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February 2, 2012

Location Based Services Value Chain

 

Location Based Services (LBS) are increasingly becoming popular especially in the consumer market. Due to inherent capability in devices to provide the user location and penetration of smartphones, Location based products and services are readily adopted by the consumers and enterprises as well.

Location Based Services take the geo-spatial data as an input from the resource or a device and provides the services that are relevant to that location. Multiple approaches can be used to locate a resource and provide the context based service to the user. In this Blog I will limit my discussion to the Device-Centric approach in which the LBS Provider gives the app to the subscriber, who then uses it to check-in at a specific location. Check-in is the term commonly used to refer the arrival of a user at a particular location. 


Continue reading "Location Based Services Value Chain" »

January 9, 2012

Enterprise Cloud Adoption Strategic Roadmap

Adoption of Cloud in an enterprise is more of a strategic decision than an operational or tactical. Cloud adoption needs to be seen more from enterprise architecture strategy perspective rather than an isolated application architecture specific strategy for the simple reason that it has several short and long term implications on enterprise strategy which may be beyond the specific application's business or technology footprint.

Continue reading "Enterprise Cloud Adoption Strategic Roadmap" »

November 28, 2011

What is basically cloud computing? How is it different from the traditional application hosting?

Though I have been working in the different cloud-computing engagements but yet when coming to explaining it to someone who is new or for example who is not from a IT or software back ground then it becomes a little difficult.

For the complete post, please refer to this.

October 25, 2011

Enterprise Cloud trends - "Cloud First" strategy

While we were working on the Cloud strategy for Infosys a year back we had lengthy debates on how an enterprise of the future looks like with their cloud vision in the coming years. Most of our forecasts on this are coming factual. My recent interactions with clients and partners clearly reveal that the Cloud adoption by enterprises is faster than what was being perceived by a larger community.

 

"Cloud first" strategy is being adopted by some of our leading clients and few of them have a very clear approach for their Infrastructure and application stack. Hybrid is the most common trend and Private Cloud plans are in place for the new and old gears. IaaS consumption from Public Cloud seems to be a short term strategy and PaaS is becoming more prominent for application development even though there is still some fear of vendor lock-in. This to me is the right strategy as more innovations are to happen in the PaaS space and applications can leverage the power of Cloud in terms of scalability, global availability, design for failures etc. more with platform as a service. Application portability gaps across platforms and on-premise setup will gradually diminish with parity amongst on-premise server operating systems and Cloud platforms being addressed with every new version release. Those who consider that an application developed for windows server is a platform "lock-in" may not agree with me on this view.

 

One of our clients who has adopted O365 has outlined the future strategy for portals with first choice as SharePoint Online and anything on-premise will be an exception (feature parity, data privacy etc). This shows that "Cloud first" strategy is becoming the norm within enterprises with clear directions for non-standard applications and short living workloads. This works well across organizations and industries for especially self-contained application workloads which have least dependency on data residing on premise. Additionally, these organizations could have security and compliance concerns in their data being exposed to the Public Cloud.

 

Next wave is around mobility and analytics. Will discuss this in my next post. 

August 23, 2011

Practicing Agile Software Development on the Windows® Azure™ Platform

Over the years, several software development methodologies have evolved to help the IT industry cope with rapidly evolving business requirements. One such methodology is Agile... -an iterative approach to software development. Similarly rapid strides on the technology front are resulting in paradigm shifts towards software development and how IT delivers its services to business. Technologies in the form of virtualization and cloud are offering low entry barriers by making software and hardware infrastructure easily accessible and thus reduce the time to market. These are encouraging signs that help reduce the gap between business and IT. 

Continue reading "Practicing Agile Software Development on the Windows® Azure™ Platform" »

August 4, 2011

Common SharePoint Online (Office 365) Migration issues

I have been working on moving an existing SharePoint 2010 application to SharePoint Online (Office 365) and finally have been. I wanted to share some of the issue which are faced very likely and the probable resolution for the same

When I started i thought that it would be easy after all it's all about simple configuration and deploying the WSP on the SharePoint online environment. But it wasn't all that easy but had to face issues which I will list out as part of this blog.

