September 2012 2012– – Vol 3
Saplings
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Editorial Note Greetings from Team Saplings. Following the tradition, we would like to dedicate Saplings Vol 3 to our teachers. A wise man once said, “A good teacher is like a candle- it consumes itself to light the way for others ”. As we grow, a lot of things change in and around us, and we tend to forget the writers of our destiny – Our teachers. As change is one of the atomic constituents for progress, change should always be welcomed. Welcoming change team Saplings has made some changes to the newsletter. Hope you accept the change and strive towards progress. With that said, a few changes to our magazine have been made. Hopefully, these changes will turn out to be positive and light up our path towards progress. We hope that you accept these changes as readily as we do, so that our Saplings can grow under your admiration. In this edition, we have Connecting the Dots with Partha, then we have Shriharsha as Face of Orchard where he shares his story with us, Tips & Tricks giving you some neat info about commonly used software, we also have an exciting contest for the readers to participate in. We would like to thank Adarsh E A for helping us with the design, it was really nice of him to spare some time and give us his opinion on some design aspects. Much appreciated! Now, without further ado we present to you the third edition of Saplings. Hope you enjoy this one! For feedbacks and suggestions, please mail to Saplings@mindtree.com Team Saplings
Connecting The Dots... When we conceived Orchard many years back, we set out to achieve three objectives:
We wanted each one of you to be better skilled
We wanted you to feel differentiated
We wanted you to feel more emotionally attached to MindTree
Unsaid in our expectations were two more objectives: Become a true professional and be a good human being. The result achieved from each of the Orchard batches has been a mixed bag, to say the least. However, we are proud that we have created some of the brightest stars. Learning is a life-long process. I would strongly urge you to look back at the last few months and run through in your own mind all the things that you did and did not do. Does it make you feel proud ? If you were to enact it all over again –what would you do differently ? Unfortunately life does not give you a chance to go back in time and change what you did or did not ? This should be the biggest and most important learning for all of you. The career ahead of you is a little different from what you have been through till now. It is what I call “beyond lines of code” – many of you will write code but customers’ expectations are beyond functionally working code. What are these expectations and why did we not teach them – we did not teach them because some of them have to be experienced and not taught. The expectations will be varying and most often it cuts across various aspects. Past experience tells us that most of you would do very well in projects and become stars – it will not happen by accident – you have to work towards it. I have three advices to give you today:
Learning is continuous and that’s the way it will be through your whole career.
What you do, does not have to stand the scrutiny of anyone else – they have to stand the scrutiny of your own conscience; when you stand in front of the mirror all alone – ask yourself if you are truthful and honest to yourself.
Ask yourself if you are performing to your best potential. Welcome to possible. Yes, you can!
-Parthasarathy N S President & COO—IMTS & Testing
The best angle from where to solve any problem is try-angle.
Sept 2012
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T E C H TO N I C THE NEW DOMAIN SAGA
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ith growing internet technologies and the need to institute cyber presence has really fueled the existence of websites. If you own a website, domain name plays a vital role in marketing your strategy online. But the problem is, whenever we try to list our desired domain name… “It-is-already-TAKEN!” The alternate option is to compromise with our choice or to have all such cheesy domain names having numerals, hyphens or crazy extensions. But, the New Domain Saga has cured this predicament. You always tickle your nerve and end up thinking about the magnanimity of internet fraternity to allow you for various domains (this also include internationalized domain names – names in different text script). So the questions are: what’s the size of this colossal list and who maintains it? When does this list will get over or exhaust? We would like to answer the latter one first. The answer is ‘Never’! There are more than 2 Billion domain names and this list is maintained by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In order to solve this problem of unavailable ‘.COM’ domains, ICANN structured regional, national and other domains to furbish the needs of internet users( E.g.: .ASIA, .IN, .TV, etc.) calling them Generic Top Level Domain (gLTD’s). Unfortunately, again, these gLTD’s exhausted with the advent of social network and other new advancement in this field. As a measure, ICANN commissioned internet giants to propose new domain names. In the year 2011, history was re-written, and here came the concept of ‘community based and open gLTD’s. With these new gLTD’s, we will have around 1900 new domains registered instead of having generic gLTD’s. Now, if you own a pizza center, you can have something like www.dominos.food or better ‘www.dominos.pizza’. If you host an app on any of the markets, you can host a website with domain www.angry-birds.app. Just imagine, the torrent of domains available and potency to which you can utilize (exploit?) it. Considering the trend and new mechanizations, Google have applied for more than 101 new domains including crazy ones like ‘.dog’ and ‘.lol’. Though, the master of domain registrations is Donuts Inc. with more than 300 register requests. Why these numbers are so hyped, is because of the reason that the cost per domain is $185,000. Another bizarre consideration is that, it is not sure that each application will be accepted. Amazon and Google both have registered for ‘.cloud’.
market will react and what all can be registered. Also, it brings out market opportunities for players to bid for their and other’s domains. The other side, with top level 22 gLTD’s, we have millions of websites but with new 1900 inclusions. It surely is a call for chaos. The new e-world will be suffering from domain phishing, domain squatting, domain crouching and all the vices. There will be more struggles and less stability. Domain fights and domain burgling will be the general seen. Amazon started the fight by bidding for Facebook’s ‘.like’. Is this the start of new tech war? Whatever it is, but surely it opened new vistas to create and publish content with one’s unique identity and will hamper the notion ‘identity crises’. You never know, we might have something like https://orchard.mindtree someday.
