Infosys’ BPM-EAI blog offers a platform to discuss the latest trends in the Business Process Management and Enterprise Application Integration spaces. Exchange thoughts, ideas and opinions with Infosys experts on how BPM and EAI programs can be leveraged to achieve operational excellence and maximize your return on investment.

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September 29, 2011

LIVE Update from TUCON 2011 - Part : 2

While I talked about the theme elements and the key focus areas, Infosys participation at TUCON 2011 provided us with interesting insights to customer perspectives. More and more customers are finally looking at the Cloud seriously, something substantiated by TIBCO themselves.

Some interesting announcements coming from TIBCO during the course of the event:
- Focus on zero latency devices and applications is taken to a new level in line with the philosophy 'Big Data wont help you in 6 months'. Particularly interesting is the concept that 'A little bit of right information before hand, is better than all the information 6 months from now'
- TIBCO web messaging platform to service mobile and web enabled platforms as an extension to TIBCO Enterprise Messaging Service
- SpotFire 4.0, that customers and system integrators are awaiting with equal anticipation after the eye-grabbing releases of the previous versions
- A wide multi-flavored TIBCO Cloud platform that promises to be a 'one click' deployment off-premise of infrastructure and software that would take weeks if not months to deploy conventionally.
- Tighter integration of newer acquired solutions like the Nimbus owned process discovery capability and Loyalty management solutions, with Context capture and collaboration capabilities. If the prototype that we saw is an indication, we are in for some very cool technology innovations
All in all, TIBCO's data handling capabilities and the focus on low latency, data context and extending the integration capabilities is likely to create a niche platform, that isn't probably covered in existing analyst quadrants.

While at the event, we had strong cross-industry participation at the Infosys hosted cocktail event attended over 50+ clients and prospects. This coupled with the insightful interactions in the solution showcase area, does provide a point of view around TIBCO across verticals. The BestBuy Europe and Infosys hosted session on Customer Experience challenges and the hosted solution deployed was well received too.

The highlight of the Infosys participation was the key note session by Ashok Vemuri on how as businesses move away from a product-centric model towards co-creation of value, tomorrow's enterprises will be defined by their ability to create and nurture an ecosystem of innovators. We look forward to sharing the video snippets of the keynote  with you soon.

LIVE Update from TUCON 2011 - Part : 1

In my pre-event blogs,I was wondering about the single overarching theme that TUCON 2011 sessions would center around. As the diverse range of keynote sessions unfolded with topics as wide as Innovation, Customer Loyalty, Agility, Mobility, the one standout TIBCO theme that was evident was - Data, more precisely handling data in the 21st century.

As Vivek and team put it at the start of the conference, it is becoming increasingly about "Right DATA, at the right time, at the right place and with the right context". TIBCO's strategy, value proposition and the roadmap of the product line-up is very appropriately centered on this notion.

There were some interesting messages in the keynote, that alluded to the various facets of handling data in the 21st century, here's a few:
- MGM Casinos and Resorts highlighting the shift of the competitive battleground to 'Customer', and how they plan to leverage TIBCO's data handling capabilities for creating an intimate relationship with the customers, NOW!.
- Cognizant's session pointing to an interesting phenomenon, dissonance between the consumer experiences with technology vs the corporate experience with technology. Most enterprises are facing this when the employee who is uber-connected at home in the evening, comes in to work in the morning and expects the same ecosystem.
- Fedex CIO mentioning a key tenet that the logistics industry and enterprise IT at large, should find very valuable -"The info about the package is as important as the package itself"

Also, as much as it is about data at the right place with the right attributes, increasingly enterprises are moving away from control and command while handling this data. As TIBCO put it, Tomorrow's Enterprise functioning will be more akin to jazz that symbolizes improvisation, than stand for Common and Control for which Corporations were created in the first place, interesting thought... But very relevant, given the channels, types and size of data that the enterprise 3.0 is bombarding us with. Stay plugged in for more updates from the event, and keep the comments coming..

