tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14287403554346548692024-03-18T02:16:31.742-07:00TimelessnessMusings on constants and other invariantsvishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.comBlogger20125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-78711005434515743772018-06-30T23:50:00.000-07:002018-06-30T23:50:03.060-07:00Daniel Schneiss, R.I.P.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">June 29, 2018<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">My friend Daniel Schneiss passed away earlier today, peacefully in
his sleep at his home in Germany.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
world lost an extraordinary young man, a loving husband, an amazing father, an
incredibly accomplished professional and a wonderful human being.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His last couple of years were anything but
peaceful, full of pain, suffering and adversity that a devastating multiprong cancer
can bring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And yet Daniel was peaceful, calm,
serene, and full of determination, grit, an unyielding will to never give up, a
passion for life and for doing the right thing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In his actions during this fight to death, he showed what it means to
live, to not give up, to be giving in our suffering, to be caring in our
pain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I found myself in Germany a few
weeks ago, and went to see him, his soulmate Judith and their son, for a moving, and exhilarating couple of hours.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbiL6I__FOGK8wUyh9x79tQAQFo1JPGROYqNVVA_2QLYCHPOYBqSvjawXfQgFo9zH63SYaulJ4zcYDVPXfwoxIfpE_M2m0Oyc52tIYqT9hhd68N4oSyEUxjexLIt193_wb3z9Pz4bsDE/s1600/VandSchneiss_Hazakura.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivbiL6I__FOGK8wUyh9x79tQAQFo1JPGROYqNVVA_2QLYCHPOYBqSvjawXfQgFo9zH63SYaulJ4zcYDVPXfwoxIfpE_M2m0Oyc52tIYqT9hhd68N4oSyEUxjexLIt193_wb3z9Pz4bsDE/s320/VandSchneiss_Hazakura.jpg" width="240" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">This picture is in front of his beloved
cherry tree, just past the peak blossom, entering a stage he told me, true to
his part-Japanese heritage, is called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hazakura</i>,
when the Sakura transition to young leaves on the trees.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was full of life that day, and Judith was
happy too, there was much laughter, some tears, great joy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On the drive back, however, I found myself
devastated as I reflected on an amazing man’s incredible young
life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">I first met Daniel about 16 years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Building on Jim Gray’s research in mapping
strings to integers to reduce storage for data cubes, and some subsequent
research, Franz Farber, Daniel, Roland Kurz, and some of their colleagues had started to work
on bringing text search techniques to analyzing structured data in-memory in their
text search engine, Trex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was thinking
about next-generation database technology in those days, and so we met and a long, deep friendship was formed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A friendship that would lead to many
wonderful endeavors, including Hana, but also many deep lessons in transformations,
in what it takes to make transformations happen, and the culture and values that
we inhabit, that we exhibit, and that we learn along the way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the Trex days, Franz was the architect, the quintessential
“What” leader, the inspiring builder, Roland dealt with people and administration, and Daniel was the executioner, the doer,
an extraordinary combination of a deeply accurate sense of where things are no
matter how grim, and yet an unyielding, unflinching resolve to achieve
impossible goals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He would
simultaneously hold in his head the worry, the detail, of the ground reality, as
well as the undeterred confidence and clarity that we would achieve the
objectives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He and Judith, recently
married, had just become parents then, and yet Daniel was able to carry out the
extraordinary tasks of being a manager in new, alien, endeavors inside a
large company.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> The lights in the Trex and later Hana offices used to routinely be on, late into evenings, when everything around was long dark. The hallways used to often have the crackle of children playing around while their parents worked, there was much laughter, yelling, a deeply entrepreneurial spirit. </span>In the years that followed,
Daniel went on to lead the entire Hana development team, to many
incredible successes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<o:p><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP0W1bHVfpRVSod5mbyc6K95cghK_zOHV18_y3Uk5AlRNRiUKjhFzeCwkhhc0jrkzm0G1TMd1JDV4-4LOMLGHNHs6G-7abseOnbGGdvxq9i91vrRATkkWF5zBJM_iogPFUNSjbzoIlJ1c/s1600/schneiss_korea.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="701" data-original-width="930" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiP0W1bHVfpRVSod5mbyc6K95cghK_zOHV18_y3Uk5AlRNRiUKjhFzeCwkhhc0jrkzm0G1TMd1JDV4-4LOMLGHNHs6G-7abseOnbGGdvxq9i91vrRATkkWF5zBJM_iogPFUNSjbzoIlJ1c/s320/schneiss_korea.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">The picture above is from one of my last technical meetings
while I was at SAP, in the lab in Korea in 2014, with Daniel speaking
passionately about something and me and the other colleagues, listening
intently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again a combination of passion
and dreams integrated with objective ground reality.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was this duality, what some call “The
Stockdale Paradox”, that defined him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And it was especially this duality that defined him in his fight against
cancer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He clearly knew very clearly,
and grimly, the toll that his body was taking, and yet he fought and had a sublime smile on
him, a grace that was exemplary, and gave energy to those around him, at a time
when he needed it the most.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="9" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="heading 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 7"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 8"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="toc 9"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footnote text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="header"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footer"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="index heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="35" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="caption"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="table of figures"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="envelope address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="envelope return"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="footnote reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="annotation reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="line number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="page number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="endnote reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="endnote text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="table of authorities"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="macro"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="toa heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Number"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="List Bullet 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="10" QFormat="true" Name="Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" SemiHidden="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="11" QFormat="true" Name="Subtitle"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Body Text Indent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="FollowedHyperlink"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="22" QFormat="true" Name="Strong"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="20" QFormat="true" Name="Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Plain Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="E-mail Signature"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Top of Form"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal (Web)"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Acronym"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Address"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Cite"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Code"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Keyboard"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Preformatted"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="HTML Typewriter"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Normal Table"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Outline List 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Colorful 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Columns 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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Name="Table Elegant"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Subtle 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
Name="Table Web 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" Name="Table Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" UnhideWhenUsed="true"
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Placeholder Text"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="1" QFormat="true" Name="No Spacing"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" SemiHidden="true" Name="Revision"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="34" QFormat="true"
Name="List Paragraph"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="29" QFormat="true" Name="Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="30" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Quote"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 3"/>
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<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="60" Name="Light Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="61" Name="Light List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="62" Name="Light Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="63" Name="Medium Shading 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="64" Name="Medium Shading 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="65" Name="Medium List 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="66" Name="Medium List 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="67" Name="Medium Grid 1 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="68" Name="Medium Grid 2 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="69" Name="Medium Grid 3 Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="70" Name="Dark List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="71" Name="Colorful Shading Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="72" Name="Colorful List Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="73" Name="Colorful Grid Accent 6"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="19" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="21" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Emphasis"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="31" QFormat="true"
Name="Subtle Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="32" QFormat="true"
Name="Intense Reference"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="33" QFormat="true" Name="Book Title"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="37" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" Name="Bibliography"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="39" SemiHidden="true"
UnhideWhenUsed="true" QFormat="true" Name="TOC Heading"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="41" Name="Plain Table 1"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="42" Name="Plain Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="43" Name="Plain Table 3"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="44" Name="Plain Table 4"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="45" Name="Plain Table 5"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="40" Name="Grid Table Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="46" Name="Grid Table 1 Light"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="47" Name="Grid Table 2"/>
<w:LsdException Locked="false" Priority="48" Name="Grid Table 3"/>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">The great Indian text, the Bhagavad Gita, as a mentor of
mine recently eloquently reminded me, says that we have the rights, the
opportunities to do our work, our karma, but not to the fruits thereof. While none of the remarkable achievements of
that unforgettable team would have been remotely possible without Daniel’s
dedication, hard work and leadership, he deeply understood, and exemplified
this belief that we just do our thing, it is upto us to do it as well and as
passionately as we can, and then circumstances come together to make great
outcomes happen.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Transitions, in death and during life, are defining moments,
for organisms like us, but also for organizations. We experience this one big journey of our
lives, and many journeys during it. And
indeed when we think about it, our journeys are all there is. We all are, and are parts of, diverse and multifold journeys, as Feynman said, specks in the universe, universes within us. And if we are fortunate, we
get to be parts of great, purposeful journeys, ones that move us, and move us
all forward. Finding great problems,
great missions to work on, inspiring teams to give their best to these, keeping grand
dreams, big ambitions in our minds, and yet our feet firmly on the ground as we
move forward, I’ve learnt is what all great journeys, and great humans, are
made of.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">Death comes to all of us.
It is, as Steve Jobs once said, a destination that we all share. And yet it is in how we act when facing
certain death, that we reveal who we are, who we can be. And Daniel did so, vividly, to the benefit of his son, his wife and us all. I feel sad, but deeply proud of my friend
Daniel, or Schneiss, or Schneissi. Your
body is gone, but you live on, inside us, in our memories and in our hearts, as do your creations, your life’s
work and your life’s ways...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;">-- Vishal</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></div>
</div>
vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com193tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-51020502309906614552017-08-21T10:06:00.003-07:002017-09-03T16:09:09.776-07:00University of Queensland Speech<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<br />
Last December I was honored to deliver a commencement address at the University of Queensland. I spoke about AI, jobs, our futures and education. Here is a video and a transcript. I covered a bunch of key points in this brief address, and I hope to elaborate on these points in a longer post soon.<br />
<br />
-- Vishal<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1fPowUmqSm8/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1fPowUmqSm8?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Honorable Chancellor, honorable Vice Chancellor,
distinguished leaders of this great university, the graduates and the guests,
it’s a great honor for me to be here today and thank you so much for this
amazing recognition, for which I’m deeply grateful.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">It is a big day for all of you, for the
graduates a culmination of a long journey of education that many of you have
been on.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But is it a culmination? <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">As I think about our future, and your
future, and the times ahead I would like to make three points -about AI, about
jobs and your learning abilities and I hope you will find these useful. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><b>My first point </b>is that we are living in,
we certainly are entering, the times of AI and the jobs that you will go through
over the course of your lifetime, will go through a radical change. Earlier
today, today’s New York times, it’s still the 14<sup>th </sup>in the US, had an
article about the great AI awakening and also today in the New Yorker magazine
there was an article about our automated future and it is just today just two
of their publications. There is no doubt when we look around that the AI
technologies will have a profound impact on the jobs that we see around us today.
Increasingly we have to assume that the jobs that can be precisely articulated
and specified, are going to be automated. Much has been written about this. I
will not belabor this point but we all have heard about jobs from truck
drivers, to retail store owners, medical diagnosis to legal research and in my
own world of IT services, various forms of system administration, business
process operation and even operation and maintenance of complex systems are
going to be automated. And yet we have to live and we have to thrive in these
times. </span></span><span style="font-family: times, "times new roman", serif;">So the question is, can we?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><br /></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><b>My second point </b>is that, yes we can. Of
course we must, but also that we can. We are still in the early stages of these
technologies and the pervasive role that they will ultimately play in our lives.
Recently we have seen, no doubt, some remarkable successes, some remarkable
applications and some amazing achievements of these AI technologies and AI
systems. But when I think about this and when I look at the state of the art, I
realize that we are still quite far from the Society of Mind that Marvin
Minsky<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: red;"> </span></b>wrote
about in mid 1980s. We are still quite far from thinking about enabling a great
symbiosis between intelligent systems and people. We are still quite far from
being able to imbibe and impart our contexts into the contexts of our systems
and vice versa. Being able to achieve shared perspective with ourselves and
using technology to enable that, and being able to achieve shared perspectives
with machines, is still quite a way into our future. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Also when we think about the role of
technology in creating jobs we have to realize that as technology takes away
jobs, the creation and the enabling and scaling of that technology ends up
creating more new kinds of jobs. People say that it is different this time
around with AI because this is about our minds and not just about our bodies.
But nonetheless, the reality is that every technology that will displace the
jobs of today, is going to be followed by the enabling and the construction of
those kinds of technologies. So, despite being early in these times the
second key question becomes how do we thrive in these times, what are we and
especially what are you as young graduates to make of this?<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><b><br /></b></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><b>My third and final point </b>is
that I see only one way for us to thrive in these times and that way is
learning, “EDUCATION”. We have to learn to build these systems. We have to
understand and learn to construct these systems of our future. Even if a system
can drive a truck, a human still has to buy that software and build that system
and that system is written by us. We need to understand computing and artificial
intelligence as fundamental enabling technologies and scale the education of these.
Given that every walk of life around us is going to be transformed by computing,
we are still quite in the early days of this and we have to think about
enabling and equipping ourselves with these technologies. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">My wife Vandana runs our Infosys
foundation in United States, and she recently made this great observation that
in the dark ages 6% of the world’s population could read and write and if you
are to think about the computing and AI as the new forms of literacy, today
less than half a percent of the world’s population can understand and program
what you do implying therefore that we are still in the dark ages when it comes
to computing and the ability to build the systems. And even when we look at the
further out future, at a time when we are able to build systems that can take
precise specifications and do those jobs, no matter what those jobs might be, in
other words, systems that become perfect and problem solving, those problems
that can be precisely defined, we still have the human frontier of problem
finding. Of being able to look into great unknown and identifying and
articulating problems that are yet to be solved. That problem finding, that act
of creativity, that act of innovation is still in our frontier is, still ahead
of us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Techniques like design thinking which the
University of Queensland has been working on are quite fundamental to that
future. We still live in times where innovation is seen as something mystical, something
that is done by a chosen few who somehow are born with the ability to innovate
but when we look around us we realize that innovation is no more than the act
of seeing something that is not there. Seeing something that is yet to be
invented, that if it were to be invented, that would lead to the world that is
more desirable, that is more feasible, that is more viable, a world that would
be better. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">So when I think about these times of AI,
it seems that our destiny is quite straight forward. We all have to become
ignorant, and why not. Nonetheless, whether it is to build these systems to be
relevant in the times of these systems or to be able to become innovators, the
key is ‘learning’. We can no longer believe that going to school that all of
you have done for the first 17 or 20 or 25 years of our lives and then stopping
going to school, is the way of life. We have to think about learning for life,
for our entire lives. We have to learn all of this, but most importantly, we
have to learn to learn itself. We have to ask ourselves what is the world that
we are living in, what is it that makes it what it is and how might I create
the future of this world, a great future of this world.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">Alan Kay, a great teacher of my life,
famously said that, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the best way to
predict the future is to invent it</i>”. I believe that the invention of our
future is what is in our future. In the age of AI, we have to switch our
context from making a living to making a life, a life that may be artificial OR
more importantly a life that may be ours. That in building the AI’s of our
future we end up amplifying ourselves, we end up improving our own humanity. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 106%;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;">I wish you all the very best in these
times ahead, for you and for all of us. Thank you!<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
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-->vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com342tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-18224766460473319052017-08-17T21:27:00.000-07:002017-08-17T21:27:23.849-07:00Moving On...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 13.5pt;">
Earlier today I resigned my position as MD & CEO of Infosys. Here is the mail I sent to our employees. <br />
<br />
--</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Dear Friends,<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
After a lot of reflection, I have resigned from my
position as your MD & CEO effective today.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A succession process has been initiated, with Pravin serving as interim
MD & CEO, and I will work closely with the Board and management team over
the next few months to ensure a smooth transition. In addition, I have agreed
to serve as Executive Vice Chairman on the Board to further ensure continuity
until the new management is in place.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
For days, indeed weeks, this decision has weighed on me. I
have wrestled the pros and cons, the issues and the counterbalancing arguments.
