World Getting Smaller

2009-11-25T00:05:00.002-06:00

Funny Search Engines

Search Engines are powerful and crazy - they search this world wide web, gazillions of web pages and provide the results. The reason for writing this - someone that I know sent me an email with a link to my blog. I had to read my three old year blogpost. And I had to write this new one.

I am still alive, just too busy to spend any time on writing new blogs. I still work with Cisco as Advanced Services engineer. I do write occasionally some blogs internal to Cisco regarding my work.

I (my profile) also try to write some blog entries at Cisco Community Central for Service Provider Mobility at:
https://www.myciscocommunity.com/community/sp/mobility

Search Engines - keep up the great work.

2008-01-10T01:18:00.000-06:00

First job out of college: Large company vs small start-up company

This topic is always a debatable one. Two weeks back, I was with my college friends after we have been in industry for 8 yrs now. And we still were discussing this topic!! Imagine the situation of a fresh out of college student.

When some of my best college friends met during the christmas time, one of the topics that came out was how our choices have affected our career so far. One question that still is debatable is big company vs small company.

The Answer:
I made this observation that probably we have been asking the wrong question. More than size, probably what affects the career more is whether the company you are joining is a great company in terms of finance, culture, team and every other aspect. Is it one of the market leader with great thought leadership?
Size to a large extent dictates aspects of the company culture. And it is more of a personal preference to accomodate to that culture. As long as the company you choose is a market leader, probably the career will help itself.

Most everyone agreed to this thought. We still could not agree if we should have the debatable topic of large company vs small company in our minds.

Closing Thought:
In one other blog for the first job out of college, I felt that the greedy algorithm probably is a good choice for most people (80-20 rule, so for 80% of students). For reference, it is here:
http://ribansal.blogspot.com/2006/04/job-market-greedy-algorithm-works.html
I think to choose the sector, this algorithm still works for most.

2006-07-22T17:51:00.000-05:00

Our first "Moniversary"

20th July. That marked our (Aarti and mine) first month of marriage. She went to watch a movie with my parents in India and I went for dinner with my sister here in US. And my phone bill soared around that day!

20th August. She will be joining me here in texas. The brain has already started the countdown, it seems. And it reminded me that July is 31 days long. Okay, 29 days to go..

2006-06-04T20:03:00.000-05:00

Success Formula
What works to get you to the top

From Dilbert.Blog
Here was the blog piece from Scott Adams:
http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/04/success_formula.html

The key point that Scott points out are:

There are multiple factors involved which combine together to make it happen (Scott points out: Brains, Luck, Looks, Reputation of School)
If one of the factor is lacking, the other factors have to shine brighter
Somewhat implicit (though the most important of all in my opinion): You as an individual need to realize whats working and whats not

My Opinion
Another key point that might be implicit (or hidden in "being smart") is: In every situation, it may be different sets of attributes that work! So "being dynamic" and "watchful" is the key!

Overall, though, I would agree with his thinking!

2006-05-24T15:15:00.000-05:00

Abraham Lincoln and Apartheid

Learn from history
In continuation of the reservation issue in India, I realized that India is not the first country to go through this phase. USA has gone through the phase when Abraham Lincoln fought against the apartheid

Considering Abraham Lincoln to be one of the greatest leader in the history, we need to learn what he did good that made US a great country and also learn what mistakes he made. Wonder if the indian politicians (or the first mandal commission) ever gave it a thought

2006-05-24T15:06:00.000-05:00

Reservation Issues in India:
If nothing more, atleast be a leader!

Reservation or No-Reservation:
I am not going to debat for or against the reservations here
[ Though being fair, my personal opinion is that government has focused on too much on the means rather than the end. So, whats the end? The end goal should have been: "make it a better place to live, for everyone". This end goal can be achieved using thousands of methods, and reservation is hardly a good choice ]

Atleast be a leader!
The interview of the Congress HRD minister, Arjun Singh, done by Karan Thapar is one of the most spoken lately. Its surprising that the person who brought the reservations up being clueless:
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/decision-on-quota-is-final-arjun/11063-4-0.html

Reading it, I felt: If you could do nothing else, be a leader - be vocal and supportive of what you do and believe

Dirty Politics!
I guess thats how politics work.. Arjun Singh through his one simple interview achieved multiple goals:

He made sure that Manmohan Singh is to be never remembered as the reformer of Indian economics anymore
He has also made sure that Congress does not win the next round of elections. And guess what - the blame goes to the people whom Karan is taking orders from!

I guess the politics motto: If its not me, then noone else!

2006-05-16T02:33:00.000-05:00

Google: Making relevance!

Command Line interface to the world!!

Google on the news:

Google launched "Google Onebox" recently:

http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/

Another nice article on the launch:

http://www.informationweek.com/internet/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=186700039&pgno=1&queryText=

Machine replaces human!

For more than a decade, IT consulting companies promised the convergence/integration of the applications that an enterprise had been using. This integration is a huge task which the consulting companies were meant to fail at - nevertheless they made huge bucks!

Google has launched this innovative tool to just achieve this convergence/integration. No more do you need an IT consulting company to create tools that would integrate data from various applications

Hope Google can expand this tool (and still maintain the speed!)

Another Nice Feature

Another feature that I liked is that the data can be represented graphically (though this needs some development work today)

Marketing Innovation

Google pitches this as "command line interface to the world" - which I found to be really cool! This not only shows the big audicious goals that Google has, but also the power that they have to affect the world!

Open Source

Like many great projects have discovered that open source can help scale the project - which otherwise would have grown organically over a loong period of time. I believe, this project is one of those ones that fit with the open source models. And Google is not new to this game - they have done this before

This time, Google just need to expose APIs and sit back and relax. The rest of the applications would be integrated by the open source community!

