Boxed In In Bangalore: Analyzing Sentiment On Indian Traffic Congestion

Click to enlarge. With a population of more than 1.2 billion, India is projected to be the world’s most populous country by 2025. By 2050, it is estimated that India’s urban population will constitute nearly half of that country’s total population, straining an already stressed infrastructure. The good news: Urbanization is an indicator of positive economic development. With improved urban planning, India can tackle urbanization challenges and increasing population to create a country that is poised for sustainable growth.

We heard a number of discussions about the potential for social listening intelligence last week at the Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Orlando.

This is an area I’ve been involved in within the IBM team for several years now, starting with some early explorations for how social data could be informative for our marketing efforts stretching all the way back to 2008.

It’s been exciting to watch this space evolve and mature, and with the advent of the IBM Social Sentiment index, we’re starting to see very practical uses of social data for better understanding if not the wisdom, then certainly the perspectives, of the crowd.

Yesterday, IBM held a Smarter Cities Forum in New Delhi, India, where we unveiled a new social sentiment capability to assist our customers in their Smarter Cities engagements.

We also unveiled findings from the latest IBM Social Sentiment Index on traffic, which looked at public sentiment across India’s largest cities — Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai.

Boxed In In Bangalore

If you’ve never experienced traffic in India, you can get a taste of the Sunday traffic in this video I shot during my first visit in June 2010.

But the recent analysis of publically available social media showed that the worst congestion in India is primarily caused by accidents and bad weather (three out of four times) when looking at the three cities together.

It also indicated some interesting variations between the three. For example, social conversation in Mumbai about stress around traffic is about half as high as Bangalore and New Delhi; references to the impact of rush hour on congestion in New Delhi are between five and seven times more negative than in Bangalore and Mumbai.

With a wealth of online content and public commentary on social channels such as Twitter and Facebook, city officials need new ways to measure positive, neutral and negative opinions shared by citizens regarding important city issues.

IBM’s advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies used to analyze large volumes of public social media data in order to assess and understand citizen opinions are now available to city governments around the world via new capabilities delivered with the IBM Intelligent Operations Center (IOC) for Smarter Cities.

Making Cities Smarter: The IBM Intelligent Operations Center

The IOC — which combines IBM software and services to integrate city operations through a single dashboard view to help cities improve efficiency — is now augmented with social media analytics capabilities that will help city officials make more informed decisions by looking at unfiltered citizen attitudes and actions, distinguishing between sincerity and sarcasm and even predicting trends as they surface online.

Combining the knowledge that population will rapidly increase in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai in the coming years, with sentiment on commuters’ preferred mode of transportation, could help these cities more accurately plan for needed investments in transportation infrastructure and its potential impact.

City officials could also gauge where public awareness campaigns need to be administered to shift commuters to different modes of transport in order to alleviate growing traffic congestion.

The IBM Social Sentiment Index on transportation in India’s three largest cities surfaced several insights including:

• The top three factors impacting traffic congestion that citizens in each city talked about most online were diverse. Delhites chattered about public transportation, weather and the stress of commuting, while Bangaloreans show more concern for their overall driving experience, construction and parking issues, and Mumbaikars are talking about private transportation, accidents and pollution more often.
• Conversation in Bangalore around parking is viewed three times more negatively than in the other cities. Despite recent infrastructure improvements, less pollution and a solid public transit system, Delhites are experiencing a far higher amount of stress (50 percent) than those in Mumbai (29 percent) or Bangalore (34 percent). Most likely, this can be explained by an uptick in rallies and weather events this year, as well as the recent power outage.
• Surprisingly, sentiment on the topic of construction was relatively positive in Bangalore and New Delhi, and positive and negative sentiment on infrastructure in each was relatively even. Together, these may suggest that the transportation infrastructure improvements being made over the last two years in each city are beginning to positively impact citizens.
• Analysis shows that the relative negative sentiment for rush hour (35 percent) is one of the key drivers impacting traffic in New Delhi, which may explain why citizens talk about stress significantly more than commuters in Mumbai or Bangalore.