Continue reading "Common SharePoint Online (Office 365) Migration issues " »

July 19, 2011

Step by step approach to expose on-premise database using Azure infrastructure

With the advancement of Azure cloud infrastructure, there arise many heterogeneous requirements which are of type of system(s) having combination of on-cloud and on-premise components. Specially from the on-premise database point of view for certain scenario, this blog series is intended to explain the options, steps, concerns and benefits of different approaches.

For complete blog, please refer to this.

June 29, 2011

Consumer Cloud

With the Apple iCloud announcements, the consumer cloud market is once again set on fire. In the context of delivering "contextual unified integrated services", this article looks at leading vendor landscape and tries to plot co-relation and comparison with their respective product offerings for consumer cloud.

June 14, 2011

Basic Azure enabling guide

This blog is basically to onboad any new developer to Azure development environment in the least possible time with the right resources available.

With Azure getting stabilized, there are myriad of Azure related articles and blogs made available in the internet. And sometime it is very much possible for a new comer/ developer to get deviated and get confused from where to start. And eventually instead of understanding the basics of the different azure building blocks, they sometime get lured to creating complex application.

So, this blog is not to teach Azure but provide a beginner with a simple guide with pointers to different resources (articles, blog, SDK samples) which will help him/her to grasp the basics of Azure architecture. And help the developer to move in the right path without wasting his/her precious time in understanding from where to start. I have tried to keep it simple with reference to the basic samples from MSDN, SDK and different blogs but tried to keep the maximum information

The complete post could be reached from here.

 

June 6, 2011

Mystery of the Windows Azure Diagnostics Performance Counter table

Are Performance Counter Diagnostics logs not getting created in your Azure development storage? Or is your Azure development fabric displaying similar error messages, while getting your specific performance counter to register

PdhAddCounter(\Process(MonAgentHost#0)\ID Process) failed

 The problem could lie with pointers to your system performance counters being corrupted. Here is a step by step guidance to investigate and resolve the issue.

Continue reading "Mystery of the Windows Azure Diagnostics Performance Counter table" »

June 3, 2011

Basic steps to expose the on-premise WCF service through appfabric Service bus to be used by Silverlight client in the Azure cloud

Basic steps to expose the on-premise WCF service through appfabric Service bus to be used by Silverlight client in the Azure cloud. It also talks about the steps to be followed to move an existing Silverlight client to the Azure. Some of the information has been taken from MSDN, Azure SDK and other blogs. The purpose of this is to provide all the information in a single place and there-by saving the precious time of developer.

For complete content, please refer to this post.

May 26, 2011

Rainbow in Cloud!!

As Cloud Computing starts becoming pervasive, more and more application patterns are considered or evaluated as fitment for running on Cloud.

Feasibility, and readiness for doing Business Intelligence (BI) on Cloud becomes one of the key asks.This is not simple and needs to be evaluated from multiple perspectives such as business, technology to the least. Business perspective would include aspects such as functionality required, cost-benefit, and elasticity of the environment, to name a few. Technology aspects would include readiness of stack to support functionality on Cloud.

Continue reading "Rainbow in Cloud!!" »

May 13, 2011

Entity Framework handshake with SQL Azure

Entity Framework shipped with .NET Framework 4 helps in building data access layer to interact with SQL Server or for that matter any data store. Enterprises that have invested in building web applications with Entity Framework, SQL Server as a database and now needing to move to SQL Azure database will need to see how their existing applications will seamlessly work with SQL Azure as a database.
I am sure many clients would consider this as one of the key consideration while planning application migration to off premise fully or partly.

Continue reading "Entity Framework handshake with SQL Azure" »

May 12, 2011

Migrating on premise SQL Server Database to off premise SQL Azure

Microsoft's answer to Relational data service on Cloud is SQL Azure, the immediate next question is how easy and seamless is to move my existing investment of on premise SQL Server database to SQL Azure. Of course, there are other questions related to cost, benefits, etc. but we will park them for now and possibly focus on only technical aspects of moving from SQL Server to SQL Azure in this blog.

Continue reading "Migrating on premise SQL Server Database to off premise SQL Azure" »

March 31, 2011

Is cloud computing same as putting things Online?

All those just boarding the cloud train, may have posed this question to themselves or to others who may have a know-how on cloud. Being a Cloud SME myself, I have faced this question several times. This post is an attempt to clear some of the confusion that exists around this specific topic.