September 27, 2011

The Innovation Advantage: An Infosys POV

Before wireless radio transmission was invented, long distance communication was a matter of days, months or years. But in 1895, a brilliant Serbian-Croatian inventor Nikola Tesla demonstrated a simple wireless system which could communicate over a 50 mile distance almost instantly. But he failed to commercialize the idea. Years later, an Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi applied for a patent for radio transmission in 1893 and became the first man to commercialize radio. Marconi was later known as the inventor of radio.

radio-tower-small.jpg History is replete with such inventions which never saw the light of the day until a market-savy individual understands its potential. Hindered by the slow spread of information and uncertain financing, a stereotypical eighteenth century inventor toiling for months in his underlit laboratory might achieve too little or too late.

The 21st century is indeed the best time to be an inventor. The vast repositories of information at one’s finger tips and viral nature of many social networking mediums ensure that many obstacles that inventors of the past faced are no longer present.

But does this mean that enterprises are thriving with innovation?

The reality seems to be far from it. In a survey conducted in 2010, 95% of the 300 Fortune 1000 executives surveyed recognized the criticality of innovation to future growth; more than half of those surveyed admitted that their company had no tools or processes for fostering enterprise innovation and at least a third saw their absence as a barrier to innovation.

Paradoxically, the hunger for innovation among consumers seems to be higher than ever before. Popular websites like Facebook and Google launch wide-sweeping changes overnight in a race to please its online visitors with ever-increasing functionality. Consumer electronics manufacturers carefully plan their release calendars for several years in advance to intentionally stagger their innovative features. Retailers need to add the redundant ‘New and Improved’ phrase in most products to keep the consumer excited. To today’s impatient generation, if a company has not innovated for a while, it is as good as dead.

With the ever growing importance of fostering innovation within the enterprise; there is an increasing need to create more springs of innovative ideas, connect them with changing customer needs and allow them to shape the future organization.

According to Infosys there are three key enablers to build an environment of innovation:

  • Adaptability - Often disruptive changes within an industry gives an opportunity to reexamine the core strengths of a company. Insights from such an exercise might not just help reinvent itself but also ensure its longetivity.

  • Collaboration - Ideas spread faster than ever in in today’s socially networked world. Companies thriving on innovation have successfully created Innovation Platforms on a global scale to accelerate ideation and teamwork.

  • Simplicity - Over the year, organizations have grown through several mergers and acquisitions, resulting in process complexity and legacy systems. Perhaps, hidden under those layers of obfuscation is a simple and easy to understand business system. Simplification invites innovators to think and improve your businesses.

This Infosys point of view is further explored in the whitepaper ‘The Innovation Advantage: Build the Future-proof Enterprise’ and available for free download.

September 22, 2011

TUCON 2011 - More on BIAN as Core Banking Surround

In Continuation with my previous blog post http://www.infosysblogs.com/bpm-eai/2011/09/tucon_2011_-_core_banking_surr.html#more on BIAN indentifing 250 service domains across Sales & Services, Reference Data, Operation & Execution, Analytics & Risk and Business Support business areas, I think it is an important event within Banking Industry in terms of taking a collective step including Product Vendors & SI vendor to bring in standardization which was really due for long.

So how does this standardization help banks internally and collaborate with their partner eco system?

From a bank's perspective, it provides a great opportunity to adopt BIAN best practice of business area classification for its IT systems to reduce overlaps, identify opportunity for consolidation, establish the service catalog and lastly look at business area based legacy modernization

From a Product vendor perspective BIAN provides the basic guidelines of componentizing the application landscape and expose it as a re-usable service aligning well within the banking industry.

For a System Integrator partner, BIAN provides a unique opportunity to work alongside with  customers and other industry players to jointly define, build and implement next-generation banking platforms based on a common architectural framework.  To leverage this opportunity, Infosys has  been enrolled as the newest member of BIAN comminity . Read here for more details.

