Day1@ Taubman Building, Harvard Kennedy School: After registration and snacks, there was a conversation with Adesh Pratap Singh Kairon – Cabinet Minister, Punjab Govt and Navin Jindal, MP lok Sabha & MD Jindal Steel & Power. They Spoke about how Indian political landscape is changing by all youngsters are coming to politics and managing to win the elections. Navin spoke about how he fought for the right to wear Indian flag themed badges, after writing letters all the MP’s after 6 years government of India approved. He remembered the incident when Sachin tendulkar was not allowed to wear his helmet which has Indian flag on it. Navin says that things will happen in India but it takes time with lot of constant pursuing.

Mr. Kairon, alumni of Kellogg’s b school, spoke about how he works with ground level people to understand issues and try to resolve them. He also mentioned that Punjab govt gave 100 acres of land for free to setup ISB.

They both have tremendous faith in the upcoming Indian govt’s ambitious UID project. Ruling party MP Mr. Navin stressed the fact that funds are available to complete the project. UID will be equivalent of SSN in US.

Tarun Khanna Prof at HBS: In his interesting talk, he mentioned how a hospital in Bangalore are operating heart surgeries with fraction of cost compared to western countries, This hospital has very low failure rate compared to US and Europe. In his talk, he praised couple of Indians; first one he spoke about is Mr. CV.Madhukar, who runs a non-profit organization (http://www.prsindia.org) which focuses on making legislative process in India better informed, more transparent and participatory. And the other is Mr. Varun Aggarwal, MIT Alumni, Co-founder of Aspiring minds (www.aspiringminds.in). His company provides scientific human capital assessment solutions to help companies hire appropriate talent and helps graduating students get matching job. This company has large database of students assessed across the nation could be used by companies to identify and the pick the talent literally anywhere and anytime. I got an opportunity to talk to him for few minutes.

In Day 1’s final session, Mr. Lant Pritchett, Prof at HBS, been doing research on India. From his research figures, he came up with startling facts about Indian education and the quality of the end products. I felt that what he said was true as in our education system it is not about understanding the concepts it’s about marks. With this Day 1 ends

I think I need to go now……will post the remaining Day2 tomorrow…
Day2- Burden Hall, HBS:
Future of management education in India
Investing in India
Returning to India
Speech – Subrata Roy Sahara Chaiman of Sahara group

$25000 for 25 years at 18% per annum (compounded Qrterly) will yield to $2 million.
Sounds simple right?? But here is the question, how do you get 18% interest?

Compounded quarterly means – the interest would be compounded every quarter.

Let us say you deposit $1000 in a bank @ 10% interest per year.

One year = 4 quarters

At the end of the 1st quarter:

principal = 1000, Interest = 25

=> Value of your investment at the end of the 1st qtr = $1025

At the end of the 2nd quarter:

principal = 1025, Interest = 25.625

=> Value of your investment at the end of the 1st qtr = $1050.625

If you see here, the interest earned here is 25.625 whereas the interest earned in the previous quarter was only $25. This is because for calculation of interest for the 2nd quarter, the interest earned in the first quarter would be added to the principal.

Shorter the compounding interval more the interest earned.

BABY giraffes never go to school. But they learn a very important lesson rather early in life.
A lesson that all of us would do well to remember.

The birth of a baby giraffe is quite an earth-shaking event. The baby falls from its mother’s womb, some eight feet above the ground. It shrivels up and lies still, too weak to move.
The mother giraffe lovingly lowers her neck to smooch the baby giraffe. And then something incredible happens.  She lifts her long leg and kicks the baby giraffe, sending it flying up in the air and tumbling down on the ground.
 
As the baby lies curled up, the mother kicks the baby again and again Until the baby giraffe, still trembling and tired, pushes its limbs and for the first time learns to stand on its feet. Happy to see the baby standing on its own feet, the mother giraffe comes over and gives it yet another kick. The baby giraffe falls one more time, but now quickly recovers and stands up.
Mama Giraffe is delighted. She knows that her baby has learnt an important lesson:
Never mind how hard you fall, always remember to pick yourself up and get back on your feet.

