Indian IT Industry

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 22 Oct 2009 08:41

^^^ Both Bill dada and Steve babu have made business contributions in their unique ways but you are giving Brin bhaiyya too much credit (Google did not become a business powerhouse due to him or Page)

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 22 Oct 2009 09:20

int netz architects (called principal engineers / sr tech leads / distinguished engg) do just engg work and interact with product mkting to get customer requirements or to jointly propose/demo certain ideas to big customers or shows.
lot of desis in this tribe. in spare time they file patents, attend standards meetings and
write RFCs.

product mkting deals with the product rollout, pricing, wheeling-dealing, interfacing
to the worldwide sales force, getting customer requirements etc. these are usually
ex engineers who took a MBA along the line. increasing num of desis in this tribe too.

solution architects are another tribe who come up with architectures and deployment scenarios to help the customer. there is also CPOC - customer proof of concept labs wherein large scale trials can be run to validate customer scenarios and prove that its not just a box with few blinking LEDs. solution architects are former tech leads from
the development or devtest side. they are pretty good in netz. again, good number of
desis. they may also be called TME - technical marketing engineer. some of the netz bob (best of best) I have seen are TMEs.

in small cos or other fields, some of these roles may surely overlap.

Tanaji · Post by **Tanaji** » 22 Oct 2009 13:49

Perspective from a telecom vendor side:

If the project is sufficiently large enough i.e. different types of nodes in multiple sites, there is a Chief Engineer involved. This person is responsible for end to end design. He does has the capability to get into the nitty gritty provisioning details, but usually leaves it to other architects on the project. His main role is to ensure technical compliance, address inter site issues , but more importantly scope of work and finance compliance. He works closely with the PM, but the PM is usually not technically capable of identifying whether a particular item is within the scope of work or not. He does not necessarily design, but his role is very technical... typically such a person has 15 years of experience as a lead architect before becoming a chief engineer.

sinha · Post by **sinha** » 23 Oct 2009 14:30

CalvinH wrote: Sinha Ji, I would admit here that I have not worked with the "Software architects" that you have mentioned in the Post. I have seen and talked to them in some frontline tech companies in bay area and yes they do have all round view of the technical/commercial/functional part of the product/product based service. I have not met a single one having the same insight in Indian (india based MNC included) IT services or product companies. Do we have a Bill gates Steve jobs or Sergey brin in India, someone who can think beyond normal code to the other aspects of a successful product. May be, I havent met them.

If you are going to be around Bangy/Hyd - PM me, I can link you up. However the numbers as a proportion of total IT workforce will not compare well. There are good reasons for it.

Indian IT services - well let me say the form and function technicians of Top-5 Indian companies has been driven by their market conditions. The previous posts in this forum are replete with examples of guys being disillusioned by quality of code that Indian IT services firm write, or lack of technical expertise when they go head hunting. The point is each of these service companies have adapted to their market demands and innovated and inculcated just about enough smart people to solve problems which are relevant to them. I can safely point out to some public information where you can see examples of techies in these companies suitably innovating in areas where clientele and business needs exist like http://www.tcsinnovations.com esp the Labs section.

However because of their western client specific focus, when they have been hit with large scale projects in India - panic button pressed and most of these companies have been found wanting on "India scale and complexity" solutions. As usual, the first step is to go searching for partners in the west and see what can they bring in. Ideally best discussed in a separate thread in context of Indian Technology requirements, as I have a major crib on this side.

Indian offices of MNCs - you can count on fingers where design work is passed to India. Most of them try and use these as factories where design is provided from outside, and you code and test and apply the CMMi lipstick of metrics, alerts, continous process optimization and what not. BUT there are exceptions.

Coming back to architecture, the type of decision making that I talked about, is fairly common on a day to day basis.