But now, after much thought, and considering the environment of the last few
quarters, I am clear in my decision. It is clear to me that despite our
successes over the last three years, and the powerful seeds of innovation that
we have sown, I cannot carry out my job as CEO and continue to create value,
while also constantly defending against unrelenting, baseless/malicious and
increasingly personal attacks.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">In 2014, we started
with a very challenging set of conditions, and in the last three years, we have
decisively turned things around.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Three years ago, I started this journey with a calling,
to help reshape the company around innovation and entrepreneurship, to deliver breakthrough
value for clients, and to help elevate our work, our standing, our selves, on
the basis of a dual strategy, bringing together dualities of renew and new,
automation and innovation, people and software, to show a new path forward in a
time of unprecedented disruption within the industry and beyond. That time, around
and before June 2014, was a difficult time. Our growth rates were low and
attrition was high. There was a sense of apprehension all around and I came
here to help enable a great transformation as our core business faced intense
pricing pressure, and clients looked increasingly to innovative partners to
help shape their digital futures. Now, a bit more than three years later, I am
happy to see the company doing better in every dimension I can think of.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
We have grown our revenues, from $2.13B in Q1FY15 to
$2.65B this past Q1. We did so while keeping a strong focus on margins, closing
this past quarter at 24.1% operating margin, beating some competitors for the
first time in many years, and improving against most in our industry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps more importantly, our revenue per
employee has grown for six quarters in a row. Our attrition has fallen, from
23.4% in Q1FY15 to 16.9% this past Q1, and high performer attrition is hovering
at or below the single-digit threshold for a while now.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We grew our $100M+ clients from 12 when I
started, to 19, and increased our large deal wins from ~$1.9B in FY15 to ~$3.5B
this past year. We’ve done all this while improving our overall utilization, to
a 10-yr high this past quarter, and an all time high including trainees, while
improving our cash reserves, rewarding employees with a new equity plan, and
returning cash to our stakeholders. And we have done all this while improving
our standing with clients to the highest ever in the 12 years since we’ve done
our client satisfaction survey, and a jump of 22 points in CxO satisfaction.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
A few days ago, Nitesh, Radha, and I met a client in our
office in Palo Alto. It is one of the largest companies in the world - and the
CIO was excited and proud about seeing automation come to life in their
landscape.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her reaction to seeing many
of our innovation projects, as well as our workspace itself, was thoroughly
rewarding, and a testament to all we have achieved. She requested us to bring
our innovative work and processes to everything we do with her team in a
similar space, and even that we help them establish a similar presence for
their company in the valley!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a sentiment
I’ve often heard from clients who’ve visited our 12,000 sqft space here, that
has seen 2200 visits over its ~27 months; clients where we saw much faster than
average revenue growth following their visits. So, as I look back on the three
years as CEO, what brings me the most joy is the new roads that all of you have
traveled, the new frontiers that all of you have enabled.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From embracing the new ideas in education,
teaching ourselves Design Thinking like no one else ever has, learning AI, new
development processes, and more, to applying these learnings via Zero Distance,
a one-of-a-kind program of massive grassroots innovation, powered by education,
by the amazing Zero Bench, and by your creative confidence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With 16500+ ideas generated, 2200+ of which
have already been implemented, ZD is proof that innovation need not be the
domain of a chosen few in some elite department, but is the prerogative of us
all; proof that the extraordinary within each one of us can indeed be
unleashed. To complement this grassroots innovation, we’ve launched 25+ new
services that contributed 8.3% of our revenue last quarter, up from zero in
April 2015.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And our own new software business
is now at 1.6% of revenue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our AI
platform, Nia, now with 160+ scenarios deployed at more than 70 clients, is
helping drive both automation within the company, and breakthrough new business
scenarios outside.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beyond new services
and new software, we’ve ventured into new horizons, from our startup fund’s
investments in promising new businesses, to the work we’ve done in the last 3
years in local hiring around the world, especially in the US, to the exemplary
and inspiring work our US foundation has done in bringing computer science
education and a culture of making, to the masses. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
And I am proud of how we have upheld our values, our
culture, our integrity, whilst we have gone about this massive transformation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am proud of how our Board has worked,
tirelessly, selflessly, these past quarters, despite intense, unfair, and often
malicious and personal, criticism, in not only upholding our standards of
governance and integrity, but also indeed raising these.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>None of our successes would be worthwhile for
a moment, if this was not the case.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I was, and remain,
passionate about the massive transformation opportunity for this company and
industry, but we all need to allow the company to move beyond the noise and
distractions.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Back in May 2014, when I first met many board colleagues,
I thought of the road ahead as a road for the next 33 years of this iconic
company. For Infosys is more than a company: it is an idea, a dream, a
pioneering possibility.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Back then I
thought, just as I do today, that the time ahead called for a company that
could show the way to a digital future, a future where our humanity, amplified
by automation and software, would unleash our creativity, our imagination, to
construct great worlds of our futures, and would do so powered by education, by
our timeless value of learnability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such
an Infosys, whilst staying true to its core, to her values and timeless
principles, would shine the light in an altogether different context, a
different reality. Such an Infosys would be one where an individual’s
entrepreneurship, ability to imagine and create, ability to learn, and to
amplify themselves with software, with AI, would create a greater whole. Rather
than an overarching system enabling the people, the people’s agility and
imagination would create a greater system. Three years later, we can clearly
see that the seeds of this idea have taken root and are growing, into beautiful
new flowers and plants, and I see no reason why these cannot continue, and help
shape our company’s future.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
For sure this journey has been a difficult one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No one, especially me, thought it would be
easy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Transformations are hard to begin
with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A massive transformation, of such
an iconic institution, with such groundbreaking achievements behind her, would
be even tougher, and the exponential rates of change all around us, further
amplified by geopolitical matters, would add that much more headwind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But all this was known, and clear, and in
many ways added to the calling that I felt.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For as the legendary architect Daniel Burnham said, “Make no little plans;
they have no magic to stir man’s blood.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
But after much contemplation I have decided to leave
because the distractions, the very public noise around us, have created an
untenable atmosphere. I deeply believe in creating value in an atmosphere of
freedom, trust and empowerment. Life is too short to engage in battles of
opinions in the public, these add no value, take critical time and focus away
from the business, and indeed add more to the noise, to the eardrum buzz, as I
wrote to you a few months ago. The founding principle of the strategy I laid
out for our renewal was personal empowerment, working in an entrepreneurial
environment.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I need this for my own work
as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Steve Jobs, in his famous
commencement speech at my alma mater, said:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
“Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone
else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other
people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner
voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition,
they somehow already know what you truly want to become.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">I now need to move
forward, and return to an environment of respect, trust and empowerment, where
I can take on new lofty challenges, as can each of you.<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
As Steve Jobs said, I must follow my heart and my
intuition, build my buildings, give my givings, and do something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Over the next weeks and months, I look
forward to working with the Board and management to create a smooth transition,
and simultaneously staring into the great unknown, and to doing something
great, something purposeful, for the times ahead.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And also to spend some time with my loved
ones.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve been away from home far too
often and far too long.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
As I completed my three years recently, many people asked
me if I have any regrets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This question
is more apt today and the answer is a clear NO. Not for a second.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However difficult the noise of the last
several months has been, I wouldn’t trade our time together for anything. I
would not give up the experience of seeing the gleam in your eyes as you described
a new idea, invention, or contribution. You worked on these confidently,
without reward, without arrogance, showing exactly the kind of creative
confidence that David Kelley talked about in Design Thinking – a wonderful
thing to witness. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
I am deeply grateful for the immense support and love
I’ve received from all of you, from our worthy clients for whom we do our
life’s work, and by our shareholders across the globe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am grateful for your trust, confidence and
friendship, and am thankful to our team of amazing leaders, who will help lead
our company to greatness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To my first
Infoscion colleague and trusted friend Ranga, who enabled us to achieve the
things we achieved, to the amazing Ravi, a pocket of passion and energy and
execution excellence, to the calm and steadfast Mohit, who introduced me to the
band of brothers and lived it, day after day, to the larger than life Rajesh,
with his great heart and big laugh, to Binod, a veritable bulldozer brother
with his broad shoulders and broader smile, to the one of a kind Ramadas, the
architect and protector of our magnificent campuses with his indomitable spirit
and world-class excellence, to the always smiling Deepak who helped live the
strategy, to Krish and the best HR team in the world, especially the
extraordinary Richard, Nanju, Shruthi and their amazing team for helping to
carry out some of the craziest and most amazing people initiatives, to
Inderpreet, a new voice to the team, a voice of calm, strength, integrity and a
stability that far belies the little time she’s been with us, to Jayesh and our
entire finance team for their dedication, their impeccable meticulous integrity
and world-class excellence, and especially to my partner, friend, and pillar of
strength, Pravin, who carried all the load in the world, with a smile, impeccable integrity and the
most amazing grace, and will now lead you to the next phase of our company's growth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To Zaiba, Bala sir,
Nagaraju, Hari and many others for making it possible for me to be me and to do
my work, to my Palo Alto family: Sanjay, Abdul, Navin, Ritika, Barbara, Tao,
Vinod, Shabana, April, Sudhir and others who have stood by me and have given up
so much to be a part of this journey and contributed so much to it, and indeed
to thousands of Infoscions who’ve made it all matter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am thankful to Sesh and our entire board
for their unfailing support and confidence in me throughout this journey.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
Together we have achieved a lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even in the midst of all of the distractions,
even as the tendency was to return to the familiar, we still managed to
persevere and make wonderful progress. We have laid the foundation for the next
30 years of Infosys, and I feel deeply proud to have worked alongside all of
you in sowing the seeds that will return this company to the bellwether it once
was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As you’ve all often reminded us,
Infosys is no bigger and no smaller than any of us, the people, the
Infoscions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You are the ones that will
take Infosys to the next 30 years and beyond.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As I think about the time ahead, for all of us, I can only see us
powered by a freedom from the known, of renewing ourselves to thrive in the
time ahead. Each one of you has vindicated my deeply held belief that people
are capable of doing more, achieving more, being more, than they ever imagined
possible. So, keep pushing yourself to do better at whatever you are good at,
but also learning to do things you have never done before, indeed, nobody has
ever done before. I know I will be doing the same.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
The Board, Pravin, and I will communicate additional
details as we move forward in this transition, and meanwhile, we continue our
work as is. I wish all of you the very best in your journeys ahead.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoPlainText">
V<o:p></o:p></div>
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com622tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-18065256963867402932016-03-22T22:55:00.001-07:002016-03-22T22:55:39.239-07:00Andy Grove<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Andy Grove passed away earlier today. A pioneer of our industry. I spent a memorable summer at Intel 25+ years ago, when Andy was the CEO. My brother used to work at the then AI lab and I spent a summer working on some exciting new AI techniques and applying these to semiconductor manufacturing. Andy met the interns, as he used to every year, and spoke from his heart about many things. Excellence, being paranoid, what great leadership is all about, process excellence (he was passionate about seeing Intel be at least one generation ahead of the competition on the microprocessor manufacturing processes), about how there comes a time when the founders of a company leave and then their instincts and values have to be institutionalized into a company's culture and its structures and processes, and many other matters. He also spoke to all of us about our potential, the human potential, with his own experience of surviving the holocaust as a youngster with his mother, escaping the soviet rule and coming to America, and becoming the first non-founder CEO of Intel. Amazing man. His determination to have Intel dominate not only the semiconductor technology, but its manufacturing process, helped create a giant company of our times that is a cornerstone of the digital world. What an example of our human potential. </div>
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R.I.P András István Gróf...</div>
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com95tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-81666458690672268052016-01-25T19:30:00.002-08:002016-01-25T19:30:45.196-08:00Marvin Minsky, 1927-2016<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Prof. Marvin Lee Minsky, or just Marvin to those who knew him, died last night. We have lost one of the great humans of our time, perhaps of all time. A humble, brilliant, passionate man, with a blazing intellect and an amazing zen, a childlike curiosity, Marvin pioneered much of the early work in AI, together with John McCarthy, Herb Simon, and Allen Newell and others. He opened our eyes to much that was new, and he and his academic progeny have shaped a lot of what we know about AI today.<br />
<br />
With a grad school recommendation letter of all of a single line, Marvin changed my life. And his work, his teachings, his ways of exploring the unknown, his ability to span and to combine several widely varied disciplines, have been a great lesson to me, a source of great inspiration over more than 25 years, from my graduate studies, to our recent work on AI, both at Infosys and with OpenAI. Indeed when I started my AI lecture recently for Infoscions, not happy with any of the recent work I saw, I went back to a paper Marvin wrote before I was born (<a href="https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.803/pdf/steps.pdf" target="_blank">"Steps Towards Artificial Intelligence"</a>).<br />
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As sad as I am, and countless others are at his passing, perhaps even sadder is his recent <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/video/543031/marvin-minsky-reflects-on-a-life-in-ai/" target="_blank">statement</a>, on the current state of the work in AI, at a time when we hear about AI and its impact on our world and our lives all around us. Last week I was in Davos at the World Economic Forum's mtg, and AI, and its feared impact on people's lives, and jobs, was the talk of the town. I hosted a panel with some key experts as well, to try and add something hopefully thoughtful, to all these voices, but perhaps just added more to the noise, and all along I kept thinking of how Marvin would have reacted to all that sound, all those alarms. Perhaps he'd have chuckled, before unleashing a typical Marvin zinger that would put things in perspective, and yet enlighten. Despite the widespread interest in, and hype around, AI, we are nowhere close to implementing many of Marvin's ideas, including his work in the society of mind, which he published ~25 years ago.<br />
