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Express Intelligent Enterprise

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Val Souza

Who's afraid of the Digital Divide?
Is the digital divide, that alleged gaping chasm that separates the "technology haves" from the "technology have-nots" a figment of the imagination of over-zealous academics and activists?

Issue dtd. February 28th 2005
Cracking the manufacturing conundrum
Ken Kao had never visited India until last November. Yet his Taiwanese company, which specialises in networking gear and consumer connectivity, has had a 36 percent stake in an Indian joint venture for the last 10 years.

Issue dtd. January 24th 2005
Revitalising a languishing society
At the beginning of last month, I was at an IT conference which, in terms of content, I would rate as one of the best I’ve attended in a long time. Unless you were there too it would be almost impossible to guess that the conference I’m referring to is the 39th national convention of the Computer Society of India, CSI 2004. Surprised? Well, so was I.

Issue dtd. January 10th 2005
What’s your BI quotient?
Is Business Intelligence (BI) relevant to organisations in India? Now that’s a moot question, especially when you consider that so many of them are still struggling to get their basic enterprise IT infrastructure in place. Meanwhile, CIOs of many large corporations tell of shrinking or static IT budgets; those that are more fortunate can at best hope for a 3-5 percent annual budget increase. BI thus seems like a ludicrous luxury for most of corporate India.

Issue dtd. December 27th 2004
Gettin’ wiki with it
Does the open-source paradigm apply only to software? If there can be collaboration amongst thousands of people on the writing of program code for things as complex as a computer operating system, why can’t this model be used for other products as well?

Issue dtd. December 13th 2004
My Reference Desk
In today’s interactive world, communication is king. No matter what your profession or line of business, impressive communication—both written and spoken—is often instrumental in elevating you above the crowd and helping you stay ahead of the ruthless competition.

Issue dtd. November 22nd 2004
Reflections on Technology Senate 2004
We received so many questions from the audience during the conference sessions that one of the Gartner analysts present was impressed enough to remark that he'd never seen such high levels of interaction at a conference before

Issue dtd. November 08th 2004
The Paperless Chase
Over a billion trees are felled yearly to produce the world’s annual paper supply, almost all of which comes from plant cellulose obtained from tree wood pulp. Are there no alternatives?

Issue dtd. October 18th 2004
The soul of a new magazine
“Be careful,” my well-meaning but decidedly risk-averse friends and relatives warned me. “They’ll make you slog and then pay you a pittance, if anything!” But throwing caution to the wind, I took up the project to launch India’s first weekly IT newsmagazine back in the spring of 1990.

Issue dtd. September 13th 2004
Spammers Anonymous
Most of you who caught my phishing column last time would have realised that a good number of the Web’s security problems originate from the anonymity that e-mail provides to those tech-savvy enough to cover their tracks completely.

Issue dtd. August 23rd 2004
Phishing in a troubled Web
Whenever I’m deleting spam from my official e-mail account—and that’s pretty often, since my e-mail address is widely published and publicised—I’ve always wondered who on earth could possibly be idiot enough to fall for all the bizarre schemes and scams in that spam.

Issue dtd. August 9th 2004
The return of the ASPs
While the initial public offerings of Google and Tata Consultancy Services have understandably been given top billing by the media, I’ve been considerably more intrigued by a much smaller outfit that successfully went public recently—Salesforce.com.

Issue dtd. July 12th 2004
The Importance of Search
Here’s a thought-provoking prediction: More than two centuries will elapse before we have artificially intelligent search functionality that can match the intuitive capabilities of the average human reference librarian of today.

Issue dtd. June 14th 2004
Our future's in the balance
Over two thousand years ago, the great Greek dramatist Euripides wrote about the importance of 'balance': "The best and safest thing is to keep a balance in your life, acknowledge the great powers around us and in us," he recommended. "If you can do that and live that way you are really a wise man."

Issue dtd. May 24th 2004
Mavericks in the corporate jungle
Google. The reigning Internet-search king. Love ’em, or hate ’em, but you sure can’t fault ’em for lacking chutzpah. For, which other company would keep everyone guessing by making a major product announcement (Gmail) on April Fool’s Day?