Take an example of a "solution architect" and say he is working out something for an Indian Govt Bid - He/she will not only have to combine technical merits of a technology provider, but also consider whether his/her company has enough leeway with OEMs to get the best pricing. Even if you get the right price, squeezing the best value by extracting and optimizing on number of cores by considering ways to optimize a solution are normal. Where and how can you use open source (as long as it does not violate standards/ RFP conditions) is also common (e.g. Nagios/Groundworks instead of OV/Tivoli/CA). What productivity enhancement tools to be considered to beat the competition and lower your costs etc (MDA/Code generators/Pre-built platforms). I have seen some examples of people using hot-out-of-research-labs handwriting recognition systems to increase the efficiency of digitization of records, which again is common requirement for many bids. Some bids may also be Uptake centric/transaction pricing based, how best to get eventual clients to use the system including tieing up with telecom providers, online advertisement agencies etc can be quite exciting and headache for a solution architect. Many times, you will be given a "winning price" by the people-in-know and asked to fit the solution to that price while meeting all the requirements. You cannot suggest non-sense as eventually you have a stake in execution and will have to justify everything to execution team (if by chance you manage to get out of it). The companies I know, if you designed it, won it, will make sure you execute it with ownership.

An Unfortunate corrolary of external focus in Top tier Indian companies is this sense of stigma associated with Domestic projects, recession was good because it diverted some good talent towards these projects.

I can take a few examples of other grades of architects including product lines within India - but gets boring because it is not as exciting as Google Wave, if you know what I mean.

Agree that sizing/scoping is always done by someone who knows it. My question was when it is a management type of job why cant a smart project manager do it with Architects helping him with their expertise/Product or Industry knowledge rather then other way around.

[/quote]
who "owns" the idea, product line, tool or solution is the real question. as far as I could see, the shift in SRoys company was this shifted under Senior Architect's control - then it has to be PMs working to support the architect and not the other way around.
In many cases, Architects lay the blame for eventual failures to poor execution and garland all the blame on PMs- this way, the idea to execution to fruition rests with them. They just cant wake up and decide we should shift to Scala and junk Java one fine morning OR shift to SCRUM (as examples). Pragmatism and commercial sense will mix in with Technology, I hope.

Rahul Mehta · Post by **Rahul Mehta** » 27 Oct 2009 21:34

.

Is there anyone here who has worked on "Audio Fingerprinting"?

Or anyone knows anyone who has worked on "Audio Fingerprinting"?

I need some help on this.

.

Tanaji · Post by **Tanaji** » 27 Oct 2009 21:41

^^^

What do you want to do?

manish · Post by **manish** » 28 Oct 2009 19:42

Looks like the Big G is going to throw its hat in the navigation services ring - and it will be free.
Google Offers Free Navigation System for Phones

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In a move that is likely to be seen as an attack on yet another industry, Google on Wednesday introduced a free navigation system for mobile phones that offers turn-by-turn directions.

Analysts said that Google’s free service, if successful, could erode the sales of GPS navigation devices made by companies like Garmin and TomTom and of navigation services offered by cellphone carriers.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 28 Oct 2009 20:50

they are very good at entering new industries with free solns...but how do they propose to make themselves some money on it? getting sponsored ads on a small cellphone screen - NOT what the user needs.

Rahul Mehta · Post by **Rahul Mehta** » 28 Oct 2009 22:56

Rahul Mehta wrote: Is there anyone here who has worked on "Audio Fingerprinting"? Or anyone knows anyone who has worked on "Audio Fingerprinting"? I need some help on this.

Tanaji wrote:What do you want to do?

1. Given a 24 hour audio recording of a channel say SonyTV

2. Given a 10 second audio advertisement.

3. Find all instances of ad in the channel recording.

People claim they have done it using "Audio Fingerprinting". Audio Fingerprint is made by first taking FFT of the wav file, then dividing the FTs into bands, taking energy in each band and then taking some hash. The papers do give a sketchy idea, but I cant find a detailed pseudo-code .

Rahul Mehta · Post by **Rahul Mehta** » 28 Oct 2009 22:58

Is anyone researching in India on how Sanskrit can be used as Computer Language?

FYI, http://ratnuu.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/ ... -language/

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 29 Oct 2009 06:03

Rahul Mehta wrote:Is anyone researching in India on how Sanskrit can be used as Computer Language?

FYI, http://ratnuu.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/ ... -language/

Yes CDAC used to look into it. Sanskrit is very structured and tabulated but why would one use it as a computer language unless it brings in some new programming concept. What they can probably look into is using Sanskrit for spoken audio commands where computer can interpret what you are saying by understanding the language (as opposed to matching fixed phrases) - I had tried in 1st year college with mixed results (but then voice recognition tech was pretty worse then).

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 29 Oct 2009 06:05

Rahul Mehta wrote:
Rahul Mehta wrote: Is there anyone here who has worked on "Audio Fingerprinting"? Or anyone knows anyone who has worked on "Audio Fingerprinting"? I need some help on this.

