global business

The Toxic Terrabyte (article from IBM)

10 February 2008


I came across this interesting article from IBM. In a world where computerization is invading every aspect of life, the exponential growth of data is but a natural outcome. This data has to be managed effectively otherwise it can turn toxic and kill the efficiency of the organization. According to the article “As companies, government departments and other organisations accumulate information at an accelerating rate, they face growing costs and inefficiencies that threaten their ability to function. The answer lies not just in new ways of applying IT technology and services, but also in changes in individual and organisational behaviour”.
I tend to agree with what the article has to stay in terms of data growth and the implied toxicity of unmanaged growth, but the solution offered seemed targeted towards their own products( doesn’t surprise me though..). Managing data growth could be a good market for storage solution providers and has room for many players beyond IBM. In fact our company also has expertise in this space and I look forward to helping our clients deal with this problem.

>The Toxic Terrabyte (article from IBM)

10 February 2008

>
I came across this interesting article from IBM. In a world where computerization is invading every aspect of life, the exponential growth of data is but a natural outcome. This data has to be managed effectively otherwise it can turn toxic and kill the efficiency of the organization. According to the article “As companies, government departments and other organisations accumulate information at an accelerating rate, they face growing costs and inefficiencies that threaten their ability to function. The answer lies not just in new ways of applying IT technology and services, but also in changes in individual and organisational behaviour”.
I tend to agree with what the article has to stay in terms of data growth and the implied toxicity of unmanaged growth, but the solution offered seemed targeted towards their own products( doesn’t surprise me though..). Managing data growth could be a good market for storage solution providers and has room for many players beyond IBM. In fact our company also has expertise in this space and I look forward to helping our clients deal with this problem.

Internationalization and Localization

30 June 2007


The USD has been weakening for quite some time now. The last four years has seen a plunge of the order of 30 to 40% versus Euro, Canadian dollar, British Pound, Australian dollar and now the latest is the surge in Indian Rupee against USD. The decline in USD is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly for US firms which sell their software globally. To our clients in the US, European market, all of a sudden, has become more important.

Selling to Europe may be a good thing for our clients, but to us, it brings a different kind of challenge. A perfectly running software on English version of Windows 2003 all of a sudden starts behaving erratically, might even trigger a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death in Windows lingo). Some languages like Danish and French are more forgiving, whereas German and Hebrew (Israel) have given us some grief. Some of the Asian languages which use double-byte character set like Mandarin and Japanese are also challenging.

With bulk of our sales earlier being in North America, this wasn’t much of a problem, but as other markets become important to us, we are increasingly concerned about making our software ready for different locals. After all, our clients problems are our problems! We help our clients in growing their business, only then are we going to get more business from them, simple… you think ;-)

>Internationalization and Localization

30 June 2007

>
The USD has been weakening for quite some time now. The last four years has seen a plunge of the order of 30 to 40% versus Euro, Canadian dollar, British Pound, Australian dollar and now the latest is the surge in Indian Rupee against USD. The decline in USD is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly for US firms which sell their software globally. To our clients in the US, European market, all of a sudden, has become more important.

Selling to Europe may be a good thing for our clients, but to us, it brings a different kind of challenge. A perfectly running software on English version of Windows 2003 all of a sudden starts behaving erratically, might even trigger a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death in Windows lingo). Some languages like Danish and French are more forgiving, whereas German and Hebrew (Israel) have given us some grief. Some of the Asian languages which use double-byte character set like Mandarin and Japanese are also challenging.

With bulk of our sales earlier being in North America, this wasn’t much of a problem, but as other markets become important to us, we are increasingly concerned about making our software ready for different locals. After all, our clients problems are our problems! We help our clients in growing their business, only then are we going to get more business from them, simple… you think ;-)