Chirag Mehta
Technology, Design, and Innovation strategist at the Office of the CEO, SAP, focusing on technology and architecture strategy and strategic operational, product, and management innovation. Adjunct faculty at Santa Clara University and San Jose State University with the department of computer engineering teaching graduate classes. Frequent speaker at conferences, special events, Chirag blogs at Cloud Computing.
Loving What I Do For Living
A few months back, I was helping a very large customer of ours to help simplify as well as automate their process of trading financial instruments. During one of my many visits to their office, I met a person who was trying to explain to me his job in supporting the people that are involved [...]
Design thinking: A New Approach To Fight Complexity And Failure
Photo credit: String Theory by Michael KrigsmanThe endless succession of failed projects forces one to question why success is elusive, with an extraordinary number of projects tangling themselves in knots. These projects are like a child’s string ga…
Coming To A Place Near You: A Private Cloud Spiked With Big Data
Netflix similarity map Yesterday, I moderated a couple of panels at the Big Data Cloud event. I have been a keynote speaker, panelist, moderator, and participant for many conferences in the last few years. It has always been a pleasure to see the cloud and big data becoming more and more mainstream. Here are my [...]
Early Signs Of Big Data Going Mainstream
Today, Cloudera announced a new $40m funding round to scale their sales and marketing efforts and a partnership with NetApp where NetApp will resell Cloudera’s Hadoop as part of their solution portfolio. These both announcements are critical to where the cloud and Big Data are headed. Big Data going mainstream: Hadoop and MapReduce are not [...]
Bangalore Embodies The Silicon Valley
I spent a few days in Bangalore this month. This place amazes me every single time I visit it. Many people ask me whether I think Bangalore has potential to be the next Silicon Valley. I believe, it’s a wrong question. There’s some seriously awesome talent in India, especially in Bangalore. Don’t copy the Silicon Valley. [...]
Make To Think And Think To Make
I’m a passionate design thinker and I practice design thinking at any and all opportunities. Design thinking is part art and part science. John Maeda is one of my favorite thought leaders on design. He published a post talking about art as a form of asking “what do I want to know” rather than “what [...]
Disrupt Yourself Before Others Disrupt You: DVD To Streaming Transition Is Same As On-Premise To Cloud
Recently, Netflix separated their streaming and DVD subscription plans. As per Netflix’s forecast, they will lose about 1 million subscribers by the end of this quarter. The customers did not like what Netflix did. A few days back, Netflix’s CEO, Reed Hastings, wrote a blog post explaining why Netflix separated their plans. He also announced [...]
Freemium Is The New Piracy In The SaaS World
It is estimated that approximately 41% of revenue, close to $53 billion, is “lost” in software piracy. This number is totally misleading since it assumes that all the people who knowingly or unknowingly pirated software would have bought the software at the published price had they not pirated it. RIAA also applies the same nonsense [...]
Life Is Too Short To Remove A USB Stick Safely
Today, Steve Jobs resigned as a CEO of Apple. I think I will remember this day and so will others. “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do [...]
Parallelism On The Cloud And Polygot Programmers
I am very passionate about the idea of giving developers the control over parallelism without them having to deal with the underlying execution semantics of their code. The programming languages and the constructs, today, are designed to provide abstraction, but they are not designed to estimate the computational complexity and dependencies. The frameworks such as [...]
Designing Terms Of Service Is As Important As Designing A Product
Dropbox revised their Terms of Service (TOS) over the long weekend. That triggered a flurry of activities on Twitter. Dave Winer even deleted his Dropbox account saying that he would revisit it once the dust settles. A lot of people concluded that there’s nothing wrong in the new TOS and that people are simply overreacting. [...]
5 Techniques To Deal With Spam: Open Letter To Twitter
I love Twitter, but lately, I am getting annoyed by Twitter spam and I’m not the only one. I don’t want Twitter spam to become email spam. I don’t want to whine about that either, so I spent some time thinking about what Twitter could do to deal with spam. Consider this an open letter [...]
Social Shaming
An interaction designer, Joshua Kaufman, had his MacBook stolen a few days back. He is a smart dude. He had installed an app called Hidden on his MacBook before it was stolen. He tracked down the thief and asked the Oakland PD to catch him. They said n…
Disruptive Cloud Start-Ups – Part 1: NimbusDB
Being at Under The Radar (UTR), watching disruptive companies present and network with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and venture capitalists is an annual tradition that I don’t miss. I have blogged about disruptive start-ups that I saw in the previous years. The biggest exit out of UTR, that I have witnessed so far, is Salesforce.com’s $212 [...]
Gamification Of Enterprise Applications
Gamification is a hot topic for consumer applications. It is changing the way the companies, especially the start-ups, design their applications. The primary drivers behind revenue and valuation of consumer software companies are number of users, traff…