By applying analytics capabilities to the area of social media sentiment, organizations are able to better understand public opinions, and city officials can gain additional insights in order to draw logical conclusions about where they should focus their attentions and resources.

For example:

• Take Bangalore, the technology hub of India. Understanding that most commuters prefer private transportation despite negative sentiment around parking and construction may indicate that city officials should consider if it makes sense to advocate for more commuters to use mass transit and invest in infrastructure that will keep up with demand as more companies locate there.
• Since Dehlite’s indicate that public transportation is the preferred mode of transportation, city officials could use this insight to study which areas have high ridership and less road traffic and then implement similar actions in highly congested areas.
• In Mumbai, negative sentiment around traffic and weather at the peak of monsoon season (August) generated 5.5 times more chatter than in November. If the city could measure the fluctuation of public sentiment on these potential causes over time combined with specific weather data like rainfall or temperature, it might be able to better prepare to divert traffic during monsoon season or determine areas where a public safety campaign is needed.

“Like all rapidly growing cities across the world, there are infrastructure growing pains in many Indian cities,” said Guru Banavar, vice president and chief technology officer, Smarter Cities, IBM. “However, when city officials can factor public sentiment — positive, negative or otherwise — around city services like transportation, they can more quickly pinpoint and prioritize areas that are top of mind for their citizens. This could mean more targeted investment, improving a particular city service, more effective communication about a service that is offered, and even surfacing best practices and successful efforts that could be applied to other zones of a city.”

Methodology: IBM Cognos Consumer Insights And 168,000+ Discussions

Public social media content was analyzed by IBM Cognos Consumer Insight, which assessed 168,330 online discussions from September 2011 to September 2012 across social platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Forums and News Sources and derived 54,234 High Value Snippets through a series of advanced filtration techniques for insight analysis.

The IBM Social Sentiment Index helps companies tap into consumer desires and make more informed decisions by looking at unfiltered consumer attitudes and actions, distinguishing between sincerity and sarcasm, and even predicting trends.

About the IBM Social Sentiment Index

The IBM Social Sentiment Index uses advanced analytics and natural language processing technologies to analyze large volumes of social media data in order to assess public opinions. The Index can identify and measure positive, negative and neutral sentiments shared in public forums such as Twitter, blogs, message boards and other social media, and provide quick insights into consumer conversations about issues, products and services.

Representing a new form of market research, social sentiment analyses offer organizations new insights that can help them better understand and respond to consumer trends. For more information about IBM Business Analytics go here.

You can also follow the conversation at #IBMIndex on Twitter.

For more information about IBM Smarter Cities go here, and follow the conversation at #smartercities on Twitter.

IBM SmartCamp Finalist Profile: ConnectM — Sensing Opportunity In The Towers

If you’ve ever been to India, you could drive yourself crazy trying to count the number of cellphones (although you could count the traffic lights in Bangalore nearly on one hand!).

Vivek Khemani, CFO, ConnectM delivers his company's pitch for remote sensing analytics for the telecommunications industry during the IBM Smart Camp Global Finals.

India’s telco deregulation in the late 1980s helped the Indian telecommunications industry leapfrog traditional wireline phone infrastructure, and instead you now have 350,000+ cell phone towers spread across the span of the sub-continent.

IBM SmartCamp Finalist ConnectM has a vision for better utilizing all those towers: To become a leading energy management solutions provider, leveraging business intelligence and analytics across the telecom tower and building infrastructure.

The company’s offering provides a remote monitoring and energy management solution for energy spend optimization, operations and management, asset management, and revenue assurance.

Sounds mundane? Well, the market for solutions that manage and optimize energy alone is an estimated $16B worldwide, and ConnectM is utilizing its current leadership position in India, with an installed based of over 5,000 cell sites, to build a scalable and profitable business.

Before it even reached the IBM Smart Camp finals, ConnectM delivered annualized energy savings of over $4 million US to its current customers, including both India and India-based multinationals, demonstrating well before it came to requesting venture capital money, that it was already making money.