Continue reading "Is cloud computing same as putting things Online? " »

March 30, 2011

Changing partition key in Windows Azure Table Storage

You might have faced a situation where you have defined your partition key logic initially and due to some reasons you need to change your partition logic to something else.


Read on to know how you are going to handle such situations.

 

Continue reading "Changing partition key in Windows Azure Table Storage" »

Performance of range queries on a Windows Azure Table Vs a Normal Database Table

Most of the times in a normal database a full table scan occurs when an index is either not used or there is no index on the table(s) being used by the statement (SQL or Oracle statements). Full table scans usually return data much slower than when an index is used. The larger the table, the slower that data is returned when a full table scan is performed.

Continue reading "Performance of range queries on a Windows Azure Table Vs a Normal Database Table" »

Configuring Azure development storage for team development scenarios

While developing applications in a team environment, it is important that the development team has access to a shared data store. And if you are building cloud applications targeting the Windows Azure platform, dev fabric along with the dev storage are the key components which stimulate the Azure platform aka cloud on the local development environment. However, as far as the dev storage goes, the default storage endpoints are configured to listen for requests received to the local host (127.0.0.1). As a result of which the dev storage is not accessible from remote locations.

Continue reading "Configuring Azure development storage for team development scenarios" »

March 28, 2011

HTTP Error 404.17 - wcf service from Azure development fabric

If you happen to get the following error while accessing a WCF service hosted in Azure dev fabric,

"HTTP Error 404.17 - Not Found. The requested content appears to be script and will not be served by the static file handler."

Here is what you should be taking care of.

Continue reading "HTTP Error 404.17 - wcf service from Azure development fabric" »

November 8, 2010

Microsoft Broadening Horizons on the Cloud

In the recently concluded Microsoft's annual developer conference, PDC 2010; Microsoft made a slew of announcements on Azure. In addition to Windows Phone and IE 9 announcements, for the 3rd consecutive year in a row, the event was Azure dominated further laying emphasis on the commitments being made by Microsoft on the cloud.

At the event, Microsoft announced several new features that will help strengthen its presence in the public cloud space vis-à-vis its competitors.

Continue reading "Microsoft Broadening Horizons on the Cloud " »

August 23, 2010

Unique Column values in Azure Table Entity

Recently in one of our projects we had a requirement, where column TemplateName within an entity named Template should have unique values. Users were supposed to enter the value for TemplateName while creating a new template. Later on, saved templates were being used by all the users in the system. Obviously, duplicate template names would confuse users while selecting the specific template.  At a glance this seems to be a very simple and standard requirement.

Continue reading "Unique Column values in Azure Table Entity" »

July 16, 2010

Windows Azure Clouds for your Enterprise - What? Why? and Hows of Windows Azure?

 Over the last couple of years, since the public announcement of Azure was made way back in PDC 2008,  we have been working on the Windows Azure platform; talking to customers, understanding their challenges and helping them adopt cloud. Based on these interactions and through Experiential Learnings, we have obtained insights into the different aspects of Azure-based development.

Continue reading "Windows Azure Clouds for your Enterprise - What? Why? and Hows of Windows Azure?" »

July 6, 2010

Small but effective points to notice during implementation in Cloud- Part 3 (Cloud drive)

This is the continuation of the thread "Small but effective points to notice during implementation in Cloud". The last entry of this thread could be found here.

 

Here are a few points to be noticed while using azure cloud drive and subsequently save your precious time. While using cloud drive for one of our projects I consumed a lot of time in figuring out a few error-causes. These would have been very simple to comprehend had the complete message been thrown instead of just the error codes.

Continue reading "Defining the Application Portfolio using the "EXIST" framework" »

June 7, 2010

An efficient way of deploying a static web site on Windows Azure

In discussions, we realized that developing and deploying a simple static web site on Windows Azure might turn out to be an uncalled affair of work for development and deployment. Let us take a simple example of a restaurant where the owner wants to put a web site for the internet presence. This site would mostly have static web pages and relatively low traffic of local consumers. Let us build a hypothesis for this type of static web sites. I want to stress a point; a Static site doesn't mean a plain vanilla site of images and text. Instead it could mean using Flash, SilverLight and JavaScript capabilities to increase richness of the web site.

