Author: LZRVC

ChinaIT: Geak (果壳)

2014, August 31

The gadget of 2014 is definitely not a smartphone, but a smartwatch. If the revenues of the global watch industry are stable at around $60B, the smartwatch market has been increasing tenfold per year and is estimated to reach $2.5B in 2014.

Among the companies that offer innovative products, Shanghai-based Geak company is forerunner in one domain: they are preparing to be first in the world to launch the round face smartwatch in September 2014 – Geak 2. The new Geak 2 watch will also feature Android 4.3 OS, a completely independent Chinese app ecosystem, and low energy consuming CPU. Take a glimpse here at the design.

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ChinaIT: Umeng (友盟)

2014, August 22

Umeng (友盟) is Beijing-based company providing the most comprehensive, multi-platform data analytics services of the mobile phone users behavior. A vast majority of Chinese mobile app development companies are Umeng’s clients. It is estimated that Umeng’s SDK is embedded inside 180’000 mobile apps in China.

Company led by former Google employee Jiang Fan was created in April 2010, and it became visible already in November 2010 when it attracted funding by Li Kaifu‘s venture capital fund Innovation Works. And more recently, in April 2013, Umeng was acquired by Alibaba for (estimated) $80M, but retained a separate brand and management structure.

So, what are exactly the services provided by this company?

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ChinaIT: Software Export to China

2014, August 7

If you are a company that is considering to market your software in China, what should you do ? Let me analyze the market and legal issues around the export of software and business development in China.

First of all, on which kind of software one could expect to make money there ?

Chinese market is especially hungry for the solutions in Smarter cities, Cloud management, and Business intelligence. Following in demand are social analytics, platform-as-a-service, internet of things and big data. As for the value of the market for this type of software, you need first to know that in this country, Continue reading “ChinaIT: Software Export to China”

ChinaIT: Deepin Linux

2014, July 22

If you are one of those who are looking for alternatives to MS Windows for personal or professional use, there is one cool Linux distribution that many Linux experts have been talking about recently. It is Chinese Deepin 2014.

Deepin 2014 was issued in July this year, and at the moment, it’s been rated as 13th on the popularity scale among about 300 commercially active distributions worldwide. Chinese company based in Wuhan has done a great job in adapting Ubuntu 14.04 and developing themselves some cool stuff, which makes the whole OS very stable, attractive and easy to use. I have installed it myself and here below is my review.

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ChinaIT: Inspur (浪潮)

2014, July 11

Here is my marketing analysis of the currently fifth biggest server manufacturer in the world, Chinese company Inspur (浪潮). The company had achieved record fourfold increase in server shipments from 20’000 units in 1Q2013 to 80’000 units in 1Q2014. It currently holds 3.4% of the world server market, in front of Japanese Fujitsu. (see Gartner’s report)

Inspur is gaining traction following the recent disputes between Chinese and US governments on the communication backdoors and unauthorized accesses. In the aftermath, Chinese ministry of finance persuaded several banks to participate in the trial use of domestic servers. Following the successful tests at China Construction Bank, other companies have started massively unmounting and scrapping equipment of American IT manufacturers and replacing it with Inspur infrastructure.

So, who is this company based in Jinan, and is their current marketing strategy I2I (IBM to Inspur) sustainable ?

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ChinaIT: Tencent (腾讯)

2014, July 4

Have you heard of Tencent (腾讯), 4th largest internet company in the world (bigger than Facebook) ? It is known for QQ instant messaging, but the flagship product in 2014 has been WeChat (微信), the most powerful social-mobile app in China with 400 million users.

WeChat allows users to chat, speak, leave voice messages and other things like WhatsUp. But it is used also as a shopping channel and payment platform.

Consider this use case: Use the app service DidiDache to book the taxi. Then while riding on the cab, use other cool features to book the restaurant and order food, shop online or discuss with friends. At the end of the ride, use the same app linked to your bank card to pay the taxi. Clean, cashless, sophisticated, and powerful.

No wonder the revenue of Tencent grew 36% YoY, and only in the 1st quarter 2014 it was $3B. The value of WeChat alone is estimated to $30B.