Quick Facts
Price for a new gLTD is $185,000 and to maintain it you have to pay $25,000.
Even political parties can’t remain unaffected by technology, watch for .DEMOCRAT and .REPUBLICAN.
Amazon applied for 76 while Google applied for 101 domains. Winner is Donuts Inc. with 307 domains. Donuts Inc. – A company started in 2011 just after announcement of new Domains. Interesting!
The most sought out registration was for ‘.APP’ – 13 applicants. Now, there will be a bidding for multiple application (here .app) which may earn a lot of profit for the NGO, ICANN.
Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic etc. are the other languages apart from English for which registration has been filed. - Sanidhya Nanavati
DID YOU KNOW? PeopleHub won the NASSCOM IT USER Award 2012 Under the horizontal category – Social media adoption
Advent of this new trend is like a new field of research, how the Is reading in the bathroom considered multi-tasking?
Sept 2012
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T E C H TO N I C MS OUTLOOK—TIPS & TRICKS Continuing the series of Tips & Tricks, here are some very creative and interesting tips with which you can toy around with MS Outlook. These tips & tricks will definitely help you learn more. There’s a whole world in there, we have just opened the doors.
Note: This works only within an organization connected through MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SERVER.
Quick Parts
If you want incoming mails from specific people to be automatically categorized with some color category then go to FILE>MANAGE RULES & ALERTS->NEW RULE. Select the option – Apply rule on messages I receive->NEXT->choose your category->NEXT and check the option assign it to category Category. Click on the category hyperlink present in window below. It opens a new window which gives you an option of choosing a color category. Select one and click finish. Next time whenever a mail comes from the person or group that you have chosen, a color category gets automatically attached.
In most of the cases we often need to use a common phrase, such as “Revert back in case of queries” or “Please send in your valuable suggestions/comments”. In such cases, when you write a mail just copy such phrases and click on the Insert tab present in the header, select Quick parts and click on the option – Save selection to quick part gallery. A new window opens which prompts you to give a name. Choose a name that can be easily referred to. Then hit the Ok button. Next time you want to use such phrases, place your cursor at that position, go to insert options, select Quick Parts button and select your quick part.
Disabling New Message alerts When you are busy giving a presentation or doing an important job, incoming mail alerts usually make the situation awkward or distracting. You can easily disable these alerts by choosing the FILE->OPTIONS->MAIL. A screen containing settings for mail opens. In that under the sub heading message arrival uncheck the Display a desktop alert option.
Recall a message To recall a message without sending a revised message:
Categorize by colors
Reply and Forwarding options You can tell Outlook how and whether to include the original message when you reply, and how to manage the original message when you forward it to someone else. Go to FILE->OPTIONS->MAIL. Replies and Forwards. Choose the option you prefer for "When replying to a message" and "When forwarding a message." Unfortunately, you can't specify these options only for the current message, so if you want to make a change that applies only to the current message; make sure to change the options again after the message is sent. - Satish Inamdar
ORCHARD ODYSSEY
1. Go to Sent Items folder. 2. Open the message that you want to recall. 3. On the Message tab, in the Move group, go to Actions->Recall this message. Press OK. In addition to trying to recall a message, you can send a replacement message. For example, if you forgot to include an attachment, you can try to recall the message, and then send a replacement message that has the attachment. The original message is removed from the mailboxes of the recipients who have not yet opened it, and then is replaced with the updated message.
DID YOU KNOW? Best Corporate Governance India 2012,was awarded to MindTree by World Finance.
August 8th ‘12: A day which celebrated the triumph of around 600 Campus Minds with gusto, pride and gratification. The day began with November batch and then February batch’s graduation Ceremony. Both the ceremonies included handing over certificates, solo and group dance performances & band performance. The day shall be remembered eternally.
What happens if you get scared half to death twice?