2006-05-16T02:29:00.000-05:00

Innovation: no more prerogative of R&D

BusinessWeek: World's Most Innovative Companies

Business Week with BCG came up with the list of Top-25 innovative companies. They have a great article with lot of data at:

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_17/b3981401.htm

Key Message:

The key message of today's innovation is summarized by comment from IBM CEO: "The way you will thrive in this environment is by innovating -- innovating in technologies, innovating in strategies, innovating in business models"

Innovation has to be in every part of the company - be it sales or marketing or corporate strategy or R&D. Cisco for example had been successful with its innovative acquisition strategy. Cisco for this next decade is innovating on the partnership model

Just as a Note: I might not agree with the list that BusinessWeek has come up with. I do agree though with the key message of the article/study

2006-04-30T17:09:00.000-05:00

Job Market: Greedy Algorithm works!!

Greedy Algorithm:

The algorithm works by selecting the best option available at the point of time when a decision is made

Application: Job Market

I have realized that this algorithm really works for the job market

For our example we would consider software engineering which has applications is almost every industry and hence forms a great example. If say finance industry or supply-chain-management industry is paying higher to the software engineers at a particular point of time, the demand in that industry is high and the chances are high that the demand is going to be high for foreseaable future. So if you made a decision based on the greedy algorithm - you have made a right decision. Many people that I talk to get confused between doing what they like vs following this greedy algorithm (the details on this for later)

Market decides for you!

If you flow with the market, like finance or supply-chain-management industry in our example above, market has made a decision for you. The chances are that it will atleast sustain growth for the next 10 years from the time you selected: 10 yrs is just an empirical number. If that industry keeps the momentum, keep adding 10 yrs till it maintains that momentum. When the industry starts to pay equal to most other industries, time to count down!

College Admissions

This (market) somehow also decides how youngsters select their subject of interest (especially in countries like India). For example, when Civil Engineering was at its peak, people would select civil engineering etc

Misc Thoughts
* Even if you do not make it to the "growth" industry at first, but if you make a job change and use the greedy algorithm, you would settle down in that "growth" industry"
* Other examples of these "growth industries" that i see today may include Security in networking industry

2006-04-21T18:44:00.000-05:00

Never say Never!

"Never say Never" was a lesson that I learnt at Cisco when I was working in a product team. This was in June 2001 - which almost marks the beginning of the tough time for the industry

Me and my team would interact with a world-class sales organization which was trained to maximize the sales number in that tough environment. The sales guys did not like a negative answer especially for requirements that their customers felt as "must have" and if the competition could do

I realized that the only way to sell your product was to make sure that you 'never said never' for any requirement within your "domain". The "domain" would be defined by your product positioning. The sales people loved it

And when there are hundreds of customers with varying requirements, the policy of "never say never" gets out of hand easily. And it did, for us too!! However amount of time we would work, it would never be enough!

When I look back now, we were being naive. But it seems so exciting though! Probably it gave us a purpose!

2006-04-21T15:34:00.000-05:00

Meeting with Old Friends!!

Read from a friend after 15 years..

It was early March 2006 morning when I checked my gmail account after multiple weeks - don't generally use the gmail account. And saw an email from Shabbir Ali. The name was so familiar that my heart was pounding

The email read something like: am I the same person that he knew of from "Indian Community School" in Tripoli

Oh yes, I am... I last saw you in June 1992 when I left for India. I still remember you - a nice and caring person, soft spoken

Coming back to the present, checked the date on the email. 10 odd days that the mail had been in my mailbox. Great not too old, responded to it, dont want to miss the chance!

..and the Gang!

And after a couple of mail exhanges, I realized Shabbir had been hunting down the school friends - there had already been 30+ people he had been in touch. And he is maintaining a group and an album on yahoo!

It was all exciting to meet these friends back again after 15 years - its so hard to describe in words. Walked on the memory lanes watching each of those photographs in the album - not just once but multiple times. Had been fun - miss those times!

2006-04-20T19:53:00.000-05:00

Journey from Saving to Spending: Missing half the equation

History taught us to Save!

Traditionally India has been "save the money" economy. It was the call of that time:

Generation at that time was evolving to become "well-to-do" middle-class
Govt under Indira Gandhi followed the socialist model - banks became nationalized and so did many other industries
Govt needed money - to build the country - and created policies to ensure people save money

And as history has shown us socialism "never" works in practical - after all power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. And when India adopted Global Free Trade in early 1990s, it was the "paradigm" shift for India

Principles from "capital economy"

Spending is the norm now with government policies ensuring this.. spending rather than saving has tax benefits, loans and credit-card spending are doubling every 6 months, market forces are working at its best with competition at its peak and prices at its bottom. The money is churning into the market

Question to ponder upon

And my friend asked: Now that people have stopped saving in government banks, how does the government make money? Sure government needs money for building the infrastructure never required anytime before or meeting the energy demand or for the next generation of green revolution

The easy answer, I thought, was more sales lead to more taxes

Missing half the Equation

The other half of the answer that I initially missed was investing. Jobs that government have to do - now are being done by private sector companies. This leads to an increased demand for the user money, more return on investment by the private companies, more interest for people to invest and hence more activity in the stock market. Well, this also eases off the government to do anything (except regulating)

And also, then, seems to complete the shift now: Saving --> Spending and Investing

Further Thoughts

Another friend of mine made a comment: in those old days, if the price for gold would go up, the real-estate, the stock market, the market spending all would come down.. and vice-versa
And NOW is the first time that all these different markets are growing at the same time. People are spending and investing

2006-02-28T01:34:00.000-06:00

Discovering the Known:

Working Hard vs Working with Passion

A few days back I was struggling if everyone who works hard really has passion. And the answer seems easy - NO

But then why do people work hard if they dont have passion? And how does passion differ? How would one differentiate a person with passion to a person who just works hard?

