The Inauguration

Software. Information Technology. Business. Green Technology.

While each area is vast and seemingly disparate, I believe they are interconnected, forming a crossroad, and it is that crossroad on which I aspire to build with my career.

This blog is an outlet for me to write about these four areas that I am most passionate about. My passion for these areas is almost innate, but it has spawned from my professional experiences and my unique personal curiosity.

Software

From the days I was writing code for and project managing my high school’s activity point system to the days I was writing code for and project managing a test automation system deployed in servers in the US, India, and China, Software has been core to my experiences. I started with VB, Basic, and C in high school to C++ and Java in University and C# in my internship and full time work experience at Microsoft. I have enjoyed writing code and my favourite part has been debugging and fixing bugs mainly because I’ve been quick at it and it makes me feel gratified.

While Software has eased our lives, enabled instant communication between people around the world, and increased our productivity at work, there are still many more problems it is yet to solve. Only about 1.5 billion of the 6.7 billion people in the world use the internet and so there’s still a big market to penetrate [1]. Software as a Service (SaaS), Artificial Intelligence, Unified Communication, and Business Intelligence present exciting new possibilities and countless business opportunities. On the consumer front, people are looking for better ways to manage, protect, and share, their photos, videos, and documents. On the developer community front, new evolved software languages are replacing older ones and developer tools are increasingly making it easier for software engineers to write code. Innovation in software test automation will further decrease the time it takes to release software products with higher quality.


Information Technology

My final year University project which was developing the applications and infrastructure for a wireless network of PDA’s, laptops, and desktops that could do voice, video, and data communication, a network engineering internship, my personal spare time during University spent setting up servers at home on old computers, and my work experience with web services and databases introduced me to aspects of what it entails to build and maintain IT networks. The complexity of building and maintaining data centers and IT networks, which is now a necessity for a company’s survival, is what intrigues me.

As workers are becoming more mobile and as large organizations are relying on data centers to not only manage information, but also secure it, there are still many challenges and opportunities in this area. Virtualization technologies are helping reduce costs while cloud computing is changing the way information is managed and stored. It will be interesting to see how these changes will pan out. Traditionally, many IT services companies, big and small, including consulting arms of major corporations such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, have provided this support to corporations who have invested in managing their own data.


Business

Most of my reading comprises of business books. Ultimately, businesses exploit opportunities, drive economic growth, provide goods and services, and determine which technologies prevail in the free market. Technology developments and advancements without business acumen become science experiments.

Business enables us to actualize engineering solutions in the market and drive technology adoption. And for non technology businesses (and in most cases, technology businesses as well), understanding the business processes and functions helps determine what tools and systems will drive efficiency and help the organization meet its business goals.


Green Technology

The potential of green technology excites me. Every time I read articles on green technology, or the problems that can potentially be solved by green technology, my mind wanders off to dream of all the engineering solutions that can help us solve our energy crisis. I think we can break down this into two problems:

1) How to reduce our energy consumption
2) How to reduce our carbon footprint

The first requires figuring out ways to be smarter and more efficient with our energy usage. The second involves changing process and materials used to reduce carbon emissions that are changing our climate. These problems are pressing and government policies and public attitude is a reflection of that.

This problem space is new and the solutions do not exist. VC funding is moving from IT to Green Tech which is a reflection of the potential of this area. I think Software and IT will play a key role in how this industry shapes out. One McKinsey study predicts that datacenters will surpass the airline industry’s emissions by 2020 [2]. Recently, there was controversy around how much carbon is used in each Google search and Google is currently investing hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce the energy cost of its datacenters [3]. It just makes sense; reducing costs is one of the fundamental drivers of business. The term “Green IT” has only recently been coined to reflect this entire new problem space. With the current state of the economy, there will be an increased focus in investing to reduce IT costs [4] and once the economy picks up again and more capital is available, I think there will be major investments in Green IT.

Furthermore, I feel technology should not be considered as a carbon emitter, it should be considered a mean to solve our energy problems. Smart software can help us measure our energy usage and determine cost saving techniques, and simulate energy usage reductions achieved by different cost saving strategies. It could do it in real time, where homes could be smart enough to know to turn off light bulbs, reduce heat used in our ovens, and automatically close our refrigerator doors if accidentally left open. In warehouses we can implement energy efficient production models that are managed real-time by software. We can fundamentally change the way our datacenters exist through not just through innovation in software and virtualization technologies, but also by building low cost hardware that generate no heat and are faster than today’s hardware.



[1] http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
[2] http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/data-centers-are-becoming-big-polluters-study-finds/
[3] http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-responds-to-search-carbon-cost-claims-1324968.html
[4]http://www.internetnews.com/software/article.php/3789131/IDC+Economy+Will+Force+IT+to+Transform.htm