Common Advice

Know what you want
At the beginning or even at the peak of your career, always be clear about what you want:

·         What you want from your job?

·         Why you are doing what you do?

·         When do you need to switch career tracks?

·         Are you doing what you love?

The more you know what you want, the more you will understand yourself.

Why you do what you do
Faced with challenges or even when you are far along any endeavor, remind yourself why you’re doing what you do.

·         You will have a clear perspective of the direction you are heading towards.

·         You will have a better focus and not lose sight of what you truly want.

·         Doing this at intervals is very crucial because we easily tend to lose sight of our roots

·         This will help you to never forget where you come from and the reason for your actions.

Check your quadrant
Be a “first quadrant person”. On a graph-chart there four quadrants.

1.    The “+ +” first quadrant of the top left is an analogy for people who succeed and help people around them to succeed too.

2.    The “+ -” second quadrant represents people who succeed by sabotaging their colleagues.

3.    The “- +” third quadrant signifies people who don’t succeed but allow others to step on their accomplishments to succeed.

4.    The “- -” fourth quadrant represents people who don’t succeed and won’t let their colleagues succeed either.

If you are going to follow the quadrant theory, do your best to be in the first quadrant.

Do what you love
Do your best to find what you love doing and accomplish it.

·         If you have found your passion in life, you are the lucky one.

·         If you haven’t, you might as well start enjoying what you already do.

·         After all, no job is insignificant.

Make friends at your work place and it will probably be like the boring math lecture that you enjoyed simply because your closest pals were around you.

The Big Picture

The world’s ‘digital universe’ will grow to 8 ZB by 2015. While this figure is very daunting, the bigger challenge is the different data forms and formats within that 8 ZB data. IDC predicts that by 2015, over 90 percent of that data will be unstructured. Just think, every 60 seconds, the world generates massive amounts of unstructured data:

§ 98,000+ tweets.

§ 695,000 Facebook status updates.

§ 11,000,000,000 instant messages.

§ 168,000,000,000+ emails sent.

§ 1,820,000,000,000+ bytes of data created.

§ Surveillance Footage: Generic metadata (date, time, location, etc.) is automatically attached to video files. However as IP cameras continue to proliferate, there is a greater opportunity to embed more intelligence into the camera on the edges so that footage can be captured, analysed, and tagged in real time. This type of tagging can expedite crime investigations for security insights, enhance retail analytics for consumer traffic patterns and of course improve military intelligence as videos from drones across multiple geographies are compared for pattern correlations, crowd emergence and response or measuring the effectiveness of counterinsurgency. 

§ Embedded and Medical Devices: In future, sensors of all types including those that may be implanted into the body will capture vital and non-vital biometrics, track medicine effectiveness, correlate bodily activity with health, monitor potential outbreaks of viruses, etc. all in real time thereby realising automated healthcare with prediction and precaution. 

§ Entertainment and Social Media: Trends based on crowds or massive groups of individuals can be a great source of big data to help bring to market the "next big thing," help pick winners and losers in the stock market, and even predict the outcome of elections all based on information users freely publish through social outlets. 

§ Consumer Images: We say a lot about ourselves when we post pictures of ourselves or our families or friends. A picture used to be worth a thousand words but the advent of big data has introduced a significant multiplier. The key will be the introduction of sophisticated tagging algorithms that can analyse images either in real time when pictures are taken or uploaded or en masse after they are aggregated from various Websites.

§ Virtualized: A converged infrastructure requires the virtualization of all heterogeneous resources: compute, storage, networking, and I/O. Virtualization separates the applications, data, and network connections from the underlying hardware, thereby making it easier and faster to reallocate resources to match the changing performance, throughput, and capacity needs of individual applications. This end-to-end virtualization improves IT flexibility and response to business requests, ultimately improving business speed and agility.

§ Resilient: A converged infrastructure integrates non-stop technologies and high availability policies. Because diverse applications share virtualized resource pools, a converged infrastructure must have an operating environment that automates high-availability policies to meet SLAs. A resilient, converged infrastructure provides the right level of availability for each business application.

§ Open: Products are being built using open standards. This avoids vendor lock-in. Also interoperability and portability are easily accomplished. 


§ Orchestrated: A converged infrastructure orchestrates the business request with the applications, data, and infrastructure. It defines the policies and service levels through automated workflows, provisioning, and change management design by IT and the business. Orchestration provides an application-aligned infrastructure that can be scaled up or down based on the needs of each application. Orchestration also provides centralized management of the resource pool, including billing, metering, and chargeback for consumption. 

§ Modular: A converged infrastructure is built on modular design principles based on open and interoperable standards. A modular approach allows IT to integrate new technologies with existing investments without having to start over. This approach also gives IT the ability to extend new capabilities and to scale capacity over time.