At TUCON 2011, we will be showcasing our capabilities on BIAN and would like to discussion in details with you. Looking forward to meeting you to discuss more on the implementation.

TUCON 2011 - Exploring 'Big Ideas' in enterprise software: Customer Loyalty in Utilities

In my previous blog I talked about one of the key 'Big Ideas' at TUCON 2011, - Customer Loyalty - , its implications in retail and some solutions and sessions that attendees could look forward to. A more interesting case of customer loyalty is being witnessed in an industry hitherto known to take its customers for granted - Electric Utilities.

A little over a year ago, customers of a leading west coast utility in US resorted to a major backlash following installation of smart meters that triggered fears of electricity bill spikes. Such was the impact of the "Bakersfield Effect", as it is called now, that a state sponsored inquiry was hinted and industry analysts talked about obstacles to Obama administration's $8 Bn "Smart Grid" initiative. An innocuous rate increase bill that didn't grab any attention when approved by the Utilities Commissions earlier, might never be the same again.  And at the heart of the issue is - Customer Loyalty. The aspect of Customer Loyalty that is central here is Customer Engagement and co-operation with a service provider. My colleague Larry Rubenacker talks about this effect and its implications in greater detail in his blog on 'The Smart Customer Experience Mandate'.

The Mobile, Agile, Social and 'Smart' utility customer expects more from her utility than a website to pay monthly bills! Utilities across the US and around the world are now looking at ways to engage the customers more and more, even if they are functioning in a regulated market with little choice to customers for switching their providers. This can only help the Utility in smoother change management of major initiatives like the Smart Grid, Energy Savings programs, Distributed Generation and other novel 21st century solutions.

A few months ago, TIBCO themselves made a welcome surprise acquisition of Loyalty Labs, a company specializing in Customer Loyalty offerings to retailers, hospitality chains and the like. I wonder if leveraging that for Utilities was ever thought  about, but it would be very interesting to see how a platform like that could be used for marketing heavy applications in Utilities. At Infosys we have seen a lot of interest in applications like our Demand Side Management  solution, that has been designed to build successful and planet friendly customer reward programs for Utilities. Drop by our booth at TUCON 2011 for a detailed conversation about the solution, or write back what you think about this new Customer Loyalty paradigm in Energy and Utilities.

Finally consulting think-tanks like ours are looking at devising Utilities centric solutions for driving customer engagement, customer loyalty and even customer retention where needed, using modern day platforms. Read more about Customer Service focused Utilities solutions here or interact with our industry experts sharing their thoughts on our Smart Utilities.

 

SOA Evangelist

A football coach when he joins a school, primary if you may want to call it, has a herculean task of training the kids for the real game. Kids know that the ball needs to be kicked into a goal and more often than not, in their enthusiasm of game, kick the ball into their own goal; defeating the very purpose of match. There might be “dares” too, as to who would dribble the ball for most part of the game - which in effect stops the ball being passed on to an untagged player near to the opponent goal, missing out on an opportunity to win.

Similar would the situation of an SOA Evangelist visits a client’s IT department for the first time. In the enthusiasm to go the next stage of IT maturity teams from different Lines-of-Business would want to reach the targets individually, like the a kid hitting self-goal for the notion of hitting a goal, irrespective of whose goal the ball is reaching. This is where the SOA Evangelist needs to play the role of a “coach” and get the buy-in from management to create “rules of the game”. This would help in setting the “goals”. This would imply in forming of a centralized SOA Center of Excellence, which has oversight across all the LOB IT divisions and the owner of such Center of Excellence would directly report into CIO of the organization.

The IT divisions of LOBs “dare” each other as to who holds the “ball” for longer time, by owning the services of their LOB for use within their Unit as against making them “Enterprise wide” Services. Again, as a coach gives directions to children’s team to “pass” the ball for team’s benefit, the Evangelist needs to conduct workshop and ensure that all the LOBs concur with the idea of “centralizing” services, for sake of overall benefit of the Enterprise.

