Category: Uncategorized

classification of growth has lead to a very generic macro level perspective that can be compartmentalized as organic and inorganic. One where the company grows through its hard work and push, thereby improving systems within, and products leads to better profits and share value thereby a bigger market cap. This, I feel is a good way of growing, simply due to the fact that the possibility of learning during the process. This is much slower and has its own loopholes and downfalls, there by making this route to growth sometimes a harder path to take.

Another interesting path that is taken by many is the “inorganic” path. This mainly encompasses the M&A route that leads to a larger organization with a better market cap. However, mixing oil and water cannot happen by just mixing them, you need to add emulsified agents, or blend them in, like with mayonnaise. The acquiring company generally looks for a company that either compliments or supplements its existing talent pool thereby enabling itself to move into a relatively new market, or a new product or a another competitor. In essence, any M&A activity involves changing the 4Ps and creating a new set of 4Ps that are different from the company’s existing ones.

So how does an M&A activity help a company? Well, like the points mentioned above:
1. The company sees great scope in a particular market, however, it does not posses the necessary talent or technology to enter this market, hence it decide to acquire a company that is doing well in this market for the same.
2. The company needs to grow to show that it is doing well, I call it the ford route, acquire other companies that will help add to your product portfolio and say very boldly to the world that my product portfolio has increased hence I am dong well.

there are many more reasons why M&A activities take place, but this is not the reason of this post. Many a time, actually majority of times the merger fails to take off, due to cultural or other factors, some notably good ones that lost value for the share holder rather than gained value are he AOL-time Warner merger, Daimler Chrysler,etc. etc

However, a symbiotic relationship need not necessarily exist purely through a merger or an acquisition. There are MoUs that can be signed by companies such that they can work with each other to help provide better services to their customers.

Cashnet, a common atm switch built for Indian banks is one such example where consolidation of infrastructure has worked well to better the customer experience. Cashnet is in direct competition to VISA/Maestro’s switching and backbone networks, however, with the interconnect fees being charged per transaction, the possibility of moving customers from counter banking to ATM banking would have been tough with this as a deterrent. The average cost of servicing a customer at the branch works out to about Rs.200/- per transaction as opposed to Rs.20/- at the ATM and about 0.40P via the internet. Hence, embracing technology is a good way forward for the bank thereby allowing them to be able to spread their reach and improve the customer touch points.

Consolidation in t he banking industry has seen a string of mergers between banks and other institutes. The ICICI merger along with ICICI bank to result in a single entity, the same with HDFC and TimesBank resulting in HDFC bank, Global trust bank etc. This can be seen as a path forward to many banks.

Like with setting up any infrastructure, the costs involved are rather high, and the returns need not necessarily offset the investment. The greatest risk is the fact that a large percentage of the income is from interests generated via lending. India has the highest percentage of vehicles bought on loans. The worldwide average is about 70% vis a vis 80% in India.

The ability of the treasury in the bank to be able to roll the customers savings profitably is the key to survival of the banks. Hence, areas where the bank can save on infrastructure costs it will either outsource or work with other banks. In the case that the bank has decided to go on its own, eventually might lead to its collapse, and its assets being picked up by another bank.

The banking scene is fraught with trends of Mergers or acquisition or understandings within the community in order to survive against the big fish.

I stand at the door,
wondering where i need to go,
my life is ahead of me,
like a book, with empty pages.
waiting for me to write,
about, me, my love and my life.

now how i choose to write that,
it is all up to me,
cause my life is in my hands,
to be what i want to be.

I stand at the door,
wondering where she is,
looking for the light,
feeling a sense of pride,
now, why should it affect me?
the five words, L,O, V E

Now How i choose to write that,
it is all up to me,
cause my life is in my hands,
to be all i want to be.

—- Guitar Solo—–

the door closes,
i am neither in nor out,
wondering why i have to be,
in so much of doubt,
i see the light,
i see the dark,
i see the love,
as bright as a spark,
i wonder what holds me,
no matter how hard i try,

its all up to me now,
to live my life,

now how i choose to write tht,
it is all up to me,
cause my life is in my hands,
to be all i want to be.

Well, I could not think of a better title, because i just wanted to pen down some of my thoughts, and my torch, which incedently is new, was lying next to me, hence the title.