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So in looking back on his life, and reflecting on his passing, perhaps the best we can all resolve to do is to live his dream, his aspiration, of building systems that get ever closer to Artificial Intelligence, but to do so in a way that he would have been proud of; his purposefulness and integrity, his gang of experimenters, his childlike curiosity, his "model railroad club", his instinct to look at things from many different perspectives. That a purposeful, unencumbered, pursuit of artificial intelligence may in the process get us that much closer to our natural spirituality.<br />
<br />
Upon hearing the news of Marvin's passing, Alan Kay, his friend for the last 50 odd years, said to me "... there was no one ever like him." So true.<br />
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R.I.P Marvin. There was no one ever like you. We will miss you...<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com43tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-48489119906442537962015-12-13T10:21:00.001-08:002015-12-13T10:21:12.742-08:00OpenAI: AI for All<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Yesterday saw the <a href="https://openai.com/blog/introducing-openai/">announcement</a> about the birth of <a href="https://openai.com/">OpenAI</a>, a non-profit organization to develop and advance Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, and share these in the greater good. Infosys, and I, are a part of this endeavor, and very excited about it and I've been asked tons of questions in the last 24 hours about this, so I thought I'll write some thoughts down.<br />
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<b>Why?</b><br />
<br />
A few weeks ago, Marvin Minsky, one of the fathers of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the one who gave the field its first definition -- that AI is "the science of making machines do things that would require intelligence if done by men" -- made a few <a href="http://www.technologyreview.com/video/543031/marvin-minsky-reflects-on-a-life-in-ai/">sobering statements</a> about the state of the art in AI. Indeed I felt sad listening to this giant lament the lack of fundamental progress in the field, and highlight some of the underlying causes. And this despite all the buzz and hype AI work has picked up lately. Marvin is one of the truly great human beings and scientists, whose teachings and advice helped influence my life and led me to focus on AI in my grad studies and beyond. So more than anything else, I see OpenAI as an opportunity to "do something about it".<br />
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My friend and teacher Alan Kay once referred to Sam Altman as a "builder of civilizations". When Sam, a wise man who is but 30 years old, was thinking about the idea of building an open ecosystem for, among other endeavors, AI, Alan and I shared our ideas with him and our experiences. Sam asked me if I would be ok with the fact that such an endeavor would be untethered and would produce results generally in the greater interests of humanity, and he was somewhat surprised by my reaction, that indeed I would only support this venture if such an openness was a fundamental requirement! In all my experience with corporate research teams, I found a continual struggle for the teams to find relevance with the work in the "here and now", usually knowing that this unnecessary and premature seeking of relevance not only blinds us to those opportunities that can shift our paradigms, it defeats the point of research. He shares the view that cooperation helps dramatically improve our lot, helps create a foundation for much larger value creation than any isolated "feudal" system can. Indeed, endeavors such as agriculture, and science, show that when we share, we improve all of us. As Newton once said, "if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants".<br />
<br />
I am really excited that Sam, Elon Musk, and others -- including Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Amazon Web Services, and Infosys of course -- are supporting this great endeavor, and in addition to Alan, a great set of leaders will serve as advisors. Ilya Sutskever, who has worked over the last several years as a leader in developing the so called "deep learning" techniques, will direct the research at OpenAI, and will be joined by several dynamic leaders and individual contributors, whose conviction and imagination will help this field move forward, based on the best of what we know, the best ideas, the best inventions, and the key lessons.<br />
<br />
Our wish is that together the OpenAI team will do unfettered research in the most important, most relevant dimensions of AI, no matter how long it takes to get there, not limited to just identifying dancing cats in videos, but to creating ideas and inventions that amplify our humanity, that help us learn more, see/perceive and understand more, and be more.<br />
<br />
<b>Why Open?</b><br />
<br />
One question that's been asked since yesterday, is why should this be open? Isn't it better to have deep AI be in the hands of a select few experts or specialists? My sense is, our trust in complex systems stems mostly from understanding these and their predictability, whether it is nuclear reactors, lathe machines, or 18-wheelers; or of course, AI. If complex systems are not open, not open to be used, extended, and learned about, they end up becoming yet another mysterious thing for us, ones that we end up praying to and mythifying. The more open we make AI, the better.<br />
<br />
<b>Why Infosys?</b><br />
<br />
Another question that's been asked a lot, is why Infosys? We at Infosys, with over 150k software engineers, are unique beneficiaries of and contributors to this endeavor. Most of our work is in building and maintaining software systems, and AI will increasingly shape the construction and evolution of intelligent software systems, in all kinds of domains and industries. In addition, as a large services company, many parts of our work can transform fundamentally with AI. In services like infrastructure management, business process outsourcing, and verification and maintenance of existing software, we can massively migrate mechanizable work to automation, and instead build intelligent software systems, that amplify us, our abilities, as well as those of our customers. So a great transformation that we are undertaking at Infosys, is to embrace automation at a very large scale, so people can, as Prof Mashelkar once said, "do more with less for more", and at the same time, educate ourselves in new areas to help build intelligent systems, but also to innovate in our work, to exercise our creativity in everything we do, and amplify our abilities, our humanity, using AI.<br />
<br />
But beyond business, there is another key reason; our endeavor to do purposeful work. Our founders always believed in this. Many years ago, Mr Murthy and our founders started the ACM Infosys award, which celebrates great young Computer Science practitioners. The Infosys Science Foundation supports work in the pure sciences, as does the Infosys Foundation in India. And most recently, the Infosys Foundation in the US, is working hard on its mission to help enable/expand computer science education, and has already started many promising initiatives here in the US. So OpenAI aligns very nicely with our long-held values.<br />
<br />
So as we get started on this great journey, I find myself excited, hopeful that OpenAI will help uncover great innovations, that new AI techniques yet to be discovered, and built to share, built in ways that are open to all, will help us transcend our limitations, improve and amplify us all, and that our work in artificial intelligences, may help bring us closer to our natural spirituality...<br />
<br />
-Vishal<br />
Palo Alto,<br />
Dec 12, 2015<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com129tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-88775467213334114562015-08-01T12:53:00.003-07:002015-08-01T12:55:50.025-07:00Days, Quarters, Years. The Moments in Our Momentous Lives...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Today marks an year since I started my journey as the CEO of Infosys. One Year. One spin of the earth around the sun, with my life's work centered around the Infosys planet. There has been a ton of interest about my first year. This, of course, is a good thing. I feel privileged to be in this position, and feel ever more aware of the weight of the responsibility. But I don't understand the significance of the one year mark. I never did. Anniversaries and artificial ritualized celebrations of the sort, beyond the uniquely personal aspects of these, somehow always seemed to me to be pointless constructions.</div>
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We posted a good quarter recently. Our Q1 results saw the best revenue growth in 15 quarters. Most of this was due to great execution by our sharply focused leadership teams, and some of it due to the innovation seeds that we've sown over various points last year, that are starting to bear fruit. But again, the 90-day cycle, an imposition largely constructed by public markets around the world, seems to defy any meaningful purpose. Indeed, arguably, focus on 90-day performance, can often distract us from longer-term progress. When we look at many emerging and flaring crises in the broader economy around us, we can see the results of some of the short-term gain oriented decisions and mindsets. Whether in the debt matter between the Eurozone and Greece, or Italy, or the stock market situation in China or even many industries' responses to the disruptions they face, etc... We all see large-scale phenomena over the centuries that are collaborative in nature, whether agriculture or science or long-term research or some forms of democracies, and the fruits they continually yield, and yet we, by and large, make like hunters and gatherers and force ourselves into local minimas, knowing that the right things to do have far longer cycles than 90 days. There are far too few examples of long-term innovation, and waiting for fruits to be borne over longer lifecycles than our attentions and our senses can stay tuned for.</div>
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And yet we too are governed by our cycles. Our life cycles. Earlier this week Prof. Kalam passed away. An extraordinary, and extraordinarily humble and grounded human being, one that set an almost incomparable example of what a human can do, and at the same time showed us that a human can do so if we get ourselves to. While doing something he loved, his amazing life came to an abrupt end. Once again, a reminder of the fragility, and yet the finality of our lives. We shine, sometimes brightly, for a while, usually an all too brief a while, and then we fade away, into the same grand void the same grand dance that creates us.</div>
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So all this got me thinking this weekend, on our moments, our anniversaries and our lives.</div>
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I was in Munich yesterday and the day before, visiting some clients and meeting our team. Had some amazing sessions and discussions. But the visit with our onsite team was what stayed with me. Young kids and experienced Infoscions. Full of passion and energy. Inspired. Of course there were the selfies. But it was the glint, the gleam, in their eyes that I found inspiring, and awesome. They were all bringing innovations to their day-to-day work, and were excited about sharing these. I asked them about their lives in Munich, the long summers, the harsh winters, the language, the food. Most of the colleagues were young, a lot of them singles, yet to marry. Living away from families and loved ones. One young male infoscion said he's had to learn to cook. That there is a local grocery store (called Bollywood!). But their energy, the human energy, was palpable. And on my way back to the hotel, I thought this was what it was all about; this urge to innovate, to do more, to be more, to do something beyond us, to improve the lot around us, every day, every single day. To wake up every day and to work to improve things. To deal with the struggles and stresses of our lives, and yet to work to endure and to improve. To renew all we are and all we do, and yet bring some new in addition. To marry our natural daily cycles, with longer-term improvements and patience. Living in the moment and yet not being blinded by instant gratification. So the most heartening bit of all was to see this basic duality at work in our teams, and that lifted me up. I found that to be the most fitting realization for today. And if today is anything like yesterday was, anniversary or not, it will have been a worthwhile day, a day to remember for all the right reasons, a great piece of our extraordinarily fragile, immortal, lives.</div>
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-3842715480399465052015-01-24T23:14:00.002-08:002015-01-24T23:14:36.439-08:00Davos, a state of mind<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I wrote the following thoughts on our internal Infosys portal, and felt it is worth sharing with the wider world...</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Davos is a small town in Switzerland, but, for a few days in January, during the World Economic Forum’s gathering, it transforms into a large state of mind. I’ve been here with our amazing, inspired, Infosys team, meeting with clients, partners, world leaders, thought leaders and other leaders and visionaries. Beyond the learnings and the dealings, there are the journeys Davos puts you on. It is easy to get lost here, in more ways than one. In the maze of routes and security gates that connect the various venues. But also in the plethora of thoughts, visions, roadmaps, forecasts, warnings and other articulations, for these are to be found all around, aplenty. I’ve been absorbing much of this, over the last 3 days, and every once in a while have also been adding to the mix, answering the questions of curious journalists, and in other venues. It is somewhat surreal; there is a lot of human warmth in the freezing alpine cold, a very curious and spontaneous blend of diversity, of thought, of personalities, of ego, and of humanity in general. The atmosphere, in many ways, drowns out the content. And all you remember, to paraphrase Maya Angelou, is how you felt. As I look back on the last 3 days, I feel good, about the future of the world, the future of our company. For sure much doomsday prognostication was to be found, and real threats analyzed, but by and large, as I get ready to visit a great client and partner of ours, at 11PM</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">, I find myself with a distinct feeling of comfort, that the road ahead of us is ours to carve, ours to shape, that while there are great big factors and forces that can influence our world and forces that can shape our contexts, that the stage has been set for us to do our thing, and that if we do it, the greatness to follow is ours to achieve. That the times ahead are calling on us to be bold, to be decisive, to be determined, not to sway in the winds driven by others, but in building the great futures that our clients seek and that we deserve. So in that sense Davos has been a great mirror, a great echo chamber, one where you travel far to reach, and get lost in the brilliance of humanity, only to find that which you always knew, but perhaps had lost the courage to believe…</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">I leave here as a world citizen, a proud Infoscion, ready to, together with you, all of us together, to build the future of our predictions, the future of our aspirations, a more human future. And that, underneath the layers, of snow and of words, is what I've found this town to be all about.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Best, </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">V</span></div>
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-65858895999992626712014-11-28T20:46:00.001-08:002014-11-28T20:46:27.930-08:00Rain Drops in Tokyo<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Gray and rainy day in Tokyo. Rain drops making their way down the window; a very beautiful, reflective, humbling dance. Puts things in perspective, as we go about our daily busy-nesses and try to find our own ways to be thankful on this thanksgiving wknd...</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">As I sit here, busy with important, yet mundane, matters, and try to find a balance between reflecting and living in the moment, between living in the here and now, and in the nows down the horizons of time, the flow of some of the drops down my window made me write this.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><i>In the moment</i></span><br />
<i><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">With its momentum</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">The rain drop slides down the window</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Purposeful, making its way to its potential</span><br style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;" /><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">Does it know it is the rain?</span></i><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">And then the 5-7-5 spirit of the Haiku, led to this...</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><i>In the moment, raindrop slides</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"><i>With its momentum, purposefully down the window</i></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">-- Vishal, Nov 29, 2014</span><br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com28tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-15401376974662076122014-09-25T15:45:00.003-07:002014-09-25T15:45:58.841-07:00Phool Inder Sikka<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Phool Rani, Nov 1940 - Sep 2014.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuQ6eXdQGLd1idEsnx9FB0iT0-OqfyU9RfvwOL-HSMwaLzMcJRUS3ZCISvWVfSXnSJi0PJMS4r5VxQ7Xf5XwRLP53MbjYwnbDhVPLA1ZwDk9oMUebyyajLGB7c1PnHHZHEdZwrCdSKg0/s1600/mama_and_me.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDuQ6eXdQGLd1idEsnx9FB0iT0-OqfyU9RfvwOL-HSMwaLzMcJRUS3ZCISvWVfSXnSJi0PJMS4r5VxQ7Xf5XwRLP53MbjYwnbDhVPLA1ZwDk9oMUebyyajLGB7c1PnHHZHEdZwrCdSKg0/s1600/mama_and_me.JPG" height="320" width="304" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="font-size: 13px; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">My mother and me, circa 1971. </span></td></tr>
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Mother, Wife, Mother-In-Law, Grandmother, Sister, Daughter, Friend.<br />
Delhiite, Gujarati, Californian.<br />
School Teacher, Life's Teacher, Warrior, Rebel, Pioneer, Avid Traveler, Adventurer, Foodie, Curiousity Hound, Brilliant, Larger-than-life, Bon Vivant, Encourager, Comfort-giver, Pacifier, Confidant, Guidepost...<br />
The first, and the strongest pillar in our lives.<br />
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R.I.P. Mama.<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-47281499342165870552014-09-01T00:44:00.004-07:002014-09-01T10:45:31.430-07:00Our Second Third<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It’s been a month since I started as the CEO of Infosys. An intense and rewarding journey. And journey is a key word here: I've been on the road a lot. And perhaps that is fitting, especially when charting a new course, because the thinking of it happens on planes, trains and automobiles heading in all kinds of directions.<br />