Passion

Passion as described at dictionary.com is:

A powerful emotion, Boundless enthusiasm, deep and overwhelming emotion

Work done with passion involves feelings and emotions

Work Hard

When people work hard, they have a "motive". These motives seem to vary drastically depending on the person, job, situation et all - they may include "proving oneself", "differentiating oneself from the pack", "feeding family" et all

Burn Out: It is therefore apparent that people who work hard may get themselves burnt out if the "motives" dont get fulfilled in a timely manner. Whereas people with passion would not burn themselves out

Switching Modes: I have realized that people may move from "work with passion" zone to "work hard" zone and vice-versa. Would have to think more about the circumtances on these switches. Does passion dwindle over time? over certain circumstances? I think the passion does gets lost - if the work involved loses the meaning that one associates with

Differentiating: 80% of the times I believe it is easy to recognize that emotion which accompanies when you talk to the people in the "work with passion" zone

"Working Long" vs "Working Hard"

I came across an interesting article through the google search. It claimed "working long" is what we mistake for "working hard" and "working hard" is really taking [calculated] risks:

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/69/sgodin.html

2006-02-27T23:05:00.000-06:00

Smell in the Air - Tale of the city

Wakai Desh ki Hawa mein Khushboo hoti hai

Its been more than 6 weeks back when I was looking at this photograph taken on a roadside "dhabha" near a highway in India. The dhaba was connected to the highway via a dirt track on which was parked a jeep and a few folks posing around it

The first thought that crossed my mind: we dont find these things - the dirt track, the dhaba - in the US. And almost the same instant I could smell the air so typical of those locations

And I felt for the first time that the air smells in India - natural and lively - tries to portray the culture of the city. And boy, it is different than the "aritificial air-conditioned" air that we breathe in US

Am I complaining here? nah... hmm, may be don't know..

I landed on Delhi airport yesterday. And the same thought crossed my mind again. The air is trying to tell me the tale of the city!

2006-02-13T02:44:00.000-06:00

Life always gives a choice. And that too a tough one

The above statement has become one of my basic beliefs now

The irony in life is that it always gives multiple options. Looking back from the future, one of the option looks so obivious. And yet in the situation, its all confusing making it tough to choose

Lately I have been trying to convince myself that the choices I made in the past were correct. Why do I have to convince if I know those choices were correct? Probably because I am still afraid if those were the right choices

Matrix-2

This whole thing about the choice reminds me of Matrix-2 - I need to watch that movie again. I watched it long time back when it was just released. I had felt let down by Matrix-2 after the wonderful Matrix-1 which I watched atleast 25 times!! Maybe, Matrix-2 was not bad afterall, it was me who was immature!

2006-02-05T12:29:00.000-06:00

Complainers and Upbeat in Family

Like most professional, I love reading Dilbert. Recently I happen to click on Adam Scott's blog. Found this entry interesting - it started with a generalized statement of one partner being a complainer in the family:

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2006/01/men_versus_wome_1.html

Get closer to resolution

More interesting was one of the comments on the blog. Its reproduced below:

".. From John Schaeffer: 'complaining without having a resolution in mind is just bitching.'

Too true. Our family has operated for years under the rule that you are not allowed to shoot down someone else's suggestion (i.e, about what to have for dinner, how to divide up chores, or how to escape the kidnappers and scale the outside of the 70-story building) unless you have a new suggestion of your own.

I learned that one before I got married, when I eventually realized that my own complaining was not moving events any closer to a resolution -- when all I did was complain.."

I loved this thinking - that it needs to be integrated into our own life in a more explicit way

Upbeat Family
On Adam's comment about two upbeat people mating.. I think the two upbeat people find common interests to pursue and invest their time together. And can exist together for ever

2006-01-30T01:03:00.000-06:00

Titbits on Ford and Pixar-Disney

Ford and Big-Three Automakers

As a consumer, I had argued that Big-Three US Automakers would lose to the Japanese - Honda, Toyota, and even Nissan have become great marketing machines and have won consumers' hearts with their quality, reliability and price

Japanese automakers have handled 4Ps of marketing in a nearly-perfect manner over the last two decades (even Hyundai has done a superb job lately). And no-one can argue Japanese lead the manufacturing (and their famous "lean production"). The combination makes them the leaders

This week when I read the restructuring plans of Ford, my heart sank. The moment I had been unknowingly waiting for has probably arrived - that was it!

I did a quick google search to look for the reasons the industry watchers were claiming for this debacle, found a couple of them:

Healthcare plans promised to the Unions decades ago, pensions now run into Billions of $$s
Innovation has been slow whereas Japanese have launched great products at a faster pace (probably Keiretsu is the reason)
Perception of reliability and quality

References:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/02/AR2005120201377.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/autos/bigthree.html

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/worldbiz/archives/2005/04/27/2003252221

How has Chrysler survived so far?

They changed themselves and created "American Keiretsu". They are still a long way from the goals but they are on the right track at the least

References:

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=96403

http://www.aiada.org/article.asp?id=53022

Pixar-Disney

Finally Pixar reached an acquisition agreement with Disney making Steve Jobs the largest shareholder of Disney, funny! The speculations fall into 2 categories:

one category adds to the hype of the acquisition
another is about the growing suspicion of any relevant changes that this deal may bring

Bob Iger has done a great job to give the authority to some of the leading innovators from Pixar - hoping to bring new ideas. But the war is far from over and that is to convince his senior management team - and down the chain - that these changes are the only means for the company's survival. And this is no easy thing. Afterall, how many successful acquisitions can we count?

