My experience in Sales

Long time ago, when I was pursuing my masters, as a part of the course I had a to complete a three month internship. I got selected into an organization which was into Networking and Server sales. The three months I spent there were pathetic. I almost forgot those days.

However, I have recently saw a Hindi movie, which depicted the true picture about sales. After watching this I remembered my old experiences.

During the internship, for the first few days I was asked to collect existing Customer feedback on the sales done with them. One day I ended up at an Agricultural Research University in Hyderabad. I met a professor who was in-charge of a Digital Library project. I met her and asked for feeback. She almost started crying. The story unfolded so ...

Our sales guy approached her long back and started explaining her about SUN's initiative in digital library solutions. He recommended her a server which was priced at Rs.5 Lakhs or half a million in Indian currency. She, I assume asked him if it would work with any custom software and he said yes. The Prof. blindly bought it. In the other part of the story, which happened before, someone else approached her regarding a software solutions to Digital Libraries. She gave the contract to them to write a software for the university.

Now on the D-Day they had both the software and the server. They kept the software CD in the CD-ROM of the SUN server and expected something to happen. Oops!!!!! nothing happened because the software was written in .NET. The university realized this and called the software vendor and requested to rewrite it in Java. The guy accepted it for another 2Lakhs, which the university did not have.

So the day I went there I learnt that because of all this fiasco, the Prof got demoted, the solution came to a halt and they have a software and hardware which do not work together. The prof boots up the server and checks yahoo mail once in a week.

After this she tried calling my sales guys many a times, in vain.

This is how sales are ... People are duped 1000% of the times in software. That is the reason why software is selling.

There would be a time when people would certainly get intelligent and then I wonder what these IT sales guys do?

If you want to know the name of the horrible company I worked for ...

Liferay Symposium 2009

On 5th October 2009, Liferay conducted a symposium in Bangalore at Hotel Leela Palace. My company, Nous Infosystems is a Silver Partner to Liferay.

I had a one hour slot to talk. Myself being an Identity guy, to present something relevant to Liferay, I chose to integrate Liferay with Sun Identity Manager. Post experiment with the integration I have presented a paper on the same.

Highlights:

We leveraged the Liferay API for the following functions

• Retrieve a list of all the Roles available in the Liferay System
• Retrieve a list of all the User Groups available in the Liferay System
• Retrieve a list of all the Communities available in the Liferay System
• Override the User Create function to create user with a given set of parameters
• Create web service calls for all the functions

Using these web services calls we retrieved the list of user groups, roles, communities from the Liferay system dynamically every time Liferay was selected as a resource for any users. Upon combining the policies for mapping roles to communities and User groups, the user was provisioned to the Liferay User table using a webservice; this webservice calls a function which overrides the basic Liferay Api create user function. Similar are updates and deletes.

All comments and discussions are welcome. The presentation can be found here.

Note: The one in the suit is not me :-)

Cutting Cost? You must read this

Okay it’s been some time I wanted to write about this. Last year when I was working with a large organization the first initiative they took up as a part of cost cutting initiatives was they reduced the thickness of the tissue paper used in the loo. Then they removed employees (LOL)

Just looking at the crazy ideas people are getting these days, I thought I shall share all such nonsense to the world and might be who is crazy but did not get these ideas can implement them.

1.    Remove tissue paper from bathrooms.
2.    Remove the soap solution at the wash basins
3.    Use cheap paper in the loo or if you think your guys only wash, remove the paper
4.    Do not put any glasses next to the water purifiers. Ask people to get their own bottles to fill. If you want to be kind, just put one glass and place a poster saying, “This glass is washed twice everyday”
5.    Don’t use coir or soft carpet. Use a plastic one. It can be cleaned easily. The cost of carpet shampoo can be avoided.
6.    Switch on only every other alternate light. Switch off the remaining.
7.    Switch off the AC during lunch hour.
8.    Charge for four wheeler parking space. This way all employees shall get only two wheelers or use public transport and reduce the carbon footprint 

9.    Switch off the coolers; just let them function only as purifiers.
10.    Cut the size of the coffee cups.
11.    Install the coffee machines very far from the employees’ work spaces. So they get frustrated to walk till them and stop having coffee.
12.    Rent some space in front of the office for a chaiwala who sells cigarettes etc. so people would prefer going out for a smoke and then have tea there.
13.    Also you would get some rent.
14.    Call those guys who place TVs in offices for advertising purposes. Ask them to start their business in all common areas and they would pay you for it.
15.    Rent small office spaces in cafeterias to people who would like to sell clothing or some fancy stuff etc.

Technical

1.    Install printer, don’t give paper. Keep the paper with the manager
2.    Allow Google access to only employees who are on a project
3.    Remove dialing outside number access to all employees, except managers or above
4.    Do not provide any stationery to the employees.
5.    Give the manager one diary yearly, enough

If I get to find or hear any other nasty things in this domain I shall post it.

Have fun guys.

Acquisitions for expanding business

I think by now its official. Mphasis is acquiring AIG Systems and Solutions India Pvt Ltd. Mphasis is trying to expand its customer base by leaps and bounds by this acquisition as AIGSS has many clients across AIG with the highest revenue generator being AIG Corporate systems. 

And to tell you, AIGSS had to roll out a lot of young heads to compensate some numbers. 

Blame the software???

Yesterday my brother was narrating what happened at his workplace. Before that; he is working for an MNC which serves a large international clientele.

Last month his account was credited with salary which was more than his CTC. He assumed it was the variable pay or some extra pay for working on weekends. Later he enquired and to a surprise many employees got excess salary. Before everyone could even think of celebrating the company sent a mailer saying due to some wrong calculations everyone got credited excess salary and the same shall be deducted next month.

This is how companies are being managed. What quality can be delivered by such people to the clients???

Identity Governance - A good (Q & A)

Check this out

Identity Governance - Buyer's Guide

Sailpoint has recently released the Identity Governance Buyer's guide. Try and give a read ...

Data Cleanliness

White spaces; these things are quite irritating. Its been quite sometime that we are struggling everyday with these camouflaged spaces in the query outputs. I thought its worth mentioning to my readers and IAM implementors, please do check for these as most of the places you implement you may encounter these and can create quite a mess. 

These things never showup for a naked eye but they are always there. Keep checking :-)

Touchscreen Conference Phone

This is a very cool phone. Read it here

Wish you all Happy Ugadi

Is the SUN setting?

I still can believe if its true that IBM would acquire SUN Microsystems one of the world's best companies. I am a technology guy, do not understand much of these business gimmics, however is it for this that someone struggles so hard to make a brand help the world by their open source products etc and then shrink the company and sell if off???

Its harldy a few years back SUN was more than $30B company and now its hardly $3B, why? Is it someone's strategy to bring SUN down and buy them? What is the problem? Or is it that SUN's strategy of business has flaws?

I wonder if tomorrow IBM or whoever would ...

1. Sell the SUN Identity Suite/JES?

2. What will happen to SUN PS?

3. What will happen to the Open Source initiatives?

At least as a person who loves the products and as someone who respects SUN, I would not appreciate this. The management should have taken enough steps to keep the brand up and glowing, rather selling the shop.

SBI - No one can beat them

The guys who wrote the software should really be appreciated.

FaceBook Privacy Tips

My hundredth post :-)

A good article; with tips to secure your facebook profile.

Looking for Java Developers with 2+

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