Continue reading "An efficient way of deploying a static web site on Windows Azure" »

May 31, 2010

Virtualization and Private Cloud - Draw a line

Many a times you might get this question, where do I draw a line and say what's virtualization and what's private cloud? While setting up a private cloud lab we had similar question. Though, there is no clear answer, we tried to take out a few characteristics which might help.

Continue reading "Virtualization and Private Cloud - Draw a line" »

March 31, 2010

Azure Table Storage Vs. SQL Azure

At the time of application design decision on Azure, most of us get into this discussion at some point in time, “Table Storage OR SQL Azure”.

I thought of listing down the pros and cons for both of these storage options. Following comparison might be helpful to drive the decision.

Continue reading "Azure Table Storage Vs. SQL Azure" »

March 30, 2010

Load up your clouds just about right - need for capacity planning

Well, if I have compute and storage available on-demand then I would not worry about capacity planning,Right?

Continue reading "Load up your clouds just about right - need for capacity planning" »

March 15, 2010

Handling certificates for Azure management API calls

I had a very tough time in one of my projects where we were using the Azure management API from a web application (deployed in Azure cloud). Before this project, we had successfully used these APIs in a windows based application but this is first time we were using in a web application. And apparently had a good amount of learning in a very new dimension.

Continue reading "Handling certificates for Azure management API calls" »

February 15, 2010

ws2007HttpRelayBinding and Windows Azure Client

Recently we have faced this issue of not being able to consume a WCF service which was exposed using ws2007HttpRelayBinding from Windows Azure Web Role as a client. We had registered a service on AppFabric Service Bus with ws2007HttpRelayBinding; below is the service registration code for the service.

Continue reading "ws2007HttpRelayBinding and Windows Azure Client" »

SaaS makes financial accounting easier

It’s been so much talked and written about technical benefits of Cloud computing. I thought of looking at it from financial accounting point of view. Comparing the traditional IT expenses with Cloud computing expenses especially SaaS model, might give a different picture of the income statement. Before I go ahead and try putting forward my interpretation, want to make a disclaimer that I am no way finance or accounting expert, this is just a plain interpretation of what I understood. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

Continue reading "SaaS makes financial accounting easier" »

January 27, 2010

My First Tryst with Certificates

I recently worked with Windows Azure Service Management REST API to programmatically use few groovy operations on hosted services like creating/ upgrading deployment, getting deployment status etc. These features need authenticated requests.

Continue reading "My First Tryst with Certificates" »

December 14, 2009

MYOC - Offload compute intensive tasks on Azure using the Offline Processing pattern

In this post on the MYOC cloud development series, I will share an offline processing design pattern where certain computation tasks are offloaded to another execution task using queues and that can help reducing the overall processing time of online transactions. This is a very useful pattern to use, if you plan to build highly scalable and compute intensive application on the web today. This patterns is also used by many popular websites. Here I will demonstrate how we've used this pattern to help reduce the poll creation time.

Continue reading "MYOC - Offload compute intensive tasks on Azure using the Offline Processing pattern" »

December 2, 2009

Unknown user base – Think of Cloud!!

As Cloud computing is gaining momentum and slated to become mainstream, the most prominent question that every one asking today is “Which applications are most suitable on Cloud? Which are first to go on Cloud? What are the characteristic that one should look for?

Continue reading "Unknown user base – Think of Cloud!!" »

November 30, 2009

Dallas – Information as a Service

     We are witnessing information explosion over the internet, tons of information is getting accumulated in. However, we still struggle to get the “Accurate and Authentic Data”. Have you ever needed the zip code of a city, route to reach a place, dining menu of restaurants, weather forecast and history, crime rates in a specific area of city? This list just goes on. How do we get this data? Search this information on our favorite search engines and rest in peace when we find it!! But, do we really know whether the data which we got is really accurate?! It could be stale, misleading or just plain inaccurate!! Why can’t you get information as easily as you can get a size 40 Creamy white Louis Philippe shirt or maybe a striking green 8 GB IPOD shuffle; because INFORMATION is not commodity yet!! 

Continue reading "Dallas – Information as a Service" »

November 20, 2009

MYOC - E-mail Invite Notification

In this blog we’ll see how e-mail notifications can be sent to the participants to cast their vote for a poll using Microsoft live.

Continue reading "MYOC - E-mail Invite Notification" »

MYOC - Update Twitter Status

In this blog we’ll see in details how sending a tweet from a particular twitter account programmatically works on Azure.