One of the things i personally belive de-motivates anyone beyond measure is the lack of any acknowledgement from people involved. i put in a lot of effort into something that i did sometime ago, but hoewver, acknowledgement has never been attributed to me, but to some others, sometimes, i wonder why this happens. is it that its an oversight? but i guess what upsets more is that someone who does nthing gets acknowledged as having contributed, thats even more depressing.
sigh!!1 i guess i have to just live with this kind of stuff all the time!!!

in todays world: what is the single point that provides the competitive edge? Technology: there has been a steady move from man, to machine to microchips.
from the industrial revolution, there has been the constant urge to find ways of doing things, better, faster and cheaper, thats what makes the company do better, and thats what sells. The horse drawn carriage was replaced by a motorised carriage (even though in some states in india, there are still ox drawn carriages, thats a generation behind the horse drawn ones), the hand made motor carriage was replaced by the assembly line, the assembly line was perfected to JIT, and that has provided for cheaper faster cars. now a company that first had gotten itself lovely sales persons who could talk the hind legs off a donkey, and also sell sand to the arabs at the same time. later, there was the inkling that the things were not going as planned, so they turned towards technology to get and track the customers needs, wants & desires. that worked really well, then everyone got into doing just that. Jaguar did that rather successfully, wherein, they used technology to track their customer service requirements, and this has become an industry standard. Jaguar worked hand in hand with Peppers & Rogers group to come out with a customer relationship mgt suite that helps track the usage, and based on the customers driving patterns informs the customer about service frequencies etc. this worked well, because it provide for a “personalised” attention to each customer. From what i heard, lexus goes one level further with technology. Each car owner’s specifications are taken into account, and once the internal adjustments for the car are made, they are embedded intot eh key that is handed over, that includes seat height, airconditioning, music system volume etc etc, so when the car is opened with a particular key, the adjustments are made for the driver to get in. That is clearly a competitive edge using technology.

However, technology can be replicated, so what is it that the company needs to stay in front? Using technology to enable business, not using technology for business. Using technology to enable business is to be able to leaverage on cutting edge technology to offer better services to its customers. The market is moving from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. World over, it is the services that play an impact. Even in a manufcaturing company, the services angle plays an important role in deciding the buying decisions of the customer. Hence, any company, wishing to stay ahead of competition, should use technology to enable its employees to work better.

Unified communications platforms,VoIPs, MPLS, MoIP etc are all new age technologies that are coming into the market. ompanies that are able to implement them will definitly be able to push ahead of competition.

On example of leveraging on technology, a food service company was able to reduce response times from 24hrs to 15 mins due to implementation of CISCO’s Unified communcations platform. Another IT service company was able to shave 20% off its data communcation costs due to its migration to an MPLS network.

So, now that we know that technology is here to stay, we should allow ourselves to leverage on it to enable businesses.

That is the latest competitive edge!

Well, there is this group of cycling enthusiasts, whom i had gotten to know of, yesterday, they were planning on taking a trip to the north of the city. i thought, hmmm. maybe i will take a ride, meet up with them and head back, so i went to meet them, and the idea of actually peddling a bout 65 Kms did sound fun, it was that inbetween place, neither too far, nor too close! so we took off. It turned out to be a very interesting ride. the sights, the sounds. The pain of cycling really got to me by the end of the trip, i was a pile of aches. That did feel rather bad, cause the others seem to have been in good health! 🙁 so now i have something to work towads, i think i must get a better seat on my cycle, i think that will help! 🙂
anyways, i decided that if i comeback and give into my aching joints, i might not be able to get up, so i bravely put up a front and head out to finish errands! i finally go to sleep rather early, and then wake up in the mornig with a phenomenal back ache! something that does not hurt, is hurting now! 🙁 aarrggh! got to get back in shape!

off late, there has been a lot of “hue and cry” about HP’s independent probe into the alleged leak of information of its board meetings to the media. The HP board inducted a vendor to look into these, and also to look for the source of the leaks. The HP director assigned to oversee these, Patricia Dunn, appeared to have been unaware of the use and methodology of pretexting. Gathered from various news reports, I figured that Dunn, would not have ordered the use of such means, considering the high profile of this case as well as the unethical nature of the method. However, why is there such a hue and cry?