IBM’s Solar Servers

There is no investment you can make which will pay you so well as the effort to scatter sunshine and good cheer through your establishment. — Orison Swett MardenAccording to the U.S. Department of Energy, data centers can consume up to 100 times more energy than a standard office building.In fact, less than 15% of original source energy is used for the information technology equipment within a data center. A technician inspects IBM's solar-power array atop the roof of the company's software development lab in Bangalore, India. The technology is designed specifically to run high-voltage data centers, integrating AC- and DC-based servers, water-cooling systems and related electronics. The 6,000-square-foot array is capable of providing a 50-kilowatt supply of electricity for up to 330 days a year, for an average of five hours a day. A 2008 McKinsey report suggested that demand for data centers was expected to grow at 10% CAGR over the next decade, but because of their enormous energy consumption, they were expected to consume as much energy as 10 new major power plants by last year (.2% of world energy production!) Enter Big Blue. IBM said today that is rolling out the first solar-power array designed specifically to run high-voltage data centers, integrating AC- and DC-based servers, water-cooled computing systems and related electronics. The new array is spread over more than 6,000 square-feet of rooftop covering IBM’s India Software Lab in Bangalore. The solar array is capable of providing a 50-kilowatt supply of electricity for up to 330 days a year, for an average of five hours a day. By employing unique high-voltage DC power conditioning methods – and reducing AC-DC conversion losses – the new IBM solution can cut energy consumption of data centers by about 10 percent and tailors solar technology for wider use in industrial IT and electronics installations. In many emerging markets, electrical grids are undependable or non-existent. Companies are forced to rely on expensive diesel generators. That makes it difficult and expensive to deploy a lot of computers, especially in the concentrated way they’re used in data centers. Using IBM’s solution, a bank, a telecommunications company or a government agency could contemplate setting up a data center that doesn’t need the grid. The solution, in effect, creates its own DC mini-grid inside the data center. High-voltage, DC computer servers and water-cooling systems are beginning to replace traditional, AC-powered servers and air-conditioning units in data centers. IBM’s Bangalore array is the first move to blend solar-power, water-cooling and power-conditioning into a “snap-together” package suitable to run massive configurations of electronic equipment. “The technology behind solar power has been around for many years, but until now, no one has engineered it for efficient use in IT,” said Rod Adkins, senior vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group. “We’ve designed a solar solution to bring a new source of clean, reliable and efficient power to energy-intensive, industrial-scale electronics.” IBM plans for the Bangalore solar-power system to connect directly into the data center’s water-cooling and high-voltage DC systems. The integrated solution can provide a compute power of 25 to 30 teraflops using an IBM Power Systems server on a 50kW solar power supply. “This solar deployment, currently powering almost 20 percent of our own data center energy requirements, is the latest in the investments made at the India lab to design an efficient and smarter data center,” said Dr Ponani Gopalakrishnan, VP, IBM India Software Lab. “Ready access to renewable energy in emerging markets presents significant opportunities for IBM to increase efficiencies, improve productivity and drive innovation for businesses around the world.”

TurboTech: The Flying Solo, Almost Live From Bangalore Edition

My time in Bangalore is coming to a rapid close, but I wanted to provide a quick, solo edition of “TurboTech” as I prepare to jet out of here overnight. I can’t say enough good things about my experience here this week, or about the new team I’m going to be working with here.  They’ve been a lot of fun despite the long meetings and hard work, and I expect it won’t be long before I’m back for another visit.

Meanwhile, my cricket knowledge doubles every passing day, and at least now I can honestly say I can explain the difference between a “sixer” and an “over.”  I had hoped to get a ticket to the Mumbai Indians game this evening as part of the Champion’s League T20 this evening, but they were all sold out!

Hopefully Scott and I will be able to get our social calendars linked up once I’m back to Austin, and the stopwatch will be making its return engagement.

IBM X-Force Trends Report: Year Of The Security Breach

Attacker types and techniques in 1H2011 identified by the IBM X-Force Mid-Year Trend & Risk Report. The study revealed mobile security exploits would likely double in 2011.

