Let's offer GaaS

I agree with analysts on this - high time Indian I.T sector look at the new computing models and make use of them to provide better, wider, more ‘value-added’ services to customers. But my question is have we realized it? Even if we have, what are we doing about it? If we look at the current trends, enterprise I.T is becoming more and more services based(ok, ‘oriented’ - to rhyme with the industry buzzwords). More than the products, it’s the services that are going to be important for the customers(When was it not? Till vendors hijacked enterprise I.T landscapes). That’s the good thing for us, we are already in the services industry and what we need to now look at is to improve our services with the changing information technology landscape.

One such area is offering I.T governance as a service (I don’t want to shorten it to GaaS though), by hosting and provisioning enterprise I.T monitoring and management environments as services along with well defined governance strategy and processes so that customers don’t have to invest in costly monitoring tools and employ costly consulting teams to come up with an IT governance strategy. Some of us may be doing such services already, but we need to have much better solutions evolved in this space, say for example monitoring environments that fetch only meta-data through deployed agents from business environments so that customers are less worried about business data being shared.

What's your take?

(Utility, Grid, Cloud, SaaS, SOA,…) Computing

Though I don’t work with most of these areas, the things mentioned in the title always puzzle me, mainly by producing such questions in my mind as - Are they all the same or are they different? How are they going to affect our (I.T’s I mean) future etc. Here is what I understood so far on each of these things and how they are related, please correct if I’m wrong(and you are right)

Grid computing – A technique in which multiple small computing environments are connected and exposed to outside as a single unit of big processing power, data storage etc.

Utility computing – I think this is more of a business term that refers to somebody offering computing abilities as an external service to those in need of it, where they don’t have to invest in buying own computers on their own. SaaS I would say is an offshoot of this

Cloud computing – Ah! Trouble! Let me escape by saying this – it’s a model where grid capabilities are used in the back-end to deliver computing services to customers?

SOA – I know to some extend what that is, so I would say it’s about the way the computing services are exposed by the environments that provide those as cloud/utility services, so that consumers can have a common mechanism to reach to the servicing systems.

Though there are too much noise in this space currently, I think it will all settle eventually and we will have well tuned computing-on-demand environments available to use. Now the million dollar question is ‘by when?’. Since we are in recession and cannot afford any million dollar stuff, I don’t have an answer.

The wood-headed league

Now that we(not me, the media) are on top of it, let me start my first ‘public facing’ blog quickly with some food for thought - since other forms of food is getting difficult to earn these days

Hollywood – We all know about it.
Bollywood - You may know, I don't want to know.
Kollywood – Some of you may know, Kamal Haasan for me.
Tollywood – I’m a total illiterate.
Sandalwood – Kasaravalli, Karnad, Sathyu sure don’t belong here
Mollywood – I would name it slightly different


Now the question is what do we make out from this? For me, all the good things that I’ve seen/heard – Ray, Bertolucci, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman don’t have a ‘wooden’ background…and maybe that’s the answer?