Will keep you posted on some other cool ChinaIT companies soon.

Sasha

ChinaIT Series – Market and Opportunity Analyses

I’m discovering a real gem – Chinese IT market with a lot of busines potential, for collaboration, partnership, outsoucing, export and import, and business development.

Chinesse IT market is currently 2nd largest in the world, and is growing fast. In the contry there are 2 million registered web sites, 5 millions IT professionals. Yearly IT spending is $200B and is growing $30B per year. What is also important, China is moving the ship towards higher value adding activities and innovation, so I believe there is quite a lot to learn from this new IT power.

Maybe selling their products in the West currently looks overwhelming and risky for these businesses, but I believe it’s just the matter of time when we’ll have them more present in Europe and Switzerland, as it is already the case with Japanese corporations like Fujitsu, Hitachi and NTT.

I’m opening a new series of blog posts that I will call ChinaIT, and in which I will do deeper business analysis of some big established players, but also small innovative startups from different technology domains.

Sasha Lazarevic, 2014

Stanford Advanced Project Management

Just got the certificate from this prestigious Stanford University center in advanced project management (SCPM). Particularly interesting was training in Executing Complex Programs. I’d like just to mention some techniques taught throughout the training:

  • Zooming-in and zooming-out: this occurs all the time, so Complex Program Manager needs to change focus few times throughout a day, ensuring that if necessary,  firefighting is done on all levels.
  • Planning cycle: plan-do-replan-redo. Plan more in the beginning so to shorten “do-replan-redo” part of the cycle.
  • Scope management: what is in, what is out and what is fuzzy. In the beginning, there are a lot of unclear requirements, so put them in this gray, fuzzy area.
  • Beware of red flags in decision making: misleading prejudgments, misleading similar experiences, self-interest or distorting liking for particular people, countries, things. As solution, make sure that you have diverse leadership team.
  • Program resilience: have your program core strong and build your ability to handle whatever changes may appear.
  • Pipeline management: portfolio governance team, as independent body will prioritize the projects, draw a line, clearly cancel all projects below the line and reassign the resources to the highest priority projects.
  • Coordination overload: SMEs and first line managers are overloaded with questions from the project team members. People wait for answers and the projects are blocked. To avoid such situation, define who should respond what type of questions and how to identify if the person has too big backlog and who will be a backup person in such case.
  • Anticipate failures: accumulating small errors can lead to unpleasant suprise. Expect that people will make mistakes, and pay attention to small failures, because they can be a tip of the iceberg.
  • Communicate through actions: team members look at how Program Manager spend his or her time, this way they understand what is important.
  • Don’t oversimplify: don’t underestimate the complexity of the organization, seeks more details that might be missing.

Looking forward to using these leading edge concepts in my daily work !

“Seven Samurai”- Project Management

Did you watch Seven Samurai, one of the best films of all times? If not, or if you forgot what the film was about, let me suggest that you take a look at it, but also as a story of leadership and project management in extreme conditions.

The film was made in 1954 by legendary Akira Kurosawa. Please check the description here. I watched it several times, and always had great feelings and a lot of inspiration to learn. This what follows is my unique point of view on the “Seven Samurai”-inspired project methodology.

In Seven-Samurai project, you will find the following entities:
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On Unspecified Change Management

Change management is everywhere.

When speaking with IT guys, this process is to protect the production systems from untested changes. When talking with MBA graduates, they consider the change management to be about organization change. For legal people, what counts are the contract clauses and schedules, which describe the change management process of the overall contract. And in the end, there is project change management, which describes what level of scope changes project management can accept, and at which level steering committee approval will be required

The problem is when a project change causes a change in the code that will go to the production systems. In this case, we involve two change management processes, and probably two approval mechanisms! The project change can also result in a need to trigger contract change management process, which is even more complicated. But an organizational change initiative (“mother of all changes”) can also experience a change in its scope, so the project change management will be required also here – a kind of “change of the change”.

Project and program managers need be aware of all these change management processes and to know when they are triggered. And I think we need to start using some adjectives to be more clear what change management we speak about.

Sasha Lazarevic
November 2010