The critical aspect for any coach is the state of the playground. If the practice field is not adequate or in state of despair, our coach needs to get funds/grants from school board, so as to provide a decent (if not state of the art) play ground with a good gymnasium which can help his students to be in fit shape. By the same token, SOA Evangelist too needs to do an assessment of the existing applications in the Enterprise’s IT landscape. Based on the outcome of such an assessment, the recommendations need to be discussed with CFO and CIO for seeking budgets. As a playground needs to be leveled and some of the sand mounds need to scrapped off, some of the applications need to retired (if the case be) or modernized (based on the stage of application life cycle) or replaced (if there are better alternatives available). Once the playground is leveled, a new turf would be laid, likewise a new application that can act as an ESB needs to be procured. As the budding players need good gymnasium, the IT hands of the Enterprise need to have good sandbox where they can work out on different approaches to “Service enable” their applications.

The school board looks forward to getting some results from the new formed team and coach, especially after spending to modernize the playground and buying equipment and other peripherals. A coach would plan a “victory map” for his school’s team like playing with a neighboring school, then playing at county level, then playing at state-level school meet and finally the national school meet.

As the coach starts paving way for the national cup with small local wins, SOA Evangelist too needs to start out with showing “results” small wins, starting with service-enabling critical applications at LOB Level, automating some of the processes based on these services’ orchestration, then service-enabling all the applications in all the LOBs and finally establishing a futuristic SOA 2.0 IT Landscape.

September 21, 2011

TUCON 2011 - Exploring 'Big Ideas' in enterprise software: Customer Loyalty

In my previous blog, I shared the expectations   that a practitioner or a new client should have from TIBCO coming into TUCON 2011. Let us look deeper into some of the key themes or "Big Ideas" track as TIBCO puts it and see what it could mean for today's enterprises. Let me start with Customer Loyalty, which I feel has taken a complete new dimension for today's enterprises across all industries. Customer Loyalty is often mistaken as a simple 'frequent user' card that we swipe everywhere from a grocery store, to an airline counter,to a casino but has gone much beyond that in today's Mobile, Agile, Smart and Social (MASS) world.

How many times have you stood in front of an aisle in a premium electronics store, and 'google-d' a certain item, and found it at 70% price in the neighborhood 'low prices' store only to be zipped away immediately. Why burn precious gasoline, and not just order it online for delivery right away! The premium electronics store, invoked your interest, got you to the aisle, made you decide on the product and then just drove you away to competition - and the sales rep didn't even come to know! The multiple customer interaction channels clubbed with super efficient supply chain, ways to track inventory and of course customers' pricing focus, make Customer Loyalty a top CXO priority, doesn't matter if you are selling airplane seats or blue tooth headsets.

At the event one of our key clients - Best Buy Europe speaks about their focus on seamless Customer Experience across channels to drive Customer Loyalty, and what it takes to 'keep the customer in'. Our client and partner Gerald Curley, talks about Best Buy's approach to tackle the challenges for tomorrow's digital consumers and leveraging a cloud-based eCommerce platform for doing that. If you are attending TUCON 2011,drop by the Infosys booth to see illustrations of Infosys CommerceEdge for Digital Consumers. Also on display and for discussion are case studies and solutions around Customer Experience in diverse industries such as Finance and Insurance, Manufacturing and Utilities.

While at the event, I am looking forward to the - 'Panel Discussion | Tying It All Together: Loyalty and Your Company' where it is promised that loyalty experts will debate the importance loyalty in today's context and innovative ways through which enterprises are achieving it.  Good luck to our client partners for the discussion, as we prepare to see them in Vegas.

In my next blog I will talk about how customer loyalty has shifted paradigms in an industry hitherto known to take its customers for granted - Electric Utilities... Keep the comments coming...