I want to find out what is happening in my house, I ask someone to check, they give me the results. I don’t want to know how they did it. I find out what’s wrong, I fix it. I am happy, no one knows.

how different is this from what governments of countries do to ensure “security”? Except this is a government organization. In all fairness, people are jumping onto this “lets get at HP and prove a point” bandwagon. However, the bigger picture is not being seen.

this is quite unfair for people to be pouncing. If my security and my trade secrets are at stake, I will use any means in order to resolve these issues.

in today’s information world, where the technologies and needs are changing so fast that they can be clocked with an egg timer, guarding secrets is the greatest necessity of the corporation.

so what is the difference between a company and a country? One is guarding the people, and one is guarding the economy. Which is more important? Well, neither. They both require each other to survive. The economy requires the company to survive, and the company requires people to survive, and the people require the economy to survive. So the government, should allow the company to survive, as putting a spoke in the wheel might lead to greater consequences that might spiral out of control.

Bonobos:

Apparently, a very rare species of the ape family, this was thought to be a common chimpanzees untill 1982, when scientists found a difference in the genetic sequence. now there is a swing that these Bonobos are closer to humans than to Chimps.
I actually came across this on bbc’s website that said there exist less than 10K of these. I was thinking, that an entire species exists, who’s total strenght is less than the number of people working in one city in my office. like the dodo, if things are not done fast, the bonobo will become extinct.

so why is this ofprime importance to me? quite simple, i did chcek some pictures of these things, and i saw that these are so close to humans that they might be the missing link between chimps and humans. This is a matriarchial society, like the egyptians and some of the more advnaced societies in the world, the female bonobo makes decisions.
They breed once every 3 to 4 years, thereby giving the female time to recover and nurse the bonobo till its old enough. That is another line similar to humans ( well, i guess i am leaving out certain areas that have an annoying habit of getting “knocked” up “unknowingly” and not in terms of planning for families) that is why the number of bonobos are reducing as the frequency of births and number of offsprings are a far cry from some other species such as dogs and turtles.

Now come some more interesting facts, the bonobo infant, needs the love of a mother, else it just dies. thats very scary considering, the fact that we assumed the mammals to be of a “lesser” species. there does exist a sanctuary in DR Congo that has ‘surrogate” mothers to take care of these infants.

The links that I thought i must talk about,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/spl/hi/pop_ups/06/africa_bonobos_under_threat/html/1.stm

and the sanctuary that take care of Bonobos:

http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/

NOTE: The above images are not mine. They have been taken from the website http://www.friendsofbonobos.org/

Information overload:

As and when i type out, the keys that i press are transformed to ones and zero’s and then its pushed to the computer, that displays the keys are they are “supposed” to appear. now, the word document that saves the words that are typed by me is again saved as ones and zeros. the now the whole world, has been converted to ones and zero’s. this means that these one’s and zero;s are growing faster than the fusion on the sun, and this information explosion is going to hit us so hard, we wont know what hit us?

to us what is a file that is being saved? 45KB that is saved on my 40Giga Byte harddrive. gone are the days that a 128Kbyte harddisk is top of the line, now a days, disk players are coming with more memory than that.

So where is this going?with one document after another being churned out every minuute, the frantic typing of keyboards shows that there is information going into the system to be stored. now this systems then gets put onto the internet, and displayed for the world to see. However, there is a physical aspect to the whole thing.

Where there is a physical dimension, there will be a limit, where there is a limit, there will be a cost.

So where is the information overload heading? Currently, there are the Terra bytes, and so on, and Apple’s XSAN claims to be able to handle PetaBytes, thas the size of the GigaByte, raised to the power of five! So where does all this lead to? The cost of storage is skyroketing! with cost per GB gradually declining due to the technology cost time curve, the volume of the storage is increasing at rates of close to 100%. Now with social sites coming and people “connecting” there is a spurt of storage requirement. Take for example “you tube” or “flickr”, a site that allows people to upload and share photos. There is a poitn where it costs the user nothing to share, but the company to provide the storage space, and as and when this stoage grows, the costs allocated to the company’s storage also grows?

there needs to be a more streamlined thought process on Data & storage dynamics.People should be more concious on where what when how. there are always, multiple copies of files stored in multiple locations. Companies taking
backups are taking the backup of the same data.

There was a report that said 60% of the information on certain systems were accessed last about twelve months ago.

That leaves us with the picture that more than a couple of TB of data is lying blocked. It is not an asset now but a liability, and hence a white elephant.

People need to be taking an active role in making sure that the data that is stored is of use and not something that will not be seen after a while. if there are internet links that have interesting documents, the best thing to do is either save the links on files, or other bookmarking sites like www.del.icio.us can be made use of to save on stoage space by bookmarking the sites.