Busy in India

I won’t be delivering the as promised academic research on dancing with Elephants as promised – finding myself too busy traveling around India this week. India is an interesting place being a mix of worlds and cultures. Whenever you try to generalize about India – you can quickly find an exception. Is it an ancient culture? Yes. Is it an emerging market full of new ideas, new business models and innovation? Yes. Is it the hustle and bustle and dirt and grime of a rapidly growing over crowded emerging market? Absolutely. Is it the peacefulness, patience selflessness of an Ashram? Yes again.

 

Ravi Shanker Ashram outside of Bangalore. The “Art of Living” through music, song and dance. A delightful place one of my software engineers in Bangalore – Partha Sarkar – took me to visit.

My ADN Evangelist for India (and a bit more of Southeast Asia and ANZ) Arvind Thangli has been chaperoning me around (Dehli, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore) meeting small and large software partners, customers pursuing internal development, professors at a leading University of engineering and technology, and one of the largest System Integrators in the world. For someone like me that grew up in New York and has now spent half my life in California, the juxtaposition of third world infrastructure with first world cutting edge technology development is surreal. Showing people the latest Cloud and Mobile technologies from Autodesk, talking to them about their needs and development efforts, sharing thoughts on where the software industry is headed – from the long term value of app stores to what is best done on a mobile device versus the Cloud versus the desktop, is absolutely engaging, intellectually stimulating, and just plain fun.

This India trip included my last “DevDays” presentation of the year (for non-ADN members, DevDays is where Autodesk presents partners with an advanced look at new Autodesk technology that is going to be released in the coming year – and in some instance over the next two years). This is my fifteenth DevDays of the year having started in Melbourne (Australia) in early November, crossed Asia, then Europe, Sao Paulo (Brazil) two weeks back and now having finished up in Bangalore – having now presented Autodesk technology directions to over 1400 software developers. One take away from the world tour for those of you that are entrepreneurs, the Cloud and Mobile in the design and engineering space is now (if not last year). Not next year, not next month, not next week. Last year during DevDays we talked about how to integrate Cloud technologies with Autodesk technologies. The audience was a bit skeptical – doubts about connectivity, doubts about data security, doubts about their customers/users being ready. Those doubts are gone today. Software developers around the world are now asking “how” – and “help me” (not “my customers are not ready”).

During DevDays, I was delighted to see some great Cloud and Mobile apps developed by Autodesk partners around the world – from partners in the US, partners in Switzerland, partners in Russia, partners in Australia. Innovative technology mostly developed by just one of two engineers in just a few months. If you have a great idea for a Cloud and/or Mobile app aimed at the design and engineering community, act now. Dive in – the water is warm. Don’t delay. There is a window of opportunity for Cloud and Mobile innovation in the design and engineering community for the next year or two – and then the window will close and it could be over a decade before a new business creation opportunity like this presents itself again.  All you need to do is ask the four "Cloud andd Mobile" qualification questions when approaching a customer problem:

1. Is Collaboration needed?
2. Is there a Large changing Dataset that many people need to use?
3. Is there a Compute Intensive task that would tue up a desktop for many minutes or hours?
4. Is the Code Changing Frequently?

Yes to any of these four questions - Collaboration, Large Data, Compute Intensive or Frequent Code Change - means the Cloud is part of the answer.  Not "might be".  Is. 

And elephants love to dance with innovators - especially Cloud and Mobile innovators.  :-)

Now to risk sounding like a broken record, next week I get back to that acedemic research I have been promising for two weeks now on partnering, multi-sided platforms and dancing with elephants.