Why does the mother giraffe do this? She knows that lions and leopards love giraffe meat. So unless the baby giraffe quickly learns to stand and run with the pack – it will have no chance of survival.
Most of us though are not quite as lucky as baby giraffes. No one teaches us to stand up every time we fall. When we fail, when we are down, we just give up.
No one kicks us out of our comfort zone to remind us that to survive and succeed, we need to learn to get back on our feet.

If you study the lives of successful people though, you will see a recurring pattern. Were they always successful in all they did? No.                         
Did success come to them quick and easy? No, You will find that the common streak running through their lives is their ability to stand up every time they fall. The ability of the baby giraffe!

The road to success is never an easy one. There are several obstacles, and you are bound to fall sooner or later. You will hit a road block, you will taste failure. But success lies in being able to get up every time you fall.
That is a critical life skill. And it is the habit of all successful people.

1.

2. Is This Possible??

3.Are the purple lines straight or bent?

4.Do you see gray dots areas in between the squares?

5.You should see a man’s face and also a word… Hint: Try tilting your head to the right, the world begins with ‘L’

6.If you take a look at the following picture, let me tell you …. it is not animated. Your eyes are making it move. To test this, stare at one spot for a couple seconds and everything will
stop moving. Or look at the black centre of each circle and it will stop moving. But move your eyes to the next black centre and the previous will move after you take your eyes away from it Weird ?

7.

Thanks to creator of these illusions.

1.Passion

2.Work

3.Focus

4.Serve

5.Push

6.Good

7.Ideas

8.Persist

Source:http://www.ted.com

Business rule is a statement that defines or constrains some aspect of the business. It is intended to assert business structure or to control or influence the behavior of the business. Individual business rules that describe the same facet of an enterprise are usually arranged into business rulesets. Business rules describe the operations, definitions and constraints that apply to an organization in achieving its goals.

When we look at application development today, Business people need an IT system and IT people produce that system and there are always lots of rules involved. These rules are under control of business people and they have to communicate to IT people so that they transfer rules into the IT system.

Nature of the rules: The characteristics of the rule is that they change quite often sometimes on day to day basis, very difficult to reconcile, and IT people might feel that business requirement specifications might have incomplete, contradictory, redundancy. Rules are hardwired in the code in traditional programming which is very expensive to maintain, risky, laborious and time taking when a change in rule comes.

BRMS is trying to alleviate the pain caused by above issues. BRMS is trying to take rules out of IT system and make them a separate entity. So that BRMS can be managed by Business and IT people in co-operation. By separating the rules from code we can easily test and debug them. Reusability is another advantage- you can re-use them separately wherever appropriate within your enterprise.

In the market we have,

Corticon Decision Management System – I use this for my project

Fair Isaac’s Blaze advisor

Ilog’s JRules

JBoss Rules

Pega Rules

Visual Rules

Production Systems Technologies

Etc

To begin…

Acadia National Park preserves much of Mount Desert Island, and associated smaller islands, off the Atlantic coast of Maine. The views are spectacular. The landscape is pristine. And, the wildlife is plentiful and protected.

Bar Harbor, Maine, a small coastal resort town on Mount Desert Island, has a symbiotic relationship with Acadia National Park. Bar Harbor, with its shops, restaurants, hotels, cottages, bed and breakfasts, inns, galleries, vacation rentals and more, has a special ambiance blended with Downeast character.

I started from Portland Maine on Saturday morning at 5 am and reached to the Bar Harbor where we had our Hotel (Holiday-Inn) booked which was great with ocean view on 3rd floor. The looks from the room was spectacular. Had our breakfast and jumped into the Oily’s Trolley Tour bus, with very funny tour guide cum driver. He explained the history of the park and lobster industry. He stopped at the most favorite spots of the park for about 15 mins to have pictures. By 12.30 noon we finished our trip and gone to the Chinese Restaurant. I have ordered Lobster, this is the first time I ever ate a lobster which was delicious. After that we left to the hotel and took rest for 2 hours.

