40GbE

Congratulations to Mellanox for announcing one of the industry's first 40GbE solutions. Its definitely the next big step in the evolution of Ethernet - and it has indeed come a long way from the conceptualization by Metcalfe.

Getting networking software working at 40GbE will be an enormously interesting challenge(Though the 40GbE adapter has the capabilities for running storage protocols such as FCoE obviously in hardware). The existing software TCP/IP stacks will definitely run into *severe* issues trying to get the best out of the huge pipe lying in front of it. TCP/IP was never designed with such speeds in mind. This is not to say that there are no solutions to the problem. The CPU speeds are increasing fast, but CPU speed increases are more of a linear trend - unlike the "leaps" in network bandwidth evolution.

The market adoption however might be an issue - considering that even 10GbE doesn't have the necessary traction it was presumed to have.

Anyways - good luck folks.

SaaS model for Outsourcing companies

With the advent of cloud computing and Software as a Service, what would be the implications on software outsourcing , especially Indian? The Indian outsourcing companies have reaped the benefits for over a decade , in companies world wide opting to lower software development and maintanance costs by outsourcing the development of many critical enterprise applications. 

Cloud computing is now offering the same benefits (potentially) to companies that had trouble doing in house software development. Does it mean that the outsourcing business model is bound for the decline in the next decade and will have Indian IT outsourcing shops scrambling to survive?

Not really. Consider the case of Wipro, which now entered the SaaS market with its own cloud offering ( partnering with Oracle). The firm has shown a willingness to adapt and assimilite new business models in the context of changing world wide technological landscape. This adaptation is more than just a good-to-have , and will probably decide the success and failure of many IT outsourcing companies. 

There are however some infrastrctural downsides for Indian IT companies entering the cloud computing space. The model assumes an uninterrupted availability of power especially to run massive hosted data centers out of a developing country such as India. Considering all reliability metrics needed to run enterprise apps, is this really feasible(yes, you can always have backup power for small operations, but for running massive datacenters, what would be the costs)? 

There are some questions here and I am pretty sure that the IT outsourcing companies are thinking through the issues. 

Passion and Practicality

"Entreprenuers tend to believe - "I have got my idea. I'll go with it until I die." But I advise them to take seriously the questions about whether their plan is irredeemably flawed, and whether they need to change what they are doing. Be diligent about failing fast so that you dont spend five years doing something thats just going to fail"

- Reid Hoffman ( With Alyssa Abkowitz, Fortune)

Pretty nicely put. Its very easy for entrepreneurs to go overboard with their convictions. Reality checks are needed from time to time and the dividing lines between passion and practicality have to be clearly marked.