Cloud: Hiding the Sausage Factory

The infamous sausage factory analogy describes an unpleasant process, which is hidden from the public's view, that yields a widely consumable product, such as a hamburger. The cloud enables consumers to buy what they want without forcing them to build their own sausage factory, per say. However, the depth of the cloud extends much further past this superficial metaphor. 

The divisions that compose the cloud can be classified as infrastructure, platform, software, or business processes as a service. This concept is powerful because it empowers the consumer to pick and choose which aspects of an IT system that they want control over and which processes they would rather outsource. Just as consumers do not wish to know the details of how a sausage factory operates and only want the final product, cloud consumes may not wish to know how network and storage hardware function, they just want to choose which operating system to use on top of that hardware. In another case, a consumer might not care which hardware or OS is used, they just want a to build a software application with readily available resources that are offered through the cloud. A third consumer may not care which hardware, OS, or software is used, they just want to leverage a business process, such as SmarterCities, to accomplish a business initiative. The possibilities are endless. 

Source: http://kunalashar.com/blog/the-next-generation-enterprise-business-as-a-service-in-the-cloud/

The chart above (Copyrights go to Kunal Ashar) depicts this cloud idea extremely succinctly. On the left, we see that business process lives on software, which lives on a platform, which lives on infrastructure. However, the real value comes almost exclusively from business processes. This is critical for understanding why cloud can help business ignore traditional IT and jump straight to the top of the pyramid for their business processes.

In conclusion, the end consumer of cloud technology is the ultimate decider of choosing what they want to manage and what they want that "simply works". Consumers do not care to know the elaborate details of the internal operations of a sausage factory. The main dilemma is deciding which component of an IT system (infrastructure, platform, software, business processes) is the sausage factory to the client's business.

Summit Training

Recently, I traveled to Armonk for Summit Program training. I spent a few days meeting my peer IT Architects as well the other Summit attendees which included sales representatives, client representatives, and brand specialists. The training was a phenomenal introduction into the culture at IBM. Understanding where the company came from and what adversities that IBM has overcame turned out to be extremely invigorating. Furthermore, most companies don't zero-in on their financial statements when bringing new hires into the company. However, IBM wanted to focus our attention on what direction the company is attempting to head in. While every single cog within IBM is essential to the entire unit operating seamlessly, we were presented with knowledge of what industries and sectors the future of computing and services resides in.

One interesting part of this experience was taking a tour through the IBM headquarters. It was mesmerizing to see how the company has evolved over the past one hundred years. Viewing some of the first envelope sorters, the first type writers, the personal computer, the system 360 is indescribable. Only pictures of these inventions can delineate how captivating these machines were. Furthermore, the illusive history of IBM will show us where the next hundred years will take the computing world. Not to mention, I had the chance to snap a once in a career photo along the way.

However, I am leaving out one of the best parts of the Summit training program -- the people! The other architects that I am working with are incredible and outstanding people. They all come from technical backgrounds, but are social, fun, and energizing to be around. I know that our architect class will accomplish great feats in the future. We can leverage our backgrounds and experiences to better improve ourselves and push each other to reach new heights.

Not only were the architects motivated individuals, but the atmosphere of combining the technical architects with the sales people of the Summit program was astounding. As architects, we received a glimpse into the minds of successful people that are excellent at inspiring others. The social energy that the sales group brought with them encourages me to not only remain technically competent, but also to enhance my social skills at every opportunity so that I can become a well rounded individual. 

I wore a suit everyday, but I enjoy dressing up. I was glad to be surrounded by other like minded people who are intelligent, technically sound, and personable. I will be looking forward to meeting up with my section of trainees as we head to Raleigh next month for Global Sales School training. It is an exciting time to be an IBMer.

Patent Pondering

"Inventing is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". Perhaps one of history's greatest inventors, Thomas Edison, hit the nail on the head when he said his now famous quote. For the majority of my academic studies, the work involved with school merely dealt with completing the task at hand but focused little on creating new ideas to solve the problem through a completely different method. I am a believer in a Utopian society. So, I am continuously thinking of how ordinary activities can be optimized in order to accomplish tasks in the most efficient manner possible. Although I like to think that I have grandeur ideas, I have noticed some difficulties with transforming these abstract ideas into tangible implementations that have the potential to be patented. 