My personal opinion is that Disney management team needs an overhaul - lay down the rules and whoever does not follow gets a chance before he is thrown out. One good example would set the stage for the change - people would realize that this is being taken seriously

One good article covering the story:

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=41181

I love both Steve Jobs and Disney

And hence I just hope Bob accomplishes his task successfully

I admire Steve Jobs - I love his creativity. I love Macs for their creative designs and fell in love with iPod when I used it. Incidentally I have "never" owned an apple gear. I was fascinated by Steve when I first realized Pixar was his creation - and that was 3 years back

As a kid, I had always liked Disney creations - they had been fantastic and they can turn me into a kid again even now

2006-01-22T20:03:00.000-06:00

Constituents of Cisco's Culture

Summary:

Cisco is a great company to work for - what makes this a great company? Culture - in one word

Great companies have great culture, they:

Value the employees and Nurture leadership
follow Open and Candid Communication
Grow
Give back to the community

Cisco's Culture:

Open Communication
Catch Market Transitions
No Technology Religion (imp for tech company)
Drive Market Changes
Stretch Goal Mentality
Taking Measured Risks
Healthy Paranoid to excel
Empowerment
Teamwork (has become important over the last few years)
Frugality
Giving back
and the base of everything we do - Customer Success

John believes two things that can get us away from being a great company are: (1) losing touch of customers and employees (2) bad execution! Powerful, eh?

Background:

I recalled that Collins and Porras did a great job detailing what Great companies do in "Build to Last". I have to revisit it again. Let me just add that John wants to build a company that is not only "Build to Last" but also "Build to Lead" - I guess they go hand-in-hand, but anyway it is a stong message

Lastly, a challenge to analyze and pen-down a culture is that many of these are implicit and may not be easily visible

2006-01-18T00:10:00.000-06:00

When the industry grows...

They are the toughest times, in a summary. Below are the two examples: Outsourcing example from India, Year-1999/2000 example in the US

Outsourcing example:

I was telling Himanshu - when an industry grows like outsourcing industry in India, the enterprenuers there dont need a business plan or even (complicated) business sense. The money flows in, business grows for any small enterprenuer

[I am not trying to say that its easy, but its not difficult if you want to cross over that initial "comfort feeling of known"]

Thinking later over the discussion, I realized probably this type of thinking might be the biggest pitfall for most enterprenuers

When the market is growing, the enterprenuers should balance between:

* making money today and growing with the market (make the most advantage of this growing market)

* building the "competitive advantage" that would help them sustain themselves when the market slows down, whenever it does

It is not easy to realize the second part of this balance.. and makes these times the most tricky ones

It is ironical, though, that companies which build these competitive advantages dont have a clear advantage during the growth period

Year-1999/2000 example:

This was a golden time, tons of money was pouring into the market. New companies were showing up like the grass in the lawn - any company with some slides as business plan had a funding, trial and error was at its peak. The established companies were showing crazy growths

In there, were some established companies that could not keep up the same growth level as the rest of their industry. Some of them finally had to cook the books to keep the investors happy. For them, its a huge peer pressure, pressure built from the WallStreet and the Board, implicit pressure from customers

If we were to analyze these companies, the problem was not developed during the growth period, rather the symptoms were more visible now. No remedy to band-aid the symptoms would solve the issue as the problem would resurface as a different symptom

During this time, the call is a balance between:

* removing the problems from the roots

* flowing as much as possible with the market growth currents

2006-01-08T21:02:00.001-06:00

Google Simply Rocks!

And My View on What Microsoft Should do!

Google Does It Again!

Google is a perfect combination of technical competency of the decade and the marketing machine - atleast for now. Combining this with their Outside-In approach has made them the "talk of the town". It has used these capabilities once again at Consumer Electronics Show (CES) for the launch of its video service

Yahoo News has a pretty good story about their launch:

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060107/gadget_show_google_video.html?.v=3

http://yahoo.reuters.com/financeQuoteCompanyNewsArticle.jhtml?duid=mtfh05774_2006-01-07_05-32-42_n06140985_newsml

Cringley Column predicts the direction where it might be leading (which is kewl):

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20060105.html

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

Every news that is reported is filled with Google vs Microsoft. To me, its funny - newspapers are just trying to increase their circulation, eyeballs etc - selling what would sell!

My View on What Microsoft Should do:

M$ needs to decide what markets it want to play in irrespective of the competition. Their strength continues to be their dominance position in Operating System and Office tools

So they need to ensure that they win the following segments (which they already play-in with different degrees):

Desktop (enterprise and consumer segments)
Servers
Mobile handsets
Consumer Electronics

They need to pull in all the hardware vendors together - which is so much opposite to M$ today. But if they can do that, they can execute on the vision of Convergence - with M$ dominating on all these different device types!

If M$ wants to have a big presence in the media market, they have to have a focused leadership team with a planned strategy and an execution plan. And then let the battle begin! They would win if they are organized

If M$ wants to have a huge presence in online services - like email, blogging, photo sharing, video - they need to understand where the market is going, what the key players are etc. They need to put down the pros and cons of having a [cloned] online services portal, of investing in one of the other leading-edge services portal or of licensing the softwares to the application hosting sites or these portals

They can come up with a "Microsoft Online Portal Office" which can be licensed to many portals. Under this suite of new office tools, they can then innovate and do acquisitions to grab new ideas (say a new service comes)

What may also make sense is the implementation of the theme Convergence on the web - a relaunch of passport in some other manner! This theme can be combined with the Microsoft Online Portal Office and voila, they can lead that market segment

On the security front, they can turn the tables around. Make everyone responsible for it - it is a collaboration and a shared responsibility of the virus protection guys, the firewall guys, the networking guys et all. They need to realize that security market with all the players is something that can not go away, so let these other players take a part of the blame when these players take part of the pie!

Conclusion

I am not sure whats up at M$ and/or what Steve Ballmer or Bill Gates are planning. But their marketing strategy is broken and they need to show a vision to the world!

