ForeThought - RCV Innovations

The Year between 2 and 3 has been exciting and challenging. We strive to live by our core values of Humility, Integrity and Learning. We are stabilizing our business into: 1. IP Creation 2. Project Services 2. Managed Services Our efforts on IP creation for our partners and customers has been an exciting experience. We value  our partnerships in the IP creation endeavors. Our Team has contributed to enriching 5 SaaS platforms in the last 3 years. I would like to recognize the current leadership team - Sudhir Nair, Ranganath Rangaraju, Priya Rojekar as well as our Alumni...Jyoti and Sriram for thier wealth of experience and their contribution to our growth. Our 50+ Team is our fuel..We have Giri - our first hire followed by Shilpa, Pradeep, Murali, Rajababu, Veeresh and Vamshi. We have team mates starting from Satya who have done well with us and have been placed or moved into friendly companies in better roles. We have embarked on a journey to build a strong pr...

I am bullish on prospects of Microsoft to drive the hybrid cloud agenda in the Enterprise... Great hardware talent from nokia and xbox teams are driving innovations in gestures and post mobile wearable devices cementing its kinect led leadership position. The Internet of things could be another big growth area for microsoft as most embedded devices come with windows driver stack. Run Satya run...  

Data Storage, Archival and Retrieval is a mega challenge. The Age of Multimedia and Cloud computing is driving data volumes to insane heights. Compliance laws are driving the need to store data for 7 more years. Data Archival company has a bright future if there is a simple, safe and scalable way for protecting and preserving data. There may be a business opportunity in building Long term - low SLA (within 24 hrs) recovery storage. The Need for Cold storage for Food preservation is also a national priority for increasing profitability for the farmers and  reduced shortages of food. A hybrid Data Storage and Cold Storage facility based on Geothermal Technology to reduce energy consumption and create sustainable systems. As the Geothermal systems are very capital intensive, it may be an interesting way to Cross Subsidize food storage  with Data Storage. This may be a practical with indian companies innovating in Geo-themal technology. I am impressed by GREENPRENEU...

We have been working on appliances for over a year. The concept and application of our technology is being actively validated in PoC's at customer locations. Cloud + Appliance model to create Simple, Secure and Frugal Cloud Services for Emerging Enterprises  is gaining traction. We are inspired by Vision of Industry leaders from Intel, Google, Apple, Cisco and IBM  to develop technology platforms for tomorrows intelligent, data driven connected cloud of everything. We believe in leveraging Internet of things, Big Data and Cloud technologies  to create high impact frugal solutions focused on emerging markets, We are not focusing on: 1. Traditional Data center Equipement 2. Conventional Personal Computers 3. Standard Storage or Network Equipment Our goal is to create complete solutions based on open, proven, industry accepted technologies. Vamanit in sanskrit literally means "make iT smaller"-Dwarfed... Our Information Infrastructure Stra...

Appliances always had a soft-corner in Data center and cloud strategy. My Brush with appliances started in early 2000. We were looking at soultions for traffic management and billing for small ISP. the solutions with software and hardware were quite complicated. We came across small company out of Israel called Allot Networks (www.allot.com). they did a good job in a simple way. Later at NVIDIA, I was exposed Netapp for NAS storage which quickly pivoted into block storage with iscsi. they literally gave away the iscsi protocol license for free with the box for a long time. On the network side, my Exposure was with F5 networks while managing nvidia.com. We were facing scalability issues during product launhces and driver release announcements. We tried newer players such as Array Networks and Netscaler while they were in Beta. We ended up assisting and supporting Netscaler with our feedback to evolve the product to have in-memory caching. In VMworld 2013, I have seen a emergence ...

Desktop experience is essentially a combination of personalized profile storage, processing engine and Interaction Interface. Personal Profile Storage: Profile consists of preferences such as background color, placement of programs on the screen, Documents (current and recent), Search Results, Alerts(new mail, IM, phone call), password keyring for cloud services, bookmarks, application data(registry entries/file locations) and any other items that are specific to the individual session. Processing engine: The guts of desktop its cpu, memory, network and disk i/o capabilities that drive the performance and intuitiveness of the local and cloud applications such as office or graphics rich apps, Skype, webex etc. Interaction interface: Keyboard, Mouse, Multi-Touch and Display. The elements that assist in user interface and interaction. The trends in personalized storage are rapidly moving to cloud either as storage(google drive/dropbox) or as a synchronization platform(...