Okay, it’s my last day in Bangalore.  At least for this particular journey.

I don’t have any more India-related news, except to report that the Kolkata Night Riders beat the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the CLT20 last night, here in Bangalore.

KKR won by nine wickets, and now I know why there were such sad faces in the stadium as I watched the end of the match late last night on TV.

As I was watching cricket, IBM was releasing the results of its “X-Force 2011 Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report,” a tiding I always attempt to cover in some depth, both because I find the reports fascinating and enlightening, and because I consider it a real service that IBM is providing to the global IT community.

Poised at the frontline of security, the IBM X-Force team serves as the eyes and ears for thousands of IBM clients – studying security attack techniques and creating defenses before many vulnerabilities are even announced.

The X-Force Mid-Year Trend and Risk Report is based on intelligence gathered through IBM’s research of public vulnerability disclosures as well as the monitoring and analysis of an average of 12 billion security events daily since the beginning of 2011.

Drumroll, Please: Moble Exploits Are Ripe For Exploitation!

The headline: This report demonstrates the rapidly changing security landscape characterized by high-profile attacks, growing mobile vulnerabilities and more sophisticated threats such as “whaling.”

Adoption of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, including the “Bring Your Own Device” approach, which allows personal devices to access the corporate network, is raising new security concerns.

IBM X-Force has documented a steady rise in the disclosure of security vulnerabilities affecting these devices.  X-Force research recommends that IT teams consistently employ anti-malware and patch management software for phones in enterprise environments.

Click to enlarge. This graphic explores what the security situation might look like if it were run by the IBM X-Force team as they attempted to deal with this year's exploits.

Other key findings from the study:

• Malicious software targeting mobile phones is often distributed through third-party app markets. Mobile phones are an increasingly attractive platform for malware developers as the sheer size of the user base is growing rapidly, and there is an easy way to monetize mobile phone infections. Malware distributors can set up premium texting (SMS messaging) services that charge users that text to a specific number. Malware then sends text messages to those premium numbers from infected phones.
• Some mobile malware is designed to collect end user’s personal information. This data could then be used in phishing attacks or for identity theft. Mobile malware is often capable of spying on victim’s personal communications as well as monitoring and tracking their physical movements via the GPS capabilities common in these phones.

“For years, observers have been wondering when malware would become a real problem for the latest generation of mobile devices,” said Tom Cross, manager of Threat Intelligence and Strategy for IBM X-Force. “It appears that the wait is over.”

Critical Vulnerabilities Triple in 2011

The X-Force team also reports that the percentage of critical vulnerabilities has tripled thus far in 2011.

X-Force is declaring 2011 the “Year of the Security Breach” due to the large number of high-profile attacks and network compromises that have occurred this year.

This graphic explores the top website categories from the 1H2011 report containing at least one malicious link.

There is a cadre of notable emerging threats from this year’s breaches:

• Teams of professional attackers motivated by a desire to collect strategic intelligence have been able to gain and maintain access to critical computer networks through a combination of stealth, sophisticated technical capabilities and careful planning. These attackers are often referred to as “Advanced Persistent Threats” (APTs).
•  The success of APTs has raised the profile of “whaling,” a type of spear phishing which targets “big fish,” or those positioned in high levels of an organization with access to critical data. These targeted attacks are often launched after careful study of a person’s online profiles has armed an attacker with the information needed to create a compelling phishing email that the victim will be fooled into clicking on.
• Attacks from ‘hacktivist’ groups, who targeted web sites and computer networks for political ends rather than just financial gain. Hacktivist groups have been successful in using well known, off-the-shelf attack techniques such as SQL Injection, which is one of the most common attack techniques seen in the Internet.
• Anonymous proxies have more than quadrupled in number compared to three years earlier. Anonymous proxies are a critical type of website to track, because they allow people to hide potentially malicious intent.