Continue reading "MYOC - Update Twitter Status" »

MYOC - Telephony with Twilio to Vote

MYOC (Make Your Opinion Count) – an online poll application hosted on Microsoft Azure, uses Twilio to make it easier for people to participate in the online polls. Twilio is telephony in the cloud which exposes RESTful APIs to build scalable voice applications. It supports both inbound and outbound telephony calls. Pricing is developer friendly with pay-as-you-go model.

MYOC uses Twilio in two ways –
1. Poll creator can place a call  for participant to caste his/her vote
2. A participant can dial-in for a particular poll to caste his/her vote

Let’s see what all it takes to use twilio in MYOC to call a participant and accept his/her vote or to handle an incoming call to cast a vote.

Continue reading "MYOC - Telephony with Twilio to Vote" »

Points to notice while migrating data from traditional database to Azure SQL

Generally when it comes to migrating heavy data from one SQL server to another, among others following approaches are widely used:

1.       Using SSIS package

2.       And using BCP.

One needs to keep in mind a few points for the fruitful migration without any anomaly.

Continue reading "Points to notice while migrating data from traditional database to Azure SQL" »

November 19, 2009

Get Agile, Get on Azure

Software engineering methodologies are evolving to address the complexity and probable dynamism of the business requirements. One of the methodologies –Agile - helps teams respond to the unpredictability of building software through incremental, iterative work cadences, also known as sprints. In an agile paradigm, every aspect of development — requirements, design, etc.  is continually revisited throughout the lifecycle creating high visibility of the progress to all the stakeholders in the application development process. Traditional methodology involves creating the requirements for the complete application and then the development team almost goes into hibernation to develop the application and more often than not ends up giving unpleasant surprises to business. Nobody inclusive of the SMEs sometimes is able to visualize the final application state; moreover the demands are changing and creating chaos in the development process.  AGILE comes to rescue as all the stakeholders are involved in the application development process beginning with the first iteration. Instead of building what developer understands or rather interprets and showing end product collectively, we prefer to show application in pieces take feedback and improve in an iterative manner. It becomes a continuous improvement process.  AGILE gives a good visibility on development process, application feature sets and planning process to all stakeholders.

Continue reading here

 

November 18, 2009

MYOC - Enabling Federation on Azure Applications using Windows Identity Foundation

As a part of the current work we are trying to provide Federated Authentication in Azure Application. We want to develop a web application in Azure which would outsource authentication service to another component which would in turn authenticate users with its own enterprise. The basic idea is to be able to provide access to authenticated users from trusted organizations. As a sample we will use MyCompany as one of the trusted organizations. 
To achieve this we explored Windows Identity Foundation (previously called as Geneva Framework). Windows Identity Foundation provides Claims based Identity Management. It means the applications would have only authorization logic as per the claims (attributes) of the users since these claims are certified by a trusted source; these claims are secured also and hence can be trusted by the authentication mechanism. Using this framework authentication can be outsourced to some other central application or central storage and develop a claim aware application. Hence there is no need to bother about plumbing of the authentication code; one can just make use of the trusted claims received from the application which takes responsibility for authentication.

You might have got the point; this claims based model can be extended to achieve Enterprise SSO / Web SSO / Federated Authentication.

Continue reading "MYOC - Enabling Federation on Azure Applications using Windows Identity Foundation" »

MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 2

Following my previous blog, on the MYOC system requirements, here I shall be covering the solution design of MYOC.

Continue reading "MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 2" »

MYOC - Building RESTful services on Azure

In this post on the MYOC series, we will look at how RESTful services can be build on Windows Azure. Building RESTful services may be no different than how you would do it traditionally on-premise. Nonethless this post will detail the steps in building REST services in Azure and additional steps which need to be considered while developing a service for Azure.

Continue reading "MYOC - Building RESTful services on Azure" »

November 17, 2009

Deploying non-microsoft applications on Azure

In my previous blog post, I had shown you a deployment model in which an application could leverage the capabilities of both on-premise as well as being on cloud. In that blog I had shown how application storage had been migrated from on-premise to the cloud.
In this post I will show you yet another deployment model possible on Azure and which may interest most of you who may have applications running on non-Microsoft technologies. I will discuss a model on how applications build on Java technologies can be deployed on Windows Azure and hence can reap the benefits of Cloud Computing.

