An entreprise is built upon dynamic process of communications and collaborations - it is not about just people. It functions in a collaborative environment, and significant amount of effort goes towards sharing of information and action performed based on it. This process requires creation, review and tracking of reports and significant data.

With a host of outsourcing models being in action and managers along with workers going mobile, dependence on flexible but accountable information systems is a must. An obiquitous existence of Internets and Extranets have been an indicator to this. Today, a business development manager spends more time at client’s place with ease as all information and tools are at their fingertips as they are connected to corporate Intranet/Extranet. He/she can be in constant touch with their product manager who is working at their corporate office. A small discount on a particular product can instantly be communicated to the business development executives to have an edge over competition. In a similar fashion, the product manager can review the status on a small patch to the product prepared by his/her development team located in a different part on the globe.

If communication is happening quickly and effectively, and if the collaboration is seamless irrespective of locational disparities of departments, we say that the entreprise collaborates well.

When I delve deep into the interplay of technological efforts and babelian disparities among technology vendors, it looks a chaotic transition of the state of Web from one to another. And the transition is quite volatile that the process towards an equilibrium can have cascading effect to settle in an unexpected state.

We welcome any technology that comes in our way, and start creating applications around it. Huge documentation follows with a number of websites created to highlight the same. Freelancers and small business houses start building business around any single idea. New economy is created and communities are built up in their own ways. Many virtual civilizations, unaware of each others, grow up in months.

Big companies take up a few ideas and create another version of a platform or a product to popularise it with a billion dollar marketing budget. Even companies will not stop to add another web browser to this already overcrowded browser-baskets. A small innovation can make a big news if publicity is well organized.

We are basically trying to create our own language to speak and everybody separately. The communication process is becoming increasingly difficult and a big economy is even growing to ensure interoperability and inter-communication capabilities. Does it look funny? But it is true with Web 2.0.

Where is an intention to crowdsource the already working platform or product? Innovation can never be Innovation2.0 with Web2.0. In fact, we are 2 down zero now!

Life is tough in a software project environment. Everybody tries hard within the rigid triangular framework — scope, time and cost. One deviation from the defined scope, takes the project away from its desired objective. One day delay in completion of a task may have cascading effects on other dependent tasks in the project and can have a negative impact on the commitments of the project team. One paisa more spent on the project may create a hole in the pockets of the stake-holders of the project, and may also put the project on a dead-end. Adding to this stiff situation, current software making demands quick adoption by project team to the rapidly changing user or process requirements.

Life is tough indeed. On the other hand, the professionals involved in the project are human. They need to keep their social commitments and maintain a healthy family life back home.

Today, stringent demand from the projects have forced the coders to extend their working hours well beyond nine to five schedule, and even to spend many sleepless nights before software releases. To add salt to the demeaning life, current sprout of agile methods and off-shoring practices require nightly releases.

Every time the project manager calls project review meeting and discusses the progress, many fail to show the compliance to the timeline. Now, timelines change like the changing user requirements! Coders always think that they have put effort sincerely through the whole period, and have also tried hard to finish the tasks as soon as possible. They think they are fast, and project managers are too demanding. On the other hand, project manager struggles to convince the client with the buggy source code piled during the day. Sometimes, the function that was working perfectly is now non-functional — a loss that has become predominant when specs change often and releases happen daily. Of course, to contain the pit-falls, pair-programming is being encouraged. When the project manager and client want to see a workable system every time, one of the paired individuals constantly looks at improving, refactoring, and achieving the desired stability in the source code.

All said and done, every aspect is experimented to enable the software making fast and release-worthy at the end of the day. However, we always miss the subtle points of these methods – micro-granularity of change. The change needs to be broken into small tasks each of which can be achieved in one or two hours, and also, it should be a feature or functional change to the system that the end user can notice. This does two things:

1. When expectation is known and well-defined, project manager gets time to discuss with client comfortably about the evolution of the system, and the client (sometimes, it is marketing manager) can give appraisal about the end-user feedback — a professional triumph!
2. Coder gets a fixed set of tasks to achieve during the day. He or she is able to finish their day’s job in time with self-satisfaction, and can also take spouse to see a movie in multiplexes in the evening — a personal triumph!