2006-01-08T21:02:00.000-06:00

My Second Job at Cisco

Richardson, TX April, 2004

Summary:

This job taught me the importance of:

Communication - It is the single most important thing that matters!
Building Relations
Reinforcement of my earlier lessons: (1) Be Precise in your communication (2) Target your audiences appropriately (3) Excite the market by new thinking

I would complete this sometime later!! Probably when I look back two years hence, I would be able to write this better at that time :-)

2006-01-08T20:53:00.000-06:00

My First Job at Cisco

Bangalore June, 2001

Summary:

This job would teach me:

How to Excite the Market
How to Simplify Communication that out to the field
Basics of human skills (which I wld have to improve upon during my next job)

Slow Start on the Job:

I joined as a Software Engineer for a product called Service Selection Gateway (SSG). We were working on integrating it with Cisco IOS and it was at a design phase

We would have endless meetings within the team: discussing design criteria and ways to achieve them. The discussions would get hot (read: really long) at times. Amit used to attend every one of them (I liked that fact)

About the team:

On the meetings, you could instantly feel:

Coolness that T S Ajai would bring during those heated discussions. His words would almost be final - he had that uni-directional shield around him - heat would not come in and the information would only flow out
Excitement that Murthy would bring in. You knew something is up when he would start with "Boss!"
Experience that Gpr would bring in and you could feel the hard work he can do

You would also note others like Ranjan Sahoo (excitement), Rajan Dhinakaran and Navneet Aggarwal (experience). Your first impression about Vinodh, Ashoka, K S Srinivas, Vivek Achar would not be a whole lot until you worked with them

One thing that I can not forget to mention: Everyone including Amit liked the fact that Ajai and Murthy knew the whole code by heart - which to my young developing mind was a big thing! It gave me a goal

First Phase:

I would fix some bugs and minor things here and there in the first couple of months. It was a great time to learn the code and follow the foot-steps of Ajai and Murthy. I would play with Cisco equipment and learn the different technolgies

Our product was going through the EFT (Early Field Trial) now and everyone was asked to contribute to make it successful. Ajai and Murthy with their experience would be the folks to contribute the most to it. The product then moved into the deployement phase

Early on, I would just listen to what most other folks are commenting on the customer support alias. Slowly, I picked on some email threads during the night time - so I would help resolve issues when no-one was around to help. Everyone would praise this effort. And hence would start the beginning of a role similar to Technical Marketing Engineer

Second Phase:

At the time, I was working on every issue that would ever flood the Customer Support alias for the SSG. It was a combination of queries from presales effort and postsales issues. Both of these efforts (pre and post sales) were different and I learnt from both of these activities

Since we owned the product, we were most excited about it success. The revenues were not enough for this product to have a dedicated Product Manager

Lessons Learnt:

Presales effort taught me:

"Simplicity in Communication": Sales is a complex operation with Customers, Competition, FUDs etc. And I as part of "marketing" the product, needs to simplify the communication - the more we simplify, the faster the adoption of the technology in the field and the better chance we have of winning the deal!
"Exciting the Market": Sales team and Customers both need excitement in the market. We chose innovation as the path and we drove innovation in multiple dimensions. (1) expanding the role from dsl segment to broadband wireless, metro-ethernet, cable, pwlan et all. (2) addition of new requirements (we were known as feature factory): if we heard anything from the customer or sales team that we felt might prove important for other customers, we would add it! And we have to keep that momentum to excite the field

Postsales effort taught me:

Feedback Mechanism: Postsales support is one of the strengths of Cisco - kudos to Cisco TAC team! For us, to be almost flawless, we had to form a feedback loop for our product. And so it was!

Last Phase:

There was enough momentum to dedicate full time Product Manager and the different market segments (Broadband Wireline and Wireless) had some form of Product Manager attention to it. The management at Central Development Organization (CDO) decided that it was the time for the Next-Gen product. And it was a time for me to move on!

2006-01-08T20:41:00.000-06:00

How Did I land up at Cisco Systems

Sept, 2000

Short Background:

I was picked up by Cisco from the campus. It was a job beyuond my dreams. My dream jobs were Sun and probably Novell (as my primary interests were OS and Networking and I was a linux geek back then)

Amit Phadnis had come for recruitment on that day - who eventually became my manager at Cisco

I was from Mechanical background but with my interests and my knowledge in the computer arena, I never had issues passing the written tests. It was always the interviews that used to last anywhere north of 5 mins

Technical Interview - Starts:

I stepped inside the interview room where I had been multiple times already for other companies. I shook hands with the two interviewers and grabbed my chair

The interview started with my background (arggh.. Mechanical Engineering). Amit told - "well, we recruit some of the best people from CS and EE.. we are the best company.. one of the largest market cap (and all that kinda crap that I knew and had heard them during PPT)". I assured them that I can surprise them with my knowledge. Amit scanned my resume once more for a second

Amit looked at his watch uninterestingly and told his partner - "the next candidate would not be in before the next 25 mins. Why dont we ask him something." Voila, my chance to convince them!

Technical Interview - Lasts Forever:
So Amit started with some good C questions like pointers-to-pointers, pointers-to-functions, pointer-to-strings and changing in functions, static extern variables et all. I did fairly well. I was giving them examples of where I have used those trying to convince them that I knew more than what they think I know

So we moved up to Data Structures and then to Operating System and then to Networking. By this time, I knew it was well past 30 mins now and I had done pretty good - missing only one or so! I could feel that Amit was convinced that I knew what I was talking about

Technical Interview - Turning the Tables:

Amit's next statement surprised me - "we hire only CS and EE students but exceptions can be made." And he asked me a couple of questions about when I can join, is moving to a different city (Bangalore) an issue et all

I was further surprised (and probably excited) when Amit started to convince me why Cisco is a good choice for me. He was talking about the challenges, the best company and compensation philosophy (stocks and stuff). He, then, explained me about the HR interview The tables had turned over now!