Sept 2012
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O R C H A R D B E AT S KNOW MINDTREE BETTER
I
t all started on the D-day of Osmosis 2010, Subroto announced a very unique initiative – it was to be called 5*50. Proposals were invited from all of MindTree for ideas that had the potential of becoming a 50 Million Dollar business in a span of 5 years. A few engineers from the erstwhile Networking and Storage IG of PES had been working on an idea of making Cloud Computing secure. They were convinced that they had hit upon something unique and were on the lookout for options to converting this idea into a full-fledged product. And on August 15th of 2011, almost a year ago, the announcement was made by KK, that the idea, then called as the “Virtualization Toolset” was chosen to be the only idea that had cleared all the gates to emerge as the winner of the first edition of the 5*50 initiative. Before, I get to describing the idea itself, I need to give a background of Virtualization. For a long time, almost since the dawn of computing, a Server or Personal Computer was almost always associated with only instance of an Operating System. There were dual boot systems, but there would be only OS active at any point in time. In the world of servers, especially application or web servers, the IT administrators had long known that the utilization were typically in the (15- 20)% range, which meant that for most of the time the CPU was idle. However, the server continued to draw the same amount of power and required the same amount of cooling irrespective of the utilization. With the increasing cost of power, cooling and hardware etc, the need to increase the utilization of these servers became increasingly important and the technology that answered this need was Virtualization. Virtualization breaks the link between the hardware and an Operating System. It introduces a layer in between the Operating System and the hardware called as the Hypervisor. The primary role of the Hypervisor is to simulate multiple instances of hardware and in turn enable multiple Operating System instances to run on a single piece of hardware.
ware, then this leak would potentially have a very negative impact on the enterprise. To describe this idea with an analogy, think of the ID cards that each of us has. The ID card enables us to enter MindTree but no other company. We extended this idea and added an ID to each of these VMs. This ID ensures that the VM can be “powered on” only in a Trusted Environment. This Trusted Environment also prevented VMs without the ID from being “powered on” in the Trusted Environment. We called this technology “SecureVM”. With this as the core technology, we have created a Cloud Management product called VMUnify. VMUnify works at the IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) level. With VMUnify, we enable organizations setup an Infrastructure Cloud built on the core technology of SecureVM. VMUnify offers a portal that users can use to request VMs, configure VMs, decide the time duration that they require these VMs for etc., with this data, VMUnify creates a VM, configures it and then returns a link to the user via which the VM can be accessed. All of this is done automatically without any user intervention. Multiple studies by analysts from Gartner, Forrester and IDC state that the overall addressable market in this technology space is upwards of 5 Billion dollars, so there is a lot of potential for a solution like VMUnify to grow and make a mark. It’s been a little more than a year since the announcement was made on the 5*50 initiative; in this year we have developed a beta version of the product with which we started PoC (Proof of concept) at 6 service providers in India. We will shortly be releasing the production version of VMUnify and also with it will make the announcement of our first set of customers, so stay tuned...
With Virtualization, every OS instance or image was reduced to a file (think of something like a zip file that contains the OS and the application). This file when “powered on” on a Hypervisor turned into an OS. An OS running on a Hypervisor is called as a Virtual Machine or VM. Since, the OS image was now reduced to a file, this immediately introduced a security threat, and a rogue employee could copy this file and power it on outside of the enterprise environment. If the VM has a source code repository or if it contained pre-release soft-
Always try to be modest. And be damn proud of it!
- Giridhar L V (On behalf of Team VmUnify)
Team VmUnify
Sept 2012
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O R C H A R D B E AT S MINDFAME– WINNING ARTICLE Saplings in association with Orchard Community Champions organized MindFame, a writing competition for Orchard Community. Competition was open only to Orchard Community and we were awed by the number of entries. What made us happier was the quality of the entries that came in. It was a tough job for us to select the best among many special articles. We would like to thank the Jury Members for helping us out there. A big Thank You to Sagar Paul, Deepa Krishna, Farangis Chowdhury, Sanidhya Nanavati and Anuradha Goulay for their time and effort. Congratulations to the winner, Vikesh Kumar. I hope you have fun with Apple I-Pod Shuffle. You deserve it. Competing closely with Vikesh were Mukul Soni & Sandeep Biswas. Please find their articles hyperlinked on their names. Until next time. Happy reading! Are Smart phones taking us away from the real world? Was genetic engineering accomplished to make biological weapons? Was TNT originally made to destroy peace? Was the first computer virus originally made to steal data? The answer to each of Vikesh Kumar the above question would be an emphatic “NO”. Smart phones – which are proof of advancements science has made – are being accused of taking us – the creators – away from the real world. I fail to find justice being done to smart phones. Someone said - “We are what we make of ourselves”, how true is it? The saying can be extended to “Things are what we make of it” – be it health, wealth, relations or the “Smart Phones”. It is for us to decide what we really want to do with what we have. We can have ourselves isolated from the real world or let ourselves observe it better, appreciate them more each time or hate experiencing them again. The old-generation phones we had required multiple steps to achieve trivial goals, had almost no contribution to our real lives
apart from communicating via voice and texts. We never complained when our old generation phones required to type in our message compared to today’s phones to which we can speak to and get it done saving few hassles and time, yet we complain of smart phones driving us away from real world. Are they really doing it? Feeling homesick? One video chat with loved ones and smiles on their faces brings more satisfaction, rejuvenates us and help us concentrate well in our other engagements thus bringing even more satisfaction from work and relationships. Lost in a town, or need to find a shop? That nifty map application could take you where you want, find you the place where you could find your thing, could be a life saver too. When in a different place with a different language, a small translation application could just come to your rescue. Oh! Missed replying that important email that came just before you left your desk? Again, a smart phone brings that to your notice without your effort. Constant updates and feeds allow you to discover more, build hobbies, and follow what interests you more closely – closer than was ever thought of. Those regular social feeds also help to know the other person/party/community better and take relationships to the next level. Timely reminder of upcoming events help better prepare for it. Got a brilliant idea on a vacation or journey? Just get into conference with your team for a moment and get the wheels rolling. How much more could we expect from one device to get us real with the world? It was not designed in the first place to consume valuable times of ours and just because we drove our car on a wrong route does not mean car is at fault. Disciplined use is the essence to make or break any innovation and if done properly, smart phones could make us smarter too. Vikesh, Winner MindFame, is Feb batch, TTG-Java Campus Mind. He comes from Samastipur, Bihar. He likes cooking and clicking photographs. AI and robotics fascinate him.