At IBM, the culture strongly encourages employees to generate their own ideas, write up a description of the idea, and then submit the idea to a patent design team. While I have a day job consisting of an abundant of projects to complete by certain deadlines, I do enjoy imagining an ideal world and coming up with new ideas to move us from present day to this ideal world that I envision. Rather than watching TV late in the evening, as the majority of other people tend to enjoy, I prefer sitting down with my thoughts and letting my imagination run wild. While this purely used to be a hobby, I can now submit ideas that I develop on my own time through the IBM patent team. However, the idea engendering process is not as straight forward as I anticipated.

To begin, I am currently working with a team on an idea that has a strong possibility of passing through the rigorous patent process at IBM (I am also an optimist!). But, who wants to stop at one patent when they could develop a dozen more? If only it were simple to think of an idea and write it up during the twilight hours of the evening. Prior to joining IBM, I fabricated a plethora of "patent-able" ideas. What happened? For starters, I was unaware of the precedent work that others have published. Therefore, my ideas were definitely new and useful ideas, but more than likely lacked the punch, in terms of uniqueness qualities, that sent an idea all the way through the patent process.

While exploring the depths of my imagination in hopes of stumbling upon my next eureka moment, I discovered another attribute of the patent process that makes it somewhat difficult for idea thinkers. The potential patent has to exist as a plausible idea at a certain date in the future. Said another way, a potential patent cannot be too near-sighted because the idea may already exist or would require such simple implementation techniques that it would not surpass the minimum novelty requirements of patents. If the idea is too far-sighted, in terms of technological advancements, then the idea may be seen as too far-fetched and too abstract to implement within the realm of present knowledge. Therefore, the ideal patent must exist somewhere in the middle, in such a way that it is novel enough that no one has thought about the problem in the same way and that the patent architecture could be created in the near term future with modern technology.

Now that the difficulty of uniqueness and feasibility has been addressed, one must choose an area to host their idea search process. The ubiquitous nature and power of mobile computing has a garnered my attention. Not only does the vast majority of Earth's population own a phone, but they carry it on them at all times. The data that is generated through a mobile device is astronomical. I am also familiar with mobile computing and my creative side can envision many improvements in the mobile space to help better the world. Therefore, I now know where to look in order to start generating ideas on my own time.

As I embark on a career that reveres patents, I plan to start patenting early. Some of my short term goals include not only sending our current idea through IBM's patent process, but also adding one or two more patents to the list of my accomplishments. One of the main struggles that I currently face is giving my creative side the right size cage to develop, so that new ideas are not too small in terms of uniqueness and not too ambitious without a sense of plausibility. As Edison noted, inventing is 99% perspiration. I will keep pressing on until a worthy idea knocks me upside the head.

First Month of my Career

After joining IBM as a supplemental hire three weeks ago, I am not the same person anymore. I have grown and expanded my knowledge in numerous ways since becoming an IBMer. On my first few days of work, I had nervous and bewildered feelings of entering my new home. However, those feelings quickly evolved into feelings of inspiration and excitement as I wake wake each morning and head into work. The transition from a background of internships, research, and education into the IBM workforce was seamless. Only a week into the job, and I knew I had made the correct career decision and the best decision of my life. Even better than my decision to attend the greatest university of them all, Texas A&M.

To begin, I was quickly staffed on developing a Mobile Banking application with a senior IT Architect, whose identity will be shortened to BH. The sheer potential of this project made my eyes light up with eagerness. The business applications for this project were straightforward. BH was working on a personal mobile application that functioned across platforms, such as iPhone, iPad, desktop, Android, etc. There were a few caveats that differentiated this type of work from others, including a SpeedCash withdrawal option and a premium retail advertisement inclusion. However, I spent my time familiarizing myself with the architecture of the application and how different modules functioned and communicated with one another. At the same time, I began developing portions of this project, such as enhancing the database and writing web service calls to the Next Best Action back end business logic. Although I would only be with BH's team for nine weeks until I transitioned to the Summit Program, I had a reason to look forward to coming to work and continuing my learning adventure.