September 20, 2011

TUCON 2011 - Core Banking Surround Strategy

Today, banks are looking to maximize value from their Core Banking Platform by focusing on its surround to enhance customer experience or  improve operational Excellence. At the same time, they are looking to standardize application landscape for enabling interoperability across products and solutions, resulting in the emergence of BIAN (Banking Industry Architecture Network),a common framework for banking interoperability.

BIAN an industry wide initiative has identified 250 service domains across Sales & Services, Reference Data, Operation & Execution, Analytics & Risk and Business Support business areas (Source: www.bian.org) to identify the opportunities for standardization. Infosys is the newest member in the BIAN community with a clear aspiration to provide banking organizations with common and logical pre-configured services landscape, designed on BIAN principles. Our primary role will be to drive decomposition of services along with  partner members defined by BIAN to ensure standardization, governance and lifecycle management of those services.

TIBCO today has changed it's positioning  from a pure play integration provider to a an end-to-end stack provider, becoming the defacto option for core banking surround strategy, leveraging its process management, SOA, business optimization & Transaction management capabilities.

Along with our partner for a decade, TIBCO, we have embarked on this joint initiative to implement BIAN service specification which will enable banks to plug and play these services within its enterprise using TIBCO ActiveMatrix Suite

Our experts at TUCON 2011(http://www.infosys.com/BPM-EAI/news-events/Pages/tucon-2011.aspx ), would be happy to discuss and present our success stories in  BIAN. Look forward to meeting you.

September 19, 2011

TUCON 2011 - Expectations of a BPM-EAI practitioner

In my previous blog,I explored the theme of TUCON 2011 , this year's edition of TIBCO's premier annual event. I also wondered about the reason for TIBCO's transformation to what I regard as a 'total stack' player - Out of the 20 odd product categories on TIBCO's website, only 4 strictly deal with integration.

What this means, is that the success of TUCON 2011 could well be judged by the coherence of strategy that TIBCO displays at the event. For starters I used the MASS enterprise theme - Mobile, Agile, Social and Smart as my take on an illustrative theme.

Going by the TUCON 2010 theme of - Two Second Advantage - and what has gone by since then, my top expectations from the event as a practitioner would be to know:

o Real life transformational instances of the 'Two Second Advantage'
o Latest additions to TIBCO's stronghold products in the integration space and how can clients cross leverage new trends like Grid Computing, In-Memory Computing from the integration platform
o Early successes and roadmap of 2010's major launch, TIBCO ActiveMatrix BPM - a category where leading analysts do not seem to be appreciative of TIBCO's efforts
o Roadmap for TIBCO SpotFire - TIBCO's poster child of last year - especially for customers who do not subscribe to an underlying TIBCO ESB or a Composite Application framework
o Key levers and possible solutions or frameworks that TIBCO plans to use to 'move closer to business'

Customers new to TIBCO's offerings might be surprised by the sheer breadth of the product portfolio. If you are in this boat, your primary intent should be to understand:

o What can be a starting point in your journey with TIBCO, especially now that it doesn't default to a 'data bus'
o What is the timeframe you should set for yourself, to showcase benefits of a Two Second Advantage within your enterprise; based on other customer experiences
o How do you leverage only the right sliver of the 'TIBCO stack' that aligns with your enterprise vision and the top transformational programs, knowing well that it will co-habit with your enterprise middleware investment.

Well on a side note, I would be very interested to use the Fantasy Football Analyzer to see if Tony Romo can get closer to that ever evasive playoff win this season, for all those aching Dallas Cowboys souls.

 

Sustainable Energy for a Better Tomorrow by Infosys @ TUCON 2011

Sustainability is the ability to endure and ensure that businesses succeed without endangering resources for future generations. It is vital that organizations become environmentally responsible in order to be sustainable themselves. However, sustainability is not only a need but also a source of tremendous opportunity to businesses: opportunity to differentiate, innovate and earn trust.