Advances In Security

“The rash of high-profile breaches this year highlights the challenges organizations often face in executing their security strategy,” said Cross. “Although we understand how to defend against many of these attacks on a technical level, organizations don’t always have the cross-company operational practices in place to protect themselves.”

Although the X-Force team declared 2011 as a watershed in high-profile security breaches, the report also uncovered some improvements in areas of computer security that show headway in the fight against crime on the Internet.

• The first half of 2011 saw an unexpected decrease in web application vulnerabilities, from 49 percent of all vulnerability disclosures down to 37 percent.  This is the first time in five years X-Force has seen a decrease.
• High and critical vulnerabilities in web browsers were also at their lowest point since 2007, despite an increasingly complex browser market. These improvements in web browser and application security are important as many attacks are targeted against those categories of software
• As major botnet operators are taken down and off-line by law enforcement officials, the report shows a trend in the decline of spam and more traditional phishing tactics.
• After years of consistent spam growth until the middle of 2010, there has been a significant decline in spam volumes in the first half of this year.In the first half of 2011, the percentage of spam that is phishing on a weekly basis was less than 0.01 percent. Traditional phishing has greatly declined from the levels X-Force was seeing prior to the middle of 2010.

Also of note, the SQL Slammer Worm has been one of the most common sources of malicious packets on the Internet since its appearance and naming by the IBM X-Force team in 2003, but it has fallen down the list after a dramatic disappearance observed in March 2011.

The most recent analysis strongly suggested that the SQL Slammer Worm’s disappearance is due to an unknown source or actor. The analysis showed that a time-based trigger using a Slammer’s server clock was used to shut it down, proving that it was disabled by a single cause.

Traditional Vulnerabilities Still a Problem

The X-Force report uncovered numerous attacks that target traditional security vulnerabilities. According to the report, attacks on weak passwords are commonplace on the Internet, as are attacks that leverage SQL Injection vulnerabilities in web applications to compromise backend databases.

Databases have become an important target for attackers. Critical data used to run organizations — including financial/ERP, customer, employee, and intellectual property information such as new product designs — is stored in relational databases.

IBM researchers tested almost 700 web sites — from the Fortune 500 and other most popular sites — to uncover that 40 percent of these contain a class of security issues referred to as client-side JavaScript vulnerabilities. The existence of vulnerabilities like these in so many corporate web sites is indicative of the security blindspots in many organizations.

This graphic reveals insight into the exploit effort versus potential reward in the 1H 2011 X-Force report.

IBM Launches Institute for Advanced Security in Asia Pacific

To help combat security risks and to foster collaboration amongst security industry leaders, IBM is launching the IBM Institute for Advanced Security in Asia Pacific in order to combat growing security threats in the region.

The IBM Mid-Year X-Force report states that top countries originating spam have shifted to Asia Pacific, with India sending out roughly 10 percent of all spam registered today, and South Korea and Indonesia also making the top five list.

This Institute joins its predecessors in Brussels, Belgium and Washington, D.C., focused on European and U.S. clients respectively.

About the IBM X-Force Team and the Trend and Risk Report

This report comes from IBM’s X-Force team, the premier security research organization within IBM that has catalogued, analyzed and researched more than 50,000 vulnerability disclosures since 1997.

The IBM X-Force Trend and Risk Report is an annual assessment of the security landscape, designed to help clients better understand the latest security risks, and stay ahead of these threats.

It is the result of the work done in IBM’s nine global Security Operations Centers, which is provided as a managed security service to clients.

The report gathers facts from numerous intelligence sources, including its database of computer security vulnerabilities, global web crawler, international spam collectors, and the real-time monitoring of an average of 12 billion security events every day for nearly 4,000 clients in more than 130 countries.

You can learn more about and download the report here.

Don’t Even THINK About Parking Here: The First Ever IBM Global Parking Survey

Considering that traffic congestion has been an ongoing theme during my week in Bangalore, it only stands to reason that parking follows.

IBM just released its first ever parking survey, and Bangalore made the top, or near the top, on a couple of key metrics. It was first in terms of most parking tickets issued, and second (only to New Delhi) in terms of cities where drivers argued most over parking spaces.