As I built up my knowledge base around IBM's mobile and banking presence, more meetings commenced under the direction of BH. The associated culture is one of high intelligence, diligent work, and innovation. Rather than merely assigning developmental work to each team member, creativity was encouraged and expected. By the way the senior team members felt and thought about their ideas, I gained the sense that they are open and always interested to hear new ideas. My heart was ecstatically pounding. Even though I was only going to be assigned on this project for a short period of time, I discovered that I could contribute to the direction of the project. As soon as the meeting ended, I rushed back to my desk to jot down my thoughts and ideas. I would need to test them, but I was looking forward to creating my own value within the project itself and then receiving feedback from the team.

Although my tenure at IBM is short at this point in time, I know that this culture is the best place to grow my career. This intuition is built upon my recent experience of attending the DFW Technical Exchange. I had the opportunity to listen to several extremely interesting presentations about industry viewpoints and internal efficiency. I connected in a small atmosphere with profound experts in their respective industry. The conference drenched my internal flame with gasoline. I saw so much potential to generate my own ideas which will hopefully evolve into patents someday as well as collaborate with other IBMers on a wide variety of topics. 

In conclusion, the culture at this phenomenal company has instilled a desire to innovate within. I am excited to begin my journey as an IBMer in order to create as much value as I can for my co-workers and for IBM itself. I am truly looking forward to making the world a better and smarter place.

I am an IBMer

They always say listen to your elders. However, I did not take other's people weary words when they warned of the full time recruiting process and the difficulty of applying for jobs in today's market. Upon graduation, I interviewed with numerous firms. Many went well, some could have gone better, but I was feeling empty on the inside because no prospect seemed to be the dream job. 

After several intense months of networking among individuals in the computer science industry, I stumbled upon the Summit Program offered by IBM. I researched the program in much depth and gained a better understanding of the role that IBM was looking to fill, which was an IT Architect in my case. Specifically, the role would exist in the service unit under Sales & Distribution to financial service clients. My condensed summary of the position can be best described as the overlap of programming, financial services, and client interaction in a Venn diagram. This position was ideal for someone with my background. I felt my excitement rise as I read more and more about IBM's IT Architect role. This could be what I was looking for all along.

As I went through the interview process, I realized that I enjoy my conversations with IBM's IT Architects and the Summit Programs managers. My conversations with these key people led me even further to believe that I had discovered the Holy Grail of first year hire programs for myself. I fell in love with IBM and the IT Architect. The interviews progressed smoothly, and I was accepted to the Summit Program! I would be a future IBMer in hopes of creating a Smarter Planet.

Although the interview process was rather intense and challenging, I enjoyed the entire process. I found myself attached to the culture at IBM. It was one that was very business oriented, but also required a dosage of innovation in a perfect recipe. Although the program started on July 10, I had several months before beginning work because I was hired in late January. I was looking forward to starting my career at IBM so much that I wanted to start work as early as possible. IBM handled this process with extreme helpfulness and found a Co-Op position for myself, which began in early May.

At this point, I was still anxious to begin my enticing career as an IT Architect. I decided that the best place to start was ordering Java books, which IBM considers one of their main programming languages. I sifted through these books in my ample spare time. Although I was introduced to programming through C++, Java was close enough to C++ that I had minor difficulties in adjusting to the new language. I began writing sample programs to affiliate myself even further.

As I await my start date at IBM, I plan on continuing to grow my knowledge base as much as possible. Namely, I am blessed to have discovered this dream job. The IT Architect role in the Summit Program could not fit my personality better than any other job out there. I may have struggled through finding my job match up, but the wait was worth it. IBM, here I come!

Business 101

Initially, my interest in business grew its roots in finance, and specifically, the market. I was fascinated with applying engineering methodologies to help predict stock prices and back testing ideas with large data sets. Although most of my interest was garnered from self study and research, I decided that reaching out to the Mays Business school at Texas A&M was the next logical step.

