August, 2009
by Shailesh Paliwal
Shailesh has 15 years IT experience articulating the next steps in the evolution of information technology toward strategic business applications and services that deliver performance coupled with intelligence throughout organizations. He has been providing extensive architecture consulting services in the areas of Information Management and IT Performance Engineering and Enhancements with the specialization in Information & Performance Architecture , Enterprise Databases/ Data warehouse designing , Data / Dimensional modeling and Business Intelligence. He is a computer engineering graduate from a premier institute in India and is TOGAF 8 and CDMP certified. He held volunteering position of Editor at CMG - MeasureIT and contributing author within the organization. He is expert in Sahaj Yoga meditation and volunteering classes on Stress Management through mediation in corporate world. He is working as Senior Technology Architect at Infosys's Performance Engineering and Enhancement consulting practice of System Integration unit. He can be reached at - shailesh_paliwal@infosys.com
About the Author
Shailesh Paliwal, Infosys Technologies Ltd
With a background of 19 years of IT experience, Rajinder is an AVP and Head of Performance Engineering and Enhancement (PE2) practice at Infosys' Systems Integration (SI) unit.
Rajinder started building this practice from the ground up three years back with an aim to change the paradigm of Software Engineering -- from Reactive to Proactive and from Disjointed to Holistic, thus ensuring better value to clients from IT investments. It was surely considered an ambitious goal when he laid his hands on it.
It gives me immense pleasure to introduce Rajinder Gandotra.
In these three years, his team has grown from a handful of architects to a large number of Performance Architects at various levels with skills across the technology stack. Coupled with good revenue growth in this niche consulting space, his practice has contributed significantly in driving technology thought leadership for Infosys in the Performance Engineering and High Performance Computing space. Other contributions include improving delivery excellence and helping many projects come out of performance and scalability risks, thus avoiding financial penalty or loss of client business due to missed business deadlines.
Rajinder attributes this success to his team's hard work and incredible commitment.
Rajinder is a natural entrepreneur and prior to starting the PE2 practice he had set up the Technology Consulting practice at Finacle, Infosys' universal banking solution. He feels lucky to have enough freedom to pursue his passion even in this large company - thanks to Infosys!
Rajinder has been involved in performance engineering and enhancement space since past ten years now. His experience spans across Technical Consulting, Management, Strategy and Execution.
Measure IT: How did you get started in this field?
Rajinder: I started in this space when I joined Infosys around ten years back. I was part of the Finacle journey that went on to become a truly global product. We realized that one of the key requirements was to ensure that this solution is able to meet the scalability and performance needs of the world's best and largest banks. I first led the Finacle benchmark to establish its performance and scalability characteristics. In this program, I was guided by great technology leaders like Shard Hegde from Finacle. I led another program for building a capacity planning tool for the Finacle solution. I also set up a Technology Consulting practice which helped in improving Finacle solution performance at a client site. We also provided feedback to the engineering team based on our field experience.
Measure IT: What are the factors that motivated you to start the PE2 services?
Rajinder: Well, going by the research and my experience at Infosys, I realized that the current industry paradigm of software engineering is reactive and disjointed. As a result, many programs are at a potential risk of failure or result in sour client relations owing to poor performance of applications. Being a senior Performance engineering professional, this situation gave me a business idea of a dedicated horizontal offering in this space.
I surely owe it to Infosys top management who encouraged me to turn the business idea into reality with the required support and investments.
Measure IT: Based on your wide experience in the performance space, could you please share your ideas on the potential flaws in this space?
Rajinder: As I mentioned, the traditional approach to software engineering is reactive and disjointed and I feel there are the three main lacunas in the traditional approach.
Firstly, "resolving problem on its occurrence". If we talk about SDLC, traditionally organizations maintain a functionality-centric focus. This combined with a lack of resource and time often results in inherent performance and scalability flaws in the design of application or coding style. Performance testing was recently included in the development cycle, but this is also inadequate. Any performance/architectural issues discovered during performance testing/UAT can often be much delayed and cost-intensive. This may result in a Go, No-go decision, as the application being developed may need significant changes to achieve desired performance and scalability objectives. This would cause delayed delivery, effort overrun, lost customer relations and business loss. The need is to proactively drive performance engineering in all stages of SDLC.
Secondly, there is "no singular ownership to resolve performance issues or optimization across the technology stack". Whenever a performance issue occurs; organizations often bring in all the vendors to resolve the problem. It is common and expected of an individual vendor to own up the responsibility for optimizing the performance of his part and not worry about the other parts of the solutions. So in a typical scenario, we see the application vendor taking responsibility for performance of his application, the hardware vendor focusing only on hardware and the database vendor focusing only on database. This results in a sub-optimal solution from the customer's point of view because no individual owns the responsibility for optimizing the entire stack in this scenario.