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Late in the evening of my very first day, I found myself in our university in Mysore, addressing ~13k of our fired up, screaming, trainees in the amphitheater of our magnificent campus. And that campus, which I’d heard so much about over the years, was far beyond my expectations. Its beauty, its attention to detail, its magnitude, and its sheer awesomeness, is something to behold. Almost 350 acres, lush green, massive use of renewable energy, and just a great example of sustainability and smart city innovation. And the university itself is an extraordinary institution. We can train ~16k resident students concurrently with a world-class team of educators. Truly exemplifying the spirit of a company that is founded on education, on learning. As my mom used to say, when we can learn anything, we can do anything. And nowhere is that simple truth more evident than in our Mysore campus, where you get the palpable feeling that the young trainees, on their way to great companies in the world to do great work, can do anything, because they can learn anything. It became clear to me that revitalizing our learning core must be a key focus for us going forward.</div>
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And last week I was in Lodz, Poland, where one of our largest BPO team works from. Part of an enterprise that endeavors to run nothing less than the mission-critical business processes of some of the largest companies in the world. Our team collectively processes hundreds of Billions of dollars in trade on behalf of our clients, just the procurement processes oversee more than 1% of the world's business trade! But what amazed me the most was our team there. Their passion, desire to improve, their creativity, was amazing, and infectious. The way Business Process Outsourcing has come to be, what I refer to as yesterday's BPO, is not so relevant to businesses anymore. We can do better. We must do better. And at Lodz one can see how automation, intelligence technologies, collaboration technologies, design-thinking, and a culture of continuous improvement both radical and incremental, will completely rethink BPO, into something far more exciting and relevant. One that is focused on innovation, on a deep understanding of how business is done, and on amplifying our teams with technology and automation and AI techniques, so they can deliver amazing business value and solutions, not merely augmenting them in a dreary downward spiral of cost. It was exhilarating.<br />
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And in between these two experiences, there was:<br />
- Connect 2014 in Las Vegas, where our worldwide sales team as well as many partners were gathered. It was great to be with this fired up team, sharing strategy and roadmap, opportunities and concerns, and to just understand and learn and connect.<br />
<span style="font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">- Tons of hanging out with Infoscions across the board, learning the company's culture and fabric (and the bounty of TLAs that Infoscions seem to rattle off fluently). I've been reading about our products, analysts reports, our processes, many many examples of code and experiences, and also the 2700+ concrete ideas that were submitted by Infoscions as part of Murmuration. </span><br />
- An offsite of 3 great days with our entire leadership team, in the august environs of my alma mater Stanford, thinking thru things, fighting thru issues old and new, small and big, mundane and sublime, as well as hanging out at the d.school doing a great embrace of design thinking, sitting down with startup companies and listening to many friends from the industry and the valley, talking about the road ahead for us.</div>
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- And more than 20 enlightening sessions with clients and partners.<br />
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What all of this has made clear, more than ever before, is that the world around us is being transformed in a fundamental way with software, with computing and communication technologies. As bits reshape and pervade the atoms all around us, connecting us and the world around us, most businesses find themselves in a struggle to survive, to transform themselves and to be relevant in the times to come. And in this struggle sits the great opportunity for us, the great opportunity of our times. Every client I talk to, invariably has two distinct sets of priorities:<br />
1. Renewing their existing systems and landscapes and activities. Opening up their existing systems, to the benefits of cloud computing and other technologies, opening them up to the pervasive connectedness around us, whether of mobility, or connected systems and sensors, or analytics and complex data science techniques for business improvements and also <span style="font-size: 12.727272033691406px;">achieving operational efficiencies in their existing operations.</span><br />
2. Building completely new systems to help their businesses grow in new ways, in "being digital" as Nicholas Negroponte presaged 20 years ago. New intelligent systems and applications, built on new platforms, in new unprecedented areas of business, where software is making its way for the very first time, and where previous generation systems simply can't be transformed or bent into. And these systems must be built in completely new ways, with new economics, even sometimes with new business models.<br />
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This dichotomy of Renew and New, is the basis for our clients' future. And it must be ours too. In many ways it is a timeless dichotomy. Alan Kay (and Arthur Koestler) called it the pink plane and the blue plane. Our clients must transform themselves with this dual priority. And so must we. Our transformation must enable, and follow from, that of our clients. And to enable all of this, we have to invest in our future, in deep employee engagement and massive two-way communication, in research and technology and learning new ways, new hows and new whats, and especially in education. Our team and I are working thru all these matters. I am looking forward to starting to share elements of our road ahead beginning in mid-October. But for now it is clear that our work ahead will be driven by<br />
- our grounding in education,<br />
- while continually improving and optimizing our existing business areas with better processes and better automation/intelligence in all walks of our business, and<br />
- in embracing and practicing design-thinking and innovation to help us and our clients explore their great new frontiers. <br />
I look fwd to sharing more on our road ahead starting in mid-october.<br />
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On this labor day, as I get ready to get on another flight, I am surprised, and inspired, by the parallel between the journey of India and that of Infosys. Infosys is 33 years old, and I’ve referred to our road ahead as a journey for the next 33 years, the next third of a century, our second third. A couple of weeks ago India celebrated her Independence Day, her 67 years of independence. For half of that journey, my company has been around, as a leader, a pioneer. And as I look to its, and India’s, next 33 years, which will culminate in India’s 100 years as an independent nation, I find myself thinking about the great human potential that is yet to be fulfilled. The great amplification that we can bring to ourselves, and to others, with our education, our learnings, our skills, our products and services, our culture. How the transformation of our company, can be, and must be, an enabling transformation of all of our clients with great, purposeful technology. And I find myself full of hope, expectations, anxiety, excitement, like a traveler at the beginning of a great journey, a rewarding one, full of great experiences and challenges, great fun and accomplishments, and contributions, a journey that enriches and empowers us all.</div>
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com52tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-29865535774791616262014-07-04T11:30:00.000-07:002014-07-05T23:04:02.362-07:00Transitions and Anchors<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The last 8 weeks have been surreal, a blur. From running all of SAP's products to being appointed the next CEO of Infosys, I've been through two extraordinary transitions within a period of time that feels like an instant. And at the same time, these two transitions happened amid the backdrop of much bigger transitions, and transformations, that organizations go through, from companies to countries. Transformations they must go through, to survive, to continue to be relevant, when the circumstances and contexts around them change dramatically. Companies around the world, including mine, are going through these transitions, driven to a large extent by software and computing technology. And as I write this over the fourth of July weekend here in the US, my country of citizenship, I join more than 300 million citizens in taking the time to celebrate independence and big transformative ideas, such as individual freedom, democracy and a constitution to guide a nation. And at the same time, my maternal homeland India has just seen a great transition of its own, and more than a billion citizens find themselves hopeful and looking ahead to a great transformation under a new transformative leadership. So I've found myself reflecting on both my own transitions and those of large organizations, and thought this summer weekend is a good time to write some of these thoughts down.<br />
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I was at SAP for 12 years. More than a quarter of my life. And we did a lot. It was a great ride, a great wave. After the news of my resignation and my sudden departure from SAP came out, there was at first the shock of the abruptness with which all this happened. But such is the nature of waves. A great ride one moment and gone the next. This was followed by an incredible outpouring of support from thousands of friends and colleagues, more than four thousand of them, deeply heartfelt emotions, and show of support, that made this transition so memorable and the 12 year journey so worthwhile. It reminded me that we are defined not only by the work we do, but also by the deep and lasting relationships that we build during our journeys. <br />
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Among the tons of calls that I received in the aftermath of the news, there was one that was going to be very significant in shaping, in bringing about, another transition, both in my life and in that of a large company's. This was from a recruiter leading the CEO search for Infosys, a pioneering Indian IT company. Within a couple of weeks I found myself being swept by another massive wave. The iconic nature of Infosys, especially in India, made it impossible to delay the decision any longer, and I was announced as the next CEO of Infosys on June 12, scarcely 6 weeks after leaving SAP. As I write this, I am looking forward to taking the leadership responsibility on Aug 1, and looking forward to a great transition that must follow my little transition. A great transition and its set of challenges and opportunities, that await my new company, as well as every company in our industry, and indeed as software reshapes the world around us, every company in the world.<br />
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Transitions at large companies are in many ways similar to personal ones. Perhaps this is not surprising. Doug Engelbart had compared organizations to organisms. Companies, after all, are us. No more, and no less, than us, the people within them. So a transformation of a company, is really about the transformation of the people within, and around it, transformation of the contexts we form, the processes we have, and of the things we do. So when I see the debate underway among Harvard professors about the Innovator's Dilemma, and when I look back on what we achieved at SAP, my fundamental conclusion is that there is no innovator's dilemma. There is only a desire, a willingness, a courage, to change. To learn. To understand new ways of working and being relevant. The idea that there is some kind of a rule blocking an organization's ability to deal with disruption, makes no sense to me. That these disruptors came and disrupted us and there was nothing we could do about it, is simply nonsense. Disruption is not an excuse, a fait accompli, it is simply an opportunity to learn new skills and to develop new products and services, and processes and economics. An opportunity to renew ourselves and our organizations. And it comes down to having anchors that help us guide through such a change. Anchors in these cases tend to be the deeply rooted principles, experiences, values and ideas/visions that companies are built upon. Competencies and processes follow from these, and then the products and services delivered, and the relationships, the economics, etc. emerge. But the grounding, the anchors, determine how the organization transitions.<br />
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Many people have asked me about how I dealt with such a large transition so quickly? I reflected on it, and realized that we too have our personal anchors that help manage these. Our perceptions are relative. In that, our ability to understand reality is based on observing and measuring change. From our sight to our hearing, and even in deep silence, when our senses are asleep, our measures are all relative. And so it is that we seek our solace in our anchors. We measure how far we've drifted, or how far others have drifted from us, with reference to our anchors. And I found myself in the comfort of my own anchors. From my alma mater, to true friends who shared a deep sense of personal connection and roots and expressed their concern and pain and brought support. Some long-time teachers whose wisdom, and clarity, was very welcome, to some newly acquired relationships, guardians of principle and regulation, who became friends and whose strength carried us forward. To family who showed that blood is thicker than water, and to the spirituality that one finds solace in, within and without. And then there is my wife, my V. My companion, my compass, my anchor. Her singular support, strength, dedication, selflessness and passion, have reminded me of what unquestioned support is all about, what love means and makes us do. I can best evoke what John Nash said in his Nobel prize winning speech in 1994:<br />
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"...And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found.</div>
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I’m only here tonight because of you.</div>
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You are the reason I am.</div>
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You are all my reasons.</div>
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Thank you."</div>
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Thank you V.</div>
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We often hear that with the right values within us and the right support beside us, we can deal with any transition. But when we think about it, we realize that with these two elements guiding us, transitions don't even matter. And perhaps that is the constancy that we seek, amid the chaos and the noise and the change. The constancy of the stillness and purpose that is within us, the constancy of the love, support & strength that we derive from the relationships right next to us. Great transitions happen because of the purposeful work done by everyone in an organization. And purposeful work comes from unwavering purpose within us, and from the strength of the purposeful relationships all around us. As we celebrate our independence, we, both as organisms, as well as the organizations that we form, owe our deepest gratitude to our anchor points. The relationships, the lessons and the principles, that have kept us from going adrift, and provided us with the direction, the purpose, in our journeys...<br />
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-- Vishal Sikka<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-89033129962280332662014-05-01T17:02:00.002-07:002014-05-01T18:58:21.024-07:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Words and Wisdom...</div>
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Many of you have asked me about an article published in E3 that talks about me and other leaders of our company in a callous and unrestrained manner. Since this is about our work, and today is labor day, I thought it appropriate to say a few words on this matter.<u></u><u></u></div>
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I joined SAP about 12 years ago. I've spent more than a quarter of my life here, learning from colleagues working in every location and function, but also from our leaders, especially Hasso as well as Henning. I have worked with mostly a new generation of SAP, my friends and colleagues, some also mentioned in the article. When I first came to SAP, I used to wander the hallways, bridges and corners of our buildings in Walldorf, trying to understand our roots, our fabric, our purpose. During this time, I sought inspiration from one of my favorite books: Hermann Hesse's <i>Siddhartha</i>. <u></u><u></u></div>
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<i>Siddhartha</i> is an extraordinary combination of the cultures of Germany and my native India, and a deep inspiration to an entire generation of Americans, the very 3 cultures that have shaped who I am. Towards the end of his book, when the two main characters Siddhartha and Govinda, now old men, speak about wisdom and knowledge, Mr. Hesse wrote something profound in the voice of Siddhartha:<u></u><u></u></div>
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<i>"...Wissen kann man mitteilen, Weisheit aber nicht. Man kann sie finden, man kann sie leben, man kann von ihr getragen werden, man kann mit ihr Wunder tun, aber sagen und lehren kann man nicht. ...eine Wahrheit läßt sich immer nur aussprechen und in Worte hüllen, wenn sie einseitig ist. Einseitig ist alles, was mit Gedanken gedacht und mit Worten gesagt werden kann, alles einseitig, alles halb, alles entbehrt der Ganzheit, des Runden, der Einheit."<u></u><u></u></i></div>
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In English: <i>“Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it. …A truth can only be expressed and enveloped in words if it is one-sided. Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth.”<u></u><u></u></i></div>
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Our words, including mine here, are at best half-truths to you the reader. But sometimes words are worse than half-truths, far worse. They are the fabrications of a gossip-monger. This article is one such example, as are others like it lately. It is without attribution, quotes, or review by the people it speaks about and whose ambitions, motives and inner-most values it describes, without ever having asked them about these, nor understood. As such, it represents a reality that does not exist, except perhaps in the fanciful imagination of a writer. It is governed by base motivations one can only speculate upon, perhaps under even baser influences. What makes it truly irresponsible is that it is articulated to the world under the guise of a legitimate publication - a gross abuse of journalistic duties.<u></u><u></u></div>
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Our metrics, our means of perceiving reality, are inevitably relative. Our perspectives, our points of view, shape who we are. Great collections of diverse points of view create rich syntheses of knowledge that enrich us all. This, as Hermann Hesse so eloquently articulated, can become the basis for our personal wisdom. This wisdom is then our connection to an absolute truth. No matter how long or how short our journeys, how broad or narrow our reach, or how big or small our jobs and titles, our wisdom is uniquely personal to us. But, perspectives are only valuable when they are honest, and grounded in reality. Spoken from the heart. Seen through the eyes of an innocent four year old. This is what Design Thinking teaches us. This is what Hasso has taught me. This is what Einstein discovered. This is what enlightened the Buddha, and what Herr Hesse invoked in his masterpiece.<u></u><u></u></div>