Through Mays, I joined several extracurricular organizations to help expand my knowledge about finance.
First, I joined the selective Aggies on Wall Street (AOWS) organization. Through this course, I learned about financial modeling, I networked within Mays, and then took a trip up to New York with my nineteen other classmates. We visited around twenty firms during our two week stay in New York, including J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, PwC, and several smaller hedge funds. This was an excellent chance for me to see the lifestyles of the investment bankers in the city. Below is a picture of our group of talented individuals posing with the famous NYSE Bull:

2011 Aggies on Wall Street

Next, I was admitted to the prestigious Titans of Finance. Our of the fifteen members of the class, I was one of two engineers that were allowed past the gates of entry. Our diverse class included finance, accounting, real estate, economics, and a few other majors as a part of the whole. We were official members of Titans 12, following our leader and teacher, Britt Harris (http://robinthecoach.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Britt-Harris-bio.pdf), who is currently CIO of the Texas Teacher Pension fund in Austin with $120 billion in assets under managment. Britt lectured us every other week on the intricacies of macro investing and graciously took our class and significant others out to eat dinner. Britt's vast amount of resources and friendly personality help bring in successful leaders to lecture our class every now and then. Below is a picture of our group with Glenn Hutchins, CEO of Silverlake.

Titans of Finance XII. Glenn Hutchins, CEO of Silverlake. Britt Harris, CIO of Texas Teachers Pension. Jerry Strawser, Dean of Texas A&M Business. Sorin Sorescu, Head of Texas A&M Finance.

The Titans of Investing class taught me much about the financial markets and about life in general. I have so many profound, pleasant, and inspiring memories from this class. Titans is an active part of each graduate of the program to this day and I try to make it back for dinners whenever I am in the College Station area. I hope to give back to the community in my life because of all that I have received.

Finally, I participated in Horizons. The goal of Horizons is to pair current students up with a summer internship in investment banking or management consulting. I decided that investment banking seemed interesting, so I pursued the banking guild. Also, Horizons partners students with mentors in the industry, such as hedge funds, investment banks, private equity, entrepreneurship, etc. Through the help of my mentors and the Horizon program, I received an interview and internship offer from Goldman Sachs in Houston.

I worked at Goldman Sachs in their oil and gas investment banking division in the summer of 2012. I learned an incredible amount about the oil and gas industry as well as the definition of hard work. It will remain one of the experiences that I can always draw upon anytime my life enters a turbulent patch. I am incredibly grateful for this opportunity that many others dream about.

Computer Engineering Videos

Throughout my tenure at Texas A&M, the Computer Engineering department threw some very hard and intense course work in our face at times. However, there were many exciting opportunities to expand our creativity through self engineered projects. The youtube links below demonstrate some of the more appealing projects that we worked on, which include Computer Wizard, Friendly Fire!, and Automated Turret. 

While watching these videos, keep in mind that all projects were completely thought out and researched by our teams and not an assignment from the professor. The projects were created from absolute scratch with no previous work. The projects were developed in under a month in lieu of other course work. We had received A's on all projects. It was after this when the professor asked us to make videos to show future students. So, the videos were compiled on short time notice before semester breaks. I was the primary software developer on all projects and consulted the hardware side as well. Each project is described in more detail below.

Computer Wizard: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlkWMx3IwtU

The concept of this project was to create a computer building system that would assist ordinary people with the knowledge to build a computer from scratch from NewEgg components. Essentially, a computer illiterate person would specify how they intended to use the computer, input how much money they were going to spend, and then were returned a list of compatible computer components as well as an assembly guide for these computer components. Out of a class size of 15 projects, we received 2/3 awards, which consisted of votes from our peers. We received the "Grand Champion" (given to the best overall project) and the "Pablo Picasso" (given to the most innovative group) awards.

Friendly Fire! (Educational Robot Tank Game): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldM_XQXgLNU
This project was a turn based game in which two users would play from their laptops against one another. The players had to answer mechanical physics questions correctly in order to move a robot tank across a battle field. Then, the player was able to launch a projectile at the enemy tank in order to score a point. The purpose of this game is to educate players in physics while enticing them to learn about robotics through the assistance of a fun game.In the video, one cannot see the GUI very well in the video, but it monitors whose turn it is, the score of the game, and the current state that the game is in. The GUI is the master control of the game.

Automated Turret: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrAXUkCtobg&feature=youtu.be
During this project, our team created an automated turret system that would track a user defined color on a computer through a Logitech camera, send coordinates to the turret machine, turn the turret, and then resume firing small foam projectiles at the targeted color.
The 1:52 mark shows the main idea behind this project although the camera is angled to the side. In the top left corner, you can see the user click on our team member with a red shirt. You can see a red dot appear on the screen, and the Logitech's internal black and white interpretation of the shirt slightly below. Then you notice how the turret follows our team member with the red shirt on and shoots foam missiles at our team member.