It is now 18 years since I graduated from IIT-Chennai with a B.Tech in Electronics and Communications. When I look back on my college days and relate them to my present job, I realize to what extent my student days actually helped me prepare for an IT career.

A perennial question is, what is it that is different about the IIT system of teaching. For me, the preparation for the Joint Entrance Examination to get into IIT itself was a tremendous learning. It helped me realize what I was capable of and how much I could stretch myself at an early age. The IIT system is less knowledge-based and more focused on making you solve a variety of new problems and gain confidence.

Life at the IIT hostel also helped me understand the different cultures of people in India. For the first time in my life, I lived with, shared the joys and sorrows of friends, from many states in India. I vividly recollect our 'Industrial Tour'—a veritable whirlwind Bharat Yatra. And thanks to IIT, I truly understood the phrase 'Unity in Diversity' that characterizes our nation.

Later, when I moved to the University of Southern California, to complete my post-graduation in Opto-Electronics, it was fairly easy to mingle with students from many nations like the USA, UK, France, Slovenia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. I realized then that, across the globe, most of us share and cherish the same values.

Looking back I feel, that although I studied many subjects, such as control systems, circuit theory, digital communications, quantum mechanics, and so forth, I never really got to apply them directly in my IT career at all. However, many of the concepts and problem-solving techniques that I learnt, are still extensible and helpful today.

That is exactly what we do, here at Cognizant! We use our knowledge and capabilities with vigor to solve problems faced by our customers. Back in college, we learn concepts and simulate situations to apply our learnings! In business though, we apply these concepts to solve customers' real problems. It is no wonder that we have emerged as a leading IT and business solution provider, thanks to our passion for building stronger businesses for our customers.

After 18 years of being a student and 15 years of professional life, I have realized more than ever that, learning never stops. Learning is continuous. To emerge the best in your area of specialization, you need to have a relentless passion for continual improvement. In an IT career, success is all about how well you apply your learning and capabilities to solve customers' problems. Since our customers are leaders in their industries, they too share the same passion.

In retrospect, I also feel that hostel life taught me to appreciate my friends and work as a closely knit team. Believe me, this helped me quite a bit in my life, when I had to work with a much larger team executing large programs for our customers.

I was fortunate enough to witness the remarkable growth of the Indian IT industry in the last 14 years, at close quarters. Today, you are fortunate to start working with robust processes, tools and infrastructure, much more advanced than what I started out with in my IT career. In 1994, power outages were common; we worked on fragile PC-XT desktops; email, browser and mobile phones were expensive emerging technologies out of reach for most of us and 32 Kbps was a high speed data link!

If I were in college today, I would make sure I found time to broad base my education. Those days I guess, I was too narrowly focused on technology, and much less on my own well-rounded self-development! Today, in my role at Cognizant, I meet with many young people and realize how much more wholesome they are. They are well informed, vibrant with ideas, have an energetic and excellent attitude not just towards work, but are also committed to improving society around them.

Across industries and careers, nearly every successful professional will have the following attitude:

Think Positive,Be Courteous, Be Ready to Learn, Be Humble, Do the Best you can, Be Pleasant

Remember always, being successful also means being acceptable.

Whatever you do in life, do it really well. That is the most valuable lesson I learnt from my father, and it continues to guide me even today.

Cognizant's mini celebrity!

A peep into the latest tech trends

Students of Thanjavur-based SASTRA University got an overview of the top emerging trends in computing and Information Technology recently. G. Ramasubramaniam, Senior Manager, Cognizant, Chennai, who addressed the students of the Computer Science & Engineering and IT departments, as part of a meet organized by the Srinivasa Ramanujan Centre for Computing at the University, highlighted trends such as Cloud Computing, Social Networking, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Mashups, Virtualization and Green IT.

He noted that Cloud Computing was leading in providing a variety of services. So, this delivery of “Software as a Service” (SaaS) was both scalable and elastic as it used internet technologies and techniques to design and develop services for external customers.

Talking about social software and networking, Ramasubramaniam noted that organizations had started adding a social dimension, and use of blogs and microblogging activity by employees, combined with conventional website activities was helping companies understand employees better. Additionally, blogs and other forums help the company create new knowledge exchange platforms.

Incidentally, G. Ramasubramaniam is an alumnus of SASTRA University.

Power Break

Power Break is an informal platform for both associates and the senior management to interact with each other, over tea.

Go Green - Planting of Saplings @ Campus Hyderabad

At Cognizant, we take environmental issues quite seriously. The pro-environment movement within the organization is the “Go Green initiative” that encompasses individual, community or business unit level and local level activities that promote better utilization of our resources and optimize energy usage by all our employees.

In fact, here at Cognizant, we have a theme song for the entire initiative urging employees of Cognizant to 'Go Green,' reduce waste generation, try reusable technologies and techniques in everyday activity and optimize all energy spending activities.

Taking this to the next logical step, the Hyderabad Campus HR team conducted a sapling planting drive across eight key educational institutes in the city.

Around 50 associates at Cognizant Hyderabad participated in the plant sapling drive held here as part of Go Green in partnership with Greenpeace.