Tanaji wrote:What do you want to do?
1. Given a 24 hour audio recording of a channel say SonyTV

2. Given a 10 second audio advertisement.

3. Find all instances of ad in the channel recording.

People claim they have done it using "Audio Fingerprinting". Audio Fingerprint is made by first taking FFT of the wav file, then dividing the FTs into bands, taking energy in each band and then taking some hash. The papers do give a sketchy idea, but I cant find a detailed pseudo-code .

Unless you are recording direct from source, you will have to do pre-processing of some sort to take out the ambient noise. Even after that case simple hash-based finger printing may not work. My 2 khotta sikkas.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 29 Oct 2009 06:13

Singha wrote:they are very good at entering new industries with free solns...but how do they propose to make themselves some money on it? getting sponsored ads on a small cellphone screen - NOT what the user needs.

Right now GOOG is all about collecting as much info as possible and establishing as much presence as possible. What few people realize is that their way of doing business is quite ironic given their "Dont be Evil" mantra. In reality their mantra goes: "Regardless of whether GOOG can make money or not, first make sure that others cannot make money and then we will figure out if we can monetize it or not". So it is less about making money on their own and more about establishing their presence and preventing others from making money. Hence, you see their pre-emption strategy in different fields which has been quite successful till now - Eric Schimdt gets the credit for this not the PageRank twins.

That being said the maps demo by Vic Gundotra was not that impressive at 2nd glance due to the limitations imposed by the inherently small physical form factor of the phone and the need to push buttons on the phone (you cant do everything with voice - havent evaluated the google voice search yet).What makes it dangerous is the additional attention off-the-road required for using the maps on the phone. However, I do see some traction for this in low-end budget category but not enough yet to hurt GPS makers or in-car nav. It was nice of them to show a car mode UI (basically larger fonts, simpler home screen) which can be turned on using a cradle but again what looks cool is not practical - Gundotra was touting "At Arms Length" use but that same feature is an issue if you have to push buttons "At Arms Length".

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 30 Oct 2009 07:25

pandyan wrote:iphone has an app for something similar. if you play a clip of a song, it will tell you all the details about the song. ofcourse, all the magic is happening in some server in a remote data center...so, the technology exists.

That is a key point - where is the recognition taking place? If it is on some back-end "cloud" then it will lead to real crappy user experience for the mobile user coz unlike the song app (which is pretty cool BTW, try it if you havent) the voice recognition is being used for critical interaction such as navigation directions so such kind of tradeoff b/w processing, battery and network latency is critical.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 30 Oct 2009 08:49

I am not a particular die hard for sanskrit / pali / prakrit ... in the course of time
long before the fav whipping boys(EU) arrived in india, these had fallen into disuse because of the development of the languages we see today.

I would say stay mobile and on horseback - go with the flow to target the biggest sweet spots (if that means programming in english , talking kannada at home and swahili at work - so be it)

be formless, mobile and present no fixed target for your enemies - cardinal rule of longevity on BR too.

mirror your enemies moves, drive him nuts by giving him nothing original except his own moves to target...

Tanaji · Post by **Tanaji** » 30 Oct 2009 15:56

Raja Bose wrote:
Rahul Mehta wrote:

1. Given a 24 hour audio recording of a channel say SonyTV

2. Given a 10 second audio advertisement.

3. Find all instances of ad in the channel recording.

People claim they have done it using "Audio Fingerprinting". Audio Fingerprint is made by first taking FFT of the wav file, then dividing the FTs into bands, taking energy in each band and then taking some hash. The papers do give a sketchy idea, but I cant find a detailed pseudo-code .
Unless you are recording direct from source, you will have to do pre-processing of some sort to take out the ambient noise. Even after that case simple hash-based finger printing may not work. My 2 khotta sikkas.

I knew a guy who did this for his thesis. It was quite involved. First he subjected both streams to some sort of pre-processing, possibly to remove ambient noise as RB suggests. Then, for the clip to be identified, he broke it up into segments of lengths a function of the total length and also what it is composed of. He then transformed that into some sort of a curve on a graph, and then used this curve to match the curve in the target stream and used some curve fitting techniques to see a match. The output was a probabilistic number. Sorry, it is a bit complicated...