  What better way could you end your day?

Answer is… Sunset Sea Kayaking adventure. Yes I did it for the first time. Earlier in my life once I have done Scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef. Yes Kayaking was altogether great and relaxing experience. Our guide was very helpful and clear in giving the instructions. As we are beginners we were given Tandem boat experienced people can upgrade to solo which was kool.Initially I thought it was tough but once I get going then it was fun. Got a chance to see the beautiful event of the day…Yes ‘the sunset’

Coming to dinner: This time we decided to goto American restaurant called Poor Boy’s Gourmet, I ate mussels and Octopus which were not pleasant looking creatures that scared my wife alot.Taste was OK.Though I tried to eat all but failed. Had pasta and lobster and left to the hotel and signed off for the day.

Sunday morning: Kept alarm at 4 Am to get some sunrise pictures but I could not get up. I woke up at 7.30 am and left for swimming in the outdoor heated pool and it had hot spa. That was good all my body pains from my last night’s kayaking were vanished.

Today my plan was to visit the places which I thought I liked while I was in yesterday’s Oily’s tour. My wife and me unanimously voted for Cadillac Mountain, just brief about Cadillac Mountain in Acadia National Park is the highest point along the North Atlantic seaboard and is the first place to view sunrise in the United States. We spent our rest of the morning at the summit at 1528 ft. and head back to Home Sweet Home.

My recommendations: Bring a jacket, try lobster, try octopus, drink Blueberry soda, and Kayaking

Organizations have found a host of compelling reasons to do this. Some have discovered that they must share order and shipment information in real time between legacy systems and existing production applications located in warehouses or manufacturing facilities. Others have come up with equally compelling diverse scenarios.

What Integration solutions do?

-Integrate systems that were not designed to work together

-Accommodate various elements of information technology that may be dissimilar and incompatible

-Integrate across an increasingly broad organizational scope, perhaps encompassing multiple separate businesses

-Make maximum use of information

-Accommodate and even proactively exploit change

-Support the way the business operates, not the other way around

 Why integrate systems and applications?

A successfully integrated enterprise can reward your organization with significant cost, resource, and time savings. Enterprise Applications Integration (EAI) connects existing and new systems to enable collaborative operation within your entire organization.

A successfully integrated system allows information to work harder and smarter, increasing the speed of business reaction time, and facilitating seamless, straight-through transaction processing.

Although a number of Integration solutions-Middleware technologies are available in the market. Some of them are briefly discussed here.

SAP Exchange Infrastructure

Tibco

BizTalk

Web methods

IBM MQSeries/WebSphere

See Beyond

Mercator

Oracle fusion

Vitria 

1. Sap XI

XI is well suited for connecting SAP systems with each other and with non-SAP. SAP XI provides an integrated workflow engine that allows defining adapters to non-XML protocols and mappings to convert data content from source to target format.

XI comes handy particularly incase of SAP – Non SAP interfaces where you can import standard integration content. Also XI has got sophisticated open standard adapter framework which is very easy to implement and custom logic can be implemented using Adapter module programming.

Monitoring is better than any other middleware product. It offers exhaustive monitoring features like message, performance, component monitoring etc, all of which can be used to track and rectify the errors. It follows a hub and spoke model.

When you need to integrate with an SAP system XI has an advantage in supporting various SAP components and so on.

Process functionalities inside XI to modify content in the communication channel on own defined rules for business purposes.

Mappings and adapters are good as comparable with any other middleware product.

Synchronous & Asynchronous communication is possible.

2. Tibco

TIBCO is described as having the most advanced BPM features overall, spanning both integration-centric and human-centric features due to the company’s aggressive strategy to sustain competitive advantage by adding leading-edge features, whether via internal development or strategic acquisition.

For the integration of custom applications into the e-business infrastructure, TIBCO makes available a comprehensive Software Development Kit that enables enterprises to build their own adapters.

Tibco has many adapters that are built by their own.

Tibco simple and productive User Interface is much more matured than XI.