The drive held on August 27, 2009 saw the enthusiastic participation of excited Cognizant employees as they planted 1000 saplings at various institutions including Chaitanya Bharati Institute of Technology, Vasavi College of Engineering, Srinidhi Institute of Science and Technology, VNR Vignana Jyoti College, Osmania University, Gokaraju Rangaraju Institute of Engineering and Technology, and Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Technology.

What's more, Mission Sapling was fully supported by volunteers from the respective colleges as well.

Logically, anyone can question whether 1000 saplings can make a difference to the fight against drastic climate changes. But then the truth is, the participants understood that, every step makes a difference in the long journey. Moreover, the program highlighted each participant's commitment to the cause.

Open Source gaining in popularity among companies

Analysts who track the IT industry opine that, adoption of Open Source solutions by enterprises is on the rise. Today, open source software is considered enterprise-ready and hence, is slowly being adopted by companies.

The functionality and features available in open source software make it good and functionally equivalent to proprietary software (where the code is the property of a company, organization or individuals). Enterprises are looking at 'good enough' computing – in other words constantly searching for software tools and products that are good enough to do a specific or required job.

Some of the open source software that have high visible adoption include Apache Web server, Tomcat and JBoss application servers, MySQL databases, Linux operating system or Eclipse IDE.

The term “Open” in Open source software stands for openness of the code - the code of the software is open for anyone to inspect and read. The user of open source software is “free” to make changes to the source code and thus modify the software. In most cases, the user can/must communicate the changes back to the community. Although most of the open source software is free in monetary terms, this however, is not a must - for example, all software from Atlassian is open source; its code is available for anyone to see and modify; however the software is not free – one has to pay for the software and its source code.

Yes… it's good that software and its source code are openly and freely available. But then there is a downside too or barriers for their adoption by enterprises. Some enterprises that are keen on adopting open source, face a lack of support services; and also there is no guarantee for the lifetime of some open source products / tools. Most of these are community products, developed by a group of developers, and hence, support for the products is generally available from third-party companies and not the developers. This can be a business risk for enterprises.

Also, if a developer group supporting the products stops further development, there is no further product life cycle or product updates. This is again viewed as a risk by enterprises.

However, currently some companies are working mainly towards alleviating these risks. Such companies have developers who work on the open source product. Some others are providing paid support for the product. Thus, the primary risk of non-availability is being reduced considerably. Examples of this include Alfresco, RedHat among others. And with these companies forging alliances to become financially viable organizations (for example the RedHat-JBoss alliance), the larger organizations will also be able to provide a defined roadmap for the products and guarantee product upgrades and maintenance.

At Cognizant, various projects use the open source software listed above, besides portal servers like Liferay and JBoss, content management systems like Alfresco and Drupal, programming languages such as Ruby, PHP, Python, frameworks like Struts, Hibernate, grid computing platforms like Hadoop, Condor, and virtualization solutions such as Xen. The Linux operating system is also used in various servers and desktops.

The open source center of excellence at Cognizant has been working with open source for the past 10 years. We work on gaining experience in various open source technologies that are emerging and heading towards becoming enterprise-ready and aiding their adoption within Cognizant in various projects.

Sivakumar K, Architect, Global Technology Office, Cognizant.

High energy contest at kolkata ET in The Campus Quiz

“Of all the cities where we have held the ‘ET in The Campus Quiz’ contests, Kolkata has generated the best response,” said quiz master Giri 'Pick Brain' Balasubramaniam. He was really impressed with the standard of competition among the colleges that participated in the quiz held recently at St. Xavier's in Kolkata.

Held countrywide in numerous cities, for many years now, the contest was jointly organized by the Economic Times and Cognizant.

Attributing the high standards of quizzing “perhaps to the very good basic reading habits in the city”, Giri Balasubramaniam said that, Bangalore and Pune gave Kolkata a good run as close competitors.

After a tough and nail-biting final, St. Xavier's represented by Bharat Bhagnani and Chirac Jain, emerged the winner. Praxis Business School represented by Saurav Jalan and Sahil Shaha came second, while defending champions IIM-C (C. Ram Shankar and Shobhit Bhatnagar) was placed third. More than 110 general and professional educational institutions competed in the prelims.

According to Giri Balasubramaniam, the nature of quizzing had really changed over the years. It was no longer about recalling facts, but more to do with useable knowledge and its application.

Daker Shaaj @ Kolkata

A 3-day festival held recently at Cognizant's Kolkata (Salt Lake Sector V) facility that allowed employees to decorate their workplace, turned different wings of the company into a visual delight.

Different parts of the office reflected different themes: such as a post office, an ancient township of the Indus Valley Civilization era, another, a house of puzzles and the fourth a newspaper office. With the onset of Puja celebrations, most of the wings had images of Goddess Durga. The festival titled 'Daker Shaaj' (Bring the Mandap to your Workplace) – was part of the Autumn festival that allowed employees to participate in an inter-departmental competition. Based on the decoration, the Human Resources function chose winners and gave away awards. The main aim of the festival was to bring out the creativity of the employees, most of whom have a technical background.

Significantly, the campus associate trainees – candidates who have joined the company fresh out of colleges in the region - actively participated in the 3-day festival and wholeheartedly shared their innovative ideas for decorating work bays.

Edited & Supervised by the Corporate Marketing & Communications Group. Send in your feedback/suggestions to C2C@cognizant.com or campus@cognizant.com