You know, there are folks like media sentry (the lapdogs and attack dogs of RIAA/MPAA) that do this for a living and have readymade services that will do it for you. Search for media sentry and see if they can help you out.

Then again all the above may be TRIVIAL for you.

krishnan · Post by **krishnan** » 30 Oct 2009 16:01

Something like those programs which claims to find duplicate songs in your PC

bhargava · Post by **bhargava** » 30 Oct 2009 16:11

pandyan wrote:iphone has an app for something similar. if you play a clip of a song, it will tell you all the details about the song. ofcourse, all the magic is happening in some server in a remote data center...so, the technology exists.

Is Shazam what you are referring to? http://www.shazam.com/. I found it a couple of days back and was taken aback when it correctly recognized an old kannada song from 1968 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB-q8Mpn-dw)

Umrao Das · Post by **Umrao Das** » 01 Nov 2009 08:42

CalvinH Saar, I strongly urge you to read this.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 01 Nov 2009 11:18

pandyan wrote:
Raja Bose wrote:which is pretty cool BTW, try it if you havent) the voice recognition is being used for critical interaction such as navigation directions so such kind of tradeoff b/w processing, battery and network latency is critical.
I was tempted to buy an iphone...but being an sdre, found the contract clauses too restrictive..I wanted full TOT/choice of service integration but did hear about some amazing applications that can be built with integrated data/gps/accelerometers. Star gazer/Star Map type applications are really innovative.

Regarding the music search...that is like any other kind of search engine with massive amount of data that would need dedicated data centers..

On the speech recognition aspect on small devices...never liked them anyway; the capability is pretty weak and add accent to the mix they are pretty much unusable.

Dont forget magnetometers in the sensor mix!
iPhone is losing out big time on capabilities, UI and everything else except their multi-touch (which wont last long) to expensive newbies like N900/Maemo5 and expensive and cheaper alternatives from the Android stable.

SRoy · Post by **SRoy** » 01 Nov 2009 20:31

Thanks ArmenT, never thought of that

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 01 Nov 2009 21:11

I have the low cost indian edition. at one point was considering gifting it to a particularly dysfunctional manager in our outfit. but thought better of it to save my kursi.

ArmenT · Post by **ArmenT** » 01 Nov 2009 21:40

@SRoy: You might want to retract that offer, especially on a publicly readable forum. You don't want to get BRF accused of aiding and abetting IP theft.

OTOH Mythical Man Month is a great book. Anyone in IT should buy a copy. Too often, managerial types ignore its advice to their peril.

CalvinH · Post by **CalvinH** » 03 Nov 2009 00:55

Umrao Das wrote:CalvinH Saar, I strongly urge you to read this.

Thanks. Will defintely try to look it up. Checked it in Amazon. Not very pricey.

Nayak · Post by **Nayak** » 04 Nov 2009 12:08

Ground-zero report. Take it FWIW...

The economy is certainly picking up. Improvement signs started trickling in September. Companies decided to up the head count in the last annual quarter. In October, consultants went into an overdrive hiring abduls in the 0-3 years bracket. The trend now is to get the grass level goats fattened up and then hire the kasais err managers

next year.

I am in the 5 + year bracket and for 6 months I did not receive a single call. Consultants wanted me to pay a upfront fee to even pass my resume to the companies (things were really that bad).

I will truly believe the economy has recovered when Ascent (TOI placement paper) pages exceed the yellow journal Bangalore Times.

KarthikSan · Post by **KarthikSan** » 04 Nov 2009 12:27

Question to the gurus here: Do you know how a site like Ebay is programmed? I don't know any programming except some BASIC, C and FORTRAN. Are these sites programmed using a language like Java or is it something completely different? I assume there would be a front-end (User interface) and back-end (database with user information etc). TIA.

krishnan · Post by **krishnan** » 04 Nov 2009 12:38

websites like EBAY might use cgi , or php/ASP/JSP.

Sriman · Post by **Sriman** » 04 Nov 2009 12:44

IIRC, eBay is a J2EE shop.

Edit: http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/p ... _study.pdf

KarthikSan · Post by **KarthikSan** » 04 Nov 2009 12:58

Cool. Thanks for the info.

Raja Bose · Post by **Raja Bose** » 04 Nov 2009 13:14

KarthikSan wrote:Question to the gurus here: Do you know how a site like Ebay is programmed?

EBay is programmed?!