This interview lasted for 50+ mins when I glanced at my watch as I exited out of the interview room. Amit was apolozing the next candidate waiting and asked him to move in

Interview with HR:

Shiny Samuel was the HR person that visited IIT-Kanpur campus that year. Amit had a closed door meeting with Shiny and I just hoped that HR gets convinced (I have heard of horrible HR stories from seniors - and I was praising that this one is a kind one)

Amit asked me to discuss with Shiny and handed me his card and left to interview the next candidate

The first few sentences from Shiny were to ease me. This was an uncomfortable feeling because I was thinking that the worst part is about to come and she is preparing me for it. Or probably she is thinking the best way to put forth the worst part. Anwyay, it was the bad couple of mins. She then told me "they hire only CS and EE students.. choose the best engineers around the world.. legal issues if they take any other student beyuond CS and EE"

And then the most relaxing part followed that Amit and she could make an outside campus offer - even though they are hiring within the campus. I had no problem for this (its Cisco that I would be working with!). I told her that its a dream come true for me and she could be assured that I have passion for my work et all

Time for the Offer Letter:Bangalore Dec, 2000
It was the winter break when I visited Bangalore. I stayed with S Shridhar (my college room mate) who was then working in Wipro

I visited Cisco Office couple of times. On my first visit, I met with Shiny who asked me to meet with Amit and that he would ask me to join the team. She would progress as per Amit's instructions. I went to meet Amit who told me that he would take care of the process and I meet with him on 2nd Jan. He then asked me to meet with couple of folks from his team, so I met with Navneet Aggarwal and B L Balaji. The team was leaving for lunch and I had a glance of the whole team of around 30 people. On my second visit, I met with Amit and got my offer letter (finally!)

Part of Cisco Family: Bangalore June, 2001

I joined Cisco as a software engineer. I met with other members who joined Cisco with me - we were part of the first batch to join in that cycle. There would be people joining every week for the next 5-6 weeks

We went through orientation period of 1 week where we performed some team exercises and were made aware of Human Resources, cisco products, product life-cycles, software development process etc. It was excitement for me, for sure

The other folks realizing that I was from Mechanical Branch and that I was IIT-Kanpur, they asked me all sort of curiosity questions, and I definitely felt an aura around me

And hey, I am part of Cisco Family now and I owe it to Amit Phadnis!

2005-12-26T19:12:00.000-06:00

Debate: Working with a small startup or a big firm

This debate keeps coming.. and as my present room-mates are beginning to find jobs after their masters, this topic came back again. For some reasons, this is a topic that has always haunted me - and I dont seem to get an answer that is full-proof

I have always worked for a large company and have found that there are 2 primary categories in which people could be divided [ remember that 20/80 rule ]: (1) one who make things happen _irrespective_ of the position he/she is at (2) one that waits for someone to empower him/her so that he/she can then make things happen. And almost invariably, these two sets also coincides with people who take (proactive) _actions_ and people who spend their time _talking_ about how they are waiting on someone else to act before they can do something!

In a small company, things move faster - because the survival of the company depends on it. Some of my friends believe in the culture of the small companies. And they have hated the same small companies and moved on to other small companies. They tell me that they are excited about the opportunities that they get in small companies at a relatively younger age and they like the speed with which things get done - and this speed is missing in the big companies (I consider both the reasons to be half-truths)

The correct parameter:

Having worked closely with some of the other big companies as the customer for our company, I have realized that it really is the culture of the company and not the size of the company that determines the behavior of their employees - that determines the speed with which these companies work, the empowerment that they give to their employees

A quick look at the list of "best companies to work for" shows that there are 40 companies that have employee base larger than 10,000 employees (although the survey may not be exhaustive, but still demonstrates the point):

http://www.greatplacetowork.com/best/lists.php?year=current&idListName=bestusa&detail=1&order=rank

I would follow up this note with the culture of my company which is the pride of almost every single employee working at Cisco

My Answer to the Dilemmna:
One and probably the most important thing that you learn working at a large company is "human skills". It is such an important toool that you need at a large company - to get anything done, you need support from others which needs convincing the others of your point. The filters that "slow" the large corporations are important keepers - but at the same point are great teachers!

And since it is so easy for anyone to get lost in a big company - you need to choose yourself to be present in the first group mentioned above which makes things happen. This is a deliberate effort that would have to be done!

2005-12-26T17:16:00.000-06:00

"The lesson" at IIT, reflections from another university

To continue with what I had written last week about the only lesson that one learns at IIT, it seems some of the big universities also teach the same lesson to their students. Here is an example from Standford University:
http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/bmag/sbsm0511/feature_creativity.shtml

I think we should have a similar formal course at IIT - may be a compulsory HSS. It would make the lesson more clear rather than left on luck to learn it

2005-12-19T00:55:00.000-06:00

Memories from IIT-Kanpur

Looking back:

My time at IIT-Kanpur was an experience that transformed me from a "worldly-unaware" town-boy to self-sustainable person for this cut-throat competitive world, from a carefree soul to a confident person

It was as if the stone in me was polished to be passed on to the next phase - the evaluation phase in which I would determine what kind of gem I can be. This reminds me of the saying: "Life is a grindstone. Whether it grinds you down or polishes you up, depends upon what you're made of"

I remember:

Galaxy and the enthusiasm and the can-do attitude with creativity
Inter-IIT Sports Meet and the teamwork and the beat-competition
Lectures and the reason of you being there
BTP Project and the patience of my professor to teach us how to solve the problems in life
Exams and the photocopies and the night-outs
Gymkhana elections and the negotiations and the "dirty" politics
Adventure Sports Club and the beauty of the nature and the pleasure of being on the planet earth
"Ragging" and the enterance into the world of elites
Bulla and the misuse of open door policy (open communication) :-)
Quad/Canteen and the showcase of authority
Computer Center and the extremes of hackerdom and PC games
Movie Shows and the time to relax
Antaragini and the fun time and the girls
Campus Interviews and the new suit that you purchased for the occasion

The Lesson

Tried and tested almost every single-time, the only lesson anyones ever learn at IIT is being confident. Being confident when he plays his hand irrespective of the odd that he might be playing against. Being confident to snatch that win yet another time

Did I learn The Lesson

I learnt only the half-lesson - somewhat like Abhimanyu - where I did decent in the first half (extra curricular) and slept in the other half (academics)

I would have probably missed The Lesson altogether if it were not for Rajan Gupta: I owe Rajan as much as Eklavya owed to Guru Druna

2005-12-12T21:04:00.000-06:00

Back to Manufacturing in India

Combine these facts and see the writing on the wall:

Most companies in every sector are becoming modular to keep their leaness and costs down and improve their flexibility. This is driving them to find partners that are designers who can manufacture (and not manufacturers who can design)
India has huge talent pool (who are designers and can manufacture), focus on services and relatively less-capital intensive heavy industries. It has proven track record in automobile parts manufacturing
Manufacturing industry is hugely fragmented in India. Like it was for the steel industry until Mittal came in
Big corporate houses like Tatas and Birlas are still product focused companies (is it??) - they export - but they export their products, they partner but they partner to sell their own products or their partners' in the home country

Time is ripe for someone to jump in with a vision. Who will be the next Narayan Murthy or Lakshmikant Mittal?

