Culture and Identity

Culture is our identity no matter where you go and where you work... if anything that makes you unique, defines what you are and know where you belong is your culture.

You feel all the more when you are in foreign country as you identify yourself first as an indian and when people first notice you as an indian, you realise you represent your country ...  the culture, the values that  makes us unique and identifies being your self, an Indian.

The challenge always is how do we uphold this culture  that makes us unique living abroad, how do we imbibe the same in our kids and make ourselves and others proud of what we are.

There are many ways you could do so and one of them for sure celebrate our own festivals at home and teach your kids what does it mean, show them and make them feel part of it.

Here are pics of some of our eco friendly Ganesha (Self Hand made chalk piece Ganesha)with backdrop as Swiss Alps :-) and aniamals (courtesy my daughter)

Ganpati Bappa Morya, Pudhchya Varshi Lavkar Ya :-)

P.S to know more about this festival, you can find here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganesh_Chaturthi

My Daughter's 10 days @Cisco: Aspire to Inspire

i have completed 10 yrs in Europe on work permit... more than half of my professional career i have spent in this part of the world.

world as i see now is like a global village, well connected through internet, each one boasts of having friends and family across the world, reaching out to them anytime anywhere on anymedia ...thanks to internet ... and more than the land and the oceans, its internet that connects the world.

the country you reside and work (karmabhumi)is as close to you as much as your home country  but the connection you have with country you reside and  work still remains a dotted line connection in practise... And we do need reforms in immigration to really make you feel you are part of a global village ... we sincerely need more than just a virtual connection here.

It feels more when you apply for visa for your family members to visit here on important occasions... they go through the same visa process and nothi

ng matters and it just works the same way always ... It was one of those occasions when visa for my family (my sister who was suppose to accompany my parents) did not go through as smoothly as you expect it to be, which actually had impact on our summer vacation plans for my daughter ... this is still indeed foreign country and with no family support system around it makes it a bit tough at times.

since i had no other plans for my daughter who is 4 yrs old,  i gave her options to choose from

1) summer camp
2) at friend's place while both of us at work
3) work with dad at office

And since it was my fault of not planning B's well enough i gave her freedom to choose from. Moreover, I like to take her own decisions and stick to it. She was very much interested in option 3. Initially i thought it is very difficult but it was so good for both of us and especially for me.

She had got a badge from Cisco during Christmas party and she remembered to carry it with her pretty much the same way i do. She swiped it at main entrance along with mine and she had this tremendous satisfaction that it worked.

she carried with herself her bag which had almost everything she needed to spend her day with me. When we entered the office, she was bit shy to wish folks at reception and then went dancing to press the lift button as if no is watching her

As she made herself comfortable in the chair and laying around her belongings, i gave her some white papers and showing her old drawings, i told her if you draw good enough, i will put them on the desk and here are the rules

1) you don't shout or make noise that would disturb others
2) stay focussed on ur work while I do my work
3) if you want to go to toilet, we go to Gent's toilet and its all the same inside.
4) if you need anything, do let me know.

we went around to have some water and tea, when my colleagues saw little one with me, they were amused and started giving her pencil/colors/pens to make her feel comfortable. She was really enjoying the attention she was getting.

She used to stay quite at desk while i used to go for 15mts scrum meeting and one of the occasions when our director saw her  her alone at my desk and he then took her to his office and showed her owl sketch hanging in his office and gave her paper and pens and asked her to draw... she really enjoyed that outing and she was very proud that she met my big boss and spent time with him when i later told her the same.

believe me she used to accompany me for long meeting and come with me do her job sitting with me , my colleagues were surprised and equally amused to see her incredibly silent.

we used to break early for lunch to coincide with her lunch timings. we used to take her scooter while going for lunch so she gets to play a bit and we explored almost all hotels in rolle and especially vegetarian food and she thoroughly enjoyed the change. After lunch we used to walk a bit across lake watch fishes in the lake and enjoy good weather back to work.

once we came back to work i used remind her the same rules.

