How the Indian IT Industry is tiding the current global crisis ? - A Nasscom Report

PuneTech blog reports about a recent talk by Ganesh Natarajan of Nasscom on how the Indian IT industry is tiding the current IT crisis. The presentation can be found here. The report is full of graphs and figures and is a very interesting and motivating read.

My summary of the report

• Inspite of global uncertainities, the revenue aggregate (from IT-BPO sector) as a percentage of GDP continues to rise (albeit a little less compared to the rises in previous years).
• This growth (in the face of current global crisis) is partly due to entry into new market verticals like Airlines, Media and healthcare apart from Banking, Financial, Insurance and Telecom. This reduces dependency.
• The industry is progressing towards providing more end-to-end services. The report cites the BPO industry as an example, where in addition to customer support, services like finance, accounting, HR, procurement and knowledge services are also being offered.
• India is exporting its services to more and more regions (though US still holds 61% of the share). The fast growing areas are Europe and Middle East. This makes us less prone to mistakes made by "Superpowers" :).
  
• The report indicates that by 2020 India will lead the world in working age population. The estimated work force in India will be 47mn compared to -17mn in the US. This extreme imbalance in work force will work towards India's sustained growth.

To ensure that India does not lose its advantage a number of initiatives are being undertaken:

• IT Export services are being spread across more cities to manage pressure on Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Chennai, Delhi.Nasscom identifies around 43 Tier 2/3 cities.
  
• There is a comprehensive program in place for making Indias large talent force "employable". These include short-time objectives like making large investments in training, medium-term objectives like faculty development programs to train and sustain faculty (this is very very important given the current crisis of good teachers in our country) and long-term objectives like setting up new IITs, investing in technology innovation etc.
  

Embracing New Technology : The Twitter Case

I am a technogeek and try to integrate new technology in my everyday life as much as possible. This post is about how i am using twitter.

As most of you may know, twitter is this short messaging service which people use to convey updates in real time. It has become the micro-blogging platform of choice and has many cool advantages, one amongst them being able to convey live updates using a computer, regular mobile or smart phones. These updates can then be fetched via RSS feeds.

I use twitter to tell people (whoever is interested) what i am currently upto. These are normally sent to my twitter account as an SMS from my mobile. The current status then appears on my webpage.

So the next time, you call me and i do not pick up the phone, please check the twit on my webpage!

IPv4 Countdown vs. State of IPv6

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) is the body that manages the unicast IPv4 address pool (ie from 0.0.0.0 to 223.255.255.255.255). IANA assigns blocks of this space to the 5 RIR's (Regional Internet Registries) i.e. AFRINIC, APNIC, ARIN, RIPENCC and LACNIC. The RIR's use their distribution policies to further allocate addresses to local registries and ISP's which propogate them to the endhosts.

Potaroo.net predicts the following dates for the exhaustion of IPv4 address space.

Projected IANA Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 04-Feb-2011
Projected RIR Unallocated Address Pool Exhaustion: 05-Mar-2012

A live down-counter counting number of days until we hit exhaustion of the IPv4 address space can be found here . This counter is generated using data from potaroo.net report The report is pretty detailed and explains the modelling used for predicting the dates. Please note that the modelling is based on current address distribution policies used by RIRs and current consumption trends. The following graph (from potaroo.net report) shows the current status of IPV4.

An explanation of the graph follows:

Note that there are 256 /8's where each /8 is 16,777,216 addresses.

IETF_Reserved : Blocks reserved for special purpose. It consists of 16 /8 Multicast blocks + 16 /8 reserved blocks + 1 /8 (0.0.0.0/8) block for local identification + 1 /8 (127.0.0.0/8) for loopback + 1 /8 (10.0.0.0/8) for personal use + 1 /8 (14.0.0.0/8) for public-data networks.

IANA_Pool : Pools of /8 left with IANA for allocation to RIRs.

Allocated : Allocated by IANA to RIR. This does not reflect current consumption because RIRs may have a pool of their own.

So much for IPv4. Now lets look at IPv6.

In 2008, there have been atleast 2 big studies around the state of IPv6.

• Google Study on State of IPv6 for ordinary users
  
• Arbor networks study on overall state of IPv6
  

The reports are detailed but these are a few interesting points.

1) Arbor networks experiment measured the total amount of IPv6 flowing in the backbone , and they note that

At its peak, IPv6 represented less than one hundredth of 1% of Internet traffic.

2) The biggest reason cited in the summary for the above observation is money.

Specifically, the department of commerce estimates it will cost $25 billion for ISPs to upgrade to native IPv6.

3) Googles effort measures the state of IPv6 from a end node perspective as opposed to the Arbor measurement. Their key observations are :

• 0.238% of users have useful IPv6 connectivity (and prefer IPv6).
• 0.09% of users have broken IPv6 connectivity.
• Probably a million distinct IPv6 hosts exist.
• Russia leads the chart in IPv6 penetration.
  
• IPv6 prevalance is low but increasing steadily by the week.
• IPv6 - IPv4 tunelling is the most common transition mechanism.
  
• MacOS has better IPv6 penetration than Vista because of its default policies in the OSes.
  

