TESCO and its IT Generated Advantage…

To analyze the IT Generated Advantage of TESCO, let’s take a look at the various fields of technology where it has operated/invested till now.  In 2001, for the first time TESCO became involved in the Internet grocery retailing. It obtained a 35% stake in GroceryWorks. In October 2003 the company launched a UK telecoms division, comprising mobile and home phone services. In 2004 it launched a broadband service. It also offers and Internet based DVD rental service. Tesco also increased their online presence with its flagship F&F and Cherokee clothing lines.

Tesco.com’s success in the online grocery field really showcases their IT Generated advantage over other competitors. With annualized sales of more than £500 million, Tesco.com is the world’s largest online grocer. Presently, it has more than 3 million registered customers, and delivers 120,000 grocery orders per week. The company also started using Google Adwords in late 2003.

Stewart Hunter, Tesco's Online Advertising Manager, wanted to take advantage of AdWords' ability "to promote our non-food businesses as well as to target customers in a more cost-effective way." He adds that a key measure for Tesco is its return on investment (ROI): "if it's not cost effective, we won't do it," he says.

"We've witnessed dramatic increases in driving traffic with online advertising during the key campaigns we've run," says Hunter. "Google has delivered really well for us on electricals, for example, and is very good at driving trade for us during specific occasions. Over Mother's Day, we were able to drive 15,000 visits over a two-week window and saw a conversion rate to sales as good as any advertising we undertook. These were cost-effective sales for us. They surpassed our internal sales targets."

Tesco has also upgraded their IT infrastructure in collaboration with Microsoft technologies. Since the arrival of the ITAP advisor and by using Microsoft enterprise IT management framework, Tesco.com has seen significant improvement in how it plans, manages, and delivers architecture. In particular, better alignment and integration with the business, and establishing a dedicated enterprise architecture capabilities, processes, and standards.

TCP SYN ATTACK: A Form of DDOS Attack

A Syn-Attack is a form of Denial-of-Service Attack. In this type of attack the attacker sends a flood of Syn Packets to the target machine and brings it down. To understand this attack in a better way we need to take a look at the connection initiation phase of TCP protocol. When a client attempts to establish a connection with the server through TCP, both the client and the server needs to go through a 3-way handshake phase. The steps shown below demonstrate the 3-way handshake:

1.   The client requests a connection by sending a SYN (synchronize) message to the server.

2.   The server acknowledges this request by sending SYN-ACK back to the client.

3.   The client responds with an ACK, and the connection is established.

 In a TCP SYN attack the attacker exploits the first step of the 3-way handshake protocol. When he pumps a flood of SYN packets to the victim machine, the victim machine sends ACK back to the client for all the millions of SYNs it received. It not only sends the ACK back, but the server also expects a response from the client. Hence the connections are half-open at this stage, which basically translates into consumption of a huge chunk of memory. After some time when the whole memory is used up, the server can no longer accept new incoming connections. So, all the legitimate users are blocked from using the server’s services. This is clearly a form of Denial of Service attack.

There are several ways in which this attack can be mitigated. One of the methods which I worked on is by using Syn-Cookies. In this case, when a client sends a SYN to the server the server acknowledges the SYN by sending an ACK with a cookie value set. The client has to respond back to the server using the same cookie. Otherwise the connections will be dropped. Moreover, if the client doesn’t respond back in a stipulated time frame, the half-open connection will be closed too. In this way the attack can be thwarted quite comprehensively. I used to work on this feature while working on a Cisco Product called Application Control Engine (Cisco ACE). During the testing phase, I used to generate millions of syn packets to attack the ACE, but the syn-cookie feature was very stable and I could crash the system only once :D.

I know I have used a lot of technical terms in this blog. If any of my class mates is interested in learning this is detail I will be happy to help.

Should Companies Adapt to ERP or the other way round?

ERP or Enterprise Resource Planning software according to Wikipedia definition

“is an Integrated computer-based system used to manage internal and external resources including tangible assets, financial resources, materials, and human resources. It is a software architecture whose purpose is to facilitate the flow of information between all business functions inside the boundaries of the organization and manage the connections to outside stakeholders. Built on a centralized database and normally utilizing a common computing platform, ERP systems consolidate all business operations into a uniform and enterprise wide system environment.”

In short ERP helps to integrate the data in an organization in a single database so that various departments can more easily share information and communicate with each other.

The purpose behind is not only to ensure transparency but also to facilitate tracking down information regarding the status of a particular   order or its dispatch and other related operations.