I took her to lab since I had to work in lab to wire testbeds, she found it bit noisy but she could speak up at her natural self. She attended our sprint planning meeting for 2 hours, sitting in one corner and drawing quietly, but listening to what we were discussing, i realised that later she asked me lot of technical questions related to what we discussed. She still remembers this very long meeting and told me she does not like long meetings and they should be short. She was very excited to see one of my colleagues she knew on telepresence unit dialling from India. She attended our technical discussions and was very curious to know what we are doing and how we do and asking me later why did you guys discuss it that way and what were you explaining on the board. She really co-operated and more than one way she helped me do my job well.

At office she was a source of inspiration and energy for me and sitting just there next to me. I hardly step out when i'm at work but she made me explore restaurants and walk around a bit which in turn helped me and she enjoyed the change too. And at office with every one showing lot of care and appreciation for she was looking forward to coming everyday.

My wife is a doctor and she had been with her too but when someone asks her what she wants to be, she is very quick to say she wants to be an engineer and wants to work for Cisco. Hats off to her and all girls and working women. With her, as young as her  i realised, they are so focussed on what they do, so caring, so co-operative, listening, disciplined, energetic, outgoing and perfectionist .. we just need more of them. I remember one of my female colleagues remarked when I told her that my daughter is accompanying me at work, she said "by bringing her, you are doing a favour to Cisco".

Resiliency And Software Maintenance Updates: Customer Delight

Having worked for a long on Service Provider arena for most of my career, I have experienced on numerous occasion  why customers in service provide segment like to build resilient network and why would they like to have resilient upgrade path.

I started my career implementing service provider networks for TATA Teleservices  where I was part of the team who built big optical and data networks and maintained it, watched them grow from small customer base to millions, watched getting those networks commissioned and watched them go live and watched them go down, watched them get choked on new years eve and on important occasions on calendar,  watched my colleagues sitting in Operations Maintenance Centre monitoring network and handling various alarms reported from the devices in the field close and 100s of Km apart day and night, watched network engineers worked day and night to keep these networks up and running. When I look back now I feel  this was one of the most defining phases of my career which helps me connect easily with customer and more importantly with their networks for I understand what is going through their minds and how does it affect them and how they evaluate and believe in the devices and software that runs on them.

Back in 2006 when I was working for Alcatel-Lucent as a contractor through Aricent,  there was an under sea earthquake off Taiwan that disrupted telecommunications network across Asia leading to huge network down time and consequently monetary losses and virtual cut off with the rest of the world and it was realisation during those times that  how much are we dependent on these human network lifeline and how they have become integral part of our life. It was during this time that I was working on building transmission protection SNCP, 1+1/1:1/1:N MSP and MS-SPRING/BLSR ring architecture and very soon after that we had delivered transoceanic protocol with extra traffic. It was very exciting to be part of this journey with Alcatel-Lucent to make networks more resilient and contributing in a way to keep the human network lifeline healthy

Another important thing that i learned over the years is how difficult it is for a customer to upgrade their network. There are many factors associated to this.  Each release brings along set of features even if you don't need all of them and these features may linked to each other and could potentially introduce regression. In spite of this release going through a strict quality control, each release gets soaked internally at customer location as well before it is decided as worthy for upgrade and upgrade itself goes over a long time as there are usually hundreds or thousands of these devices that customer location that need to go through upgrade and the risk associated with those upgrades is very high as the newer release has to work with old one and the longer the time it takes, higher the risk associated with it. And no device in the network works as standalone,  each end to end operation involves  at least more than one device as most of the features are network feature. Also these devices are hundreds or kilometres apart with no good reachability and hence there is lot of operational costs that is associated with network upgrades and huge risk that could potentially bring down the network. So there is a tendency that customers don't like to upgrade unless there is a good reason. Each release has typically at least 2-3 yrs of life. But at the same time customer would like to have smaller maintenance units which are critical bug fixes which are discovered after the software is released. So it helps customers to have an option to go for these smaller software maintenance unit to make the existing release more robust and quickly test and adapt to it than waiting for the next release.

Again its not just the service provider segment that are conservative in going for newer releases but even its the same for enterprise customers as well.

Again it was very exciting to be part of Nexus 7.2 history which enabled software maintenance unit functionality which allows customer to take critical bug fixes and when we release those features that help customer build more resilient and more robust networks is always delighting as you know you are contributing to human network lifeline.

