Method Overloading in JAVA with Example

The above video describes method overloading in JAVA with Example. 

SAP vs Oracle

If we consider the strategy of SAP & Oracle in the last 5 years, we can easily conclude that Oracle pursued inorganic growth while SAP sticked to their proven organic growth path barring 1-2 big ticket acquisitions.

SAP became ERP system with the base of MRP. It evolved from Manufacturing Requirement Planning. Being an European Software Vendor, SAP has strong hold in the European markets and the same is the case with Oracle being an U.S company. While there were certain strong areas of each ERP system, now over a period of time, in terms of basic functionalities and the breath of areas covered is same for both the vendors. Now since both the vendors are almost equal in terms of capabilities or the Business Value Add they were providing, we would need to look at strategic directions pursued by both the companies to understand how both the ERP softwares are evolving.

Looking at Oracle, the big ticket acquisition by them of SUN technologies for $ 7.4 Billion, BEA system for $ 8.5 Billion, Hyperion, Siebel etc. The list is long, but the bottonline is Oracle is banking on buying best of breeds software solutions and integrating them with Oracle ERP.

Vis-a-viz looking at SAP strategy, apart from having handful to big ticket acquistions, SAP believes in developing their ERP system organically and doing acquisitions only when it is must or SAP products are not able to compete with best in the breed softwares, the case in point is Business Objects. Even though SAP had their Business Reporting tools like BEx Queries etc. but they were laggard compared to the market leader Business Objects. SAP realized that the with the exponential growth of data in every organization this area is poised for growth and SAP doesn't stands a chance with their product portfolio, so they decided to do the acquisition of Business Objects for $ 6.8 Billion.

Analyzing the current landscape, we can see the ERP market is balanced between both the vendors. It depends of the future products of both the companies to really create differentiation i.e. Fusion for Oracle and HANA & other in-memory applications for SAP.

Chinese Internet market: Baidu, Alibaba, Kaixin001 & Weibo

Western Technology companies has been able to establish themselves across the globe and been able to generate profits irrespective of the geography. But world's number 2 economy China is coming as a tough nut to crack. There are various reasons why Western IT companies are not able to replicate the same success in China which they have elsewhere across the world.

To understand the reasons we need to understand the political environment in China. China is not a democracy, it is a country controlled/governed by Communist Party of China which maintains its hold over various aspects of individual's life.

It is very successful in producing results. Since 1978 China started reforms, it started the creation of large export oriented hubs. Export from these zones zoomed exponentially, these zones have now evolved as full fledged cities. In 2001 China became the member of WTO and it again eased certain controls.

Reasons why western IT companies are finding it as very hard market
1. Internet penetration in China is rising consistently and more and more people are spending lot of time on net. It has become an important mode to express opinions. For a country with one party system this does not augurs well, so Communist party of China wants to maintain strong hold over internet to stop any anti-governmental agenda over the internet. The reasons are obvious why party does not want western companies to succeed. I am not going into the reason whether this is right or wrong, but reasons why party won't let western companies to control chinese internet market are obvious.

2. High Piracy: China is ranked very high in terms of piracy. Piracy rate in China is more than 80 percent, with Chinese economy becoming second largest potential for IT products is tremendous if piracy goes down. Till this time, China was doing little to control it now they have promised that they will take steps to curb piracy.

3. Almost all the duplicate websites of google, twitter , facebook are available in China and are very popular.

Baidu competes with Google
Twitter & Facebook are banned in China, their clones are gaining increasingly popularity. Check out the link for additional details:
http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/internet/Chinese-clones-of-Facebook-Twitter-gain-popularity-in-China/articleshow/6846909.cms

How Chinese market will evolve over time I will discuss in another post.

IT Outsourcing Future

In the past few days there has been lot of hue & cry in U.S regarding outsourcing. To understand the future of outsourcing we need to understand the reasons why companies outsource. Whether the phenomenon of outsourcing is limited to U.S only or it is practically followed by all the Multi National companies.

Outsourcing refers to the phenomenon of contracting out unimportant functions in an organization to 3rd party vendors. Most of the times Outsourcing refers to IT outsourcing as in the case of Information Technology it is most prevalent.

Why companies outsource their IT Division?
In an organization, there are various functions need to be performed, starting from Finance, Logistics management, Supply chain management etc. Implementation of IT products is complex job so for an organization which is in Car making (example) it was not feasible/viable to learn the implementation and then do it. So it made sense for these companies to outsource their IT division to the companies which are in the business of doing IT.