They have parking spaces in Bangalore??

I jest, but not being able to find a parking space is no laughing matter: Which is why these results are so disturbing these results: The study found that drivers in 20 international cities face a daily struggle in finding a parking space, and in the past year, nearly six out of 10 drivers have abandoned their search for a space at least once, and more than a quarter have gotten into an argument with a fellow motorist over a parking space!

Calgon, take me away!

In addition to the typical traffic congestion caused by daily commutes and gridlock from construction and accidents, reports have estimated that over 30 percent of traffic in a city is caused by drivers searching for a parking spot.

So not only do inefficient parking systems result in congestion and increased carbon emissions, they also waste commuters’ time, lead to lost productivity and economic opportunities and can lead to inefficient city services.

IBM Global Parking Index

IBM compiled the results of the survey into its first-ever Parking Index that ranks the emotional and economic toll of parking in a cross-section of 20 international cities with the highest number being the most onerous.

The Index reveals a wide range in the parking pain experienced from city to city. Chicago had the least pain when it comes to parking in the cities studied, followed by Los Angeles and Toronto.

Here’s how the cities stack up: New Delhi: 140; Bangalore 138; Beijing 124; Moscow 122; Shenzhen 122; Paris 122; Milan 117; Nairobi 111; Madrid: 104; Singapore 97; Mexico City: 97; Stockholm: 90; Johannesburg: 87; London: 86; New York City: 85; Montreal: 85; Buenos Aires: 80; Toronto: 77; Los Angeles: 61; and Chicago: 51.

Click to enlarge image. IBM's first ever global parking survey found that drivers in 20 international cities face a daily struggle in finding a parking space. In the past year, nearly six out of 10 drivers have abandoned their search for a space at least once, and more than a quarter have gotten into an argument with a fellow motorist over a parking space.

The IBM Parking Index is comprised of the following key issues: 1) longest amount of time looking for a parking place; 2) inability to find a parking place; 3) disagreement over parking spots; 4) received a parking ticket for illegal parking and 5) number of parking tickets received.

In a related announcement, IBM is working in partnership with Streetline, a privately held company headquartered in San Francisco with smart-parking deployments in California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Washington D.C.

Streetline was recently named one of Fast Company’s “10 Most Innovative Companies in Transportation,” as well as, to help cities of all sizes reduce congestion, better manage parking availability and resources and put information at people’s fingertips to find parking faster.

Streetline was selected from more than 600 SmartCamp entries worldwide based on its outstanding technology, innovative business plan, and alignment with IBM’s Smarter Planet strategy.

Combining information management and advanced analytics from IBM with data gathered from parking sensors and applications from Streetline will allow cities to make smarter and more timely decisions related to parking and their transportation systems.

Officials will be able to use this smarter parking solution to better understand parking patterns so they can improve citizen services, optimize revenue and more effectively allocate city resources.

In the future, insight from the historical and real-time data being gathered can help cities become more proactive in anticipating how parking and their transportation network interacts with other city services and plan accordingly from how it might affect economic development and merchant services to how to appropriately schedule mass transit to how best to plan around infrastructure projects or special events.

Who Moved My Parking Space? Parking Reinvented

As the majority of the world’s population moves to metropolitan areas, key city systems, including city streets and transportation systems, are being strained to the breaking point.

Additionally, vehicle emissions resulting from drivers looking for parking are so closely linked that a year-long study found that drivers in a 15 block district in Los Angeles drove in excess of 950,000 miles, produced 730 tons of carbon dioxide and used 47,000 gallons of gas searching for parking.

The Smarter Parking Starter Kit is a pre-integrated solution that includes instrumentation, connectivity and intelligence. This solution is designed to help cities “get out of park” and improve parking services, optimize operations and help reduce congestion. By leveraging advanced technologies from IBM and Streetline cities will be able to:

• Provide real-time information to allow citizens and visitors to find parking more easily
• Gather, analyze and act on information about parking resources and services to optimize revenue
• Analyze real-time information to better model and anticipate problems to reduce congestion, more appropriately price parking based on demand and provide enhanced services to citizens
• Integrate real-time information from on-street and off-street parking to enable collaborative decision making for rapid response to events, changes in parking availability and demand.