More on "Infosys mConnect" in a Microsoft Paper is available here

Continue reading "Deploying non-microsoft applications on Azure" »

November 16, 2009

Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 2

In this blog, I will continue the discussion on a possible migration scenario of migrating existing ISV application to Azure. If you haven’t read my previous blog on this topic, then you can go here...

Continue reading "Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 2" »

November 13, 2009

Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 1

Infosys on its part is helping Enterprises and ISV’s to adopt cloud.

Adopting this new paradigm of cloud computing; newer and innovative styles of using the cloud platforms will have to be explored. Here I shall walk you through one such case which demonstrates how we’ve helped one of our ISV customers, Volantis ,  to adopt cloud.  The detailed case study on this project done by Infosys is available here

Volantis is a developer of innovative solutions for mobile carriers. The company’s Ubik.com software makes it simple for users to point and click to create custom Web sites that are optimized for mobile devices.Ubik.com is a free online service that allows small businesses and consumers to quickly build a mobile Internet site, without having to write a single line of code.

To cater the applications non-functional requirements of being highly available and achieve global class scalability, which would help meet the demands a rapidly growing user base, Infosys helped Volantis to offload Ubik’s data storage on to the Microsoft Azure platform.

Continue reading "Infosys on-boarding ISV's on the cloud - 1" »

November 5, 2009

Rising of the enterprise to the clouds - An adoption approach for the Enterprise

How would Cloud Computing help an Enterprise bring about IT consolidation, an approach that can help reduce ongoing running costs as well as help respond to business needs faster?

Enterprises globally are growing at a rapid pace both organically and inorganically. A few years back IT build systems for businesses which would last a time frame ranging anywhere from 5 to 10 years. Systems used to be built to last. But today, systems have to be designed to handle change. Change, which is inevitable today, is not in years but months and sometimes even days. The IT delivery cycles are expected to shrink and meet the demands of the business faster.
Click here to continue reading..

MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 1

Following up from my previous blog, which talked about the preparatory steps an enterprise can take towards adoption of the cloud. Now let’s take a look at how one such peripheral app we can build on the cloud.
In this series, I will be walking you through an online poll application which at the very basic level is all about creating polls and participating in one. From a scenario perspective this may seem to be trivial and where every enterprise may have one or several of such apps exists out there today. However this is also a simple enough scenario to understand and demonstrate architectural and design concepts which are pertinent to cloud applications and those I have used to develop MYOC. Also further demonstrating how a simple application like this one can be enriched by leveraging cloud giving way to innovative capabilities. So let’s start…

Continue reading "MYOC - Make Your Opinion Cloud- Series 1" »

July 31, 2009

Future of Desktop Computing

Imagine tomorrow when you switch on your LCD set to watch a movie, browse internet or do some official work. Am i talking about one device performing similar task as done by another…what’s new…Convergence is already achieving that…ok fine…how about buying the personalize desktop from some xyz vendor like Tata Sky, Airtel, Infosys … and accessing that through LCD. Accessing personalized desktop through LCD…what’s that…simply put desktop with some basic computing, processing, spreadsheet,  browsing, etc. capabilities that can help you do basic stuff or your kid do homework, take exams, do certifications, etc.. Hmm…where is this going… office work, home work, without having a dedicated laptop/desktop.

Continue reading "Future of Desktop Computing" »

July 21, 2009

Transaction Based Pricing (TBP) has arrived!!

Pricing models like Fixed Price (FP) where application pricing is charged for delivering complete working application to customer, Time and Material (T&M) where IT resources (primarily no. of people) are charged based on the time spent on the project. Both these models have been around for some time and are thoroughly tested with their pros and cons.

Over a period, clients have been demanding more stringent pricing models where investments in IT and success of projects are directly tied to the business outcomes through models like risk-reward pricing. While in some selective cases risk reward based pricing has been happening, agreeing and negotiating risk reward pricing contract is not easy for both clients and service providers. Hence this has not been widely adopted into the main stream.

Transaction based pricing is a model where a consumer is charged based on the units of functionality consumed e.g. $1 per person charged for a train ticket from xyz portal. The unit here is a train ticket per person.  The transaction unit mentioned above could vary from application to application and context to context. With marketing intelligence, the pricing model can get more intuitive where offers can be devised like within a year if you buy 100 tickets, the company will refund the charges for 10 tickets and so on.

