Shoaib Abbasi to speak at Tie event in Karachi

A must attend for technogeeks and startup wannabees. From Jehan Ara's email earlier today:

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P@SHA, in collaboration with the Karachi Chapter of TiE, is hosting an interactive session with Mr. Sohaib Abbasi on Wednesday August 2, 2006 from 5 pm to 7 pm.

Venue: Pearl Continental Hotel, Mahnoor Hall, Karachi
Date: Wednesday, August 2 2006
Time: 5 pm - 7 pm (followed by high tea)

For those of you who haven't heard of Sohaib Abbasi, he is currently the Chairman and CEO of Informatica. A 22-year enterprise software industry veteran, Sohaib Abbasi joined Informatica as president and CEO of Informatica in July 2004.Prior to Informatica, Mr. Abbasi spent 20 years at Oracle Corporation where he was most recently a member of Oracle's executive committee and was senior vice president of two major divisions, Oracle Tools and Oracle Education.Mr. Abbasi joined Oracle Corporation in 1982 when it was a 30-person startup and was instrumental in growing the business from $4 million in annual revenues to over $9 billion in revenues and over 42,000 employees worldwide. As part of his contribution, Mr. Abbasi envisioned and launched the Oracle Tools business, which he grew from zero to $3.75 billion in cumulative license revenues.

Mr. Abbasi graduated with honors from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1980, where he earned both a B.S. and an M.S. in computer science.

A little glimpse into 1981, when RSI (as Oracle was known then) released version 2 of what was then called the Oracle database. Sales began growing, but it was still a tough sell to get corporate America to sign on. "To give you an idea of how hard it was, in the first six months we had no sales," said Sohaib Abbasi, who was one of two sales people who started the Midwest office.Abbasi got the idea to build prototypes for different companies they were pitching. "For example, for McDonnell Douglas we put a defective part in the database, then did a query about what other parts would be affected by the defective part," he said.To win over clients, Abbasi then did something unheard of. On sales calls he asked potential customers what kind of information they wanted out of the database and executed a query on the spot. At conferences, he would even ask audience members to come up with questions and he would translate them into queries. This was startling, considering it would take a programmer days or weeks to solve the problem with a conventional database.

Since the September 11 attacks an Islamic studies program and a professorship have been initiated at the prestigious Stanford University, California, with an endowment of US $9 million. A significant aspect of the program is the generous donation of 2.5 million dollars by Sara and Shoaib Abbasi.The support provided by the couple for the program -- Shoaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies -- includes graduate fellowships, research, new library, strengthened language courses at advanced levels and regular public programs such as lecture series by eminent scholars.

At the same time Stanford alumni Lysbeth Warren made a gift of two million dollars for a new professorship on Islam. Both the gifts were matched by the Stanford University with a grant from William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, taking the total amount of endowment for the program and professorship to nine million dollars.

This is a great opportunity for all of us to interact with someone who has 'been there, done that'. He will be talking about where the tech sector is at the moment, what the future looks like for the tech business and what opportunities lie ahead for Pakistan in the next 5 to 10 years. There will be sufficient time set up for a lot of Q&A.Those who are interested please email me at jehan@pasha.org.pk to confirm your participation.

Jerry's note from your business

Jerry is an old friend that I met 4 years ago.

A kindered soul with Swedish/Nordic blood in his veins he resembles your friendly viking warrior (ala the 13th Warrior). 3 years ago Jerry started his own show and recently roped me in with what he calls Notes from your business. What would your business say to you if it had access to outlook express.

Over the last few months, I have started to look forward to Jerry's daily emails. If you run a business and need a shoulder to cry on, download some of your misery or even share a small win, have a chat with Jerry and if you like what you on the sample notes site sign up to receive your daily dosage. The service is free and definitely recommended

The joys of a good team

First time in three and a half year fell sick towards the end of the month and didn't have to worry about showing up for work. If you ever wondered about one good reason to have a good team around, it would be its ability to function in the absence of a core memeber.

Interviewing tips at Alchemy

Went through a batch of new and year old graduates and after parsing (testing, interviewing) 40 odd prospects only made two offers. How do you improve your chances. Here is my first installment of interview questions that I wish candidates would review before walking in for an interview:

1. A small business is a small business. Which means that if you have like structure and clarity you should stay away. If you like chaos and ambiguity, you should apply. Define structure, clarity, chaos and ambiguity?