DID YOU KNOW?
DID YOU KNOW?
57.3% of our revenue comes from US, 27.7 % from Europe and 15% from Rest of the World.
In 1999, The New York Times wrote a cover story on MindTree titled – “A Different Kind of Company”
It's hard to make a comeback when you haven't been anywhere.
Sept 2012
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O R C H A R D B E AT S In Conversation With Shriharsha Harsha has won the Chairman’s award twice. He was the MindTree Idol in 2009. He is currently Account Manager of adidas account. Tell us how you started your career? I come from Dharwad, Karnataka. I did my engineering in computer science from BVBCET, Hubli. I joined MindTree as a Campus Mind. Initially, I was put into the learning program in .NET track. Later, I moved to Data warehousing. This is how I started my career in MindTree.
How was your journey as a campus mind?
You have grown to an account manager from a campus mind in MindTree. What is your next goal? There are two paths I see for myself. One is a path which is more logical is to be a Regional Manager and look over multiple accounts. And the other route, where my heart lies, is entrepreneurship. It does not necessarily mean owning a company outside but doing something entrepreneurial within MindTree. That is something I would like to do in the future.
GUESS THE PERSON
When I look back, our life was very simple unlike today. We came with no expectations & simple attitude because we had very little idea about how the corporate world looked like. We just took what came forth on the road in a stride & moved ahead. The leaders spent a lot of time with us. They shared their experiences, interests & lot more. This shaped us into who we are today.
Find childhood photograph of one of the Prominent Leaders of MindTree. Guess the leader correctly and you could win a gift voucher worth `1000.
Your take on Orchard... When I look at Orchard today, it has evolved to a great extent in terms of inducting people into the organization. I think one of the concerns I have is in some ways too much attention makes you believe that the organization is for you & it will heed to all your demands. It was true then & it is true today. Once you’re out of Orchard, you realize you’re not the epicenter any more. So I think the concept is great, the execution is great but you need a practitioner telling you what the real world is all about.
What are the three important things, according to you, one should keep in mind to have a successful career?
Send in your answers to Saplings
Remember, “the early bird catches the worm“
THE EDITORIAL BOARD
I think that it’s not only about the skill anymore. If two people have the same skill set, then what really matters is the attitude, ownership and accountability. If a person takes up a job, he needs to certify that it is complete and take ownership of that job. Second, Passion for what you do is what differentiates you from others. Third would be discipline. Sometimes, you have to hold two contradictory ideas in your head and work with that contradiction. All this really can’t come in one day, so you have to start right now.
What is your opinion about campus minds? They come with a lot of energy and that’s what we need. They are by far the best of what we have today. The knowledge they have is really appreciable. But, the important thing is what they do with it. They are extremely good at ideation but evaluation takes a little time. Almost everything happens in seconds today, but what you must keep in mind is that you need to endure and wait for success.
What is your message to campus minds? Work hard. Be patient & accountable. Don’t forget the basics. Be creative with an essence of practicality.
In sequence from top left to bottom right: Ravi Raj, Sanidhya Nanavati, Spandana Dhaduti, Joyce Mathew, Mehul Dharamsi, Anchal Sachdev, Deepa Shekar, Satish Inamdar, Ajit Pathak, Supreeth Srinivasan, Kumar Balijepalli, Ashutosh Khare, Omkar Solapurkar and Archana Bhat.
There is only one way to success– You must be focused!
Sept 2012