For the last 2-3 decades, companies have been outsourcing their IT works. It was a win-win situation for the company as well as for the vendor. Initially vendors were located nearby the client company. Fast forward to 1990-91 when internet provided the flat world of the companies located across the globe. At the same time an important event was taking place in India. India faced foreign exchange crisis at that time. IMF & World Bank agreed to lend the money to India to overcome the crisis in response they demanded the opening of Indian market.

Manmohan Singh, Indian finance minister at that time decided to open the economy. Thereby the ease of doing business for Indian companies increased suddenly. Prior to globalization in 1991, TCS, Wipro & Infosys were in existence but were not able to grow as the import of desktop was cumbersome process. To import a single PC, these companies had to apply for various licenses and it used to take more than a month to import it.

With globalization, these companies were able to ramp up their IT infrastructure & with skilled labor available these companies grew at very fast rate.

The reasons for the success for IT companies are:

1. Cost differential between Indian IT Professional vs US or European IT Professional.
2. Skilled labor availability in Indian market.
3. IT implementation & support requires large number of manpower which is not available in U.S at low cost.
4. If you do near-shoring in U.S, companies will be able to save around 30-40 percent of the cost while if they outsource it to India, the cost reduction is in the range of 80 percent.

In 2000, Y2K problem in front, every organization in U.S wanted to overcome it, suddenly India companies found themselves in sweet spot as they had availability of large manpower as well as the skills to solve it with huge cost differential.

Since 2000 to 2008, these companies grew at around 30-35 CAGR. Recession also hit these companies very hard as financial outsourcing was a big chunk of the pie.

Future
Indian IT companies are trying to move up in the value chain as most of the companies have opened their consulting arm. These companies are trying to carve out niche in IT Consulting space, till now IBM, Accenture, Deloite were the major companies in this area. In next 5 -6 years Indian IT companies would be established in IT consulting space, but won't be a major factor.

With cloud computing gaining acceptance, Indian IT companies would be equally prepared for it vis-a-vis Foreign IT companies. Next few years are going to be very crucial for any company as the market is changing at very fast rate. Only those companies would be able to survive which would be able to transform very fast & be ready to adapt new technologies.

If Indian IT players will try to stick with the old IT model, it won't be far when they will struggle to survive. In this fierce competition, only the player which can adapt very fast would survive.

US Smartphone increasing penetration - What does it heralds?

According to the comScore, in U.S every 4the citizen is now owns smartphone. It was 13.6 percent penetration last year which has now increased to 22.5 percent this year.

With such a sharp rise in the penetration of smartphones, a serious medium to use internet is emerging. Now if you want to use Facebook, twitter or small/minor internet usage, one would prefer to use smartphone. Currently for our 80% usage smartphone may suffice for category of persons who use internet for less than 1 hour per day.
Now in future, with advancement in smartphones & with the high speed internet connection in our phones it will rise to 100%, thereby over time in about 7-10 years smartphones will fulfill all requirement of 80 percent of the populations.

This is a very important insight which can be drawn. Companies which are into PC making business need to revolutionize their product ranges to come up with new innovative products which can fit into the GAP.
Just to give you an example, some time back Apple came up with 'i-pad'. This is the right device which fulfills the basic necessities for about 80 percent of the people.

I-pad is a kind of device which will cut into the share of many product categories. To start with, it can cannibalize the sale Apple products like Mac Computers or i-pod. It is slated to give tough competition to e-book reader by amazon 'kindle'.

If we look into the future and try to extrapolate the trends, we can see that in next 7-8 years usage of PC will come down drastically as their will be much more sophisticated devices available to access internet. Devices like smartphones, i-pad etc. The time has come for plain vanilla PC developers to innovate or parish. They won't get too much time to recover once competition has come up with 'great' device to access internet.

Note: I perceive that the usage of PC's will go down for general public about 80-85 %, rest 15-20 percent will still need PCs.

The secret of success of Facebook

Within 6 years of launching, the social networking site Facebook boasts of more than 500 million active users. What is the reason of such an astounding success ?
What all has gone right for Facebook that it in itself has become a phenomenon?
Why it has been so difficult for reigning Internet Czars to compete with Facebook?

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg in year 2004, prior to that it was operated within the Harvard and its users were limited to Harvard students only. Gradually it opened itself for the world, it allowed everyone to become part of the website.