In my view companies should actually put in effort to adapt to ERP solutions. The company should train itself and learn the various pros and cons of ERP solutions out in the market and make a correct decision while choosing the correct ERP platform. No company can progress further without properly grasping the ERP fundamentals. The Company has to properly understand ERP fundamentals in order to derive the maximum outcome. These are crucial factors deserving attention when it comes to ERP. The services of ERP cannot happen all on a sudden in an organization. It is a long drawn process .The spade work that needs to be done may require a couple of months and even years depending on issues like volume of the organization. Meticulous planning will definitely help to achieve ERP benefit.

Companies have to be vigilant enough more so when it comes to the question of choosing the appropriate platforms and ERP software. This issue becomes crucial when it comes to the point of corporate amalgamation. The software used by the different companies have to be brought under one common platform.

In more simple terms, ERP is software that has been designed to function in a certain way, obviously taking into account the needs of the customers. Companies who want to centralize their operations using ERP solutions should seek proper help with training and planning from the ERP solution providers. Once they are convinced and ready to adapt to the solution, they should go ahead and implement ERPs.

Let’s also consider the scenario, where the ERP solutions are customized to meet the needs of each company. First of all in this case, companies again have to go through the fundamentals of the ERP software to understand the implementation to use the solution correctly. Moreover, there is no end to customer demands and it will be very difficult to for the ERP solution providers to match all the needs of the customers.

To conclude, I feel that there should be a balance from both sides. ERP solution providers should design the software keeping in view the needs of customers and the companies should adapt their organization to be able to use this solution productively.

Facebook's Challenges for future

Facebook has become a phenomenon in the Internet Social Networking space growing massively. Recently they touched 400 million users figure. But, while Facebook dominates the US social networking market, similar international networking platforms are keeping a global monopoly on virtual social life out of reach for the California-based company. Facebook faces some strong challenges ahead of them for their future growth. Last year, they filed a lawsuit against German Social Network, StudiVZ for the violation of copyright laws, because of mimicking of its logo, features and services.And to add to their woes, StudiVZ has already 5.5 million users as compared to 2.2 million users of Facebook in the same areas. Facebook has to somehow find out a way to thwart these kind of copyright violations in future. Otherwise, it might prove costly to them in future.

Moreover, Facebook faces some strong competition from other popular social networking platforms like Orkut, Hi5, Bebo. Orkut has a strong presence in the South American and Indian market. Bebo has become extremely popular in the United Kingdom and Australia.  These platforms are a real threat to Facebook's global aspirations. Facebook should find out innovative ways to move ahead in future and maintain their exponential growth.

One of the right steps that they took yesterday, was to forge a deep integration with Yahoo. Users will now be able to log into Facebook from their Yahoo homepage. Facebook will benefit a lot from this partnership, because they will now have access to Yahoo's global market presence.

DIFFICULT ROAD AHEAD OF GOOGLE??

Google: One of the most powerful brands of the world…4^th best to work for…Internet’s most visited website…and the saga of success continues for this amazing company.

But when I decided to take a closer look at Google’s innovation success in the past 12 years of their existence and some of their future plans, the picture didn’t seem that rosy as I had expected it to be.

Some of the key issues that I observed during my analysis are:

Are they really successful with their “innovative” products?

Google has released a large number of products in the market over the past. But apart from their Search Engine, Gmail and google maps, most of their products have not done well. Google Chrome has only around 7% of the market share. The Android market share over IPhone is not as impressive as one would have expected.  Their Spreadsheet also didn’t do that good business as expected. Their NexusOne mobile phone also tanked in terms of usage and sales. Even one of their biggest revenue generators (youtube) was a result of acquisition. Now with facebook having captured the social networking market completely, and orkut usage dropping every single day, they sure realize the incoming threat. They have to lead the market in innovation if they are to maintain their growth in the long term.

Privacy Issues:

This is known to everyone. Google doesn’t handle the privacy of its users very well. Either through google chrome, cookies, mail snooping or surveillance of wifi networks they have breached the privacy on numerous occasions. Recently, it was disclosed that google had collected about 600 gigabytes of data from users of public WIFI stations during 2006-2010!! They really have a lack of concern for the user data and try to use the data to their maximum advantage.

One thing that will be interesting to observe in future is if google actually innovates more in future or relies more on acquisitions. I expect more leadership in terms of innovation from one of the leading brands in the market.