FINspeak

Since it is now obvious that every industry is going to be effected by slower consumer and business spending, there is nothing more or nothing new to add about uncertain future and economy, as we start to enter the new year...

While there is no panacea for the problems and the damages of 2008, every organization across the globe is eagerly looking at ways to control costs and reduce their expenses and risks. Leaders across the globe are looking at optimizing their resources, as they must be, and tightening the organizational seat belts to prepare themselves for 2009. Technology remains a key differentiator in these tough times and should be a place where leaders must focus on to handle short term challenges and to prepare for strategic growth.

Well, 2008 was a welcome year from technology perspective, where we have seen a new generation of technology solutions have come to being or have started to have good adoption across the industries and geographies. Some of these technologies provide a foundation for information systems that are both cost-effective and flexible.

1. Unified communications which uses a combination of Instant messaging, VoIP, Video conferencing and live meeting is a technology area which can provide significant wins for the organizations providing effective team collaborations, improved organizational productivity, rapid problem resolution and hence improved customer satisfaction. According to Forrester group organizations have seen significant savings in the travel and communication costs.

2. Collaboration tools and solutions can also help in improving employee productivity - another way to reduce costs. Many organizational leaders still do not understand the potential of tools such as Twitter, wikis, blogs and collaboration networks, as well as the cost involved in introducing similar technologies that can bring value to the business.  There are many tools that can really help in effective collaboration and they are not necessarily costly.

3. Virtualization is a key technology solution which can significantly help optimize the computing resources and hence reduce the cost of ownership of these resources and also lower energy consumption.

4. Cloud computing, a combination of software on premise and software in the 'cloud', provides organizations, a way to invest in technology with predictable payment options, so that they could free up their budget for other efforts.

5. SAAS based hosted solutions will help organizations reduce the capital investments significantly; not to mention the deployment, training and other related costs of procurement and implementation of packaged software.

It is extremely important for organizations to invest and leverage the new technology trends as we move into next year. These provide cost effective solutions to various business problems and will help organizations to transform their businesses and become more competitive.

Wishing you all a great year ahead!!

Posted by Srinivas Prabhala at 04:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

With Christmas right around the corner, my “gadgetdar” (gadget radar) has been on high alert.  Various evolutions of smart phones, cameras and MP3 players have caught my eye, but lately my eyes have been set, literally, on a Kindle.  For those who are not gadget addicts, Kindle is Amazon’s “wireless reading device”, essentially an electronic book which connects wirelessly to a book-download server. 

As an owner of a Kindle, a library is essentially at my fingertips.  More than 200,000 books are available for easy download, as well as a myriad of newspapers and periodicals—pretty awesome.  But, even more impressive than its literature selection is Kindle’s portability, usability and readability.

With HP’s recent announcement of a cheaper process for manufacturing e-paper displays, it is only a matter of time before e-book price-tags drop from their current $350+ price tag to a more affordable level.  Not that it matters, Kindle is sold out for the foreseeable future, and offerings from Sony and other competitors are holding their own this holiday season. 

It is obvious consumers see the potential of not only Kindle, but of e-book technology as a whole.  Who knows?  Some day we may all receive our newspapers, textbooks and spy thrillers electronically.  However, it is not the consumer application of the e-book which intrigues me, it is the corporate application.

Paper documents are unsecure and wasteful (environmentally and fiscally).  Laptops are heavy, unwieldy, and take time to power on and off.  As portable as the modern notebook computer is, one must still stop and sit down in order to most optimally use it.  Furthermore, many employees acting in a management capacity spend more time reading and reviewing documents than actually creating them.

An e-book modified for business use could connect to secure servers and VPN networks, download PDFs, Word Documents and Powerpoints, while providing a new level of portable readability for the on-the-go modern employee.  Bluetooth capabilities could allow employees to quickly swap important documents face-to-face (securely of course).  Need to pass out a document at a meeting?  Pull out the e-book, and beam it to everyone in the conference room. 

Moving forward, as consumer electronics become more feature-rich and advanced, it will be interesting to see how they translate to a business setting.  In the meantime I'll be eagerly awaiting Kindle 2.0!

Posted by Mohit Joshi at 06:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I like the news already. He has commented, and rightly so, that right now the patient need a blood infusion and not short term thing like budget deficit.

How true? When things get tough most of the people start to worry about the short term things like cutting cost, manage the deficit. This is true for most of the organizations. A contrarian view would be to actually increase the spending on fixing the root cause and in the preparation for the future. This is the time to build for the future and not save for present.

I think this will differentiate the leaders from the pack across organization that will reap the rewards when the tide turns.

