I’ve noticed what a sorry state the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) world is in.  This is not a new idea with me, I know other people see the same thing.  Companies everywhere are constantly chasing the best way to boost their Google results to the top of the list, but it’s a fools’ errand.  They pay big money to consulting firms, and their own internal staffs, to figure out ways to get in front of millions of users when someone types in “best Hawaiian vacation” or whatever.  But the search engine companies keep changing their algorithms so no one gains an unfair advantage.  So the target subject is perpetually moving, which of course generates tremendous churn like a school of hungry piranhas after a piece of never-ending meat.  For the search engine users just looking to find unbiased information, it’s a total waste of time because no honest little vendor can compete with the companies who are constantly throwing trunks of money at SEO.  So to the people doing the searching it’s like watching an endless stream of infomercials about the ShamWow when all you want is an honest opinion on a good towel.  I wonder what effect this is having on our online shopping habits.  I think it’s probably forcing us to give up in a lot of cases and just end up purchasing products from whichever vendor is screaming the loudest.  Or maybe it’s forcing us to return to talking amongst ourselves and simply using word of mouth recommendations.  All available on Facebook, of course.

Greetings from the Sierra Atlantic Financial Services Business unit, Home of BankON™, the only commercially available turnkey software solution that links ERP systems to banks’ treasury execution systems.

We have several topics today that I wanted to touch on since our last communication before the NACHA show in Seattle:  the NACHA Payments Conference, the importance of STP and BankON™ 2.0

NACHA Payments Conference – Seattle, WA – April 25 – 28, 2010

The NACHA Payments Conference was a fantastic show.  Hundreds of banks and Corporations got together to share best practices on electronic trading, secure networks and new ways to initiate payments: like “Twitter-pay”!  The industry is moving as fast as possible to a paperless transaction society, for both B-2-C and B-2-B.  Convenience, ease of use, security, cost, speed, and managing change will always be the key determinants that Consumers and Companies consider when looking for a payments solution that makes sense.

The BankON™ team was there, showcasing and demoing Sierra Atlantic’s seamless ERP-to-bank STP solution.  We also issued a Press Release at NACHA which generated quite a bit of interest at the event.  We met hundreds of incredible people and their positive reinforcement and ideas were gratefully received.

BankON™ 2.0

BankON™ 2.0 was recently delivered on time and on target for final testing by one of our larger multinational banking partners.  This production release will go into end-user customer accounts late this summer.  If you would like to learn more about BankON™, visit our web page at www.sierraatlant.com/bankon, or contact Pat Lowery, our Director of Product Marketing, at Pat.Lowery@SierraAtlantic.com.

Please have a great summer and we look forward to working with you.

Phil

As I write my first blog, I want to share my thoughts on the business in the emerging markets.

The emerging markets are an interesting mix of challenges and opportunities. The opportunities lie in overall growth of the economy and fast increasing consumer base. The customer expectations are  very high and they want goods and services to be delivered  at global quality at locally affordable price points. It is interesting to observe that such an environment coupled with high expectations of value from customers is spawning innovations faster than ever before. In the case of products, companies have achieved this by understanding the local customer priorities and stripping away the ‘bells and whistles’ features of the products. Indian cell phone maker Micromax demonstrates a good example of this strategy. A relatively new entrant into this business, Micromax has notched up to the third position in the market by offering highly cost effective phones with features that are a big hit among the users. The strategy was to focus on providing the customers with high priority features such as long standby battery time (up to 30 days) and dual SIM and do away with other, more expensive but rarely used features. This is forcing the leaders like Nokia and Samsung to launch similar new products to compete with them.

In the case of services too, including the IT services space, the expectation of most customers is that there would be some ‘innovative’ way for providing the solution at much more attractive price points, is driving new innovations in technologies, service delivery and business models. Unlike the traditional view of innovation as a focused R&D effort, in the case of services in these markets, innovation is viewed as solving the problem with the means available at hand. Some may call it ingenuity and not innovation. But, it is such ingenious solutions that have eventually resulted in disruptive innovations. A large percentage of the worldwide developer population being in the emerging markets and a variety of interests on the part of government, industry and academia are encouraging adoption of open source software for solving critical problems.

