Humour

Galloping around with IT

T A Balasubramanian starts his five-part guide to polish some equestrian strategies for surviving changes on the IT racetrack.

A new project looms up in the life of Doodh Byramji. Better known as Doodh, or Doodhi, the enterprising Byramji is a design engineer of Baffle Technologies, otherwise called Baff-Tech.

Today, Byramji plans to probe into the murky area of riding through changes in the information technology business. He has already been confronted on this topic by his CEO, Baidyanath Baffle, the founder and owner of Baff-Tech.

“Doodhi, we must find out what’s churning the IT business these days. I was at a seminar yesterday and I bumped into our old friend, Nawab Ghoda Ghallstone, Junior. As you might recall from your earlier visit, our pukka sahib was the founder and CEO of Ghallstone Labs. Now that plain vanilla benchmarking has become commonplace, the Nawab, it seems, has discovered an uncanny ability to anticipate market trends swirling around IT management. We need to get that kind of strategic know-how into Baff-Tech, you know.”

Byramji is excited at the prospect of catching up with the Nawab. “Nawab Ghalls-tone? Wonderful, wonderful, Baffleji. I will call on him and have a horse … I mean, a report … ready.”

So here, once more, is the action, captured in the dutiful diary of Byramji, carefully recorded for posterity.

9:40 am: Dear Diary: Back again to visit my old friend Nawab Ghallstone, the famous ‘Prince of Benchmark’. I wait for a while, noting that the entire place is now covered with carpeting, and the benches of all shapes and colours have been replaced with luxurious sofas covered with soft leather upholstery. Evidently, the old horses have been retired permanently, and put to good use.

There are many computer terminals I can see inside the place through a large glass wall, with operating staff moving around briskly, wearing business suits and ties with a silver horse logo. After a few minutes, I am greeted by the jaunty Nawab himself. He is wearing a flowing gray sherwani and has a neat blue turban with a diamond on the front.

“Well, well, Byramji. Or is it Doodh? The last time I think I jolly well bored you endlessly with my benchmark speeches, didn’t I? All that is history, my boy, as no doubt, your boss, Baidyanath Baffle must have told you. We have now become leaner and meaner, so I must warn you that I might bore you even more,” he guffaws, twirling his bushy moustaches.

We walk inside, and I listen as he launches into his current activities and projects with hardly a pause.

“Fix bayonets, for we are warriors for the future; sepoys of fortune who find riches in new technologies that few others are prepared to try,” says the Nawab, dramatically. “What you see around you, Doodh, are the brave new members of the Royal Ghoda Surf Club, or RGSC—an intrepid troop that seeks competitive advantage from the latest that every IT wave has to offer. Of course, some would say we are lemming-like creatures, hurling ourselves off the cutting-edge cliff of innovation and working out how we are going to land on the way down, as the wind whistles over our ears and we plummet to the surface below.”

“That shows what a lot of horsepower you still have, Nawabji,” I say, admiringly.

“Ah, you are sly, Doodh,” he chuckles, “Yes, a lot of horsepower, you could say. We nawabs carry on and on, like the Energizer bunny. RGSC is a veteran and advisor of venture-backed start-ups. We round up technology companies where new product research, software development, technical marketing and external evangelism are in short supply—and hopefully, turn them into race-winners. Or pack them off to pasture.”

“You have been at this for ages, I suppose.”

“Yes, indeed. My father, Nawab Ghoda Ghallstone Senior, used to breed race horses of all kinds. He designed many kinds of tests for comparing the performance of stallions. I have been breeding software companies for about 10 years now, following my father’s trade in many way. For some reason I have gravitated towards enterprise application management —building software to help companies manage the applications that run their business.”

“Run must be the operative word, I presume?”

“Of course, Doodh. You know we scraped through the dotcom boom period with my first company, Ghallstone Labs. We were focussed on helping enterprises get more out of their websites by tweaking performance. At that time, every large company, and some small ones, too, was scrambling to build a sales channel through the Web. Millions of users were jumping onto the Internet for the first time, using 14.4 Kbps or 28.8 Kbps modems. Surfing the Web on a 28.8 Kbps modem was a painful experience, like riding on an ass in a Derby. In a simple process, like, say buying a book on Amazon.com, you must have found how very sensitive you were to the speed of the website. The world-wide wait, as the Net’s notorious acronym has been dubbed.”

“Yes, I sometimes meditate as I wait. It still happens now since there seem to be even more people on the Web, and the Web itself is pretty monstrous.”

“That’s right, Doodh. We measured the speed at which a user could perform the most important transactions on a website from the end-user’s angle. With the data we collected, we could identify and dissect the largest bottlenecks to performance and then help people spend their money intelligently to speed things up. We packed more pep into the asses, so to speak. It was exactly what the market needed, and after only 18 months, we sold the company to Godzillanet, which at the time was the world’s largest hosting company.”

“You could have been the leader in turbo-charged asses. So why did you change tracks?”

“Well, I was lucky with the timing of Ghallstone Labs. You can’t turn asses into race-winning horses, Doodh. The old-style benchmarking was a dying art. In hindsight, though, I learned a lot about what goes on in the IT business. Actually, I have boiled these down into what I call my “four equestrian rules of IT strategy.” They are, of course, drawn from my experiences in benchmarking, and from my family’s interests in horses.”

“Ah, this gets interesting,” I mutter to myself. “Some racing rules at last. Straight from the horse’s mouth.”