions and of course some socialising for around 250 delegates drawn from the wide range of companies that do business with this major player in the management consulting, technology services and outsourcing arena.

This morning some of us had breakfast with Mark Foster, Group Chief Executive for Management Consulting and Integrated Markets (big companies tend to have very long job titles for senior executives), following on from his keynote address where he set the scene for our discussions on how to ‘achieve high performance in a multi-polar world’.

I have just received my first calendar spam message, and I don’t know whether to be impressed at creativity of the scammers trying to trick me out of my money or depressed that yet another useful network service has been compromised.

It arrived in an email claiming to be from the GLOBAL MAX DELIVER COMPANY in Benin, a typical 419 scam where someone tries to fool the recipient into believing that they can get their hands on large amounts of money.  I deleted the email, as I always do, but then noticed that iCal on my Mac was indicating a new appointment.

I recently attended the annual NASSCOM conference in Mumbai. NASSCOM is the National Association of Software and Service Companies - it’s a trade body that acts a bit like a chamber of commerce for the entire Indian hi-tech sector. The annual conference in February is always a great gathering of all the movers and shakers in the Indian tech industry.

• Banking (3)
• General (113)
• Hardware (8)
• Innovation (69)
• Internet (40)
• Podcasts (18)
• Public Sector (2)
• Retail (6)
• Software (21)
• TCS Innovation Labs (16)
• Telecom (16)
• Web 2.0 (19)
• White Papers (0)

• May 2008
• April 2008
• March 2008
• February 2008
• January 2008
• December 2007
• November 2007
• October 2007
• September 2007
• August 2007
• July 2007
• June 2007

• Bangalore Tigers Steve Hamm of BusinessWeek Magazine
• Compound Media Mike Barrett Blog
• Computing - Talking Outsourcing Outsourcing column by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary
• Confused of Calcutta JP Rangaswami, CIO of BT Global Services
• Silicon.com Breaking Business and Technology News at Silicon.com
• Youth Curry Rashmi Bansai of JAM
• ZdNet Tech News and White Papers for IT Professionals