The most visible innovation in the service delivery model may have been the application of mass-production techniques to services. But, after maturing to what is popularly known as ‘Global Delivery Networks’ based on tools and processes, IT service companies are proactively moving to service models akin to SaaS, where higher volumes of usage make pay-per-use models a win-win for both customers as well as the service providers. Likewise, the move to platform solutions where the service provider builds a robust software platform to standardize and automate the business processes for a particular industry (which in turn can be based on orchestration of one or more commercial off the shelf platforms), and uses that to provide end-to-end services to multiple customers in the same industry, e.g., end-to-end customer care and billing functions for an industry, etc.

The emerging markets are also witnessing a wide range of contrarian business models to the typical effort based consulting model. In a first of its kind deal in India, Bharti, the largest cellular service provider in India, outsourced all of its IT to IBM where IBM assumed responsibility for all of Bharti’s IT systems, infrastructure, and people for a percentage of Bharti’s revenues, which directly linked IT cost to business performance. The agreement construct was innovative not only from the perspective of the remuneration model for IBM, but also in terms of the scope of the delivery, which was comprehensive and included practically all of IT—current and future. As Bharti went through an explosive growth in the next few years, IBM benefited directly from the revenue growth.

As emerging markets have fewer legacies in systems and business models, I expect this innovation trend to continue. Organizations in the rest of the markets may not have similar business drivers, but they could all benefit from these innovations, of course adapted for the local requirements.

Get ready for a day of fun in the sun on July 18 as  Sevathon 2010 kicks off at Baylands Park, Sunnyvale at 7:30 am which is sponsored by Sierra Atlantic.  The premier walkathon, which derives its name from the Hindi word “seva” or service, is an initiative to bring the community together for  a common cause-supporting those in need of our service.

Over 2000 people are expected to walk/run in the 5k/10k/half marathon and attend the cultural extravaganza, the food fair and a health screening program, which will run simultaneously to the walkathon.

Sierra Atlantic CEO Raju Reddy at the Sevathon Torch Passing

Here is what the CEO of Sierra Atlantic, Raju Reddy had to say about the event in the press release of Sevathon: “It is a unique event that brings together over 38 of the largest and most vibrant non-profits in the Bay Area. We are embodying the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi-he inspired an entire nation via his walk and selfless “seva” to his nation. That’s our cause, “seva” in whatever form, manner or spirit and wherever on the planet. The Sevathon non-profits are working across the globe from village in Africa to the rural heartlands of India. We are simply bringing their work and their passion to the people. We are providing a common platform to our local communities to learn about the amazing work these organizations are doing and choose to help a cause they feel close to”.

So this would be a great event to attend and you can register at http://www.indiacc.org/sevathon/register and you read the Sevathon Press Release at http://www.indiacc.org/pdfs/SPR.pdf.

Isn’t this an interesting idea? Render games on the cloud and stream them, in real time, to the clients. Come to think of it, this is quite similar to what Sun was talking about many years ago – “Network is the computer”. I like this concept where you can stick any game on the internet and it renders straight to the console @ hand.

Here’s my take on this:

- Perfrect for networking and online games. Think about the architectural possibilities now that all the client side and server side information is on the server – the cloud. Of course the client side now becomes a video decoder.

- 5 Mbps for an HDTV output is asking for a little too much. It is not always possible for everyone to have this sort of a connection consistently. I know for sure that South Korea, Japan and Singapore can march ahead in this area, especially in the wireless devices space.

- We will slowly be able to move away from a GPU+CPU architecture to one that is purely CPU (hmm or may just be GPU) architecture. Aren’t we tending towards software renderers here? Ray tracing, although years away, should become a natural progression.

- A more consistent “Minimum Requirements” spec for playing games.

- We definitely need to consider the possibility that having a vector graphics processor will lower bandwidth requirements.

- Fatter bills for data transfer

I know for sure that this will not make consoles disappear but it will make PC gaming and mobile gaming obtain better market penetration. A few years ago Steam changed the way I played games. I hope a service like Gaikai or Onlive will also change the landscape.