Google Your Career @Google

Sometimes when you connect to linked in, you see those random job openings ... may be i have subscribed for them but that's about it that i like to keep myself up to date on the kind of openings in this region which matches my skill set.

but now you see those job advertisements customised with your picture in it "picture yourself @ google",  grow your career by following google et al.  First of all i have uploaded my picture in the profile just to show who am I but this does not mean i have given permission so that it can be used in random adds like this and i'm not sure if our pictures are getting used elsewhere. We need to have basic social networking ethics even on for the services which come for free.

i don't know if linked in does it or google but either way this is a cheap advertisement.

i'm least interested in job @google, what the heck but let me see what it is so as a curiosity i do open the link. I see they have openings for software engineers and there are 645 applicants. That's like Wow! I wonder if they use their search engine to find the right candidate with so many applicants :-). One reason could be weak job description or poor filtering and i just closed it before even wanting to know more. In my point of view it lacks basics.

one of the reasons i joined Cisco was because of the job description, it was impressive in a way to make you feel "you want to be there" than just "picture yourself at cisco"

Facebook Showcase 6 Pack Abs

When I read this news about facebook coming up with 6 pack switches, it sounded as funny as facebook trying to show 6 pack abs  to already established networking giants. I don't know why some companies dare to get into an area which is not even remotely adjacent. The only adjacency i can think of is facebook is social "networking" giant but that's about it. They just can not compete with networking giants and in fact there is not even a comparison.  There is a lot of difference between building a networking device and creating social networking service on top of it

If I was one of the facebook investors, I would be really worried about my stakes.  Knowing they are using their own devices to manage their social networking infra structure, what guarantee can you provide for quality of service. Any service provider as a matter of fact does not ideally use their own infra structure but relies on one and more external vendors to build resilient network and provide quality of service.

It's time facebook focuses more on improving their social networking service to stay afloat and they can not afford to add infrastructure level issues. I hope they don't take user granted for quality of service and performance they would eventually provide to end user on their own infrastructure. They should realise that they are in a space where it takes less time to go to dust than to rise.

I wonder if facebook really cares. Thankfully I quit facebook but when you see next time facebook is down or slow, you know who to blame.

What do customer really want?

I always wonder "What do customer really want?"

These days I have been working on a seemingly simple feature called IP SLA.

In simple words it provides and end user  a way to troubleshoot diagnose real time performance and responsiveness issues for various applications and services and it can monitor network performance continuously reliably and predictably and notify issues noticed in monitoring proactively to end user

Don't go by name IP SLA, as you clearly see it does more than that.

But at it its core it i still a simple feature as you think and there is no doubt about it

But then I was astonished to see how customers are using it. We have a techzone forum where we handle customer queries and issues found in the field by our customers. Thankfully this forum brings us closer to our customers. As a developer we lack application view of how the features that we develop are actually getting used  in the field. But at the same it is important for a developer to know this as we can incorporate the lessons we learn when we design our new features and also important to fuel new innovation as without this feedback loop we would not know what actually customer want?

So we thought IP SLA is simple but customer uses it to drive critical application like HSRP.
Customers use IPSLA to monitor active and standby intefaces to drive redundancy in HSRP.

You would obviously wonder why do they not use BFD (Since I work on IP SLA, I'm happy that they are using IPSLA ;-))but my guess is BFD comes at cost of performance which not all end devices can afford.

This is indeed a big shift to use IPSLA to check connectivity to monitor connectivity of an interface continuously to drive redundancy which calls for an extra accuracy and reliability.


So what do customers really want?
An integrated solution which improves build resilient network by combining all the features available (here it was a mix of IPSLA/OBJECT TRACKER and HSRP) and more importantly we need to provide ways to help them achieve their goal in simple way which they can afford on any device on network to penetrate even further in network.

Never underestimate any feature no matter how simple it is and for sure when we say this we don't know for sure how it is used and what it means to customers.

Quit Facebook: Turn From Social Being to Human Being

it has been a month since a quit facebook but i dont think i really miss it and instead of "social-being" i'm now turning "human-being" that now i'm getting my emotions back which i had that i like to call friends and meet them and instead of eye to phone contact increase eye to eye contact and get back to the  days when the world was not connected but  people still mattered and were connected with each other and cared for each other

I did it, will you?