Tibco does publish/subscribe very well. Available messaging types include request/reply, publish/subscribe and publish/reply interactions.

Improves overall system performance by eliminating repetitive batch requests to packaged application systems.

Lowers cost-of-ownership through general n-way rather than point-to-point integration.

Simplifies administration with data transparency provided by subject-based naming.

Enhances networked applications based on component or object development models.

Choice of message delivery service levels for optimal resource utilization.

3. BizTalk

 BizTalk is a business process management (BPM) server that enables companies to automate and optimize business processes. This includes powerful, familiar tools to design, develop, deploy, and manage those processes.

 While planning for the integration scenario BizTalk takes care about tasks like Gathering information, Defining naming conventions, planning team development, setting up and working with source control.

BizTalk 2004 is completely built on .Net.

Recoverable Interchange. In BizTalk, an Interchange can contain two or more messages, such as a batch. With the introduction of Recoverable Interchange in BizTalk Server 2006, only messages that fail validation are suspended, and the messages can be resumed after the error is corrected.

Failed message routing. New functionality is available to allow orchestration and send ports to subscribe to failed messages. When used appropriately, failed message routing can be used for notifying users of failed messages or building rich error handling and message repair capabilities.

Lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). BizTalk Server reduces the cost and complexity of automating and managing business processes with a single, unified solution for Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), Business-to-Business integration (B2Bi), and Business Process Management (BPM).

Enhanced productivity through integrated management and development tools.

Supports Computer Telephony Interface (CTI) through TAPI.

4. Web Methods

Web Methods was one of the first vendors to realize the significance of XML interactions, bringing its first generation of XML-based B2B integration software to market in 1999. Since that time, the vendor has expanded its scope to include enterprise application integration (EAI), electronic data interchange (EDI), and, most recently, business process management (BPM), giving it the most comprehensive and easy-to-use integration suite on the market.

Connectivity from legacy applications to Web delivery channels is core strength.

Web Methods provides strong monitoring features, as well as comprehensive support for vertical-industry accelerators.

Web Methods has been a strong proponent of the concepts underlying SOA since its inception.

Web Methods Fabric is priced in the midrange compared with other products in this category.

Web Methods Extended Enterprise Solution Suite software focuses on supply chain management to facilitate order processing and inventory management.

Web Methods will extend its current universe of ERP adapters to address the needs of financial services by offering full FIX adapters and SWIFT libraries.

Web Methods Fabric provides a well-integrated, comprehensive collection of capabilities for supporting many foundational requirements for advanced integration and BPM in the SOA world.

5. IBM MQSeries/WebSphere

The WebSphere MQSeries allows you to integrate back-end and external systems with WebSphere Commerce using WebSphere MQ as middleware. The supported software is MQSeries Version 5.2 or higher, with the MA88 product extension.

WebSphere MQ enables you to reliably and consistently integrate your applications, allowing you to fully leverage your existing software and hardware assets.

WebSphere MQ eliminates the need to write complex communications code and offers a choice of simple APIs (Message Queue Interface (MQI) and JMS) that are consistent across the range of more than 80 supported operating environments, provided both by IBM and business partners.

WebSphere MQ can reduce the risk of data being lost when applications, Web services, or networks fail. It also helps ensure that data is not duplicated and completes as a single unit of work or transaction.

WebSphere MQ has Powerful development facilities that simplify integration tasks by providing a functionally rich and consistent application programming interface (MQI) across all its supported platforms. It helps make integrated programs portable.

WebSphere MQ supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for authentication, message integrity checking, and encryption for data sent across the Internet.

WebSphere MQ reduces the time and skills required to be productive with a new File Transfer application that provides a simple GUI tool to move files across the MQ network with reliability.

WebSphere MQ supports clustering for dynamically distributing messaging workload across available MQ resources.

