How about a data Web that understands not only the meaning of data but also the relationships between them like humans do?  Something that ensures targeted and personalized content delivery to the user, delivering intelligent data in its true sense. A Web that anticipates and answers your questions even before you come up with them! Semantic Web or Web 3.0 does it all through use of hyper-structures leading to entities of hypertext.

Semantic Web and Enterprises

To remain competitive in the marketplace, enterprises need to effectively use information to make better decisions. Enterprises in general collect and analyze large amounts of ever changing information from multiple sources, available in multiple formats. However, for the enterprises, the need is for actionable information which can help them build competitive advantage. This is where Semantic Web technology comes into play for an organization. (more…)

This post is in continuation of the earlier post on HTML5. Before looking into the day-to-day benefits HTML5 will offer, let’s do a quick sanity check:

• HTML5 is monolithic, but browsers are not. It is misleading to divide browsers into “Supports Vs Not”.  Instead, individual HTML5 feature support should be evaluated in terms of browsers.
• HTML5 is fully backward compatible. You can simply upgrade your doctype to HTML5 without changing any underlying code; the page is still valid and will still work. There is no need to panic or to throw away any page! (more…)

HTML5 is W3C’s shiny new offering promising interoperability, speed and maintainability – almost everything, it would appear, but vacations in the tropics! It is going to live in ‘Webville’ for a while so let’s really get to know it. Sure, we can break the ice talking about the weather worldwide, but then, let’s really dig down and investigate HTML5’s personality and find out exactly what it can do. Chances are you may have already used HTML5 without realizing it, and chances are, you loved it – e.g., the file drag-and-drop feature in Google Docs. HTML5 was preceded by its reputation; now let us see if it delivers!

HTML5 will make web pages portable across devices, platforms and form factors – an idea that supports convergence with the proliferation of tablets and smart phones. Problems of varying resolutions can be artfully handled through use of related technologies like Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs). The fact that all browsers will support HTML5 represents the holy grail of page styling and interface design – i.e., cross browser compatibility, which means no more hacks, browser-sniffing or code-branching. (more…)

With the world becoming connected through social media platforms and the use of internet more extensive than ever, there has been a massive explosion of data and content. This has led to an unprecedented need for scaling solutions that store and process data. The traditional approach to address such data growth is to buy progressively more powerful hardware until the database can serve all the traffic.

Even larger companies have dealt with the horror of this scalability as they resorted to using traditional relational databases, eventually hitting limits that were unviable both financially and operationally. Google once ran off of 40,000 MySQL installations and Facebook was at one point spending $1M per month for specialized database hardware to serve their pictures.  These unviable solutions led to a re-evaluation of existing database technologies and led to the Not-Only-SQL (NoSQL)  movement. (more…)

This post marks Virtusa’s fiftieth blog posting.  Starting in April of 2010, Virtusan’s have offered their insights into a wide variety of technology issues, trends and business challenges.  It seems fitting that our half century mark should come at the end of calendar year 2010.

The year 2010 saw the arrival of the mobile app as an indisputable force to be reckoned with.  With iPhone and Android app stores carrying hundreds of thousands of applications each, there is no denying that apps have arrived.  As we watch new mobile devices, new social sites, and slick new apps being released with blinding speed we are quite possibly witnessing an inflection point in human history.  Consider this time the dawn of the true technology era.  Like the Italian Renaissance, we have our artists and visionaries.  Instead of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo in Italy we have Gates, Jobs, Berners-Lee, Metcalf, Joy, Torvalds, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC and Silicon Valley.  One hundred years from now historians may look back at this time and declare this period of time the start of the technology revolution.  Star Wars and Matrix are our Mona Lisa and statue of David?  Scary.

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Innovation is ingrained in all aspects of business and needs to be promoted, prompted and nurtured as a culture and a conscious activity. Most enterprises are facing the question of how do we bring a discipline around innovation and facilitate the process so that it does not remain as a branding or R&D activity.

As we scan the different industry segments, there are processes that cut across lead-to-order, order -to-cash, and trouble-to-resolve areas in all organizations. Each of these broader areas consists of many individual processes. In each of these processes, there is an opportunity to identify gaps or improvement areas around which innovation can be triggered. What are the innovation drivers? Launch of new products, improving the speed to market, optimizing costs, improving user experience and creating new markets are some of the drivers. Every step in an existing process that touches one of these should be tagged for promoting innovation. (more…)

Last week’s ITxpo Symposium in Cannes drew more than three thousand attendees, over half of which were senior level IT executives.  The conference agenda offered insights into future trends in typical Gartner fashion – high impact, broad sweeping trends combined with business imperatives.  There were three themes that were repeated many times – application retirement, a new era of enterprise application and innovation.. (more…)