Streetline’s patented smart parking platform detects the presence of a car through a network of ultra-low power wireless sensors located in individual parking spaces.

This information is then made available in real time both to the city, as well as to consumers via Parker, a free smartphone app via the iTunes Store or Android marketplace.

Using this real-time parking data combined with advanced parking analytics built on IBM Cognos, cities can then tap into this information to understand important factors including hourly occupancy, occupancy by block, parking duration, and trends by area.

Streetline was named the winner of the IBM SmartCamp World Finals and IBM Global Entrepreneur of the Year in November 2010.

About IBM and Smarter Transportation

IBM works with cities, governments and others around the world to make their transportation systems smarter. Smarter transportation systems can help traffic and public transit systems flow more smoothly, anticipate and improve congestion in advance, reduce emissions and increase the capacity of infrastructure.

To join in the conversation on Smarter Transportation, join us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Visit here for more on IBM and Smarter Transportation.

Speaking Of India…

And speaking of India…per my blog post about arriving back in Bangalore over the weekend…IBM recently announced a prominent customer win here just before my arrival.

The Escorts Group, one of India’s leading engineering conglomerates, is adopting IBM’s smarter computing approach to IT which will provide enhanced performance and compliment the company’s business growth goals of lowering its overall IT operating costs.

Through its agreement with IBM, Escorts Group is going to receive a workload-optimized hardware solution to replace its existing ERP infrastructure.

The advanced systems will provide enhanced performance and the new infrastructure will reside in Escorts Group’s newly-built corporate data center. This will manage the company’s disaster recovery system in addition to the ERP system.

The IBM solution is expected to provide Escorts Group with savings in power and cooling costs of between 30 to 35 percent, over a three year period.

“Escorts Group has embarked on a journey of IT transformation to achieve operational & manufacturing excellence,” said Mr. Vipin Kumar, Group CIO, Escorts Limited. “To achieve this we are not only going beyond adhering to prevailing norms, we are in fact setting our own standards and relentlessly pursuing them to achieve our desired benchmarks of excellence.”

“To aid us in this journey we needed a scalable and high-performing IT infrastructure, backed by a robust technology roadmap,” continued Mr. Kumar.  “IBM clearly had the best solution, while ensuring a reduction in our energy footprint and increasing return on investment.”

During the hardware evaluation process to support the expansion, Escorts considered various options including Itanium-based servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. and Oracle Corp.’s Exadata Database Machine.

The company, however, chose to replace its existing HP PA-RISC servers with IBM Power 750 Express and IBM Power 740 Express systems. Each of the systems is complemented by IBM System Storage DS5000s, and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager software.

Click here if you’d like to learn more about IBM’s Power 750 Express system, or here if you’d like to view the demo.

Back In Bangalore

I’m back in Bangalore.

It’s been a little over a year since my first visit, and this time, I knew what I was getting into in terms of the travel.

I calculated that from Austin to India, as the crow flies, it’s a little over 8,000 miles…or was that kilometers??

The Sri Shiva temple in Bangalore is currently under renovation during my visit, but that certainly hasn't stopped hoardes of faithful Hindus paying a visit to Lord Shiva.

In either case, it’s a longgg way on an airplane traveling 500+ MPH. But I found myself eager with anticipation.

Not only in terms of meeting a new team we had put together, but in also seeing the friends I had already met here, and also visiting the vibrant (and now 3rd largest city in India, in terms of population) metropolis that is Bangalore.

The traffic is crazier than ever…there’s still plenty of dust in the streets, not to mention sacred (literally) cows…but I also sense an incredible energy and vibrancy here that has long ago worn off other major cities in the world.

And then there’s the food, which I wish I could just pack into my suitcase and bring back to America.