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Everything else is just talk, words disturbing the air around us, for a short fleeting while...<u></u><u></u></div>
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-- Vishal</div>
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-6119347280431726442013-12-21T10:10:00.005-08:002013-12-21T10:11:34.205-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Delhi: Memories, Objects and Change<br />
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Dec 22, 2013<br />
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Delhi, India. I shouldn't say Delhi. I should say Dilli. I found myself here with a few free hours today, out of an *incredibly* hectic week. So I went by some old spots, Bengali market, Hanuman Mandir, Connaught Place, Lajpat Nagar, .... The brain is immediately drawn to the sights, so different now, yet still familiar. The colors, the haze, the crowds, the structures, the spaces. And beyond the sights, the sounds, the tastes, and, especially, the smells. The smoky, dusty, musky air. The fragrances of flowers being sold and foods being cooked, and the foul smells of garbage. All mixed into an unforgettable reminder of the ephemeral present, that is also, yet, timeless. More than any other sense, the smell takes you back. But back where? I remember being here 30 years ago, shortly after Delhi had seen a great renewal, in preparation of the Asian games in 1982. The structures are still there, but they are different. There is Talkatora stadium. There is RML hospital. Wow, Bangla Sahib is so different now. My mom used to go to these places. This is her Dilli. And of the rest of us. I guess most of it is from memory, perhaps the rest is my imagination? But it isn't only the structures that are different. It is also us. We change. Indeed when we think about it, change is all there is. The constancy of the twirl, the great movement, both human and beyond, that I see around me, was in that sense also there 30 years ago, just as it is today, and yet it is different. What is it? Is it an activity? Is it nature continually transforming the objects around us in a kind of eternal dance?<br />
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The more I think about it, the more convinced I am that while we think of the world in terms of objects, things, entities, etc. indeed all these are temporary constructs. Activities, and their change, seems to be all that is going on around us. And everything that comes across as objects, I believe, is simply a set of activities in progress that our senses "snapshot" into an object, temporarily, ephemerally, persisting/materializing it in our memories, as though it is a fixed, permanent thing. <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> Even though it isn't. O<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;">ur societies, even our languages, seem to be geared towards "things", not "activities", geared towards particles and objects, not waves and processes. </span></span>THe plate of chili chow mein in front of me, seems to be an object, but in fact<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #222222;"> is something that was flour and water and a bunch of other things that came together into an activity for a short period of time and then disappeared. </span>I</span>t is just a temporary materialization of something we observe and experience. SOmething that exists only for a moment, and in our senses.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #222222; font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I get the distinct sense that we must improve our ability to articulate actions, activities, processes, and think in these terms more so than in terms of objects, and to think of objects as transient materializations of activities. </span>And as I think of this, my thoughts drift off to computing. Us computer scientists, and IT practitioners, are horrible, and horribly primitive, at articulating actions, activities, processes. Even in purer object-oriented languages, most of the code seems to be about articulating actions. Whether it is software actions, like "book me a flight to London" or "balance my checkbook" or "repair a customer's credit" or whatever, or more "concrete" actions like commands to a robot to "go to Vishal's office with a cup of tea". Our ability to articulate actions succinctly and precisely, being able to extend, compose, project on or decompose actions is extremely primitive. We are still in the dark ages in this regard, and we must improve. This is one of my endeavors with the work on River and much more needs to be done here.<br />
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But all that is for a different day. Today is about Dilli. And to head out with some friends on a last evening here for this trip, to observe, and participate in, some activities, to make some memories, in a memorable place. For Delhi is more than memorable, it is a permanent memory.<br />
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-- Vishal<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-81259850004850258942013-11-03T14:06:00.002-08:002013-11-03T14:28:30.105-08:00Seeing the Lights: Some Frontiers for Enterprises<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It is the morning of Diwali, and already Diwali evening in my Matrabhoomi (country of birth). As Indians around the world look ahead to lighting Diyas in their houses, and lighting up the skies with fireworks, I've been missing being back home, missing the sights, the sounds and the tastes, and most importantly the lights. The colors, the glow, the patterns, the beauty, the magic. Good news is, here in our adopted homeland, there is plenty of Indian diaspora, and there will be, I'm sure, much fun and fireworks for all of us Indians, and the Indians at heart.<br />
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But Diwali is about more than the lights outside, and indeed much more about the lights within. To see, and to reflect on, what is important. How we should shape and focus our efforts, our intents and goals, and our time. To work on that which matters most. The "good", and not the "evil". I've been thinking about these matters lately. Thinking that the leading institutions of our time don't do enough to move the ball fwd for humanity, focusing rather on advancing their own agendas incrementally, or worse, their egos and reputations instead. The big consumer web companies seem driven by taking over more and more of our privacy, and people seem to have a general lack of understanding what they are giving up to receive these "free" services, and end up sharing their information trail to be monetized by others for all it is worth. Leading companies in all major industries seem focused on dealing with the new technological realities that have enabled new economic models that are profoundly disruptive to the ways they've done business for decades or even longer. And often an early casualty of this is investments in research and fundamental work in advancing the important areas. At a time when we know so little of our world, so little of our own self, our brains, diseases, energy, etc., even less is being done to invest in unconstrained/unburdened and long-term investigations into these important matters. Learning would be the missing link, but almost all work on rethinking education seems to also be about commercial endeavors that focus on new "learning platforms", rather than on improving our ability to learn.<br />
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When I think about the work that can be done, e.g. in the software industry, several things come to mind:<br />
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1. Learning of course. Better environments for learning, a culture of education, so businesses, and employees can better adapt to, and respond to changing circumstances. This has to be one of the big endeavors in all businesses. I am working to make this happen at SAP. Both in our own company's culture, as well as learning related products that SAP can bring to businesses. And beyond learning, in better ways to communicate, to share, to understand, and to design. All are needed.<br />
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2. Economics. There is a lot to be done in better understanding economics of the key issues of our time, and to transform our value-generation towards long-term sustainable models. I believe there are ome key economic tradeoffs that it would behoove us to understand more deeply: e.g. the economics owning assets vs sharing/renting these. The so-called "rental economy" or "collaborative consumption". A better understanding of the thresholds at which it makes sense to own something vs to rent/share it, would be very beneficial. There are similar thresholds in (i) make to order vs make to stock, both in manufacturing as well as in other industries, in (ii) reconstructing things vs simply renovating these, as well as in (iii) when to use a central shared service vs decentralizing autonomous teams. I've been exploring these issues, and also sharing some of this work in a Stanford Computer Science Class that I'm helping one of my PhD advisors with. I believe that there is a kind of threshold (a "Sikka Threshold" if you will :-)) that governs all of these tradeoffs, and they all have a structural similarity to each other.<br />
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3. Software. And of course, there is tons of room in improving the software situation around us, especially as software becomes the vehicle to bring about, to instrument, this latest great transformation unfolding around us. Improvements are needed in many aspects of software<br />
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a. Such as the nature of software platforms and systems. At SAP, we've been busy building on HANA's early success to further develop new architectures and landscape designs for enterprises. We are still in early days of understanding elastic, intelligent, scalable systems. For instance, the management of time in systems is still quite primitive, typical ACID behavior in databases forces distributed systems to go thru tremendous contortions, when even quantum physics has taught us that absolute time across distances and rigid notions of consistency are not only futile, they are not necessary. I am writing a paper about relative consistency, and much more simplified notions of time and management of data reliably in distributed, scalable, systems.<br />
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b. Such as rethinking the software experience itself. The software developers' experience leaves a *lot* to be desired and there are fundamental ways in which it can be improved. We've been working on some of these. From ways to make software development real-time and totally interactive/responsive, to enabling end-users to do more of the programming work themselves, from better understanding, and articulating, actions, to better ways to articulate software's abilities so strangers (alan would say "alients") can read and understand our code. In particular, the notion of activities is one of these areas. We understand so little about how to better articulate actions and processes in richer, yet efficient processes. (I am also doing some work on this area, there hasn't been a significant advance on articulating activities richly and efficiently, and expect to write a paper on this to a conference/publication this winter).<br />
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c. Such as new, unprecedented industry applications. Our notions of enterprise applications have become significantly limited over the decades. It is time for a rethink. As almost all major industries get disrupted or totally transformed by technology, it is time to build the great, intelligent, adaptive, applications, in unprecedented new areas of business. But especially the purposeful ones. The ones that move us forward, as they help bring to life the power of software to transform our world and our lives.<br />
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I think businesses, corporations, have a tremendous ability to influence the world, to shape the world of the future, and it must be our endeavor to do more fundamental work, more of the important things, the purposeful things, especially ones whose value isn't obvious in the 90-day rhythms and the lenses of the traditional financial metrics that seems to consume most large companies.<br />
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So as we get ready to light up the Diyas, and light up the skies with fireworks, I think it is even more important, and worthwhile, to reflect on, and to pursue that other light, the one that's inside of us. Towards the end of his great book, Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse's title character says to his lifelong friend Govinda, both now old men, that knowledge can be taught, but not wisdom. That each one of us must find that for ourselves. Here's to wishing at this Diwali, that each one of us finds, and pursues, and achieves, that light within, our own, unique, wisdom...<br />
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Vishal<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-49745853533660426522013-10-21T09:09:00.001-07:002013-10-21T10:26:22.546-07:00SAP, Software, and Amplifying Human Potential: Some Thoughts on the eve of TechEd<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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4 years ago today, I learnt of the death of my dear friend Ranjan Das. He passed away unexpectedly, far too young. As I was looking back on the last 4 years, and looking ahead to our TechEd conference that begins in Las Vegas today, I was stunned to realize the obvious: how time flies by so quickly, and how the things we cherish are the things that are timeless, in that these are the activities that last the test of time, and also the activities that so engross us that one loses track of time in. Both happen to not be about the superficial things in life, but about things that touch us and that matter to us in a deeply personal way.<br />
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Around this time 4 years ago I started the HANA project. We had worked on it for years already (I'd started the in-memory db work in 2002, and came up with the name HANA in 2006), but it wasn't until the fall of 2009 that we finally convinced SAP's management that HANA needed to be built and the time was now, and we started the HANA development project in October. The day I learnt of Ranjan's death, I was in Walldorf, and this was the day Franz, the core HANA leadership and I sat together and decided that HANA would run under existing applications, both ByDesign and also the Suite, in addition to serving analytics, and all kinds of new applications. That it would carry the load of the new and the old. Both, simultaneously. I felt that this was our burden to help renew SAP, a challenge Hasso had laid out to me earlier in the year. I remember walking to my flight that evening, at Frankfurt airport, telling Hasso on the phone that this is what we decided, and he was very happy about it.<br />
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Ever since those early, heady, days, it has been a hell of a journey. We built HANA in record time, and released it to customers on Dec 1, 2010. She went GA on June 20, 2011. Ever since she's been nothing short of a revolution. We recently crossed a billion dollars in HANA revenue, by far, by a wide wide margin the fastest growing product we've ever seen in SAP, quite likely also in the industry. This success is a result of HANA's technological capabilities, and the breakthrough benefits these result in. Much has been written about this, by me and many others (saphana.com has plenty of background). HANA, at its heart, represents a rethinking of the relational database, a reinvention of it, to reflect both,<br />
(a) the new hardware reality of super-affordable x86 based machines that combine very powerful multi-core processors with the super-fast access to data in large memories that are now available in DRAM, and<br />
(b) the new ideas in in-memory structures, especially the column store, the newly designed highly parallel structures and operators, and tons of new ideas in database technology.<br />
And this combination enables us to bring value to the enterprise in totally new ways. I wrote a paper at the ICDE conference this year, articulating a new way to represent this value, in scenarios that bring together data volume, speed and complexity in unprecedented ways. HANA's value also enables us to rethink the application reality in the layer above HANA, both by simplifying and accelerating the existing applications, by refactoring these, as well as building totally new applications. Many that were often not possible before.<br />
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And so all the database world seems to have woken up to this new reality. IBM's Blu, MSFT's recently announced Hekaton and Oracle's recently announced 12c in-memory among others. And yet when I look at the public material on these, it seems clear that they could have done much better, they could have done so much more. The main point of HANA is a single columnar store, where the transactions go into memory, and are available instantly and as-is for analytics, even deep complex questions, due to the power of massive parallelism, and this point seems to have been fundamentally missed by these approaches.<br />
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But while the competition misses the point, we have taken the ball fwd, and taken major steps to make HANA our platform for enterprise applications. We have added all kinds of interesting capabilities into HANA, from various application libraries for statistics, planning and business functions, to middleware and integration capabilities, to now even a complete set of application serving capabilities, so we can run and deliver entire applications directly from HANA (and, of course, if a developer wants to build apps in their favorite platform and simply integrate with HANA, they have total freedom in doing so). So on the basis of these capabilities, we have been moving every single SAP product to HANA. From the Business SUite to B1, from ByDesign to Business Objects, from Success Factors and Ariba to Sales OnDemand and Hybris. Every one.<br />
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But as we look at this platform, and the capabilities that it affords us, and take the broader view, there is a sense that it must be about more. As Alan Kay always reminded me, the future cannot only be an increment of the past. If all we did with this platform, was renew things we already knew, we'd have fundamentally missed the point. It must be about more. About enabling new capabilities, building new things, great new apps that help transform the world with real-time software. Ones that are purposeful, ones that empower us and inspire us.<br />
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The last time Ranjan and I were together, we'd spent 6 hours in a flight from orlando to SFO, during which he kept bugging me; he must have asked me a 1000 times about what the next big thing was, and that conversation led us to the point where I told him I think it was the ability to build the truly next-generation amazing applications around design, and creation, enabling the acts of creativity by companies, to help them truly find their purpose. And we'd talked about many companies in India (in particular Mahindra and Mahindra -- Anand had been a very big influence in Ranjan's life) and how they would benefit from going beyond outsourcing and consulting, towards truly creating innovation.<br />