The reasons for the success of Facebook are:

It fulfills the basic instinct of the Human Being i.e. to interact with his/her friends in a seamless environment.
What makes it a success and others a failure is that 'Facebook' hasn't tried to control everything rather it has opened itself to the developers. From the starting it acted as a platform where developers can work and create applications on top of it.

Developers across the world jumped upon this opportunity. It gave the developers basic mass of users to begin with, then developers created various applications which in turn attracted more and more users to 'Facebook'. Finally the addition of games like farmville, cafe-world & mafia wars helped the website to increase the loyalty among the users. These games were a big hit among the users and demanded lot of the their time.

What Facebook did which other social networking sites couldn't do?
If you look at Orkut ( Social Networking website from Google) , it also provides most of the features that Facebook is providing then still Orkut is not able to compete with 'Facebook' the reason lies in 'friend-finder' tool which Facebook came up earlier than Orkut.

Now Facebook has grown to such a sheer size that it will be difficult for any social networking site to give competition to it. Facebook is growing at such a frenetic pace that it is giving sleepless nights to people at Google.

Why is Google fearing the rise of Facebook?
The more and more time one spends in Facebook less time it is spending with Google applications like Youtube or Picasa etc. People prefers to go to Facebook and then watch videos which are liked by their friends instead going to Youtube and watch there. Facebook is becoming a conduit which is channeling users to various destinations, the act of direction which Google had mastered in last decade.

Google Vs Microsoft

The battle between Google Vs Microsoft has been 'the' battle of the decade. There was lot at the stakes. But in last 3-4 years, Apple & Facebook has entered into the fray to become future market leader of the internet world. All the four companies has huge cash surplus to invest, so now money is not going to be the deciding factor.

Microsoft has been the leader of desktop operating system for the last two decades. No company has been able to come up with a product which can give serious competition to Windows till now. Google is planning to come up with its own operating system next year which will be termed as "Chrome" same as the browser launched by Google earlier.

In the browser war, Google is steadily cutting into the market share of Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It was launched in September 2008, since then it is gaining market share at the expense of IE. Market share of Firefox & Apple's Safari is almost constant in this time frame.

For more information about the market share you can also check out the wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers

Looking from the future perspective, Microsoft has lost one major battle, which is to control the market share of mobile's operating system. Within one year Google has made huge strides to increase its market share from 3.9 percent to 17.7 percent.

Within Mobile operating system space, Currently Symbian leads the race with 40.1 percent market share which is hit by the rising popularity of Android. Last year its market share was 46.9 percent. Third place is currently occupied by RIM ( Research in Motion -  makers of Blackberry), which will be hugely contested by Apple's iOS.

You can refer to Gartner report for current statistics related to market share in the mobile space:
http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1434613

Presently Internet in accessed mainly through laptops, this trend is bound to change in coming 2-3 years when  our 80% of the requirements would be fulfilled by the applications on our smartphone. The usage/penetration of smartphone is rising exponentially in U.S & in European markets.

Last year Morgan Stanley came up with a report where it predicted that smartphones "will out-ship the global notebook + netbook market in 2010E and out-ship the global PC market (notebook + netbook + desktop) by 2012E."

The platform for the next technological battleground is all set.

Kindly leave your comments about how the technological world may shape up in the coming years. I world like to use these blogs as a platform where we can share views about the changing paradigm in tech world.

Making Sense of Technology

My intention to start this blog is to make sense of many technological changes taking place in our society and to understand what impacts these can bring to the world around us. I am following IT industry from the time Netscape Navigator rose to the prominence, reached its pinnacle and died silently. In last decade, technology has become enabler for every business, it changed the way businesses used to be done. The last decade has been a decade of 'Just in Time' manufacturing, global supply chains, online shopping marts, powerful search engines and so on.

The objective of this blog is to envision the role technology is going to play in the coming decade or so. Now with high speed broadband & idevices world is going to be highly interconnected in time to come. This is the age of true democracy where 20 % of Brazilians use twitter, and this number is going to move in only one direction only. Not only Democratic countries are participating in this transformation, everybody from Kremlin to Chinese is part of this revolution.

In web 1.0 the purpose was to put information on the net so that it would be accessible to everyone. The web 2.0 is all about social networking. It leverages on the social/emotional urge to connect with your friends. This blog will help you understand how the Web 3.0 may look like.


This blog will rarely provide you with the 'facts' or 'news', but with the perspective or conclusion which can be drawn from the 'information-laden' world of technology.