Adopting BYOD - Bring your own device is next evolution of Cloud. I am influenced by some arguments around complexity with traditional hypervisor based approached to delivering Applications to BYOD party.  The Virtual desktop infrastructure architectures and use cases are getting complex and expensive. The answer may be Datacenter based Hardware desktops(blade-pc ++) driven by advances energy efficient processor, system on chip technologies and innovations from server vendor in creating massive pools of thinHardware servers based on ATOM/VIA like processor technologies Building a inherently stateless desktops using these thinHardware is amenable for quick and easy provisioning with streamed operating systems.  It can be coupled with dynamic provisioning of user context, applications and data through intelligent provisioning middleware. This approach has a potential to create a compelling architectural choice for a new way to deploy centralized desktop exper...

It all started of with a simple idea of making cloud relevant to Business in India. We felt creating trained manpower is the first step. we had a goal of training 1000 people in 1000 days in cloud technologies. We hired Sai Narayan and Giri Pantla to market the training programs and VMware.  Within a Month, with help of Vinod(vmware) and Avik(vmware). We landed into our first VMware Deal of (Rs. 2,00,000/-). It was an IBM account - a subcontract to us by Venkat of Abacus-a local IBM dealer. With the right credentials and revenue, We became Enterprise Partners of VMware with in one month of our start. Ragesh(Our VMware Partner Business Manager) said, We were the fastest to reach that designation in the partner community.  We landed into several VMware PoCs(VDI etc) and deployment deals later in the year... We started of with a 2 day cloud computing boot camps. In a true cloud style, we used SaaS-SlideRocket(later acquired by VMware) for our first Brochure/Poster. We ha...

Aacharya Devo bhava... Dr. Vijay Bhatkar

Apple and Steve jobs have been my favorite place and person. I have been following apple since the retun of Steve jobs and own 5 apple devices dating back to a decade. I am happy to see the iCloud announcement. This is a strategic move for apple to drive the cloud+appliance model that apple has so successfully built from the itunes/ipod days. The fact that it is harnessing appstore ecosystem and developers coupled with the "free" price tag will drive cloud adoption to the next level. It is fundamentally changing definiton of Cloud from Application/Platforms/Infrastructure to a higher level abstraction of identity, information and will provide apple new insight into the content that is dear to people. This will result in making apple smarter about identifying trends and designing features into the products they build making those products even more compelling. The philosophy making it Simple, Secure and Scalable so that "it just works" is brilliant. This is...

Cloud computing is the most recent paradigm shift in Information technology. While it is not a result of any major technological breakthrough, Cloud Computing feeds on the advances in scalability and affordability of Power, Cooling, Security and Virtualization of Servers/Storage/Networking technologies. The most comprehensive industry accepted definition of Cloud computing is from NIST “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction “ The cornerstone of cloud computing is a new operational service model (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and new IT Infrastructure deployment model (Private, Community, Public and Hybrid Cloud) The Prudence of Indian Government policies coupled with Industry enthusiasm have been fruitful to revolutionize informatio...

Our Team(at Sify) has been fortunate to assocate ourselves with Tidal and newscale in building the first prototype of Cloud Services Delivery Framework Demo in Dubai NewScale is definitely a well thought out service catalog and workflow environment with rich set of Webservices API's. It is completely complementaty to TIDAL and LineSider as it solves a very real need to create and mange the product/service lifecycle in a Cloud computing environment. It is a excellent choice for Integrating with VBLOCK/EMC IONIX for Baremetal Provisioing of Servers/Storage along with LineSider for Network Automation coupled Tidal Enterprise Orchestrater to realize most of the Public and Private Cloud Use cases. It is a good move Cisco-Tidal, VCE/VBlock and the Cloud computing story from Cisco.

Cloud computing is raising the expectation on the agility, availability and access to sophisticated computing and communication platforms for small and medium business. Today most critical IT components for running a successful business are available as SaaS, PaaS or IaaS platforms. There is little value in recreating all these services from the scratch by a new age service provider. It may be prudent to create a skeletal platform for essential services while taking a position of services broker to organize a rich portfolio by aggregating important services into tightly knit IT-as-a –Service offering. The initial target market for such a service provider is Small and Medium Business. We will review aspirations and capabilities needed to serve the ever increasing expectations of small and medium customers from a modern service provider. The Vision, Strategy and Execution plan to create a modern Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) provider infrastructure is described on the...

