Agile Consulting to Product Offerings - ThoughtWorks has come a long way

ThoughtWorks has come a long way from being an Agile practising and consulting company to a product offerings company. Founded by Neville Roy Singham, as a Management Consulting Firm under the name of Singham Business Services in 1992, it relaunched itself as ThoughtWorks after three years of its inception to focus on building software.

ThoughtWorks is now a leading global company when it comes to Agile Development and Practices. It is helping businesses across the globe with their consulting practices which include, Agile coaching and mentoring, S/W Development and Delivery and now products suite under the initiative of Thougtworks Studio

People who are in consulting business can learn few things from them:
1. Be Agile to market forces, prefer people to process.
2. Strategic Resourcing and Innovation - it follows a different model for hiring its workforce, people who already have a good profile in an open-source project are most likely to be hired and will be allowed to continue their participation in ongoing projects. This not only leads to expertise and new opportunities but also allows employees to be engaged with what they are passionate about; its intentions are similar to the famous 4:1 Google Model.
3. Hire bright guys only!
4. Tech due-diligence - is the best way of getting the foot into the door. I don’t think ThoughtWorks has many business partners or third party vendor relationships or product based relationships, pure technical consulting has to drive more business. This is in contrast to other models/practices for growth.
5. Better Movement of People - Probably one of few companies, which has achieved better results with offshore development and delivery. Its offices are located in the UK, US, India, Australia. It is probably the only company, which runs its induction session for new employees from various countries across the globe for 2 weeks in Bangalore (helps in breaking the cultural differences, if you have an offshore delivery model).

Going forward to capture more market share and to expand the relationship/engagement with current and new customers, it has started rolling out its product offering around its consulting practices, for example, Mingle - Agile project management and team collaboration tool.
Surprisingly the product suite is not on RedHat Model. It’s closely developed by ThoughtWorks and is licensed based, with no community participation in development. This model is similar to Atlassian, where an open-source community or non-profit organisation can get a free license.

Whats’ Next - to me it is a well-placed niche market in which ThoughtWorks is operating and will be safe to say are the leaders or trendsetters in their domain. I think sooner or later it will be a target of acquisition from a big consulting company like Accenture, Deloitte or maybe 3 Indian Giants Wipro/Satyam/Infosys. As Steve Jobs said with its launch of Mac Book Air. “It is in the Air”, BEA bought by Oracle, EDS by HP, Microsoft Trying... Yahoo. I will not be surprised if cash-rich Indian consulting firms, which have fewer consulting offerings in this domain, might go for it.

It will be interesting to see how ThoughtWorks go forward. What do you think? Any thoughts?

Catchup at Cebit

I will be heading to Sydney on May 22 to attend CeBIT's Transaction 2.0 conference. For those who are interested in catching up with me, please feel free to come and chat with me. Our Australian Startups Carnival 2008 winner Scouta has got a pod for exhibition in TechRamp Pavilion, so will be there for some time as well.

It's going to be exciting and a little bit hectic, but it's worth it. I'm looking forward to catching up with new friends.

My Thoughts on HP + EDS Acquisition

I have penned down my thoughts on the recent acquisition of EDS by HP, which is about 3 C’s - Consulting, Cloud and computing. Read it here.

Microblogging with Twitter

Guest Post Written by Ujjwal Grower and edited by Vishal

Vishal's intro: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send updates (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, email, or an application such as Twitterrific. Twitter was founded in March 2006 by San Francisco start-up company Obvious Corp.

The restriction to 140 characters has resulted in Twitter being labelled as “micro-blogging”. A traditional blog is a log of what somebody is up to but in a richer, more detailed format. One of the key aspects of Twitter is to send and receive updates (also called tweets) via your browser, email, instant messaging clients and SMS so you can keep in touch no matter where you are.

How it works :
When you send in a mobile text (SMS), Twitter sends it out to your group of friends and posts it to your Twitter page. Your friends might not have phone alerts turned on so they may check your web page instead. Likewise, you receive your friend's mobile updates on your phone.

Enough from my side. Let's jump into Ujj's post on Twitter for Microblogging.

Twitter is the newest baby in the blogosphere. If I try explaining what you can do with Twitter, you will most certainly feel it's useless, but once you 'twit' for a while, you will get addicted in no time. Twitter is a mix of social networking and internet messaging, we call it microblogging. It is a way to tell your friends what you are doing. To get started you
create an account, start following some people already on Twitter and you are good to go. People who start following you will receive your updates on their Twitter page. So if I am following Amit,

I will receive his latest update - > Amit: skipped breakfast to crunch pointers in the office :(
and he will receive mine -> Ujj: new caterer serving awesome food.. life is good again :)
and so on.
Amit can also reply to Ujj directly -> Amit:@ujj kewl ..enjoy :)

Interested enough. Let me tell you the real power of Twitter. Twitting's most fun when you sync up your Twitter account with your Gtalk and Cell phone. Once you do that you will receive updates as messages from Twitter id from your friend. You can also directly send updates on Gtalk and even via text messages on a cell phone (but that is a little expensive).

Twitter is being used extensively by pro bloggers like Techcrunch, and Tech2 who need to inform their followers about their latest posts. Surprisingly even Bollywood has not ignored Twitter's presence on the web. An account of the recently released Bollywood movie Saawariya was spamming Twitter accounts extensively during the release of the film.

The other huge plus with Twitter is its API which can be used by anyone very easily to create web mashups and write their Twitter bots. One such bot was written by Taggy, men in Blue which would automatically update the Twitter account. You can develop Twitter bots using PHP and Java. More about it here. A detailed tutorial next time.