In my opinion, this is the right way to complete the project or task sooner, and not faster. Coders, now you have a choice!

As the density of websites is on the rise and web-based content is going increasingly rich, pressure is mounting on (Inter)networking companies to come up with innovative ways for handling bandwidth overflow and for reducing the latency of response from content servers to today’s ever-impatient netizens.

CDN (Content Delivery Network) is a specialised network to optimize the delivery of specific web-based content to its intended recipient — by reducing the latency to client-device request and by minimizing Internet bandwidth utilization. The sole purpose is to reduce the latency after a visitor (actually, the requesting device) requests for content. There was a day when I was struggling with my PC to download a picture of recent meteor shower for the science day celebration next day. In fact, I had to spend late in the night in my research lab expecting that connectivity would be faster, and that there would be less number of night owls.

Today, the situation is different. I am spending 500 times bandwidth daily — even downloading dozens of megabytes for listening to podcasts. I get competing offers from local ISPs to give me better for less. I get offers of “unlimited” from hosting companies to host my long chain of websites and portals. Even a manager from a leading datacenter company was asking me (as a part of survey) yesterday if I would prefer to see them in my city - either a datacenter or a customer support center. Providers have been hyper-aware about customers.

Content delivery network vendors have been quite visible now. Companies like Akamai and Limelight have demonstrated what can be achieved with this technology. It has been a reality that we are partcipating in a rapidly evolving Internet ecosystem, which has now come beyond the streaming media technology (moving audio and video over Internet to achieve a steady flow of rich media data at client device) and Internet content delivery mechanism (delivery of content over Internet using Internet bandwidth while transiting from the server to the client device). At the same time, these companies and other providers in this area have been convinced that the trend is mass customerization, and that they need to innovate further. And this will make the end-user experience better every next day.

Yesterday, a programmer in my team came to my room (Mr. Y, to keep his life safe), and informed that he has secured a new job which gives him a 20% hike, and he is quitting. “Can I quit tomorrow?” - was his query. I was aback by the sheer irresponsibility and selfishness of the person who I was dealing with for the last two months. Yes, only last two months — struggling with programming badly for a project, and I and other team members have spent considerable amount of time to lift him up, and also the project is in half-way. This programmer is on run — actually he is hopping from one company to another!

I paused for a moment, and asked him if he has a few minutes to wait before he can vanish from my view and hop to the next unfortunate company. He obliged; of course, I also offered him a cup of tea to keep his lean patience upbeat. I then typed and printed a page. It was my autograph cum certificate for this man. It reads:

TO WHOMSOEVER IT MAY CONCERN

This is to certify that Mr. Y is a programmer who hops. He is the most unfortunate gift for any programming team.

All my best wishes for him for his frequent hopping across corporate landscapes.

Yes, this is not my lone experience. This phenomenon is widespread these days — project managers and tech heads, beware!

From its inception PHP has been the language of novice. Its all pervasive functions and flexibility of coding has attracted a huge pull of computer enthusiastic into the programming world. And in turn, the methods of coding and approaches to build an application through this language have varied from team to team, and have resulted in a chaos. Every programmer has the flexibility to blame his/her predecessor. People say, PHP scripting inherently encourages swirling code base and induces fallibility in the long run if the concerned programmer does not give adequate (or rather additional) personal attention to the structure of code.

With PHP5 by Zend founders, the situation has greatly changed. However, PHP’s backward compatibility philosophy has provided enough scope for oldies to survive with their whimsical development paradigm. At the same time, a PHP programmer, I mean the programmer, faces dilemma while approaching any problem to solve with this newly powerful language, PHP5.