Are you ready? This is the question that needs to be asked by each organization rather than are you saving enough?

Posted by Mritunjay Singh at 06:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Pulsing beats, thumping bass, flashing lights, dancing, and piezoelectricity?  Yes, piezoelectricity.  Piezoelectricity, the source of energy found commonly within the internals of a quartz watch has club-goers raving for this green source of energy—literally.  Recently, piezoelectricity technology has moved from the wristwatch to the dance floor—the actual floor—to harvest the kinetic energy of dancers.  

At the Surya night club in London, the dance floor is equipped with a “bouncing floor” composed of springs and power generating blocks which, when compressed by the weight of a dancing clubber, produces a small electrical current via piezoelectricity providing up to 60% of the nightclub’s electrical needs.  This technology along with wind turbines and solar panels installed at Surya create an almost completely sustainable nightclub—the first in the world!

The application of the piezoelectric flooring certainly has more uses than high energy nightclubs.  Perhaps, the technology could be rolled out on sidewalks, at busy bus terminals, or even shopping malls where green energy could be harvested at a large scale.

I find it fascinating that a technology once reserved for your Casio can be extrapolated and magnified to produce enough power for an entire building.     

Where do you see this technology applied?  Do you feel comfortable knowing you’re clubbing on an energy-producing, piezoelectric, flashing (that’s my guess) dance floor?

I know I am.

To learn more, check out this article from the Daily Mail.   

Posted by Jitin Goyal at 02:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

In the background of unprecedented financial crisis and rising need to get higher productivity with lower costs using IT, the next wave of global sourcing would be using concerted or collaborative sourcing. It is no longer a nice to hear paradigm or good-to-have, it’s the need of the hour.

Based on the needs of the company, at a point in near future, the clients would only have to decide the strategy, geography of operations and uniqueness of approach and the set of solutions would be pre-built with customization built up. This not only reduces the total spend in IT due to sharing of cost within the eco system but also brings innovation at the speed of required tremendously reducing the time to market. 

The concerted sourcing would have multiple variants to it. Utility model for infrastructure management with clear security rules and economy of scale driving the costs down. Factory model of development for platforms that could be collaborated among service providers, under a cost and profit sharing basis. The model would help in customization, prioritization and process adherence in development. This is the next level of the freeware community. 

It would be within the lines of Cloud computing, SaaS that are already popular with the long tail as well as the start-up companies that have a niche offering with huge time to market needs.
The important pillars required for the concerted sourcing to become mainstream is not hugely different from the global sourcing with some variation:
§         Efficient & effective governance across the service providers and the clients
§         Metrics to measure the goals of the clients, performance of the provider(s)  

Most importantly, future roadmap and decision making for the products and customizations requested within the ecosystem. This is one of the flattening themes of winning in the turns.

Posted by Mritunjay Singh at 05:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

XBRL (extensible business reporting language) has been heralded as a technology which will be leading us to a verge of a new era in financial reporting with interactive data that will make the financial reporting processes simple and efficient. While some of the corporate treasurers are slowly getting acquainted with the technology, many finance managers and internal auditors, who will be most affected by it in the coming years, do not seem to be aware of this ground-breaking and innovative technology. The organizations could pursue xBRL not only for compliance but also to help address the issues of current market environment.

Per the SEC rules which are to be adopted by first quarter 2009, all public companies with market capitalization greater than $5 billion would need to start applying XBRL tags to their 10-Ks and 10-Qs for periods ending on or after December 15th 2008. While these dates discussed above represent the need for organizations to move the XBRL way rather quickly, a recent Institute of Internal Auditors (IIA) survey of more than 200 chief audit executives worldwide found that more than half are not yet familiar with XBRL, and an over 90 percent would need guidance on the new process of filing financial statements with interactive data.  This just shows that the majority of internal auditors have not yet been engaged in the process of converting financial reporting into an interactive data format.

While it is already being put to practical use in a number of countries in North America, Europe and others and implementations of XBRL are growing rapidly around the world, there still seems to be an opportunity for others to start the process and benefit from the same.

Infosys took active part in SEC Voluntary Filing Program and is one of active contributors to the XBRL effort. We have moved very quickly on adopting this standard and have learnt a lot of interesting lessons in the process. In a recent article in Financial week, we have highlighted and shared our lessons learned and our successes with the XBRL technology.

I feel that with the status of SEC proposal being in pending state now, Corporate Treasurers and Internal Auditors will have time to catch up which could be beneficial to the organizations in the end. But the main point to note for the new adopters is to start NOW and get some test filings done and get prepared for the mandate which could happen very soon.

Posted by Srinivas Prabhala at 06:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)