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Today we are doing lots of these. Abdul and his teams, Thomas Torf, Priya, Alan Southall, Ritika, Prasad and others, work with customers to find truly important, meaningful, purposeful areas for them, that need to be transformed with software, and help bring these to life. From end-user clientelling and responsive supply chains for Burberry, to real-time signal detection for EBay's analysts, from predictive maintenance for John Deere's machines, to forecasting and optimizations for NongFu Spring, Mitsui and other companies in Asia, from better oil and energy exploration, to personalized management of energy by billions of consumers. And our team in India, led by Gansu and his gang, are working with individual milk providers to see their revenues from their milk-production directly for the first time, without corrupt middle-layers in the system, thanks to the power of their Aadhar identities and HANA. And beyond SAP, today we crossed a great milestone. More than 1000 startup companies are now building their products on HANA. More than 35 already have products in the market, addressing all kinds of needs, in all kinds of areas. It is an unbelievable example of bringing the power of technology to help enable the empowerment of end-users. Great technologies, from the bicycle to Gutenberg's printer, from the surfboard to the internet, have always aspired to, and managed to achieve, the amplification of the human ability, our intellect, our senses, our purpose.<br />
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At this TechEd, I am hopeful that we can share with our ecosystem our roadmap and direction, not only for our Task A, our technology and platform, but about how it can help us find our greater purpose, help us build the great applications that empower us, that amplify our reach, and enable us to do more, and even more importantly, help us to continually learn, and adapt and evolve, as we continually get better at attaining our intents, our purposes. Ranjan would have been really proud...<br />
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-- Vishal<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com411tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-78736657218050640832013-01-20T01:13:00.002-08:002013-01-20T01:13:26.440-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
January 19, 2013<br />
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I write this at the end of a difficult week, one full of sadness and reflection. It started on a high, amid 3250 sales leaders at our FKOM in Singapore. But was quickly followed by the devastating news of the death of two very special colleagues: Andreas Raab and Dean Jacobs. I have never written an obituary before, and this isn't one. Rather it is my attempt to piece together what their lives, and now their passing, have meant, and what I've tried to learn from this, after a few fragmented moments of reflection.<br />
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Andreas was a key developer of Squeak, under Alan Kay's guidance, and a distinguished member of our technical team at SAP. He died suddenly, and abruptly, earlier this week. And Dean, or Deano as I called him for years, another distinguished colleague and dear friend, succumbed to cancer, but not before giving it a hell of a fight.<br />
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All week, since absorbing these two hits, I've found myself wandering along, somewhat numb, wondering just how fragile, and fleeting, transient, life is. How quickly, and abruptly, and certainly, it ends. And how we are never prepared, even when we know. How complacent we are, assuming that there is a tomorrow, and carrying on with minutiae and trivia, knowing, certainly in the back of our heads, if not in the front, that these amount to nothing. How much energy we waste chasing after ghosts, fighting off stupidity, even when we are better off ignoring it, how much time we spend mired in nonsense, being slowed down by the viscosity of the inane and the mundane. Unaware that moments of joy, and togetherness, and love, and passion, and giving, and creating, and being in touch with the nature within, and the nature without, constitute precisely the intransience, and the permanence, that we seek, and yet assume for granted and ignore for the shallow and the meaningless. And yet every once in a while, even if far too rarely, these truths shine through in our work.<br />
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After 9/11, Andreas wrote in his blog:<br />
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<pre>Dear friends and collegues,</pre>
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<pre>The shocking incidents of today make it important for me to say two things: First of all, I wish to express my sadness about what happened in New York and D.C. and I am sure that all of the World is with the U.S. in this hour.</pre>
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<pre>The second issue, which is actually far more important, is that we are in fact working here for a better future - a future in which such horrible incidents don't happen, a future in which our children will live and learn in peace. Computers - the internet - can help to understand other cultures better, can help to understand problems of regions far away better, can help to raise our attention to both, tragedies and threats from parts of this world seemingly far away.</pre>
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<pre>Let us not get distracted by these horrible incidents. Let us work for a better future for all of us, and our children.</pre>
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<pre>My prayers are with the families of all the people in the New York and D.C. area. Although the world will never be as it was yesterday, we can still work to make it a *better* world than before. What I've seen and heard today is in fact giving more hope than one would expect in such an hour.</pre>
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<pre>- Andreas</pre>
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Andreas, you were right. Computing technologies are still early, with a promise to improve our lot that is far and wide. We can, and must, continue to work for a better future for all of us.<br />
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Deano once patiently heard me out on an idea I had, back in 2008, and immediately called it VINA. Those of us who know why I'd named my product HANA, can surmise what VINA would be an acronym of (these were different things). He told me to pursue it with all vigor and passion I could, and even wrote up a two page plan and description for it. He almost single-handedly woke SAP up to some harsh realities of the Cloud world. His observation, that about 2000 1TB DRAM servers could hold all the energy consumption data and compute power to enable more than a billion people around the world (customers of SAP's utilities customers) to play with it, and take better control of their energy destiny.<br />
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Both voices now silent, taken far too soon, their dreams far from finished. And yet both lived lives of passion, and love, and creativity and curiosity.<br />
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Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, when reflecting on death, that one cannot fully understand death without understanding life, and that <i>"One may try to give meaning to life, as most people do, saying life is this, or life must be that, but putting aside all these romantic, illusory, idealistic nonsenses, life is one's daily sorrow, its competition, despair, depression, agony - with the occasional flash of beauty and love."</i> Both Deano, and Andreas, up wherever you are now, thank you, and Godspeed. You gave us plenty of flashes of beauty and love to celebrate, to remember you by, and to carry on your work and your legacy...<br />
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V<br />
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vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-35235976728986704672012-01-02T16:30:00.000-08:002012-01-02T16:31:23.420-08:00A Renewal Of Enterprise LandscapesRecently, <a href="http://ft.com/">The Financial Times</a> published a bylined article by me on a <a href="http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/a25fd19a-31af-11e1-a62a-00144feabdc0.html">renewal of enterprise IT landscapes.</a> It is a somewhat edited version of my original write-up, which I've posted below. Wishing a very happy, and successful, 2012 for all the readers of this.<br /><br />Vishal<br /><br />--<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">A Renewal of Enterprise Landscapes</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">How the HANA in-memory technology is helping transform businesses</span><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">By Vishal Sikka</span><br /><br />Earlier this week, Time magazine picked “The Protester” as its person of the year, recognition of individuals who spoke up around the world -- from the Arab countries to Wall Street, from India to Greece – individuals whose voices were amplified and aggregated by modern technology and its unprecedented power to connect and empower us. Twitter and Facebook, now approaching 800 million users (more than 10% of humanity), are often viewed as the harbinger of social networking. But social networking is not new. A recent issue of the Economist described Martin Luther’s use of social networking, especially the Gutenberg press, to start the Reformation. During the American Revolution, Thomas Paine published his Commonsense Manifesto on a derivation of the Gutenberg press. Within a single year, it reached almost a million of the 1.5 million residents of the 13 American colonies – about two-thirds of the populace, and helped seed the birth of<br /><br />I believe that information technologies, especially well-designed, purposeful ones, empower and renew us and serve to amplify our reach and our abilities. The ensuing connectedness dissolves away intermediary layers of inefficiency and indirection. Some of the most visible recent examples of this dissolving of layers are the transformations we have seen in music, movies and books. Physical books and bookstores they inhabited have been rapidly disappearing, as have physical compact discs, phonograph records, video tapes and the stores that housed them. Yet there is more music than ever before, more books and more movies. Their content got separated from their containers and got housed in more convenient, more modular vessels, which better tie into our lives, in more consumable ways. In the process, layers of inefficiency got dissolved. By putting 3000 songs in our pockets, the iPod liberated our music from the housings that confined it. The recent iPhone 4S has a great 8 megapixel camera within it, along with a bunch of services for sharing, distributing and publishing pictures, even editing them -- services that used to be inside darkrooms and studios. 3D printing is an even more dramatic example of this transformation. The capabilities and services provided by workshops and factories are now embodied within a printer that can print things like tools and accessories, food and musical instruments. A remarkable musical flute was printed recently at MIT, its sound indistinguishable from that produced by factory-built flutes of yesterday.<br /><br />I see layers of inefficiency dissolving all around us. An empowered populace gets more connected, and uses this connectivity to bypass the intermediaries and get straight at the things it seeks, connecting and acting in real-time -- whether it is to stage uprisings or rent apartments, plan travel or author books, edit pictures or consume apps by the millions.<br /><br />And yet enterprises have been far too slow to benefit from such renewal and simplification that is pervading other parts of our lives. The IT industry has focused on too much repackaging and reassembly of existing layers into new bundles, ostensibly to lower the costs of integrated systems. In reality, this rebundling increases the clutter that already exists in enterprise landscapes. It is time for a rethink.<br /><br />At SAP, we have been engaged in such rethinking, or intellectual renewal, as our chairman and co-founder Hasso challenged me, for the last several years, and our customers are starting to see its results. This renewal of SAP’s architecture, and consequently that of our customers, is driven by an in-memory product called SAP HANA (or HANA as I fondly call it) which, together with mobility, cloud computing, and our principle of delivering innovation without disruption, is helping to radically simplify enterprise computing and dramatically improve the performance of businesses without disruption.,<br /><br />HANA achieves this simplification by taking advantage of tremendous advances in hardware over the last two decades. Today’s machines can bring large amounts of main-memory, and lots of multi-core CPUs to bear on massively parallel processing of information very inexpensively. HANA was designed from the ground-up to leverage this, and the business consequences are radical. At Yodobashi, a large Japanese retailer, the calculation of incentives for loyalty customers used to take 3 days of data processing, once a month. With HANA, this happens now in 2 seconds -- a performance improvement of over 100,000 times. But even more important is the opportunity to rethink the business process. The incentive for a customer can be calculated on the fly, while the customer is in a store, based on the purchases she is about to make. The empowered store-manager can determine these at the point of sale, as the transaction unfolds. With HANA, batch processing is converting to real time, and business processes are being rethought. Customers like Colgate-Palmolive, the Essar Group, Provimi, Charmer Sunbelt, Nongfu Spring, our own SAP IT and many others, have seen performance improvements of thousands to tens of thousands times. HANA brings these benefits non-disruptively, without forcing a modification of existing systems. And last month, we delivered SAP Business Warehouse on HANA, a complete removal of the traditional database underneath, delivering fundamental improvements in performance and simplification, without disruption.<br /><br />HANA provides a single in-memory database foundation for managing transactional as well as analytical data processing. Thus a complex question can be posed to real-time operational data, instead of asking pre-fabricated questions on pre-aggregated or summarized data. HANA also integrates text processing with managing structured data, in a single system. And it scales simply with addition of more processors or more blades. Thus various types of applications, across a company’s lines of businesses, and across application types, can all be run off a single, elastically-scalable hardware infrastructure: a grand dissolving of the layers of complexity in enterprise landscapes. HANA hardware is built by various leading hardware vendors from industry standard commodity components, and can be delivered as appliances, private or public clouds. While this architecture is vastly disruptive to a traditional relational database architecture, to our customers it brings fundamental innovation without disruption.<br /><br />Looking ahead, I expect that we will see lots of amazing improvements similar to Yodobashi’s. Even more exciting, are the unprecedented applications that are now within our reach. By my estimate, a cloud of approximately 1000 servers of 80-cores and 2 terabytes of memory each, can enable more than 1 billion people on the planet to interactively explore their energy consumption based on real-time information from their energy meters and appliances, and take control of their energy management. The management and optimization of their finances, healthcare, insurance, communications, entertainment and other activities, can similarly be made truly dynamic. Banks can manage risks in real-time, oil companies can better explore energy sources, mining vast amounts of data as needed. Airlines and heavy machinery makers can do predictive maintenance on their machines, and healthcare companies can analyze vast amounts of genome data in real time. One of our customers in Japan is working on using HANA to analyze genome data for hundreds of patients each day, something that was impossible before HANA. Another customer is using HANA to determine optimal routes for taxicabs. The possibilities are endless.<br /><br />Just as the iPod put our entire music libraries in our pockets, HANA, combined with mobility and cloud-based delivery, enables us to take our entire business with us in our pocket. Empowering us to take actions in real time, based on our instincts as well as our analysis. To re-think our solutions to solving existing problems – and to help businesses imagine and deliver solutions for previously unsolved problems. And it is this empowerment and renewal, driven by purposeful technologies, that continually brings us all forward.<br /><br /><b><i><span style=";font-family:";" >Dr. Vishal Sikka</span></i></b><i><span style=";font-family:";" > is a member of the Executive Board of business software maker SAP AG and heads SAP’s technology and innovation areas.</span></i>vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-40407582774477165252011-08-26T19:19:00.000-07:002011-08-26T19:28:42.995-07:00
<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">An Ongoing Renewal</span>