2005-11-28T05:09:00.000-06:00

Industry Tranformations, Knowledge Development and Outsourcing

Industry Transformations:

There is no industry which has not undergone a drastic change since its inception: Horse Carriage Industry was took over by the automobile industry which witnessed the Ford's vision of mass-production in the first decade of 1900 followed by Japaneese process efficiency in 1970s and 1980s; Filtered Cigrattes in 1950s; Supermarkets in retailing during 1960s and 1970s; Mainframes to Minicomputers to PCs to laptops during the later half of the 20th century.. and these are just some examples of industry transformations

"Innovator's Dilemma" authored by Clayton Christensen shows examples from virtually every industry. He lays down the rules for these "disruptive technologies" - which eventually hit every industry

What is the common thing about these industry transformations: They are always followed by shake-outs. This is because the existing leaders in the industry fail to cope up with the transformation because they were busy doing the right thing for their existing customers. This leads to job losses and people to learn new skills. This brings us to the knowledge development aspect of today's industry environment

Knowledge Development:

GE is probably one of the first companies to start a university to teach their best people - to cope up with the rapidly-changing environment. That is followed by other companies - including Cisco

Cisco has developed "Cisco University" with the goal to develop the employees career. An important deviation from the GE model is that it is open for any and every Cisco employee. And this is based on the following thinking from John [Chambers]:

John believes that in a period of 5 years, most of us [the Cisco Employees] would be working on something different than what we are working now. It could be a:

Technology shift like from Foundation Technologies (Routing and Switching) to Advanced Technologies like Security and Voice or
Role shift like from sales management to channels management or to marketing; from Finanace to HR to general management etc

John believes that Cisco University holds a key position for employees to move on that path swiftly. This is an important aspect to survive this global transformation of Outsourcing - which has hit all the industries

Outsourcing:
Outsourcing (or Offshoring or whatever be the term used), like any other Industry Transformation, has characeterstics like:

Industry leaders who try the transformation for the name sake e.g. perform outsourcing for the sake of meagre cost cutting without process transformations would ultimately not survive,
There would be job losses and people would have to learn new skills etc

I have seen that not many people realize this powerful phenemenon of industry tranformation is undergoing. But rather most people tend to believe the hype created by the newspapers on its face value. If we were to understand this phenemenon by its roots and transform ourselves successfully, we would be better off than to fatally fight against it and/or delay it

Excerpts from Well-Accepted Resources:

This is a very interesting interview with the outgoing CEO for DHL, Uwe: http://www.usatoday.com/educate/college/careers/profile52.htm

He views Outsourcing in a similar manner and uses sentences like:
"Economies move up the skill curve continuously, and what was a high-skill job yesterday may have become a medium skill today and low skill tomorrow... For the USA, it's about staying ahead of the game by always adapting and keeping the highest value-added jobs in the country."
"Education does make us safe, but education is continuous. It's not enough to learn a trade for life."
"It is important to educate the public about the benefits of outsourcing..."

Research from McKinsey to disprove the perceived notion that outsourcing was the cause of the job losses:
http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/article_page.aspx?ar=1559&L2=19&L3=67

At Cisco:
For multiple years now, we execute on the goal of "Cisco being synonymous with increasing productivity" using Technology Improvements through networking with appropruate Business Transformations. Couple of quarters back, John presented us with his perspective of what he sees happening in the industry:
Productivity imrprovements in 1970s and earlier were driven by focus on production; in 1980s and 1990s, productivity improvements were driven by focus on transactions; over this and the next decade, productivity improvements would be driven by focus on interactions:
http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/tln/exec_team/chambers/perspectives.html
This change in the way business value-add would be perceived needs a change in the employees skill-sets and the education

2005-11-21T01:18:00.000-06:00

What is $400-a-stock Google upto?

Core Competency of Google:
What would you consider the core competency of Google? It is "search", of course. And what about this diversified successful business that Google operates? They have proven that "they understand the user behavior" - they know how a user would use a particlar application and make it simple to use. That reminds me of Sony and Apple that displayed the same characterstics

Cringley after some thoughts includes "Running clusters of tens and thousands of servers" as another of Google's core competency - which is undisputable. He then extrapolates this with some other dots like dark fibres, Open Office - and predicts how Google can change the Internet. The article, very well articulated, is a good read:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

I liked how google can create a local cache and use their page-rank algorithm. The result is that using internet would be as simple as clicking on your TV or iPoD

Resource Virtualization:

This article also reminds me of John's remarks about resource virtualization over the internet: the user would not know or not care if the CPU or memory is on the device or somewhere reachable within the internet. Google is leading the world one step closer

Basics on Google Existing Datacenters:

I found this interesting link on their existing 64 datacenters. This starts by explaining datacenter in a very lame by comparing with library. This was an interesting and easy explanation that I had never thought or come across before (I have helped built datacenters for some of the big companies, so the easy meaning was a good read):

http://www.mcdar.net/about-google-datacenters.htm

The author also describes all the 64 ip-addresses and the methods to do that. It seems lot of people watch this closely and there are terms like "Google Dance" widely available

