Frankly Speaking

‘Unlimited Choices’ It is almost a month since I arrived at Oxford, the city of Dreaming Spires. By far, its one of the most beautiful places I have ever lived or visited – Its an architectural wonder. From the serenity of Port Meadows to the beauty of Brasenose, a day traveller will be spoilt for choices that Oxford offers. One of the striking features of this small city is its calmness in the midst of all the vibrancy. The port meadow, one of the last places yet to be invaded by modern life, offers the best of nature. The beauty of the hills and the streams that surround is a treat to the eyes. Guess what, I live only a mile away from the meadows – enticing isn’t it? A week of pub-crawls, several dinners, and meetings – we are all set to get the best out of Oxford life. The striking feature of the cohort is the diversity of the students from all parts of the world. There are 250+ students from 43 countries speaking multiple languages. In a few weeks, I had the opportunit...

Its been quite an interesting year so far - Lots of introspection and retrospection about personal life and career. The heavy-duty work has finally paid off, and I am all set to explore this beautiful world.  But before that, I wanted to share some of the knowledge that I gained over the last one year. I believe most of the readers are familiar with MBA program, so I will not dwell much on this topic. I would rather focus on the strategy for a successful MBA application.  'Selecting Schools' Personally, I believe selecting the school is the most important aspect of your MBA application strategy. The earlier you select, more the opportunity to network and build a solid relationship with the school.  Most students start with GMAT preparation and then select the schools. This strategy may work at times, but it may not give the student sufficient time to interact with the school. This is especially true when you are taking GMAT in October- December period.  ...

In exactly a month and a half, I will be heading to Oxford, UK, for my MBA studies. Another dream - checked off from my list. There is definitely a lot of excitement about the prospects, but how much I will miss Singapore - All the wonderful friends and great tangy food. I had a wonderful time in Singapore - tonnes of learning from my colleagues, exposure at regional level, and of course great night-out parties with friends. That said, I am hearing from our alumni that Oxford is a great place to be - especially for its BOPS (read parties), travelling, and networking. Hopefully, I won't miss the Singapore that I love so much - A perfect confluence of East and West. Parties & Meet-ups I had the opportunity to meet some of my future class-mates/alumni at the pre-course parties and meet-ups. To describe them in two words - 'Just overwhelmed'. The diversity is amazing - Students from Economics, Finance, Entrepreneurship, IT, and the list goes on. Never in my life...

What can I say...I am really excited after reading through the article on  Oracle/Salesforce Alliance . Its perhaps one of the master moves by a master class CEO - Larry J Ellison. In the game called Enterprise Technology, the Sun Tzu had made his master move - Make your best enemy your best friend. Clearly, the Cloud computing systems have had its effects on enterprise companies in the last couple of years. Mammoth firms are/were hunting for niche-players, either to improve their market share or to dissolve the competition. Oracle - a giant in enterprise technology - was no exception and it certainly did see the impact of cloud based SaaS applications. Purely from a financial point of view, Oracle missed the sales estimates on two consecutive quarters, an event that had never occurred in the last decade. These are signs of changing market structure, and Industry participants are sensing the change and making the moves. Oracle has the best-of-class technology stack for cloud c...

I was reading through Patrick Pichette's interview with Mckinsey Quarterly last week, and it was perhaps one of the few interview reports that made me sit back, read, read, and read through again. Its quite an old interview, but worth looking given its relevance in today's fast changing IT landscape. The report certainly made me to think about many aspects of corporate finance and strategy. Patrick's  ideas are certainly commendable and thought provoking - From managing Short Term metrics to Start-Up culture. Here are some excerpts and my thoughts... 'Managing Short Term/Tactical metrics' Managing short term metrics is part of corporate life once an organization goes public. There is a general expectation from investing community to meet/beat analyst estimates and that puts a lot of pressure on C-Level executives. Nevertheless, it is required of C-Level executives to meet short-term goals as well as long-term vision. In the report, Patrick suggests that short...

Oracle Application Express(APEX) is a super-fast web based application development tool. I say "Super Fast" because its really easy even for a novice to build a complete running application. It is packaged as an add-on with Oracle Database and if you are good at reading through technical documentation, one can easily install APEX by running few scripts from command prompt. For others, you can leverage on Oracle's public APEX offering at  APEX Public Instance. All that an user needs to do is request for a workspace(free!!), bingo, you have access to the world's best database and application development tool. APEX is quite a baby stuff, but its versatile and leverages the power of Oracle database, PL/SQL, Javascripts, AJAX, jQuery. What's great about APEX? As a technical consultant, I had worked on developer tools such as Oracle Reports, Oracle Forms etc. Though these tools are powerful, I much prefer using APEX to build any reports or forms since its much mor...