There’s also the serious business that is cricket (tonight it was the Mumbai Indians against Trinidad & Tobago, playing in the first round of the CLT20…UPDATE: Mumbai won, but just barely…The Trinidadian cricketers didn’t look too happy at breakfast this morning…They were staying at the same hotel as us.), a game I won’t pretend (yet) to fully comprehend but an excitement around which is palpable.

And then, of course, there are the people of India, and the Bangaloreans in particular, whose grace and courtesy and humbleness are unmatched around the globe.

I discovered from a taxi driver on the ride in from the airport here that 3M citizens in 2003 has grown to 9+M in 2011, and though the growth here may have overmatched the infrastructure, it is the chaos and verve and tenacity of its citizenry which suggests a nation that continues on the rise even despite the global gloom and doom headlined in newspapers and websites around the world.

Though my visit this year will be a week shorter, I have a distinct feeling that my learning and understanding will belie my time on the ground, and I’m very much looking forward to the four full days I have left in this week.

As for the content of the meetings and discussions going on here, I cannot relate those due to competitive reasons…the old CIA, “If I told you I’d have to kill ya.”

But rest assured it’s with great anticipation and expectations that we move through the rest of this week.

Beyond that, I’ll have to save the sordid stories for my as-of-yet unpublished memoirs…but know that the memories of my second sojourn to “Bengalaru” being stored in my human RAM will not be erased or forgotten anytime soon.

P.S. I’m blogging on my new portable guerilla platform, an iPod 4 with an Apple bluetooth keyboard. With some luck and some precious spare time, I’ll also hope to share some of what’s being witnessed here in some semblance of video content.

The New Rupee

There’s a new Rupee coming to town.

Or, at least, to your computer keyboard.

Noted Indian tech blogger Amit Agarwal pointed out in this post recently that the Indian Rupee will soon have a unique sign that will be recognized around the globe, much like the U.S. dollar or the British pound.

According to Agarwal’s post, the Indian government shortlisted five designs following a crowd-sourcing contest to choose the new Rupee symbol.

You can see the five final designs below.

The Indian Finance Ministry initiated this competition in February 2009, and it’s believed that these new signs will be easy to write and were designed to appeal to both the India and international communities.

I did a one person straw poll here at the IBM Bangalore office, and we vote for option 3.

You can get more backstory in the following clip from NDTV:

More From Bangalore

I’ve had a few days now in Bangalore, and I promised some more first impressions.

My friend Michael commented in the previous post enough about all the work stuff, what about the important stuff like beer and food?

Well, I can assure you, Michael, that India represents well on both fronts.  I’ve had cuisine from both north and south India – both are delicious, though quite different. 

The south Indian cuisine focuses more on rice as a staple (which makes sense…it’s in the south!), and emerges largely from the four states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka (where Bangalore is situated), Kerala, and Tamil Nadu.  I’ve especially enjoyed the dosa.

From the north, you get the more spicy, meat-oriented dishes (your curries, kebabs, etc.). 

I pretty much like it all, and prefer to wash it all down with a nice, big Kingfisher beer, particularly at the end of a long day of training and workshops, which is predominantly what I’m here for.

As to the traffic, I’m getting better at playing Bangalore Frogger. 

The last few days we’ve gone out to lunch just across the street from the IBM Commerce@Mantri location and we’ve had to run a gauntlet of tuk-tuks, taxis, trucks, vans, motorcycles, scooters, and people to get across the street.

Once upon a time, I was a New York City bike messenger, and I think crossing the street in Bangalore may, in fact, be even more dangerous than that.  It comes down to timing the crossing just perfectly.  So far, so good.

As for work, this is my first time meeting our team in Bangalore face-to-face.  Our team here is whip smart and highly motivated.  I’m looking forward to learning more from them over the next 10 days and to also learning more about their country and diverse culture.

In the meantime, enjoy this first person video of traffic in Bangalore (this was light traffic, as it was taken on a Sunday!)

 

Turbo Goes For A Sunday Drive in Bangalore