Continue reading "Transaction Based Pricing (TBP) has arrived!!" »

July 20, 2009

Public Clouds,Are they any different?

The Azure pricing seems to be finally out. Here’s my take on the announcement.

http://www.microsoft.com/azure/pricing.mspx

 

I have taken a stab at comparing the Azure pricing versus value proposition vis-à-vis that of the two other major cloud providers in the market today. Let me first call out, although Amazon’s compute services (EC2) are in the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) category and folks may argue that comparing it with the likes of other Platform as a Service (PaaS) providers is not really an apples to apples comparison. 

Continue reading "Public Clouds,Are they any different?" »

July 13, 2009

Catalyzing Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has been identified as the primary growth engine of any Economy. In the early 1990s when India opened up its markets to Globalization, we saw the spirit of entrepreneurship receiving a tremendous impetus cited with several instances of Startups or Small and medium sized businesses growing leaps and bounds benefiting the nation’s economy. Infosys has been an excellent example of how entrepreneurship has contributed to India’s growth and that too both in tangible and intangible value terms bringing global recognition of India’s Knowledge driven economy.  However Entrepreneurs face several challenges which impediments to their growth. A few of the challenged being

·         Limited exposure to capital  for running their businesses

·         Limited access to experienced IT resources

·         Lacking processes and systems which can help grow their businesses

·         Inability to Innovate

IT has been the catalyst which helps businesses to foster growth, which Entrepreneurs have not truly been able to leverage very effectively. This primarily being due to the high entry barriers, primarily owing to the high capital which needs to be invested upfront in terms of hardware and software, associated in building applications and systems even before the Enterprise would have started earning any revenue. Due to this the traditional IT delivery model has not been conducive for Entrepreneurs to innovate as the risk associated with failure is very high.

With the latest computing paradigm aka “Cloud Computing”, the IT barriers have dropped and entrepreneurs can now look at leveraging IT as a tool for innovation which can script more growth stories.

Continue reading "Catalyzing Entrepreneurship" >>

March 27, 2009

How “Open” is the Open Standards Cloud Manifesto? MS creating a stir on the cloud…

A cloud computing standards document, “secretly” prepared behind closed door, dealing with interoperability on the cloud has been out-rightly rejected by MS and in the process brewed up a storm on the cloud. The main bone of contention had been the manner in which the document had been prepared.

Continue reading "How “Open” is the Open Standards Cloud Manifesto? MS creating a stir on the cloud…" »

March 4, 2009

Will my business operations come to a standstill, if the Cloud is not available?

Being one of the concerns we have often heard from customers who are seeking early adoption of Cloud within their enterprises. 

Cloud technologies being fairly nascent and the space evolving rapidly with the emergence of new players and re-positioning of leading platform players honing their products for the cloud has given way for several new and innovative opportunities to be explored but then its rapid adoption is being hindered due to several concerns primarily revolving around data privacy, loss of control, reliability etc... I shall touch upon reliability here.Read on..

Continue reading "Will my business operations come to a standstill, if the Cloud is not available?" »

February 22, 2009

Video of Infosys Solution on Channel 9

Watch the Infosys video on Channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Inside+Out/Infosys-Data-Integration-in-the-Cloud/ where we talk about how can Infosys Integration Solution help organizations augment the power of Cloud Computing with their existing IT investments and realize scenarios of Partner Integration and Collaboration.

February 13, 2009

Business capabilities met on the cloud

Enterprise concerns with the cloud, primarily revolve around Data Security, Privacy and to a certain extent the relibaility of the cloud. However in these times of economic recession; cost optimization and improving TCO are some key value propositions that enterprises see which will primarily drive the adoption of cloud today. This new model of computing will not only address these value propositions but also provide enterprises with a platform to innovate and come out with some ingenious solutions tackling typical IT problems that have hindered enterprise growth over the past few decades . Here are a few business scenarios where I see cloud computing being applied in that fashion today:

Continue reading "Business capabilities met on the cloud" »

January 22, 2009

Web, SOA and Virtualization influencing the emergence of Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a style of computing that defines the way IT functions are going to be delivered or acquired in the future. This can essentially be contributed due to the emergence of revolutionary technologies such as Virtualization, Service oriented Architecture and the Web.