There are three aspects to Cloud Automation: 1. Provisioning 2. Change Managment 3. Security/Compliance Provisioning is typically across domains and is better enabled by strong service orchestration platforms that understand both the business(CRM/BSS etc) and the technology stack. Tidal has a edge in this context with its strong background supporting Enterprise Software integration(SAP etc.) and Runbook automation use cases with its flagship product(Tidal Scheduler). Its recent focus on intelligent network automation using tidal enterprise orchestrator platform is paying off. However it's UI capability seems to be weaker than Linesider from a cloud worldview LineSider addresses provisioning from access management and compliance perspective with decent user inteface and simple VM/appliance based delivery model for demonstrating technical provisioning capabilities. Today Cisco announced the intention to buy Pari Networks. http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2011/corp_012611.htm...

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Media_Entertainment/Publishing/Clouds_big_data_and_smart_assets_Ten_tech-enabled_business_trends_to_watch_2647

I have been working for a new age service provider for over 3 years. Since last 2 years, I am part of the team responding to RFP's for modernizing major service provider networks including staging, testing and deployment of 4G/LTE services.I have been following the 4G/LTE trends at TMForum and other related information sources since then. History ======== In the mid-70's Telecom networks underwent a important change, they introduced the common channel signalling to break-away from physical network path to virtualizing the call setup. This was enabled by a relatively open standard called Signaling System No. 7 (SS7). According to Wikipedia - "SS7 is a set of telephony signaling protocols which are used to set up most of the world's public switched telephone network telephone calls. The main purpose is to set up and tear down telephone calls. Other uses include number translation, prepaid billing mechanisms, short message service (SMS), and a variety of other mass...

Our team had the good fortune of finishing the first vBlock deployment today as a Lab environment of a major Service Provider. Without Prior knowledge of Flexpod, we suggested adding dedicated Nexus Nexus 5500 based Access layer with L3 capability to vBlock for completeness of their Private Cloud Requirement. Incidentally the Launch of FlexPod today with integrated Nexus 5500/1010 along with UCS and Netapp 3000 Series came as a good surprise and Qualified our approach in terms of Bill of Material for Private cloud. We still donot see any L3 capabilities, Security and Application networking built-in. The Value of Private cloud deployments is the power of simplicity through stack standardization and while maitainting the performance, reliability and security of a vertically integrated infrastructure. Ideally intelligent non-it components such as switched pdu's, mini-VESDA and sensor networks need to be integrated in the hardware layer. The orchestration and management sta...

The Traditional Definition of information in the Enterprise is changing from simple unstructured and Structured ASCII Data to more broader binary formats. In the era where almost every business class mobile device is sensor-enabled, connected and Video capable. This popularity of embedding complex sensors, displays and end-effectors in to mobile devices is creating new and interesting Data collection and anlaysis use cases. The proliferation of sensor-enabled data-rich, video and voice capabilities into the business workflows is only a matter of time. Before too long we will see emergence of voice and video streaming functions becoming main stream information source. Transcribing and annotating audio/video streams enable easy indexing and search capabilities. The Data corellated from embedded sensors and sensor network will add a dimension to voice and video data to make it context and location aware. The Broadcast(like youTube), multi-cast(like netflix) and conference(webex) capabilit...

Cisco's Announcement to acquire Line sider is interesting to say least. The Approach of dynamically creating VLAN based on User Roles and tearing them down is a very interesting use case for Network Automation, this idea of very powerful when you look at the big picture of cloud workloads from virtual machine perspective. A better use case for Policy based Networks is to identify Virtual machine with a Certificate and Mac address on wakeup and by doing do the policy lookup/LDAP magic, the associated Nexus 1000v port can be configured to belong to the correct vlan. All in all it is nice story to follow... LineSider - Cisco Acquisition

The Cloud market places are emerging for buying and Selling Capacity of IaaS platforms. http://www.spotcloud.com/Technology.5.0.html I am impressed by AT&T Renewed focus on promoting vertical third party SaaS apps from its portal. Salesforce.com has strong ISV community on Force.com - PaaS and has started pitching for migration of Lotus, Sharepoint and other custom Apps into Force.com platform. This Cloud Marketplace trend is a welcome change in accelarating the adoption of cloud services.