6. See Beyond

From a technology, functionality, and architecture standpoint, See Beyond should be considered one of the top performers in the EAI market. See Beyond has entered the low end integration market with their new release of eInsight Enterprise Service Bus 5.0. This is fully J2EE compliant, allowing business processes and logic to run natively within an application server. This capability is unique as compared to the other pure-play EAI vendors (which provide connectivity to applications services, not pure integration).

Support for technical standards, including J2EE, .Net, and Web services.

See Beyond also provides portal builder, Business Activity Monitor (BAM), Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) facility, Extract Transform and Load (ETL) product, and other tools to provide a full-service EAI offering.

Another positive aspect of its architecture is that it has developed its integration components as an integrated suite rather than retrofitting components acquired from third parties.

See Beyond has made support for ISO 15022 messaging and connectivity to market infrastructures such as DTCC a top priority.

See Beyond faces many of the same challenges inherent to EAI vendors that target multiple vertical with their integration solution.

Despite a strategy built around vertical solutions and depth of domain expertise and “key person dependency” is still a problem for See Beyond because it targets so many verticals.

7. Mercator

Mercator is a leader in offering SWIFT messaging and enabling tools in the marketplace. Beginning with TSI and Braid, Mercator built much of its franchise in financial services by offering an extensive library in support of SWIFT. It is likely that more SWIFT messages are generated by Mercator software than by any other financial messaging vendor, and half of its relationships, particularly with the custodian bank community, started as a result of a SWIFT messaging initiative.

A broad universe of adaptors remains a key strength of Mercator today and spans a wide variety of market infrastructures, including central securities depositories such as CREST and DTC, and payment clearing systems such as CLS and CHIPS.

Transformation – Mercator was designed as an EDI tool, but its core design allows for further flexibility into any data format with the concept of a ‘tree’ which is a graphical representation of a data object.

Transport independent – non intrusive integration, if you already have WebSphere MQ, JMS or a Tibco Bus, Mercator readily plugs into the existing transport infrastructure with standard adapters. There is no additional programming required.

Embed-ability – You can plug Mercator interfaces into any application server and allow your existing EJB’s to leverage Mercator transformation and connectivity.

Mercator provides a rich set of APIs to hook existing code – these include the ability to develop fully functional custom adapters in either Java or C/C++, and execute Java Classes, JCA, cobra, and com objects within a map.

 8. Oracle fusion

 Oracle is using Oracle Fusion Middleware as the foundation for Oracle’s next-generation applications, codenamed “Project Fusion.” The use of standard technologies such as BPEL and Java will provide this next generation of applications with critical flexibility and management advantages.

 Oracle Fusion Middleware ensures that information gets handed off to the right people and the correct business applications–accurately and efficiently– even when data resides at many different places.

Access management and security, BPEL Process Manager, Identity Management, Business Intelligence, Web services.

Using the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) standard, this component of the Oracle Fusion Middleware family ensures that you can develop, monitor, and improve processes over time with optimal portability and reuse potential.

Oracle Fusion Middleware is modular (allows you to install, configure, and use only those services that you need) open, and extensible to work in a heterogeneous environment. 

An automated upgrade from one product to another is devilishly hard to provide by considering the customization of PeopleSoft that will have gone on out there.

Unless Fusion has the same data model as PeopleSoft there may be a need for manual analysis, mapping and data integration work to get it right.

 9. Vitria

 Vitria offers off-the-shelf connectors/adaptors for most of the popular databases. Vitria performs data level integration using JDBC/ODBC drivers. You can either run SQL queries against the database or you can retrieve data based on add/delete/update triggers.

The data transformations are quite robust in Vitria.

Vitria’s graphical interface to define custom transformers makes defining transformations pretty easy.

In addition, you can also create simple java classes to build your custom transformers.

Vitria has been a leader in the EAI segment in terms of its BPM.

To help expedite its penetration of the back-office it is constructing adapters to the most common third-party applications found in this environment.

1.The Shawshank Redemption

2.Usual Suspects

3.Challenge (Telugu)

4.Good will Hunting

5.Road to perdition

6.Forrest Gump

more to come…

http://www.cio.com/article/21975/The_Truth_About_SOA?page=1&taxonomyId=1498