Continue reading "Web, SOA and Virtualization influencing the emergence of Cloud Computing" »

January 21, 2009

Consuming .NET Services on the Windows Azure Platform

Microsoft .NET Services as part of Azure Services platform, offer building blocks which provide the necessary infrastructure to develop cloud aware applications. One scenario we wanted to try out was to be able to have a on-premise services to be consumed by an application hosted on Windows Azure.

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December 24, 2008

Financial implications of the Cloud

Cloud computing is a new style of computing which packages computing resources such as processing power, storage, connectivity etc as a service and delivering the same to the consumer in a scale-free, cost efficient and timely manner over the web. Applications get into production much quicker than the traditional models by which applications are provisioned. This entails a shift in the way applications would be built, executed and also managed in the future.

In an attempt to understand the financial implications of the new cloud based model used for deploying and running web applications over the traditional client server web application model a little better, we shall discuss this in the context of a hypothetical scenario which would highlight differences one would observe in both the cases.

 

 

 

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December 10, 2008

Why does the SQL Data Services (SDS) not adopt to the RDBMS model which the SQL Server has been essentially built upon

Here are some of my thoughts on this:
1. The current version of the SDS entity design is based on a free-form schema-less model unlike the rigid schema based approach which most RDBMS such as SQL Server, Oracle work on. SDS builds on an Entity definition model wherein the data object constructs gets abstracted to a much higher level. The approach makes the process of low-level object creation such as tables, constraints, relations etc… a job of the SDS layer. As far as the End user is concerned he/she would only be concerned about the Entity definition, this will include attributes along with the data types of those attributes. Though relationships are not supported in the current version of SDS, which the SDS team intents to provide in some future version .And this should not be difficult, they can be inferred easily from the entity object associations which could translate to a low-level parent key- foreign key relationships in the RDBMS parlance

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December 9, 2008

Windows on the Cloud released at the PDC 2008!

MS released Windows Azure at the PDC 2008, a code name used for the work done as a part of the Azure (MS Cloud) initiative. More details on these are available at
http://www.microsoft.com/azure/windowsazure.mspx

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November 26, 2008

Enterprise systems available on the cloud as services

Suppose an enterprise has a set of services that it feels can be exposed to the internet for business or for its own usage, there are two ways to address it.

1) Setup the services on a DMZ thereby exposing the services in a secure manner to the internet.
2) Open up ports on the enterprise firewall to allow inbound access from outside machines to the services running. [This is not allowed as it has the potential to allow users to exploit the enterprise network]

The first mode of setting up a DMZ is the preferred way, but its limitation would be allowing access of DMZ machines onto the enterprise network. If the DMZ needs to access internal systems like a Mainframe, then there could be deployment and security issues.

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November 7, 2008

Cloud computing made possible with Azure

Ranked as number 2 in the Gartner strategic technologies of 2009, Cloud computing as a technology has been marked as the potential to have a significant impact in the enterprises in the future. Microsoft too has been investing a lot in shaping the cloud of the future to will help users, be it start-ups, individuals, hobbyists or even large enterprises; build a new breed of applications and potentially create new business of the future.

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November 5, 2008

Infosys Session on Azure at Microsoft PDC2008

My name is Jitendra and I am a Principal Architect on Cloud Computing work we are doing at Infosys. Microsoft announced their Cloud Computing platform “Azure” last week and with that also made lot of the technologies which we were working with them as public information. This enables me to blog on the work we were doing with Microsoft since last 8 months around their Cloud Computing platform.

I did a session at the Microsoft Professional Developer conference event last week where Microsoft announced the Azure platform. My session was a walkthrough on one of the Partner Integration solutions we developing on this Azure Platform. You may view the recording of the session on the channel 9 http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/BB56/. Infosys Case Study on this can also we found at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/casestudies.mspx.

Enabling partner integration and extending the enterprise boundaries to external partners and customers is one of the core enabling functions of a Cloud computing platform. This gives enterprises an incredible value to expand their boundaries to public facing endpoints and make the overall business process more straight through. For instance, the AReIS solution described above helps dealers to collaborate and share information with other Dealers over cloud based infrastructure. In my next blog I would touch upon the how we used the appliance based architectures patterns to realize the solution and why such patterns would be more relevant in the world of cloud computing for large Enterprises

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