In continuation with our previous blog on Infosys participation in TUCON 2011, one of the main theme evangelized by Infosys is How organizations look towards sustaining tomorrow, using the Technology of Now. As TIBCO is seen as the Technology of now for the business of tomorrow, utilities of today are leveraging TIBCO to roll out smart electricity meters and a smart grid. Here, we present to you the backbone of Utilities, The Smart Integrator. Today's utilities must learn to interpret data and prepare for tomorrow, be able to predict the outage before it occurs and manage natural resources using Demand Side Management programs.

Infosys provides multiple solutions that target 21st century sustainability needs of the Energy and Utilities. Don't miss to experience them at the Infosys booth in TUCON 2011.

•Demand Side Management (DSM) Solution: Addressing the need for an integrated solution for managing the entire portfolio of incentive programs for a utility company, Infosys DSM solution encourages customers to employ energy-efficient best practices and install renewable energy equipment. Review the leaflet on DSM Solution and learn how it drives significant cost benefits.

•Smart Integrator (SI) Solution: Smart Integrator is an integration platform for the utilities sector that uses powerful event-centric building blocks to generate, predict, deliver, integrate, query and visualize information across the Master Data Management (MDM), CIS and Core Distribution Systems (SCADA/DMS, OMS, WAM, GIS). You can read the solution flyer and learn how Smart Integrator acts as the new age utility company's nervous system, and uses Smart Grid technologies to enable effective decision making based on real-time data and learning models.

•Enabling a Smarter Energy Platform: Electric utilities are struggling to ensure sustainable power supply, while also attempting to adapt to changes driven by need for energy conservation and concerns around climate change. Our thought paper focuses on defining energy platforms for Utilities by breaking them into blocks across the distribution network and connecting these blocks in a smart way to predict unexpected changes. Click here to download this exclusive whitepaper.

We look forward to meeting you at our booth to exchange your views on embracing the 'Technology of Now' for your business.

September 17, 2011

BPM & SOA Play in Financial Institution - Part 1

Feeling good to be back after a pause.. I had few good discussion earlier which were more generic in nature in BPM & SOA space, so for a change I thought I will be little specific and focus on Financial Institution space..

Increasing relevance of BPM & SOA in Financial Institution

I think the last downtime forced Financial Institution to think about customer and operational excellence more than anything else.. as a result today financial institution is undergoing a major change to increase their focus on customer experience to increase stickiness and operation excellence to improve its cost parameter..

It will be wrong to say BPM and SOA is going to the sole strategy for the transformation, however after seeing what large banks today are doing to focus on customer centricity and operational excellence, I don't have any doubt about BPM and SOA significance in this transformational journey..

Since there are so many things happening around it will be difficult to capture everything in this single blog, so I will try to cover this through a series..

In my view the two key areas where BPM and SOA is increasingly becoming relevant are

  • Customer Experience across products, services and channels - Multi Channel Integration, Common Customer Servicing Platform, End to End Client On Boarding, customer lifecycle management across product/ services/Channels, Faster turnaround time and Single Customer View are some initiatives Financial Institution are focusing on
  • Improving cost parameters for back end operation - Right First Time, Improving FTE count for areas like New Account Opening (# of acc open per FTE), Account Operation (# of new/existing account per operation FTE), Cards Operation, Lending Process Optimization, streamlined product operation are some of the initiatives that Financial Institution are looking into to improve its cost parameters.

So how exactly BPM and SOA is playing its part

To Improve Customer experience Financial institution are

  • Looking at process automation using BPM for customer facing processes which includes processes for handling customer life events
  • Focusing on Process and product enablement across channels using SOA so that customer are able to engage with Bank through multiple channels without any fear of context being lost. In short customer should be able to initiate a process from one channel and end in another.
  • Utilizing CEP engines to build intelligence on customer interaction to provide more context sensitive information or make offer which are relevant to customer at that moment of time
  • Focusing on building end to end customer on boarding platform which will enable Financial Institution to capture required information from customer based on product and services to complete all KYC checks, Credit Due diligence, Entitlements and legal documentation at once. The focus is primarily on reducing customer touch points
  • And at the end Financial institution are looking at unified customer servicing platform which will enable it to uniformly serve the customer across all product and services..