<br /><p>With the end of summer upon us, and the SAP TechEds around the corner, I've been putting my thoughts together. Then the events of this last week happened. And I believe they signal, simultaneously, both the great shifts that are presently underway, as well as the beautiful permanence of change, of life's ephemerality. First, Motorola's mobility business was acquired by Google. Signaling, in my view, Google's adoption of an "Open+1" strategy: open hardware for any device maker that adopts the android platform, and a +1, Google's own device, wherein the entire end-user experience can be defined and delivered. As my friend Padma, who used to run Motorola’s R&D, told me one evening over dinner, getting the end-user’s experience right is the necessary counterpoint to a great mobile OS platform. Yesterday, Steve Jobs, arguably the leading designer and innovator of our times, announced his resignation as Apple's CEO. A long-standing strategic customer and partner of ours, and a friend of my boss and SAP's chairman, Hasso Plattner, Steve has done more to bring beauty and design and purpose to products that we use, than perhaps anyone else in recent times. Under Steve’s leadership, Apple has singularly redefined our product experience, and moved us several strides forward on empowering end-users and bringing soul to our work. And also this week, HP, long an icon of our industry, announced fundamental changes to its strategy: intending to divest its touchpad and other mobile devices and operating systems, its personal systems business, known mostly for its PCs, notebooks, etc., but also the division that still makes the legendary calculators and other electronic devices, that HP long symbolized, and that became the basis of the electronic era and silicon valley, that HP heralded as much as perhaps any other company in our industry, and is instead acquiring its way into enterprise software with platform technologies such as vertica and now autonomy.</p><p>It has been an amazing week. But what is really going on here? Well, of course there is the inevitability of change. Change is as permanent as any other thing or notion we know. As I've argued in timeless software, every entity, whether in the real world, or the digital one, has a timestamp, a life expectancy, and everything must change and evolve, more or less in accordance with these.</p><p>But this isn't all there is to it. We are in the midst of a very significant shift. A massive simplification is underway, and the signs we see all around us are of a fundamental renewal and reshaping: of the world of IT, of business and indeed our world.</p><p>It is clear to me that this renewal is being driven by technology. Some people would argue that consumer expectations have driven the change, but I would argue that consumers didn’t know what was possible until companies like Apple and Google opened their eyes to the possibilities. User expectations skyrocketed from there, at home and in the office. Expectations for how technology can help businesses run better, have also increased: whether for the CEO or the end-user in a line of business. The big data challenge is not a data problem for the IT department to solve. The big data challenge is everyone, from the CEO to the end-user, wishing to understand, analyze and manipulate the fine grained details of his / her company and then do something about it. The layers for him or her to get there are dissolving. The interaction with data is direct and real-time, with easy and seamless interaction paradigms. The ways people connect have also changed: direct, immediate, virtual, as groups, and without the traditional structures that slow things down, and this has in turn enabled people to organize themselves, debate and form their common views, however radical, and to mobilize around shared beliefs – mobilizing in numbers that overwhelm governments. End-users are taking more and more control of their destiny, fueled by a virtuous cycle of connectedness that leads to disintermediation of layers, which drives end-users to become more empowered, demand better user-experience challenging us to create more connectedness. In many ways this cycle has been underway for a very long time, from the industrial revolution, or even further back, Guttenberg’s printer, but it is becoming starkly evident now. We are being better empowered than ever before in our history, with products that combine beauty and scale.</p><p>This change is forcing a renewal of the IT industry. Starting with a renewal in the hardware business. Fundamental advances in hardware, both technological, as well as economic ones, are becoming evident. I believe this is why many business strategies of leading hardware vendors are changing. A single machine of 80-cores, 2TB of memory and enough SSDs can serve massive data needs of enterprises; a cloud of these, a RAM cloud, can connect the whole world in a web of real-time trade. And this hardware renewal, is renewing software’s layers. Especially the relational database, the present incarnation of which was designed more than 20 years ago. You’ve seen me argue this before and I think this is now quite evident. Our own HANA, helps radically rethink the database. Just yesterday I learnt that on a cluster of 4 machines of 32-cores each, we can run 200 parallel users, running a complex SQL query, on 800M records, with average response times of 450ms. Each! But beyond the database, this technology helps rethink the entire information management paradigm. While autonomy (and verity, which autonomy acquired a few years ago) pioneered text search in the 90s, and vertica, which looked into a disk-based column store, are inherently different paradigms for managing structured and unstructured information, search and database technology is evolving in precisely the opposite direction. HANA intrinsically combines a massively parallel in-memory column store with various data processing engines, that process sql, text and nosql style access uniformly, within the same SQL expression, and with breathtaking speed, as our customer Medtronic demonstrated at Sapphire in May. Similarly, the so-called nosql approaches (e.g. The hadoop or map-reduce style programming models on distributed file systems and key-value stores first built by modern text engines such as Google) combine text and structured data processing on one foundation. I believe this is the right direction, even though I fundamentally disagree on the NoSQL part; SQL is a great, declarative, timeless way of expressing a user’s query intent, independent of the optimizations of any wave of technology, and is thence used by 10s of millions of programmers around the world, but I digress. So unlike past approaches, where structured and unstructured data was treated differently, as were the OLTP and OLAP worlds, redesigned software on modern hardware, can converge these two paradigms, in a way that is fundamentally simplifying, that continues to evolve with improving technology, and empowers end-users to interact and engage with data, whether structured or unstructured in a uniform, coherent way.</p><p>Closer to home at SAP, we see renewal in the software industry as well. The good news from SAP’s perspective is that we have been focusing on this renewal, in my case for around 2 years, since Hasso laid down a profound yet inspiring personal challenge. HANA is driving change in the enterprise and enabling companies to do things that were previously unimaginable. HANA removes the inefficiencies that have developed over time but also finally delivers the unbelievable user experience that meets the skyrocketing expectations I talked about earlier. For example, machines can now talk to each other and to the back end systems, help do their own maintenance, and help companies better schedule service runs. Retail forecasts and customer incentive calculations can be done 1000s of times faster. CPG companies can plan, and allocate, in real-time, products can be traced, across 10s of billions of entries, immediately, and companies can close their books whenever they want, dynamically, shaving off days from these cumbersome processes, and becoming vastly more agile in the process. Services companies can now calculate and predict the margin on short and long term implementation projects. A utility company can analyze smart meter data in real-time. And these are just the beginning. In all of these scenarios, HANA creates direct connections between people, businesses, data, machines, and causes disintermediation of unnecessary layers or steps and delivers ease-of-use. Simultaneously enabling new horizons, and simplification of the existing layers of complexity, without disruption.</p><p>Lastly, there is a renewal happening that I am personally passionate about, and that’s the one taking place inside SAP. This has also been driven by HANA, which has opened up new ways of working, new ways of thinking and new ways of developing software inside SAP. All this has led to some truly exciting set of product innovations that we’ve been working on and strategies that we’ve been reflecting on. All of SAP’s products will transform over time, whether our technology products, our existing applications, which we can now piecewise and non-disruptively renew, or totally new applications, which weren’t possible before. And with this renewal of our products, our company is renewing as well.</p><p>So it will be an important series of TechEds this year. Two and a half weeks until Las Vegas. There is much to be discussed and news of innovation to be shared and I’m looking forward to seeing you there.</p><p>To close, in the words of Steve Jobs, quoting Stewart Brand (who was one of the inspirations for my work on Timeless Software): Stay hungry, stay foolish.</p><p>Best,</p><p>Vishal</p><p>
<br /></p>vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1428740355434654869.post-51997876208532021722008-10-22T23:46:00.000-07:002008-10-22T23:55:48.264-07:00Timeless SoftwareSitting in the newly refurbished cabin of a Lufthansa 747, I cannot help but marvel at the continuous evolution of this beautiful plane.<span style=""> </span>First released in the 60s, before I was born, this machine is so fundamentally different now, modern cabin, modern cockpit, new communication systems, navigation systems, engines, and yet it is essentially the same as when it was first born.<span style=""> </span>The same principles of flight, the same reliability, the same optimizations around the essentials of travel requirements, fuel consumption, and maintenance.<o:p><br /><br /></o:p>As we at SAP have learned over the years, 36 years after delivering our first packaged application, successful large scale enterprise software follows essentially the same lineage.<span style=""> </span>It solves fundamental problems that businesses face every day, over generations of business change and of technological change and, in doing so, it continuously evolves in a constant cycle of renovation.<span style=""> </span>I call this Timeless Software, and want to write here about what some of its fundamental characteristics are, and how it will help define our software for the next several generations of changes to come.<b style=""><i style=""><u><span style="color:red;"><o:p><span style="text-decoration: none;"><br /><br /></span></o:p></span></u></i>Where We Are<o:p></o:p></b> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>SAP’s software today covers a massive breadth of business activities.<span style=""> </span>Functionality in the Business Suite covers a large spectrum of business processes, from finance and human resources to sales and service, from planning and procurement to manufacturing and logistics, from managing supply chains to managing business strategy, decision-making and compliance, and others.<span style=""> </span>In addition, its functionality spans variations on these processes across 100+ countries and 25+ industries.<span style=""> </span>Despite this massive reach, customers expect a fundamental degree of coherence, stability, reliability and integration across the various elements of such software.<span style=""> </span>The expectation of stability, given the mission critical nature of many of these business processes, coupled with the fundamental ways in which business deploy and use the software to mirror their own business and its uniquenesses, means that our software and our relationships with customers, are very long-lived and often last decades.<span style=""> </span>Over this long lifespan, customers simultaneously expect the software to contribute to their two fundamental metrics:</p> <ol style="margin-top: 0in;" start="1" type="1"><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Costs, by ensuring that the software is integrated and comprehensive, and easy to reliably operate and cheaply administer, and</li><li class="MsoNormal" style="">Growth, by ensuring that the software addresses differentiated areas and is easy to evolve, change, and integrate into others as necessary</li></ol> <p class="MsoNormal">So this, then, is the essential duality that our customers expect from their IT landscape: Deliver operational efficiency via coherence and stability, while enabling business growth and managing change necessary to survive and grow.<span style=""> </span>And this becomes our prime requirement: Enable evolution of our software without disruption; provide a large breadth of stable functionality, over generations of change.<span style=""> </span>And it is around this requirement that we seek to design and architect the evolution of our software.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>What is the nature of this change dynamic?<span style=""> </span>Business requirements change all the time; markets evolve, circumstances governing customers’ purchase of products change constantly, businesses are bought and sold, regulations change, and just the day-to-day challenges of competing require a constantly shifting and evolving IT landscape.<span style=""> </span>But change occurs at other layers as well.<span style=""> </span>People’s behavior evolves constantly.<span style=""> </span>There are now millions of blackberry carrying business users worldwide, who carry out quite of a bit of their tasks outside their office.<span style=""> </span>This year we estimate that nearly a billion people worldwide will conduct some or the other business activity on a mobile device.<span style=""> </span>The technological layers change as well.<span style=""> </span>Every year we see roughly two new major UI paradigms.<span style=""> </span>Just in the last 3 years, we have seen the iPhone, Google’s work on Google maps and highly interactive web applications enabled by <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">AJAX</st1:city></st1:place>, Adobe’s work with AIR, Microsoft’s work on Silverlight and others.<span style=""> </span>Even programming languages, and programming models around them, continuously evolve.<span style=""> </span>Roughly every 10 years a major new language emerges, and minor ones every 3 years or so, well within the lifecycle of large scale applications.<span style=""> </span>And programming models and developer communities emerge around these.<span style=""> </span>The language Ruby, for example, is thought to have reached a million programmers faster than any other language ever.<span style=""> </span>The three key infrastructural building blocks: processors, network and memory, evolve continuously and often non-linearly as well.<span style=""> </span>And this evolution sometimes enables or requires, new architectural paradigms.<span style=""> </span>For instance, cheap main-memory and elastic farms of simple servers have enabled fundamentally new ways of analyzing large amounts of data. Similarly, multi-core processors require rethinking application programming to better utilize their parallelism or risk slowing down.<span style=""> </span>So large scale software, over its lifetime, is subjected to change continuously, business change, as well as change across all the technology layers that it inhabits.<o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>As I look to the future, evolving our products for the next generation, this becomes our essential challenge: How do we build applications to serve the needs of every user, and every activity, in every business around the world?<span style=""> </span>And how do we do so effectively, efficiently and with maximum coherence? And how do we evolve these applications, their ongoing change, consumption, delivery and integration, as well as their connection to the present, across generations of change?<span style=""> </span>How do we deliver software that is always reliable, and yet always modern?<span style=""> </span>In other words, how do we build timeless software?<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Enterprise</st1:place></st1:city> applications are built using a collection of programming models and languages that describe their <u>content</u>, are executed using a set of corresponding <u>containers</u> or run-time, and continuously <u>change</u> over their lifetime.<span style=""> </span>My sense is these three constructs form the essence around which we need to understand Timeless Software, its characteristics and how we build it:<!--[if !supportLineBreakNewLine]--> <!--[endif]--></p> <p class="MsoNormal">- <b style="">Content</b>, i.e. the application content, the UI content, the integration content, to represent and serve the activities of users<br />- <b style="">Containers</b>, i.e. the runtime(s) that this content inhabits, and<br />- <b style="">Change</b>, i.e. the ongoing operation and evolution of both the content and the containers over the lifecycle of a solution while maintaining a continuous link with the past<br /><br />There are other aspects, to be sure, but these are the three basic ones and I want to share my view on their evolution next.</p><p class="MsoNormal"> <!--[endif]--><span style="color:red;"><o:p></o:p></span><b style="">The Evolution of Content Creation<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Enterprise</st1:place></st1:city> systems cannot rely long-term on any one programming language.<span style=""> </span>Alan Kay once observed that there is a major new language every ~10 yrs and several minor ones in the interim.<span style=""> </span>So over its life span, a major enterprise system sees adoption curves of several languages.<span style=""> </span>Just in the last several years we have seen very rapid adoption of .Net languages, Ruby, Python/Perl/Php, Javascript, and others.<span style=""> </span>Perhaps even more interestingly, programming models emerge around these languages, and often the success of a programming model, e.g. JEE or Ruby-on-Rails, brings with it a large community of programmers, drives the adoption of the language, and an explosion of software artifacts around it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>But lots of languages and dialects also exist for other reasons: There are many different domains & problem characteristics within enterprise systems and for each domain, unique combinations of syntax, tooling conveniences and programming models emerge over time.<span style=""> </span>From Jon Bentley’s “little languages” to the modern-day notion of “domain specific languages”, there are many variations in essentially the same exercise: expressing meaning in convenient, specialized ways.<span style=""> </span>There are programming models and domain-specific languages around User Interfaces, for instance.<span style=""> </span>Data has lots of variations too.<span style=""> </span>Modeling and querying business data, languages for reporting and analytics, for search (as Google showed with their map/reduce programming model), for managing XML based or other hierarchical data, and others.<span style=""> </span>Describing flows, events, rules, software lifecycle, and other aspects each bring their own variations, and the same thing happens in specific application areas and in particular industries.<span style=""> </span>Over time, with successful adoption, these abstractions and conveniences increase.<span style=""> </span>Our own ABAP, for instance, saw several programming models integrated within a general purpose language: abstractions and extensions for data access, for reporting, for UI, even object-oriented programming within ABAP, in the form of ABAP objects.<span style=""> </span>Java, similarly, grew over the years in lots of domains and ultimately the JSR institution served to systematize the inclusion of extensions and programming models within the language.<span style=""> </span>And there are similar examples in other domains, in hardware design for instance.<span style=""> </span>Even cliques of teenagers invent their unique DSLs for texting.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Another key source of diversity in programming stems from the nature of the programmers.<span style=""> </span>Programmers bring different degrees of training/understanding in computer science concepts, in business, and in particular domains.<span style=""> </span>So languages and language constructs, as well as specific abstractions emerge for different programmer segments, be it system programmers, business analysts, administrators, or others.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>This diversity is great, insofar as it enables abstractions and separation of concerns, so different classes of problems are dealt with uniquely.<span style=""> </span>After all, the world does not speak one language, as any visit to the UN assembly hall would demonstrate.<span style=""> </span>But the challenge is the resulting complexity that these isolations create.<span style=""> </span>The various abstractions/specializations lead to islands of diverse, non-interoperable languages, language run-times and software lifecycles.<span style=""> </span>Like barnacles attaching themselves to a host, these variations often lead to increased landscape complexity and dramatically higher costs of operation.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>So my sense is we need an enterprise programming model that is deeply heterogeneous yet integrated.<span style=""> </span>One that enables expression of meaning in a wide variety of simple and convenient ways, including ways yet to be invented, without losing coherence.