Friday 30 March, 2012

Book Review: The Long Revolution


The Long Revolution book written by Dinesh Sharma provides highly readable and informative account of the birth and growth of India’s IT industry. With around 500 pages, this book is a really a long book but would make you glue to it till its final chapter. I must thank the author because the book helped me learn history of the industry in which I have been working for last 15 years.

Saturday 17 March, 2012

Talk on Cloud Computing

I recently gave a talk on "Demystifying Cloud Computing" in state level seminar at RMD Sinhgad School of Computer Studies, Pune. It was an introductory talk and I preferred not to use PowerPoint slides for this talk. Instead I used following notes in the form of Q&A while delivering the talk:

1. What is traditional computing model? - Buy, deploy and manage hardware, system software and applications.
2. What is cloud computing model? - One or more of hardware, system software and applications are used on rent.
3. What is meant by IaaS, PaaS and SaaS? - Infrastructure as a service, Platform as a Service and Software as a Service
4. What are advantages of cloud computing? - Pay-as-you-use, Reliability, Opex over capex, Scalability
5. What are disadvantages of cloud computing? - Compliance hurdles, Openness challenged, Not flexible, Security issues
6. Which are enabling technologies? - Ultra-thin clients, Virtualization, Web services
7. What are deployment options? - Public, Community, Private and Hybrid
8. Who are leading vendors? - Amazon (IaaS), Microsoft (PaaS), Google (PaaS, SaaS) and salesforce.com (SaaS)

Wednesday 7 March, 2012

Book Review: Our Iceberg Is Melting

"Our iceberg is melting" is a fable, authored by John Kotter and Holger Rathgeber. It illustrates eight step process of organizational change management, as given in John Kotter's "Leading Change" book. The book takes less than two hours to read and helps us to learn this process effectively. Beyond this process, this fable also emphasizes role of thinking and feeling for change management. I would recommend this book to everyone interested in the topic of organizational change management.