Issue dtd. April 26th 2004
The road to offshoring nirvana
So the Infosys juggernaut thunders relentlessly on. Crossing the billion-dollar revenue milestone, exceeding market expectations by maintaining a 31 percent year-on-year growth, and aggressively projecting growth of 24 percent (31 percent if you go by US GAAP) for the current fiscal.

Issue dtd. April 12th 2004
The coming offshore boom
What’s all the fuss about, really? Zoom in close on the statistics and you find that the Indian software industry that’s being ballyhooed so, is actually quite puny on a global scale.

Issue dtd. March 29th 2004
Feeling real good about Indian infotech
As the country prepares to go to the polls—and Express Computer celebrates its fourteenth anniversary—it’s quite clear that regardless of which political party triumphs, infotech will remain a top priority for India on all fronts.

Issue dtd. March 22nd 2004
The global delivery sweepstakes
Take it from me: Regardless of protests, protectionist legislation, job losses, political rhetoric, patriotic fervour, and any other irate knee-jerk the West wishes to conjure up, it’s now clear that outsourcing and offshoring as integral parts of the corporate business paradigm of the 21st century are an immutable fact of life.

Issue dtd. February 23rd 2004
Playing the numbers game
Have you ever actually tried working out the specifics of the math? There’s this grand plan for the Indian software industry, the ‘Big Picture’ up in lights on the marquee, flashing 50 billion dollars software and services exports for 2008 (57 billion in fact, if you go by the letter of the second Nasscom-McKinsey Report, released June 2002, and which everyone including Nasscom has conveniently, and wisely, forgotten).

Issue dtd. February 9th 2004
In the byroads of Basavanagudi
Ten years ago, when software methodology maharishi Ed Yourdon visited India, he wrote about India’s software industry having matured into what he called “Stage-2”—wherein the Indian pitch had changed from one of bodyshopping of cheap programmers for onsite software coding and maintenance, to one touting high-quality offshore software development “on time, on budget and with a high degree of predictability.”

Issue dtd. December 22nd 2003
The Penguin’s Progress
Time was when the biggest debate about Linux was how exactly the word should be pronounced. Now, any way you say it, this open-source operating system that used to be the preserve of geeks and hobbyists has well and truly come of corporate age.

Issue dtd. November 10th 2003
India at the Tipping Point
Back in the year 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point zoomed up the bestseller lists and became quite a conversation piece.

Issue dtd. September 22nd 2003
Biting the IPv6 silver bullet
Even foresight has its limits. Unlike the shockingly myopic "640K should be enough for anybody" statement (which Internet folklore incorrectly attributes to one Mr William Gates), the task force working on the Internet Protocol (IP) in the early 1970s provided for something like 4.3 billion IP addresses (via a 32-bit address space) in the current avatar of IP on which the Internet runs—IPv4.

Issue dtd. September 8th 2003
What about spam?
Irony has a field day in Mumbai city. Every single day.

Issue dtd. August 25th 2003
Dousing the Dragon’s fire
When I visited China’s showpiece city Shanghai at the beginning of this year, like every other first-time visitor I too was awestruck by the imposing skyscrapers, impressive infrastructure and furious construction activity everywhere.

Issue dtd. August 11th 2003
Consolidating on the comeback trail
The price of doing well and making more moolah than the average Joe next door is unmerciful public scrutiny.

Issue dtd. July 14th 2003
Is a fever good or bad?
You’re justified in wondering what a strange poser like this is doing in a magazine that describes itself as “The IT Business Weekly”. Nothing to do with enterprise computing, definitely.

Issue dtd. June 23rd 2003
One day in the Year of the Ox
When the Harvard Business Review makes a contentious statement, you better sit up and take notice.

Issue dtd. June 9th 2003
Strangling the spammer in you
Surely, only the brain-dead would expect anyone to reply to an e-mail message they send out to millions, promising miraculous anatomical enhancement or a stake in an inherited fortune.