To improve cost parameters Financial institution are

  • Looking at increase straight through processing through Service based integration & process automation
  • looking at Standardizing business process across business lines, to ensure cross leverage of business users across products, region and line of business
  • And at the end financial institution are looking at adopting Business Objective Driven Business Platform serving multiple business line build on a flexible BPM, SOA & Rules Platform.
  •  

That is it for today.. we will discuss about each areas later..

 

September 14, 2011

Infosys Team at TUCON 2011 - Annual TIBCO user conference

In less than 2 weeks, as Vegas readies to host SOA and BPM practitioners from around the world @ TUCON 2011 from September 26th - 29th 2011- a confluence of global business and technology leaders. This year, Infosys is a Marquee sponsor at the event, that has over the years acquired a milestone status on the ' integration calendar'.

As I try to get my hands around the theme of this year's event, one thing is clear, TIBCO has come a long way from being identified as a provider for real time integration products to a set of technologies focused on leveraging data within tomorrow's enterprise. For starters - 'real time' is passé, what matters is data at the 'right time' and what you do with it! That explains the product suite of TIBCO that ranges from low latency data grid, to decision making, to visualization, to data governance. Analysts, clients and partners alike would be keen on hearing success stories of this super wide integration stack from around the world.

But why this broad-based shift one may ask. In my opinion the answer is simple. While today's organizations are successfully figuring out their data integration needs, Tomorrow's Enterprise needs to be Smart, Agile, Social and Mobile - let me coin the term MASS! Even a decade ago it was tough to associate these attributes to an IT landscape, but today most technology  leaders have one of these 4 words atop their white boards. A look at the industry confirms that:

- Utilities are not concerned about data acquisition through smart meters, but are more concerned about how will they use this data in a Smart Grid
- Healthcare payers are not just worried about timely data feeds but the ability to respond in a highly event driven industry
- Retailers that have multi-channel integration are looking at ways to predict customer behavior to make that subtle cross-sale

The industry and partner sessions at this year's TUCON surely seem to be spread across the MASS spectrum. It would however be interesting to see how all this is tied into a single theme, by Vivek and team. May I offer the MASS acronym as a suggestion, Vivek?

Infosys is represented by a cross industry team of experts and practitioners lead by Ashok Vemuri, Member of the Board, Head of Americas and Financial Services & Insurance. He will be delivering the opening keynote on September 28th and would be sharing how, as businesses move away from a product-centric model towards co-creation of value, tomorrow's enterprises will be defined by their ability to create and nurture an ecosystem of innovators.

On Tuesday afternoon, our customer, Best Buy Europe will be hosting a session on achieving a seamless customer experience across multiple touch points with an eCommerce platform for tomorrow's digital consumers.

Later in the evening from 7pm-9pm, Infosys will be hosting an exclusive cocktail reception for customers, prospects, analysts and media executives.

On Thursday, listen to JCPenney's session about improving its customer experience by real time integration of more than 1100 stores.

If you're planning to attend TUCON 2011, we look forward to meeting you at our booth to exchange your views on embracing the 'Technology of Now'. We would also like to discuss our industry solutions , viewpoints and success stories  that help in Building Tomorrow's Enterprise with the Two Second advantage. Also, we have a host of gifts lined up and if you are the lucky one, you could WIN some of them, so that's an added incentive!!!

I plan to share our experiences across various industry verticals and solutions that leverage the Two-Second Advantage in my ongoing TUCON 2011 blog series.

Also I will be updating you with my first impressions LIVE during the event based on any key announcements, general sessions and meetings with customers and TIBCO senior executives.

Keep the comments coming...