The Embankments of Faith

Suppose there is a ship that sails on the open sea. Though the ship is stoutly built, if it is flooded by a leak, those on the ship are sure to drown together. Bail the seawater of slander and disbelief out of the ship of your life, and solidify the embankments of your faith.

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Considerations for hosting SAP with a hyperscaler

When you are considering a hyperscaler for hosting your SAP environments, use the following to make decisions for your company

• Industry and regulatory standards
• Data Residency
• Cloud Economics - Running costs (OpEx) + TCO covering adoption, support and innovation + Egress
• Integration APIs
• Time to value for LOBs and IT
• Uptime and availability SLAs
• Security, Privacy and compliance

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Small daily habits or big, infrequent home runs

Small daily habits are more important than big, infrequent home runs ?

The thing with knowledge is that it can decay if left ignored. How many of us can solve the calculus problems from high school that helped us score the top rank? Just because you were able to do something once successfully doesn't guarantee that you will be able to do it again especially if you do not practice it frequently.

The belief that 'One day' you will be a millionaire is absolutely baseless if you are not working towards it daily. When you do not take daily steps towards your goals, your mind will lead you to believe in this 'One day' concept. The great thought of waking up one day to find the $10K you invested in stock market has now grown to $1 M is ridiculous. It has not happened for others and will not happen for you unless you educate yourself everyday and nurture your investments based on what you learnt.

So kick your ass and get going as that 'One Day' is today and it is right now. Make this a daily habit, learn something about investments daily rather than hoping to make it work one day and hitting the jackpot!

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Notes to self: Effective time management & productivity

1. Do MITs in the morning 
2. Divide your tasks into 4 quadrants and attack the UI
3. 80/20 rule 
4. Audit your time by divide your calendar into 30 minutes slots and tracking the tasks performed 
5. Avoid procrastination with inspiration - Rubenstein show 
6. Adopt good habits 

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Notes to self: Never stop learning

You can either be green & growing or ripe & rotting - choice is yours!. It is a fact that top 1% in your field focus on continuous learning both within and outside of your field. The notion of learning outside of your choice of filed is important as it give you perspective of how others think. It gives you ancillary information that you can incorporate in your daily activities. The end result is new and exciting ways of managing yourself in your business by taking what people have done outside of your business and applying within.

A formalized and structured time for daily learning is all you need to be the top 1%. So buddy, set it up on your calendar today and let's talk in 30 days to see if it has become a habit for you!

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Notes to self: 1440

1. Focus on minutes

2. Focus on only one thing that is most important for you at least for two hours every morning

3. Beat procrastination with time travel

4. Make it home for dinner

5. Use note book

6. Process emails only few times a day

7. Say 'No' to everything

8. 80/20 rule

9. Delegate

10. Touch things only once

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Four reasons to think Outside the Container

Microservices architecture promised unprecedented scalability in application development but with the advancement of edge computing, it became evident that microservices aren’t the be-all-and-end-all of scalability in enterprise architecture. There is still a lot of dead weight replicated across containers viz the libraries and boilerplate code. This gave birth to new construct - Serverless computing (also known as Function-as-a-Service) - Event driven application design and deployment paradigm where all the computing resources are provided as scalable cloud services.

Here are the key reasons, organizations need to take advantage of serverless computing:

1. Reduction in Costs - Unlike traditional cloud computing, clients need to pay for the services or instances used. No charges for downtime and idle time. It has been observed that drop in infrastructure cost can range from 50%-90%.
2. Flexible Scaling - Infrastructure recreates copies of function and scales to meet the demand thereby relieving developers of the overhead of resource allocation. It also greatly enhances your organization’s ability to react to the inevitable and unforeseeable changes.
3. Automated high availability - One less job for the architects and developers as serverless applications have built-in availability and fault tolerance. Needless to say, it will also reduce the time to market because there is no need to setup servers and configure environments.
4. Transparent execution -  Code is executed only in response to a well-defined business event, thereby increasing the transparency and reliability of the application to handle very specific business events or anomalies.

Finally, this bright shiny concept does make application performance tradeoffs for flexibility. Also, it makes the monitoring and debugging complicated as containers are abstracted from the application developers.

Almost all cloud providers now offer serverless capabilities for their cloud customers. Check out IBM Cloud Functions, Microsoft Azure Functions, Google Cloud Function and AWS Lambda. Interested in implementation of serverless computing, there are tons. Here is one of the most common use case.

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Re-imagine work with IBM Watson

In my experience discussing and delivering IBM Watson cognitive computing services to my clients, the single most common question I almost always receive from CXOs is - How long will it take for us to train Watson to complement the job my people are doing? Well the reality is, it is a sizable effort in any implementation that goes into training Watson with customer specific data.

With IBM releasing prepackaged and pre-trained Watson AI Tools, it definitely will reduce the training lead times. Thereby helping clients reduce the time to market for several of their Watson based initiatives.

For instance, IBM Watson Decision Platform for Agriculture gathers data from multiple sources – such as weather, IoT enabled tractors and irrigators, satellite imagery, and more – and provides a single, overarching, predictive view of data as it relates to a farm in an easy-to-use app. Thereby helping the individual growers make informed decisions and improve the yield. If you are interested, below is the detailed announcement regarding the pre-trained industry Watson packs that are becoming available.

IBM Largest Ever AI Toolset Release Is Tailor Made for 9 Industries and Professions

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How to buy happiness

If you are one of those who believe that money can't buy happiness, you definitely need to hear social science researcher Michael Norton and think again!. For the most part, people see money and spending as a selfish thing because typically people spend money on themselves. Instead try spending money on others and you will be actually able to buy happiness. Go on and hear his little experiment and may be try it yourself this thanksgiving season. 

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Review: Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business

Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business by Barbara Corcoran
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ms. Corcoran is eminently likeable on the Shark Tank and very authentic when it comes to narrating her life story. Drawing parallels from childhood days to make key business decisions, building an empire and saving it few times makes you think anything is possible if you put your best. Thank you Barb! for sharing your life lessons.

View all my reviews

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Botsourcing

Just in time when companies need their next threshold of efficiency and effectiveness, IT industry pundits have coined a new term Botsourcing. Interesting article by Phil Fersht on how 2018 investments intentions by industry are stacked in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Outsourcing.

copyright and credits - HfS Research

However, the key question remains is RPA the new outsourcing or it is just that outsourcing and automation are converging now? I personally believe it is the later. We will soon see the large System Integrators combining bots and humans within their bids and coming up with business models where clients will have the option to pay transaction price separate for humans and bots. 

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Five guiding principles for cloud organization setup

Thinking of setting up a cloud center of excellence (CoE) in your organization. Here are some of the learnings from my recent experiences that may be worth the read. Use them as guiding principles when enabling your team 

1. Roles - Operating model decisions determine how people fill roles that achieve business outcomes and not vice versa.
2. Embrace the change - willingly and enthusiastically.  Change of applications, IT systems and business direction is expected with any transformation initiative
3. Change Management - Use intentional and targeted organizational change management to change company culture and norms. It is not easy but it is not impossible too as long as you have the leadership buy-in and the right team driving the change management.
4. Culture - Build your company culture into everything you do.
5. Structure - Ensure that your cloud CoE structure has a representation from all the impacted business segments with cross functional skills and knowledge. As your organization transforms and initiative moves forward, be ready and open to change the cloud CoE organization structure. 

There are no one size fits all list of principles that work for every company so leave me a feedback in comments below as you move through the cloud migration journey in your organization.

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