2. A product focused company is different from a custom software development shop. A product focused company is not a software house. What do you think you will do here that you would not be doing at a software house?

3. Why not some one or some place else? Why Alchemy?

4. How much of a premium are you willing to pay for working with a group that is smarter than you are? How smart are you?

5. What is important to you? When was the last time you compromised on something that was important to you?

6. Are you self aware? Define self aware?

7. Have you had a life changing experience as yet? If not, why not?

Closing sales

There comes a time in a sales conversation when you just have to sitdown, shutup and listen. I still have difficulty accepting the fact that the customer is sold and has made up his mind about the product and the vendor and I should just let him coast to a close.

The other day was interviewing someone for a business development position and thought the candidate had the right attitude and possibly even the right mindset, but acted too much like a sales person. I kept on thinking about what was it that bothered me about him and then realized that a great salesperson does not act like a sales person.

Recommended reading - Closing the complex sale.

Adnan (Ahmed - not Haider) now runs the BMW agency for the Dewan's in Karachi - his two cents - It is all about followup.

Due deligence?

Had our first informal due deligence visit recently. Some one we have been speaking to was in town and dropped by for a day long visit. Here is what came out:

1. Focus and niches are still very much in. Broad brush and shot gun approaches are out.

2. Your strategy needs to relate to your competition. If you differ dramatically you must have a defensible reason for doing things differently and it must be supported by customer validation.

3. Depth in all areas - technology, domain, implementation, business development and recruitment - is required. Miss one and you will have some tough questions to answer.

4. Your pipeline needs to be well defined and well presented. Other than strategy and focus, investors need to understand how your cash flow projections tie back to actual proposals sitting in front of customers.

5. Need to maintain a balance between the soul of the firm and your cash generation function.

Took two days from the entire team. The follow up, if and when it occurs ,will take another week or ten days of serious bandwidth. Will it be worth it? I don't know.

Conclusion: Finding money is not difficult. Finding the right color with the right terms is

Generator redux

The perkins 20 KVA generator consumes 5 liters of diesel per hour, has a 50 liter fuel tank and so far supports

1. 50 plus energy saver lamps
2. 8 fans
3. 3 AC's
4. 2 XEON servers
5. 2 P-4 servers
6. 15 odd pc's
7. 15 flat screen displays
8. 1 - digital printer/scanner/photocopier
9. 1 - Microwave
10. 1 - Electric kettle
11. 1 - Water Cooler
12. 1 - 14 cubic ft fridge

Total load when most of these are turned on is some where between 35 - 45 Amperes. Rough calculations indicate that we could possibly double this load and still be under full capacity.

Before you decide who to buy it from, make sure you understand the terms of delivery, the service and maintenance contract and the depth of the sales and service organization.

Live at CresBank

Customer number three - up and running with Alchemy Risk Manager with daily reports.

Our first implementation took a year, number two - three months, number three - two months. When we first start speaking about a 90 day Basel II implementation schedule, even we had difficulty believing in that vision. Now thanks to both our customers and an amazing team at work, we have finally gone ahead and hit it.

What did it take?

a) I think the biggest driver in shortening the implementation life cycle was direct involvement of the CFO as well as personal interest taken by the President of the Bank.

b) It was easier doing it third time around. We learnt a fair bit during a first two implementation and avoided a number of false starts and hurdles that could potentially slow down implementation timelines.

c) To be fair client number three is also a much smaller bank than the first two so decision making, contract negotiations, information capture, approval of report formats and validation process were speeded up compared to the first two.

International guests

Ashank Desai from Mastek and Wilson Tan from ASOCIO dropped by a for a short visit to our offices on Wednesday. Both were in town for the ASOCIO plenary session hosted in Karachi by PASHA.

Wilson spent a few hours with us on strategy and outlook and takeaways fro his session included a stronger focus on the business case for new projects, a deeper and broader pipeline, requirements for international products (10 - 12 products across 2 - 3 product lines) and an open mind with respect to changes growth will bring.

Ashank focused more on product strategy and managing scope and feature creep as well as the right time to go and raise money. He also spoke about staying true to the culture of your firm by passing on the vision to second and third layer of leadership.

Both made a huge difference in our moral for the day and the week. Wilson and Ashank validated some of the debates we have been having internally and also pointed out ideas for future direction.

A day later NCR-Terra data Area Director from Cyprus dropped by for a site visit and we had an interesting chat about opportunities in Basel II work in Europe and rest of the world.

There is still action in Karachi.