Enterprise Computing Architecture has seen enormous growth over the years. In the olden days, businesses used multiple boxes to host data and run applications.These systems were mostly driven by mainframes and client-server models. With the advent of advanced networking architectures, the enterprise systems moved away from client-server models towards web-based N-Tier models. Along the way, there were number of changes to the way the enterprise systems performed the required functions. Distributed Computing, Grid Computing, and Virtualization changed the outlook of how computations are done over the network. The blog-post focuses on highlighting the above concepts. Distributed Computing: Distributed Computing is basically "distribution" of a "specific function" over multiple nodes in a network. Distributed computing can be achieved from client-server, 3-tier, or a N-Tier architecture. Whatever be the architecture, the fundamental principle is to break the prog...

The QUALITY Attributes are those that defines how the system should perform over a business cycle/Time Period. Fundamental to good IT design is forecasting the business peaks and troughs and how the system should behave over the business cycle. When there are peak loads, systems should automatically be able to scale and perform with consistent service level agreements. However, there are several cases in the past where such quality attributes were ignored leading to loss of revenue. Quality Attributes can be either run-time or non run-time attributes. Clearly, from a business standpoint, the run-time consideration is of prime importance as no one would want to lose business because of a system downtime or a performance lag. The blog post focuses on the run-time considerations an architect should adhere when making architecture decisions. The following attributes are considered the most important run-time attributes when designing new systems. Reliability (R), Availability (A), Sca...

I have been an HCM consultant for the last 7 years and have had the opportunity to work on various modules of HCM - from Recruitment Solutions to Core HRMS to Appraisals. In this forum, I intend to share some of the knowledge that I gained over the years - both systems and processes. What is Human Capital Management? In the industrial era, people in the organization were managed through a "personnel" department. This is akin to the current human resources department, but "personnel officers" were mostly involved in labor relations and company law. Their routine was mostly restricted to operational and benefits management. A couple of decades ago, the concept of viewing "people" as an "asset" of the organization emerged and led to "Human Resources". The human resources team is involved in entire life cycle of the employees - From Recruitment to Retirement. Their work is more strategic and advisory in nature and deals with culture, ...

The Yahoooo Deal!! The Tech M&A market has been quite a force in the last couple of years....A number of strategic acquisitions, few bad ones, and some raw deals. The cracking news for the last two weeks has been Yahoo's acquisition of Tubmlr. As I read through the news articles, annual reports, and blogs on the web - there's clearly one word that stands to justify the deal "SYNERGY". The term synergy can be ambiguous to many of us. In this blog post, we will discuss about Synergy and potential gains for Yahoo with respect to Tubmlr deal. Synergy: Synergy is the potential value that can be generated from an M&A deal. As one can understand, there should be some value created by the merged/acquired firms. If there is no value creation(i.e. Synergy), there is no point in going through the expensive M&A process. A M&A synergy can be attributed to following important factors: Revenue, Cost effectiveness, Financial. Revenue refers to increasing mark...

Master's at SMU: Its exactly one year since I completed my last coursework related to Master of IT in Business at Singapore Management University(SMU). I thought it will be quite interesting to recollect some of the important learning that I acquired over the years at SMU. The coursework, in general, was quite interesting as it blended technology, business, and management. I really enjoyed the courses on Finance, Strategy, Sourcing, and Vendor management. My specialization was on Banking Products and Processes and I acquired fairly a good knowledge about the Banking Industry. If you are interested in learning about the program, you can refer to the following URL:  SMU MITB Banking Products & Processes: This is a foundation course that provides cursory knowledge on various banking products: Savings, Loans, Derivatives, Custodian Services, Trade Finance etc. Besides it covers processes under each banking domain (e.g: Loan Servicing Process). The process knowledge that you ga...

IT Strategy: There are several thousand articles in web and in print on Business and IT alignment. They are all true in certain ways - Some articles are focused more on IT, some on Business, and few strike a balance between IT and Business. This article is no different and all I intend to do is to stitch my IT/Finance/Process knowledge together in this short article. In my opinion, A true alignment engenders from good understanding of the Business, Corporate Strategy, and Technology. In this blog post, I highlight my thoughts on how a good understanding of these various forces will be help to achieve superior operational results. But, before we get into the subject - here are the key assumptions. In my opinion these assumptions are a "given" in IT planning for "Medium to Big" businesses. The smaller businesses/operational units/lean-models can change their processes to technology, but that is not the discussion point here. Key Assumptions: Technology works ...

Its been quite a while since I blogged the last time...maybe over 3 years. I have to admit that life had been quite been quite busy with loads of work. For a change, I can afford to be quite laid back. There's a reason for my short term laziness - for I have got an admission to study MBA at Said Business School, Oxford University. Its been a tremendous journey with Oracle in the last 6+ years - Technology, Technology, and more Technology. I had opportunities to play with processes, systems, and Operations. But, I guess the "DREAM" to study in a world class university forced me to pursue the MBA program more than any other factors. If the plan goes well, I am all set to Oxford. (Details about my interview with Oxford can be found in the following URL: Oxford MBA Interview ). So, for the next few months - I am back to my blogging business and share my thoughts through this forum.