After working the whole day with full sincerity, the programmer withdraws at the dusk which a nagative feeling about his/her day’s effort. Was it in right direction? Will this result in wasteful programming as the requirements change. Etc., etc…. The programmer has now a definite uneasiness about the scalability and security of application, and its maintainability.

This is PHP Programmer’s Dusk Dilemma!

Networking is growing exponentially. This growth has been instrumental for the transformation of today’s world towards virtualisation, globalisation, and immediacy. Everybody is competing to have a virtual counterpart to each real world object (virtualisation); everybody is capable of creating and accessing information (globalisation); and the distance between research, and corporate, worlds becomes smaller and smaller (immediacy). In short, networking has a very strong impact on every aspect of life.

Current Trends in Computer Networking

Let us briefly discuss the present day networking trends: We are now using so much of computer resources that was even unimaginable before a few decades; e.g., e-greeting cards contain more computing power than all computers before 1950. To give another example, Genesis’s game has more processing than 1976 Cray supercomputer. This revolution has been possible due to the participation of users and their ever increasing requirements. Users want maximum throughput, minimum delay, minimum loss of information, and minimum delay in variations. The bandwidth requirements are doubling every four months; we need to transmit text, voice, and video on a single infrastructure. It is important to note that in E-commerce, a considerable chunk of money, around 20-30% of revenue, is spent on networking. Another important development in the recent times is the merger of Content Providers and Content Transporters; e.g., the merger of phone companies, cable companies, entertainment industry and computer companies.

New realization

This has led to new realisations. We now understand networking speed and reliability are two keys to productivity. We observe a distinct process of convergence that is taking place in both corporate ventures and technological innovations. The picture illustrates this point: we are entering an era where contents, computing, and communications will be integrated on a single platform. This offers a technological challenge. We need more storage capacity; the machines need to have more computing power; and above all, a high speed secured network is needed. In the context of the last aspect, we realise that broadband technology is the viable option for the requirements of networking.

Conclusion

The current technological progress indicates that the issue of networking bottleneck will soon be resolved, and users will be able to handle information and gain access via handwriting and voice recognition. And, this will allow them to use the internet in a very natural way.

When we look at the progress and industry-trend in IT sector, it reminds us of the happenings in Automobile industry in the early part of the twentieth century. Prior to the World War I, the cottage industries mushroomed in every corner of America and Europe. They used to produce a few thousands of automobiles together per year. And when the countries went to War, there was a massive need of new automobiles for transport of weapons, food and other materials for soldiers on the battlefront. There was also need for standardization of the vehicle components so that it can be repaired irrespective of which company had manufactured. This drove the innovation at that time and the result was enormous increase in the production quantity and enforcement of standards in the components. Now we see millions of new vehicles everyday and the number of manufacturers is significantly small.

The whole transformation has been possible through standardisation of production process and process automation.

In this perspective, the trend in the IT industry is very similar. The massive requirements of IT products in every sphere of life, be it the Finance sector or book-keeping at home, and their maintenance have imposed a need for standardisation of production schemes and components, and quicker development and maintenance cycles.

The technologies are still in their early phase of evolution in the IT sector, and also, they very much depend on the innovation by the product Vendors and the large service industry which has grown around them. While these players are contributing in a big way, the issue of compliance to standards has been a major concern for the whole industry.

For example, the most commonly used IT product like a Web browser has not seen a common adherence of protocols and other standards. In this direction, I can cite the case of Internet Explorer from Microsoft, Safari from Apple and Netscape from AOL. Similarly, the worst happenings have occurred in Wireless Industry.

So, there is a need for standard!

Another aspect of the story is if we can use an IT product and also can depend on it. Imagine of a situation when Microsoft withdraws the support for its most popular OS product, Windows 98, which is going to happen in a year or so, after all! In the similar manner, think of the case of a major television vendor withdrawing support for one of its model. In the latter case, you still own the product and can still get assistance of local service people for its repair and maintenance. However, in case of the former, nobody can help you in repairing or maintaining, as the access to the source code of the system is not available even though you still own the product.

And we need Open Source systems!