So given the predictions about end of IPv4 and the rate of adoption of IPv6, are we ready for migration? In Feb 2008, ICANN added IPv6 addresses for 6 of the 13 root DNS servers (news here) which is a step in the right direction but is it enough to prod people to migrate?

I have the following concerns about the migration:

• What would dictate the migration: economics or a better-future-internet?
• Will ISPs be willing to pay the price?
• Even if they are willing to do so, can the consumers and business transition to IPv6 seamlessly?
  
• Will security products continue working the same way?
  
• Are the vendors testing their implementations with IPv6 to make a simple software update to the tons of software already out there?
• How will this migration be different in impact than the Y2k bug of the last century? Are these comparable in any sense?
  

I have a feeling that economics will dominate this race more than anything else. If the migration is going to cost a lot of money for businesses without any added value then there is bound to be a huge pushback. Somehow the cost has to be justified to them to make this transition happen and just saying address space exhaustion may not strike a chord with every business.

The Rise and Fall of Gas!

People who have been following the economy know the state of gas (petrol) prices. But, I can provide a visual reinforcement of that fact, clearly showing the bumpy ride that gas prices have followed over the year. The following graph is plotted using data collected by me over the last one year on gas prices in the Southern California region (in Los Angeles County and Orange County). The way i collect the data is by diligently recording the date, the mileage since the last fuel fill, price of gas, gallons filled and location every time i visit a gas station to refill my car . This data helps me keep a check on my car's fuel efficiency and also serves as an early warning diagnostic system for problems. (As an aside, i once noted a consistent drop in my mileage over a period of 2-3 weeks. It turned out to be due to carbon buildup in my EFI system. Quick action probably helped me save some engine life :) ).

The plot clearly shows that gas prices started around $3.0 per gallon beginning of year, climbed all the way upto $4.7 / gallon in mid of 2008 and are falling to less than $3.0 / gallon at the end of year.

Can one predict which direction the curve is headed now ? I cannot.

The Anonymity Paradox

Scott McNealy, the former founder CEO of Sun Microsystems, once famously remarked on Privacy : 'Get over it'. This was a very bold statement to make especially for the CEO of a reputed company but he nevertheless spoke out of his experience. Its almost ten years since that statement was made and anyone who even barely uses the internet today wouldnt disagree much with Scott, though all of us would still want to believe in a perfect world.

As an aside, Privacy and anonymity are closely linked though there are subtle differences. Anonymity is keeping ones identity secret while privacy can imply keeping identity plus other information secret. For the purposes of this post i will consider privacy and anonymity the same and use them interchangebly.
In my opinion, privacy and connectivity are complimentary ideas i.e. both cannot coexist. The moment you are connected to the internet, your privacy ceases to exist. I believe that this is an unfortunate but true fact and one that people often find hard to digest. But believe it or not, total privacy does not exist in a connected world. At some level, privacy is just like security i.e. there is nothing like total privacy just as there is nothing like total security.

I can offer many reasons for this :

• Every time we do an online transaction and give out our Name, Address and Credit Card details, we are essentially "hoping" and trusting that the website will not leak out our data. Some informed users may go one step further and check if the website displays a secure logo like HackerSafe or McAfee Secure etc. Unfortunately, as detailed in this blog, it turns out that these certifications are mostly useless and can be easily sidestepped.
  

But name, address and credit cards are not the only definitions of identity and hence privacy. There are still many ways of inferring identity. A few of them are :

• Almost all websites that you browse will always log your IP address which can always reveal you or your ISP or your Organization. That is, you can almost always be tracked back.
• With the explosion of social networks and Wikis, we are getting into the habit of revealing too much information about ourselves, our families, pets and everything that was once personal to us to a much wider audience. This voluntary discloure of information is in effect resulting in very complex attacks on privacy as witnessed in the Sarah Palin and Paris Hilton case.
  
• The notion of Googling for information has caught on so much that we inadvertently reveal "stuff" about ourselves to google when we type in the search bar.
• Every time we open our gmail account and browse our emails, we also get with it some relevant advertisements placed alongside our emails. What this means is that there is a program out there that is parsing our emails and trying to "understand" us.
  
• Websites that measure website usage statistics such as Google Analytics also impact privacy in some way by storing information about your visits to websites(tracked by your IP) on its servers.

All this is fine, but where is the paradox in all this?

To state simply, my Anonymity Paradox is :

While it is difficult to maintain anonymity on the internet for the common user, the same internet offers a magical cloak of anonymity for hackers.

I was myself amazed when this realization struck me. Users find it difficult to keep their identies secret but hackers get away with their mischief without hardly ever being tracked down. The big reason for existence of the malicious hacking industry is because of this cloakability that the internet offers. Purists might argue that the law has been able to track down hackers but i do not think they will disagree over the fact that the ratio of captures to hacking incidents is very apalling at best. Hackers typically get caught when they themselves make a stupid mistake which compromises their anonymity (for instance see how Palins hacker was caught).

So at one end we have people cribbing about privacy on the internet while at the other end we have bad elements basking in the glory of the anonymous internet. To me, it looks like this is the way it is going to stay. Just like fire does not know intent and it just burns whatever it is asked to burn, the internet just does what its being asked to.

Does this all make sense ?