Is IT the Silver Lining?

Srinath PereraArchitect, WSO2

Member, Apache Software Foundation

A Silver Lining in a Hard Time We all look for a Silver Lining, does it mean it is

there? Well not necessarily, well we are hopeful.

Does technology is the “Silver Lining”? Not sure, but like to share some thoughts

Prediction is a risky business "There is no reason for any individual to have

a computer in their home." – Ken Olsen “I am confident that, 30 years from now, the

goto will still be alive and well and used as widely as it is today” – Anonymous Reviewer.

Hard Times

History Says Otherwise 13/25 best companies at 2008 where launched

in a economic downturn (Including 3M, Microsoft, Walt Disney, GE).

Great Depression, 1929-1937 Polaroid

1948-1949 MacDonald

1973 oil crisis (1973 - 1975 Microsoft

Early 1980s recession - 1982 and 1983

IBM PC

Late 1980s recession - 1988 to 1992

CNN and MTV

Early 2000s recession - 2001 to 2003: the collapse of the Dot Com Bubble

Apple IPod, Google got market share

Source :The Silver Lining: An Innovation Playbook for Uncertain Times, Scott Anthony & http://www.drjeffcornwall.com/2009/02/the-silver-lining-of-economic.html

Necessity is the Mother of Invention!

More Money does not necessarily mean more innovation.

In good conditions, we tend to take less risks, and we tend to do evolutionary solutions rather than revolutionary solutions.

People do Amazing things when things are at Stake.

For example, Apple did a great turnaround around 2001-2005, starting with the IPod to reclaim most what they lost [1].

1. Apple's remarkable comeback story, Amanda Cantrell, CNNMoney, 2006

A Fire Open up the Space for New Trees

In a Good time, competing against established companies is a uphill battle for a startup

There is a saying that “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM”

Not all Good ideas survive the market.

Hard times even the battlefield and change the “status quo”

e.g. People look for Open source solutions these days, cost saving possibilities are fully explored

Good news for countries like SL, who has to fight a uphill battle to build a competitive advantage.

Bad Time to Sell, but Cheap to Build

Bad times mean easier to hire people. start up costs are cheaper. VC can write smaller checks.

It is hard to sell things, but if you are going to take 2 years to build a product, you might end up marketing it with the boom.

Governments may end up pumping money to keep the balance.

Innovation to Break the Vicious Cycle

Bad times may open up the playing field, but to win, we need

innovations!

Revolutionary rather than evolutionary! High impact, life changers! It is about building a competitive

advantage

IT is a High Impact Science

Panel of eight judges from University of Pennsylvania named 20 life changers, 7 of which are IT based.

It touches on every aspect of our life.

– A report [1] from Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, USA said that “A day without IT => A day word stand still”.

1. Assessing the Impacts of Changes in the Information Technology, R&D Ecosystem

CS is called the Third Pillar of Science along with Theory and

Experimentation

We design, build using, build with, and run with the help of computers.

Most cutting edge research are limited by need for CS solutions

A Physics major @IU told me, research mean 80% programming (he mean it as a complaint, but I took it as a compliment!)

We (IT guys) are well Placed to Make High Impact Innovations

e.g. Few Nice Ideas I have Seen

Amazon Cloud

They have to allocate Computers for “Black Friday” and “Thanks Giving Day”, which is 10s times larger than the normal load.

They had a problem, all those computers lay idling. So they invented the cloud, and sold computer power to others while it is not in used.

Using a simple solution, they set up a new trend. And then all the Hell broke lose! Now we have 100+ definitions of cloud computing .. some says Amazon cloud is not a cloud :D

Information over Wheels

India Wanted to do E-Governance, but some villages do not have connectivity.

But all of them had a Bus, from village to the nearest City. Why not send the information with the Bus?

Idea has been used Again Polar Grid collects data from instruments by

flying a plane time to time over the equipments

We were talking about Offline data collector for Sahana few years back.

Google and Scale Google started with the Page Rank Algorithm,

which is using recommendations by other pages to rank a page .

But they built their competitive advantage with handling very Large Scale processing. Now “Google is synonyms to scale”.

They built their architecture on top of Map-Reduce, a simple idea borrowed from PL

theory Realization of the inherent trade-off between

scalability and consistency, where they gave up consistency to gain scalability.

A Formula to Make a Impact Not Known! Well otherwise you can not earn

big money with it. Few pointers I heard on the way

We all have strengths, play for them – e.g. Sri Lanka can never compete with numbers, we can only compete with Quality.

Stick to the basics: focus on strengths and weakness of computers – e.g. it is fast, it can automate most well defined tasks, it can communicate and connect but can not make complex decisions (at least not yet).

“Key to innovation is not the time you said “Euraka” rather when you says “this is fishy”” – Prof. Andrew Lumsdaine.

Example Strategy: Open source

I see some opportunities in open source, but by no means it is the only way.

Why for us, Sri Lankans, IT is one promising direction?

Because it needs relatively less initial cost. Of course we need brains, but I do not see any

problems in that front. It is one of these rare arenas where we have a

reasonable chance of fighting chance. e.g. We do pretty well in Open Source right now.

I said “I am involved with Axis2”, and he said, “then you must be a Sri Lankan!”.

Our Battle Front: Open Source When companies are short of cash, they look at

open source solutions seriously. With world debugging and Fixing, open source

projects have sometime best commercial solutions.

IBM have gave up their Web Server, Servelt container, and Web Service container long time ago.

Apache server has 60% market share.

This gave open source projects a fighting chance against giants like IBM, Microsoft, at least on some cases.

Sri Lanka and Open Source Sri Lanka lead few high impact open source Projects

e.g. Apache Axis2 – 300, 000 + downloads last month from the main site.

Sahana - the 'de-facto' global disaster management software system, used in Incidents in Pakistan, Indonesia, three disasters in the Philippines, and Peru, China, etc.

Sri Lanka is the Largest contributor to open source for all of Asia. 5% of Apache committers are now from Sri Lanka,10 Apache Members. Sri Lankan Apache Web Service contributors are considered the experts on the topic.

It has open up many business opportunities (e.g. WSO2) and given us (WSO2) a fair chance of competing with the best.

Summary Bad times are not that bad to Innovation, it

could sometime help. Winners need to come up with High impact life

changers! IT is a high impact science! IT guys are in a

perfect position for high impact innovations. Open source is one way that can give Sri Lanka

a competitive advantage.

Parting comment: May be Opensource is enough, may be not! I am sure there are

other ways as well. We have to figure them out.

Questions?