2005-11-21T01:07:00.000-06:00

Industry Analysis of the Scientific-Atlanta (SFA) Acquisition

Included some more news from industry on this acquisition:

This one is speculation/leaks in the industry before the announcement. Analysts pointed out why this acquisition would be a good fit for Cisco:

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=84450

Analysis of the news and the affect on the market-space and other players. It seems Alcatel is another big player there (which I missed in my last blog):

http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=84523&WT.svl=news1_1

2005-11-18T19:49:00.000-06:00

Cisco surprises everyone with Scientific-Atlanta Acquisition

So Cisco acquires this "set-top box" company:

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2005/corp_111805.html

[ which, btw, builds end-to-end video distribution systems and provides video system integration ]

Elements of Surprise:
When I read the news this morning, I was surprised with this acquisition for the reasons mentioned below. As anyone expected, stock market punished us with CSCO below $17 after a year now? Anyway, this was a surprise move because:

Its *huge* size - 7600 employees: We dont do these large acquisitions (well except Crescendo or Stratacom)? What happens to our revenues per employee? What happens to our cost structure which we just got to 35%? How does it affect Cisco's hiring process - we were very selective till very late?
Amount of money for the acquisition - $6.9B: Are we back in 1999/2000 days?
Buyout in Cash: This is just so against what John talks about. New employees need to show the same commitment as other Cisco employees? In the era of knowledge workers, Management team need to stay?
It is being referred to the "set-top box" company: Why don't we put this company under Linksys brand? Why under Cisco brand?
It is based off Atlanta and not off Silicon Valley: We have less than 15% acquisitions that are non Silicon valley based

When I did more research, more surprise elements sprung:

Company's gross margins are ~35% and Net Income is 11%: With the size of the company (unlike Linksys), it would affect our gross margins for a long time?
Company's revenues are $1.9B: Bit of relief that this would grow our topline immediately accompanied with the worry about our bottomline?

These thoughts were all over the place:

Did John himself (by now you know, I think very highly of him) succumb to pressure from Wall Street to show growth?
What happened to the basics of profits and productivity? Productivity that would help us beat our Asian competitors?

There seems to be a link missing here. Probably John is doing something which most people can not see. And John wants to keep that secret with him for now. I hope this is true.

With more thinking, may be we are taking the news at its face value under-estimating its value. Lets explore that and see a different viewpoint

Visionary Shoes:

So lets look at this from a different viewpoint:

John reminded us of the large Crescendo acquisition that got this router company into switching market, another large acquisition Stratacom that got us into the Service Provider space, Linksys (albeit small) got us into commercial. Similarly this large acquisition Scientific-Atlanta will get us into the Video for the service-provider
You remember we added "Communications" on our badges for FY-06. Lets see - we are leaders in data communications, we became leaders in Enterprise Voice (including Legacy and IP) this quarter, we are leaders in VoIP segment in service-provider segment. hmm.. so guess what? The important corner-stone missing to make us a true communications company is Video
To add to the Communications piece discussed above: with the focus on solutions for triple and quadruple play for service-providers, we needed a Video solution and a known brand behind it. Thats what this company gives us [ Just to remind that we may also share some of the credible features across with our very successful Enterprise Content Delivery Networks (ACNS) ]
This acquisition was the topic of discussion during our team lunch. The question that came up was: are we entering digital home equipment market competing with the likes of Sony, Phillips and Samsung? I said - no way, that's a cut-throat competitive market. So how do we position ourselves? And it flashed - anything that is an end-point like your digital TV, iPod, XBOX etc - that's not our business. Anything that moves traffic - that's networking - that's Cisco's domain. So this position fits in. And we still would partner with all the digital home equipment vendors
The above also opened up what we were doing with Linksys in the commercial market: Linksys is already the home networking leader for wired or wireless access, we have added VoIP with Sipura and true home interactions with Kiss. So with this complements the Linksys solution pretty well
Lets look at the financial aspect:

this is a monopolistic market: Motorola with the acquisition of X as another player. This enables the players to add more value for customers and in turn increase their gross margins. This also provides better bargaining power from suppliers and buyers.. i.e. unless one player is more focused on market share driving the margins out of the business
I am sure John would ask this new unit to control the costs and increase the gross margins and profits

As expected, This would be a separate entity within Cisco. Like many others in Cisco, I don't believe in doing large acquisitions for the sake of synergies across activities - that never works

Lastly as John says "If mostly everyone agrees to your strategy, you are already too late"

Conclusion:

So what is my opinion? I think if we execute it well, we can make this our fastest growing advanced technology

2005-10-22T17:05:00.000-05:00

Continuation on Communications

To continue to my post yesterday, I got this link to the ad from Telecom-Italia. This is the cool ad (must watch):
http://www.epica-awards.com/assets/epica/2004/winners/film/flv/11071.htm

Btw, we have redefined one of the foremost goal for FY-2006 with: "Cisco and Networking Solutions to be synonymous with Communications and Productivity". Last year, we had focused on Productivity alone. It is exciting that we have identified ourselves with Communications now - especially for some of us working with SP LoB (Service Provider Line of Business)

2005-10-21T14:17:00.000-05:00

Why the name "World Getting Smaller"

The world is getting smaller every day err.. every moment. We see and feel it happen - information is available anytime, anywhere - when you want it, where you want it. Add to this emails, messengers, softphones (voip), video conferences, online (read: discount) shopping etc have shrinked the world to your neighborhood

Why did I choose "World Getting Smaller" as the blogspot name? Because:
* I could not think of something else spontaneously
* Blogging is cool stuff to shrink the world in all 4 dimensions - including time that is
* We make this happen at Cisco Systems (I work with Cisco and I am sure you would have seen and bought the Linksys device from Fry's or BestBuy - which has that little Cisco logo - thats us)

I can talk endlessly about this wonderful company and the experiences there - but at the moment I wanted to get my blogspot up and running