Issue dtd. April 14th 2003
The charge of the Byte Brigade
What makes American president George W Bush so smug, confident and cocksure in proclaiming the inevitability of his victory over Iraq is the fact that he knows he has at his disposal the most advanced technology in the world and almost limitless funds to deploy it.

Issue dtd. March 10th 2003
The inexorable BPO job shift
For over a century now, the New York Times has been printing “All the news that’s fit to print,” and is widely admired for its “integrity and sound judgement.”

Issue dtd. Feb. 24th 2003
More on the curse of the Internet
If you’ve been a regular reader of this column, you’d recollect my diatribe last month warning corporations of the dangers of Internet abuse in the office.

Issue dtd. Jan. 27th 2003
The Curse of the Internet
If you’ve been a reader of Express Computer right from its beginnings in the early nineties, you’d know that we were the first publication in India to get clued in to the Internet, in terms of utilising its vast resources as a reference repository to help enrich our content.

Issue dtd. Dec. 23rd 2002
Goa’s got IT on its agenda now
When you proclaim you’re 365 days on a holiday, it’s kind of dodgy to—in the same breath—ask businesses to come set up serious shop in your State.

Issue dtd. Nov. 25th 2002
A tale of two companies
As I write this column, at the 5-star hotel across the road Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates is speaking at one more function on his third trip to India.

Issue dtd. Nov. 11th 2002
Somewhere over the rainbow
This just in: “It’s gonna get darker before it gets brighter.” Not my words, but a paraphrase of what analysts are commenting on the elusive resurgence of tech spending worldwide, as they continue to paint a gloomy picture of the tech revival.

Issue dtd. Oct. 14th 2002
Searching for innovation
The very first time I used the Google search engine on the Web, in the year 2000, I was hooked. The other search engines and directories that I used to frequent earlier were soon cobwebbed in a forgotten corner of my mind; AltaVista, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo, AskJeeves, LookSmart—the entire lot.

Issue dtd. Sept. 16th 2002
Stamp out that Spam
If you’ve been a regular Internet user like me, since the early days of NCST’s shakti and soochak, and VSNL’s first shell accounts, chances are your e-mail address has travelled around a bit.

Issue dtd. Aug. 19th 2002
Fighting for survival; looking to revival
Recently, at the annual general meeting of the National Association of Companies for Technology Training (the apex body of a majority of computer training institutes), I was witness to some of the most frank and forthright soul-searching and introspection I have ever seen in the computer industry.

Issue dtd. July 22nd 2002
Doing something about hardware
A couple of weeks ago, out of the blue, I received a phone call from F C Kohli, former deputy chairman of Tata Consultancy Services.

Issue dtd. April 8th 2002
Where have all those websites gone?
Going through my old bookmarks of favourite websites I used to visit, I was surprised and saddened to note that so many of them had disappeared.

Issue dtd. March 25th 2002
The best is yet to come
When we launched Express Computer way back in March 1990, there was scoffing. “A weekly for the information technology industry? You must be joking! Barely enough happens in a month in the Indian computer industry,” said cynic and optimist alike. Indeed, the flimsy 8-page rag that EC was back then made one wonder, briefly, if the scoffers had something in their scoffs and scorns after all.

Issue dtd. March 11th 2002
Using water to cut steel
Would you believe me if I told you that steel can be cut with water? Would you think I’m crazy if I suggested that the desktop computing paradigm that exists today with PCs and Windows and silicon chips would be ancient history a few years from now?

Issue dtd. Feb. 25th 2002
Slowly, slivers of sunshine
Was Nasscom 2002 buzzing with excitement like the last time around? Nope. No wide-eyed teens and twenty-somethings lurking at virtually every corner, seeking millions.

Issue dtd. Feb. 11th 2002
Proud to be Indian?
At the Nasscom conference in Mumbai last February, management guru Sumantra Ghoshal began his presentation with a slide that stated, simply, “Thank You”.