<span style=""> </span>One that:</p> <p class="MsoNormal">1. Enables developers across lots of domains and specializations to use their native abstractions and conveniences</p> <p class="MsoNormal">2. Uses a family of integrated domain-specific languages and tooling conveniences to build software artifacts with maximum efficiency and productivity</p> <p class="MsoNormal">3. Has a powerful glue that binds these diverse elements together</p> <p class="MsoNormal">4. Can be extended by communities and developers of various sorts in lots of different ways, and</p> <p class="MsoNormal">5. Can integrate the next great languages, including languages yet to be invented, and can itself be renovated and embedded in other programming models</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Some advanced development work we’ve done in our labs indicates that such an integrated design-time environment is indeed possible and can bridge a heretofore uncrossed divide between families of highly specialized DSLs that are yet integrated into a coherent whole.<span style=""> </span>A key piece of this puzzle is a glue that binds the various DSLs together.<span style=""> </span>The glue in this case, is a mechanism that takes a base language, such as Ruby, and uses capabilities such as reflection to extend the base language with the grammar of new DSLs in a seamless way.<span style=""> </span>The timelessness comes from being able to add new DSLs dynamically to the base language, completely incrementally, without knowing about these in advance.<span style=""> </span>We have experimented with several DSLs that plug into a glue and the glue in turn integrates seamlessly into a base language such as Ruby or Javascript.<span style=""> </span>In a promising effort conducted by our SAP Research team, we have demonstrated how standard Ruby code can be run natively inside the ABAP language run-time, thereby achieving the benefits of both flexibility in Ruby programming and the enterprise-grade and robust Abap environment.<span style=""> </span>I see several exciting developments ahead along these lines that will lead us to new paradigms in extremely efficient content creation without losing coherence.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><b style="">The Evolution of Containers: Next runtimes<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">Enterprise</st1:city></st1:place> run-times are faced with a significant challenge of optimizing the execution of the diverse and heterogeneous language landscapes described above.<span style=""> </span>So if the content is to be built with maximum efficiency of expression and <u>flexibility</u>, then the containers need to enable maximum efficiency in <u>execution</u>. <span style=""> </span>Our key challenge then is to bridge this divide between flexibility and optimization.<span style=""> </span>In layered architectures, and with the first several years of service-oriented architectures behind us, we often take it as a maxim that the benefits of flexibility and abstraction come at the expense of optimization.<span style=""> </span>That layers of abstraction, by creating an indirection, usually cost in performance.<span style=""> </span>But I believe this is a false divide.<span style=""> </span>Run-times need to separate meaning from optimization, and diversity in design-times need not lead to heterogeneity in run-times.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>More than a decade ago, I examined one aspect of this issue in my own Ph.D. work, in looking at how meaning, specified in highly generic logic-based languages, could be executed optimally using specialized procedures that could cut the layers of abstraction to achieve significant optimization compared to a generic logical reasoning engine.<span style=""> </span>The principle underneath this is the same one -- by separating meaning from optimization, a system can provide both: the efficiency and generality of specification in a wide variety of specialized dialects interoperating over a common glue, and a very efficient implementation of that glue down to the lowest layer possible in the stack, across the layers of abstraction</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>There are examples of this principle at work in other areas in our industry.<span style=""> </span>The OSI stack implements seven very clean layers of abstraction in the network, and yet a particular switch or a router optimizes across these layers for extreme runtime efficiency.<span style=""> </span>Hardware designers, similarly, use a variety of languages to specify various hardware functions, e.g. electrical behavior, logical behavior or layout, and yet when a chip is assembled out of this, it is an extremely lean, optimized implementation, baked into silicon.<span style=""> </span>Purpose-built systems often can dictate their requirements to the platform layers below, whereas general-purpose systems often do not know in advance how they will be utilized, and can often be suboptimal compared to purpose-built systems, but more widely applicable.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>But beyond crossing the layers of abstraction, run-times have an additional burden to overcome.<span style=""> </span>In enterprise systems, we are often faced with tradeoffs in managing state across boundaries of processes and machines.<span style=""> </span>There are three key building blocks in computing: <u>networks</u>, i.e. moving data around, <u>processors</u>, i.e. transforming data, and <u>state</u>, i.e. holding data, in memory or on a disk, etc.<span style=""> </span>And different types of applications lend themselves to differing optimizations along these three dimensions.<span style=""> </span>Several years ago, when dealing with some difficult challenges in advanced planning and optimization, our engineers did some pioneering work in bringing applications close together with main-memory based data management in our LiveCache technology.<span style=""> </span>The result, implemented successfully in our <st1:place st="on">APO</st1:place> product in supply-chain management, demonstrates how locality coupled with a highly purpose-built run-time offers a unique optimization on network, state and processing.<span style=""> </span>More recent work in business intelligence demonstrates that when it comes to analytics, a great way to achieve performance improvements and lowered costs, is to organize data by columns in memory, instead of in disk-based RDBMSes, and perform aggregation and other analytical operations on the fly on these main-memory structures.<span style=""> </span>Working together with engineers from Intel, our Trex and BI teams achieved massive performance and cost improvements in our highly successful BIA product.<span style=""> </span>We are now taking this work a lot further; in looking at ways to bring processing and state close together elastically, and on the fly, and by looking at ways that the application design can be altered so that we can manage transactional state safely, and yet achieve real-time up-to-date analytics without expensive and time-consuming movement of data into data warehouses via ETL operations.<span style=""> </span>SAP’s founder Hasso Plattner inspired me to do an experiment we dubbed Hana, for Hasso’s new architecture (and also a beautiful place in Hawaii), our teams working together with the Hasso-Plattner-Institut and Stanford demonstrated how an entirely new application architecture is possible, one that enables real-time complex analytics and aggregation, up to date with every transaction, in a way never thought possible in financial applications.<span style=""> </span>By embedding language runtimes inside data management engines, we can elastically bring processing to the data, as well as vice-versa, depending on the nature of the application.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Enterprise</st1:place></st1:city> systems with broad functionality, such as the Business Suite, often need several types of these optimizations.<span style=""> </span>One can think of these as elastic bands across network, state and processing.<span style=""> </span>Large enterprises need transactional resiliency for core processes such as financials, manufacturing and logistics.<span style=""> </span>They need analytical optimizations, ala BIA, for large-scale analytics over data.<span style=""> </span>They also need LiveCache style optimization for complex billing and pricing operations.<span style=""> </span>They need to support long-running transactions to support business-to-business processes that work across time zones, they need collaborative infrastructure for activities such as product design, and others.<span style=""> </span>Each of these patterns consumes the underlying infrastructure, memory, network and processing, in fundamentally different ways.<span style=""> </span>This breadth is one key aspect that the existing SaaS offerings are extremely narrow in scope.<span style=""> </span>Serving broad enterprise functionality off the cloud is a fundamentally different architectural challenge, than taking a niche edge application, such as sales force automation or talent management, and running it off what is essentially a large-scale client-server implementation.<span style=""> </span>My sense is that enterprise ready cloud platforms will enable extremely low costs of running cloud services that have a broad footprint: transactional, analytical, long-running and others, with extreme ease of development and extensibility.<span style=""> </span>We have some early promising results in these areas, but neither the current SaaS offerings, nor any other cloud platform I am aware of, can address this challenge for the foreseeable future.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>So to summarize, I believe the next great run-times will implement the glue at lowest levels possible in the stack, cutting across the layers of abstractions that make developers’ lives easy at design-time but are not needed at run-time.<span style=""> </span>These runtimes will flexibly enable various different application-oriented optimizations across network, state and processing and will enable execution in specialized containers or consolidated containers, in elastic, dynamically reconfigurable ways.<span style=""> </span>This deployment elasticity will take virtualization several layers higher in the stack, and will open new ways for customers to combine flexibility and optimization under one unified lifecycle management, the final piece of the puzzle.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><b style="">The Evolution of Change: Lifecycle Management<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Perhaps the most important piece of this trichotomy is the third one: Change, i.e. managing the lifecycle of a system over the continuous change in its contents and containers. <span style=""> </span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Enterprise</st1:place></st1:city> software lives a very long time, and changes continuously over this time.<span style=""> </span>Developers often do not often think beyond delivery and lifecycle mgmt is often an afterthought, and yet this very lifecycle management is the only constant in a usually very long life of an enterprise system.<span style=""> </span>It is the embodiment of the relationship that the system maintains with the customer, over several generations and it encompasses several aspects: change in functionality, change in deployment, integrating a new system with an existing one, ongoing administration and monitoring.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>One of the fundamental pre-requisites of lifecycle management is the ability to precisely describe and document existing or legacy systems.<span style=""> </span>This documentation, whether it describes code, or system deployment, is a critical link across a system’s life.<span style=""> </span>ABAP systems have well-defined constructs for change management, software logistics, versioning, archiving, etc., as well as metadata for describing code artifacts that makes it easier to manage change.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Consuming legacy software often means understanding what is on the “inside”.<span style=""> </span>Well-defined wrappers, or descriptors, of software can help with this.<span style=""> </span>But it is also often necessary to carve well-defined boundaries, or interfaces, in legacy code.<span style=""> </span>Such firelaning, which has long been a practice in operating systems to evolve code non-disruptively, is essential to managing code’s evolution over the long haul.<span style=""> </span>Service oriented architectures are a step in this direction, but having legacy code function side-by-side with “new” code often requires going far beyond what the SOA institution has considered so far.<span style=""> </span>It requires having data, especially master data interoperability, enabling projections, joins and other complex operations on legacy code, having lifecycle, identity, security, and versioning related information about the legacy code, having policies in place to manage run-time behavior, and other aspects.<span style=""> </span>Most of these steps today are manual, and enterprises pay significant integration costs over a system’s lifetime to manage these.<span style=""> </span>Over time I see this getting significantly better.<span style=""> </span>But it starts with provisioning, or enabling, existing code to behave in this manner, carving nature at her joints, as Alan Kay once told me the Greeks would say.<span style=""> </span>I also see incumbents with an existing enterprise footprint, as having a significant advantage in getting here.<span style=""> </span>It is often far easier to carve a lane out of existing code, than it is to replace it.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Great lifecycle management is the essential change management mechanism.<span style=""> </span>My sense is, next generation lifecycle management will enable systems that can easily be tried, consumed, extended, added to, removed from, projected on, integrated with, etc.<span style=""> </span>This will be achieved by enabling every artifact in a system to be measured, managed, and tested.<span style=""> </span>We will see existing and legacy code being instrumented for administration, for documentation as well as for integration.<span style=""> </span>This will require us to provide precise mechanizable specification and documentation of all important aspects of the system as a key ingredient.<span style=""> </span>The specification of a system’s behavior, its usage, service-levels and policies describing its operation, especially for security, access and change, will be fundamental to this.<span style=""> </span>We already see efforts in this direction towards precise, mechanized specifications of system behavior and we will see more of this.<span style=""> </span>SAP has already taken some steps in this direction with our enhanced enterprise support offering, that enables a business to lifecycle manage system landscape across their entire business from one console.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>Deep interoperability between design-times, run-times and lifecycle management, will enable us to combine deployment options in ways that were not possible before.<span style=""> </span>For the foreseeable future we see customers employing some parts of their processes as on-demand services, but deploying most of their processes on-premise.<span style=""> </span>Our lifecycle management frames will ensure that customers can make such deployment choices flexibly.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p><b style="">The evolution of our products along Timeless Software<o:p></o:p></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" spt="75" preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f"> <v:stroke joinstyle="miter"> <v:formulas> <v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"> <v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"> <v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"> <v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"> <v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"> <v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"> <v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"> </v:formulas> <v:path extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" connecttype="rect"> <o:lock ext="edit" aspectratio="t"> </v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_s1026" type="#_x0000_t75" style="'position:absolute;" wrapcoords="-38 0 -38 21518 21600 21518 21600 0 -38 0"> <v:imagedata src="file:///C:\DOCUME~1\i804716\LOCALS~1\Temp\msohtml1\01\clip_image001.png" title=""> <w:wrap type="square"> </v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]-->Our portfolio of products, starting with the Business Suite, including Business Objects and NetWeaver and Business ByDesign, will continually evolve along these principles of timeless software.<span style=""></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyOEUhu-obDMXN1MNq2lKhssd_WBGVsP7MTeGIbZNdaMgYXb3pcQkEs0lsEVoV85vjRhf9LC9pj6hQfmeOiqmZGEXT0AmaPJgxydCnN4H4rbuXOosa6qYsEBj6ABus8maXiHtjS71_FE4/s1600-h/timelesssoftware.JPG"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 184px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyOEUhu-obDMXN1MNq2lKhssd_WBGVsP7MTeGIbZNdaMgYXb3pcQkEs0lsEVoV85vjRhf9LC9pj6hQfmeOiqmZGEXT0AmaPJgxydCnN4H4rbuXOosa6qYsEBj6ABus8maXiHtjS71_FE4/s400/timelesssoftware.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5260238456524703042" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><span style=""></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""></span>As the picture above illustrates, we will continue to enhance our massive yet coherent breadth of functionality, to reflect ever increasing business activities across industries, geographies, and roles.<span style=""> </span>This functionality will be built and extended using an evolving programming model, often in languages that have not yet been invented.<span style=""> </span>And will be deployed in new ways, in the cloud, as appliances, on-premise, and all of the above.<span style=""> </span>This functionality will be exposed for wide varieties of consumption, across consumers, business user workplaces, and devices, rendered via a wide variety of specialized client-side technologies, built by SAP as well as others.<span style=""> </span>And yet all of this functionality will be under the same lifecycle frame, the backbone that will support the constant evolution, and constant optimization of our landscape at our customers.<span style=""> </span>Our products will therefore reflect these principles.<span style=""> </span>We will continually carve new lanes, and deliver new functionality, even deep new technologies.<span style=""> </span>The applications will evolve continuously, and piecewise, as nature does: bringing new things, renovating others, adding here and retiring there, and doing so without breaking its essential qualities: reliability, integrity, integration, seamless administration, change and lifecycle management.<span style=""> </span>Just as every few years we humans shed most of our cells, acquire new memories and lessons, decisions and beliefs, evolve and yet stay essentially who we are, I believe it is possible for software to renovate itself completely, and yet continuously.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>So as excited as I am looking ahead to innovations on the horizon and beyond, that there is tons of new technologies, new capabilities, and new functionality to be delivered in our software, it is perhaps most reassuring that none of these will break the essential promises at the heart of timelessness, of reliability, integrity, coherence and continuous evolution.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p>On that reassuring thought, it is time to press the bed button on my seat and try out the fancy new lie-flat bed to end a day that began already 3 timezones away, 20 hours ago.<span style=""> </span>And as I browse thru the 80 movies onboard, and notice the flight monitor displaying the plane’s airspeed of 567 miles/hr, things that passengers 40 years ago couldn’t have imagined, I find myself thankful for being in the comfort of a well engineered timeless system.</p>vishalsikkahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17581281341538283013noreply@blogger.com140