Sometimes it looks like they are conducting secret experiments on random walks and chaos theory

ArmenT · Post by **ArmenT** » 04 Nov 2009 21:04

krishnan wrote:websites like EBAY might use cgi , or php/ASP/JSP.

Perish that thought. CGI on a high-performance website?? No way jose.

I happen to know one developer from eBay. He said that they used to use ISAPI dlls with IIS in the earlier days (the ISAPI DLLs were coded in C++ originally), but since v3 of their software almost all their stuff is served from Java App servers with IIS only serving as a front end. You may see a .dll extension in some of their URLs, but those requests still go to the java app servers, not a ISAPI DLL, and the .dll extension was retained so that old links would still remain valid.

IIRC, Sun did a lot of free development consulting for them in the early days, just so they could push their platform.
http://www.sun.com/customers/index.xml? ... ubmit=Find

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 04 Nov 2009 22:09

KarthikSan wrote:Question to the gurus here: Do you know how a site like Ebay is programmed? I don't know any programming except some BASIC, C and FORTRAN. Are these sites programmed using a language like Java or is it something completely different? I assume there would be a front-end (User interface) and back-end (database with user information etc). TIA.

There's a lot of detail here. Strangely they don't mention the perl used on the backend.

http://highscalability.com/ebay-architecture

sinha · Post by **sinha** » 04 Nov 2009 22:17

and thankfully, it isnt exactly your "classic" J2EE by any stretch of imagination

Muppalla · Post by **Muppalla** » 05 Nov 2009 02:47

To tell very briefly eBay, CNN or Microsoft type sites implement one of the high end products that encompasses Content Management and e-commerce facilites. Once implemented they scale them using the hardware. Offcource Microsoft uses Sharepoint MOSS in conjunction with its lates commerce server as it got to be all Micorsoft.

From the info on the site EBay is using J2EE based content management software with Oracle as database. However, to manipulate the XML it is using MSXML. The XML parsing sucks in most of non-Microsoft products including Oracle. Though there are good parsing engines, they lack good API and also documentation. MSXML parser has a single vendor advantage in terms of API and documentation around it. The speed of MSXML is also excellent these days.

Intervowen is one of the long surviving content manangement product in ther enterprise world which in its earlier versions used perl as the language for creating content workflows. I hate that anyway

.

Now the main products in the enterprise world of content management that I know of are Documentum and MS SharePoint MOSS. In Wash DC world EMC software Documentum is doing great business though very pricey and less documented ( good for EMC folks to rip the customers). However, MS Sharepoint MOSS is really pushing the content management software wars. Its cheap and easy and comes on .NET platform and hence easily customisable if you are a MS shop.

Yerna · Post by **Yerna** » 05 Nov 2009 04:37

pandyan wrote:On the speech recognition aspect on small devices...never liked them anyway; the capability is pretty weak and add accent to the mix they are pretty much unusable.

Did you try Google voice search on iPhone? It is pretty good, works with accents too. Google put in plenty of efforts at developing the voice recognition patterns I guess, they used their free 411 service as a test bed for the voice search technology.

Avinash R · Post by **Avinash R** » 06 Nov 2009 18:42

Backbone of Japan's IT industry? Indian engineers! - Rediff

Jitendra · Post by **Jitendra** » 08 Nov 2009 01:15

manish wrote:Looks like the Big G is going to throw its hat in the navigation services ring - and it will be free.
Google Offers Free Navigation System for Phones
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In a move that is likely to be seen as an attack on yet another industry, Google on Wednesday introduced a free navigation system for mobile phones that offers turn-by-turn directions.

Analysts said that Google’s free service, if successful, could erode the sales of GPS navigation devices made by companies like Garmin and TomTom and of navigation services offered by cellphone carriers.

GoogleMaps application for blackberry has been around for a couple of years now and provides driving / walking / location / traffic density services. Though there is no audio. For turn by turn, you have to hit a key. But I've been using it for a while and it's been quite useful.

Guess this is the next step

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 08 Nov 2009 09:18

so the strategy look like use the cash cow profits from ads to enter into and destroy competition in many sectors with freebies.

vera_k · Post by **vera_k** » 08 Nov 2009 10:09

If they keep this up, Mr. Sherman will pay a visit to Mountain View.

Singha · Post by **Singha** » 08 Nov 2009 11:41

who is Mr Sherman?