Thirdly, organizations believe in a "throwing more hardware at it" attitude to solve issues with performance. It seems to be appealing, but in reality it is insufficient. It only masks the real scalability issues that will eventually surface and result in downtime. Unplanned addition of hardware beyond a point leads to unmanageable application/infrastructure silos with little focus on performance. The problem gets further compounded due to the tremendous increase in size and complexity of application and infrastructure.
Measure IT: Tell us something about the immediate benefits Infosys witnessed after the inception of PE2 services?
Rajinder: I am glad to mention that my practice contributed in improving delivery excellence, client delight and helped many projects come out of performance and scalability risks, thus avoiding financial penalty or loss of client business due to missed business deadlines. My team also significantly contributed in driving technology thought leadership for Infosys in the Performance Engineering & High performance Computing space.
Measure IT: In your opinion what will be detrimental effects of not following these paradigm shifts in software engineering?
Rajinder: According to me, IT organizations might end up paying penalties on various fronts like damaged customer relations, lost income, increased hardware costs, increased development costs and cancelled projects if they choose to ignore these performance aspects.
Measure IT: What are the biggest challenges in performance space you see now?
Rajinder: The current economic downturn has accelerated business consolidation and stepped up the need to innovate. Cost reductions, faster time-to-market, better products and differentiated services are now the key themes. These, coupled with the information explosion through social networking and the addition of new users, for e.g., cell phone users who contribute to almost 'n' times of current data users, are adding to the complexity and demand for high performance and scalability from IT systems.
The other challenge is a maturity in this space. Inclusion of performance engineering efforts means additional upfront costs, though it has significant client benefits like reduced risks, improved predictability, etc. Due to upfront costs, organizations might be apprehensive of clients not willing to pay. Also, this would mean increased competition among many vendors who do not offer performance driven development. But clients must insist on performance driven development for best TCO.
Measure IT: How would you describe yourself in a few words?
Rajinder : Highly passionate and committed to values.
Measure IT: You have contributed much to this field. Can you recollect a proud moment?
Rajinder: Well, I had a great moment last year while providing an out-of-the box High Performance Computing (HiPC) solution to a major financial institution in the Asia Pacific region. The client had partnered with Infosys to address business performance and scalability issues in its key line of business application. Using our HiPC solutions, the client was able to improve the performance of the application by more then 150 times by porting the application to a grid environment.
The solution improved the scalability of the application by supporting several hundreds of products, as opposed to a mere hundred earlier. This also enabled the bank to introduce new products effortlessly, add more simulation and research for products involving complex calculations, thus enhancing business growth.
It is worth mentioning that this HiPC solution brought countless appreciations, accolades and awards to the PE2 team.
Measure IT: What are your future projections for this field?
Proactive and holistic is the way to go in software development. Also, performance driven development will be commonly adopted and thus, performance architects will have a key role to play.
Measure IT: What were some of the biggest challenges in putting it together PE2?
Rajinder: Our biggest challenge from the inception was to get expert performance architects onboard across the technology stack. The second challenge was to create the awareness for performance driven development across internal vertical units as well as among the external client stack-holders. The third challenge was to establish PE2 as a brand.
I am glad to mention that we are reasonably successful with PE2 and have received 30+ case studies including three named studies from the fortune 500 clients for our niche performance engineering services in last couple of years.
Measure IT: What are your direct/indirect contributions to thought leadership in the performance space?
Rajinder: I was the Consulting Editor for the Performance Engineering issue of SETlabs Briefings, the thought leadership publication of Infosys. This journal reaches a wide audience of 3000+ CXO's across the globe.
I am glad to mention that my encouragement and focused guidance motivates my team members to excel in thought leadership in performance space. As a team we have published and contributed to more than 25 white papers, international presentations, speaking opportunities, referees, reviewers and editor opportunities for internationally reputed forums in performance space such as CMG International conference, CMG Journal CMG Measure IT, IEEE International Conference, Open Group Conference, HiPC International conference, IT-Toolbox and DBA-Village, to name a few.
It feels great to say that a majority of thought leadership work done by my team members caters to CMG.
Measure IT: What are your plans for this year?
Rajinder: This year we are working on strengthening and formulizing our performance engineering solutions in High Performance Computing, which utilizes cutting edge technologies like grid computing, parallel programming paradigm, etc.
Measure IT: What would you say is your key strength as a leader?
Rajinder: Providing a vision and enabling and rallying the team to achieve it.
Measure IT: Where would you like to see CMG go in the future?
Rajinder: CMG has a great reputation and I am sure it will increase its reach and impact in the years to come.
Measure IT: Anything about your family and personal life?
I love my family and I stay with my lovely wife and two kids in Bangalore, India.
Rajinder can be reached at .