PPS Narayan, VP of Engineering at Yahoo, declares that "Traditional Industrial Research model is dead". Niche problems need niche solutions. Product and Innovation time has shrunk from decades to years to quarters to months to weeks/days. The services oriented world allows for Research to get inputs quickly and innovate. Collaboration and shared problems have led to “Open Source” research models. Open Source research is the future of R&D

1. Bridging Innovation and Products in the
Internet Age
P.P.S. Narayan
March 2015

2. Bio
Work
■ VP of Engineering @ Yahoo
■ Technical Manager @ Bell Labs
Computer Science/Engg
■ Masters: IIT Bombay
■ Bachelors: Bombay University
Publications/Patents
■ SIGMOD, VLDB, CloudDB, WebDB,
Internet Computing
■ YDN, Tumblr Blog Posts
■ 4 Patents and 7 Pending
Engineer at heart!!
Views are mine and mine alone. Not of my employer, co-workers, buddies or family.

3. Definitions
Research
n.noun
■ Careful study of a given subject, field, or problem,
undertaken to discover facts or principles.
Science
n.noun
■ The observation, identification, description,
experimental investigation, and theoretical
explanation of phenomena.
Innovation
n.noun
■ a new method, idea, product, etc.
Engineering
n.noun
■ The application of scientific and mathematical
principles to practical ends such as the design,
manufacture, and operation of efficient and
economical structures, machines, processes, and
systems.

4. Problem Horizon

5. 1970s
Enterprise,
Finance
Data
Recording
1960s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Market
Application
Form Factor
Computing
Paradigm
Defense,
Academia
Communication Consumer Daily Habit
Niche
Computing
Reporting Predictive
Analytics
Computing Evolution
Real-time
Analytics
MobileInternet
2010s
Ubiquitous
Computing
Cloud, Rich
Media

6. Exhibit: Evolution of Database Systems
Flat file (VSAM,
ISAM)
1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Non-relational
Databases
Relational Database
and DBMS
NoSQL,
Distributed
Databases
Scale
Open Source
Databases
Commercial
Databases
VSAM, ISAM,
IDMS, Oracle
Version 1
IBM DB2, DBASE,
PARADOX, Microsoft-
SQL-server, Teradata,
Sybase
MySQL,
PostgreSQL
HBase, Cassandra,
MongoDB,
CouchDB, Redis,
Riak, HyperTable,
Cobbler, Neo4J,
GraphDB, MariaDB
BerkeleyDB
Aster-Data,
MarkLogic,
CouchBase,
Netezza, Oracle-
NoSQL,
DynamoDB, HP-
Vertica, EMC-
Greenplum
2010s
NuoDB, VoltDB,
MySQL-Cluster,
Tokutek,
Aerospike
SAP-HANA,
Amazon RDS, SQL-
Azure, Google-
Spanner
FoundationDB
NewSQL
Databases
Emergent
Database Class
Informix, Ingres,
IBM-Infosphere,
Versant,
ObjectivityDB,

8. Time Horizon

9. Exhibit: Packaged Software Release Cycles
1980 1990 2000 2010
Oracle 1
Oracle 2
Oracle 3
Oracle 4
Oracle 5
Oracle 6
Oracle 7
Oracle 8
Oracle 8i
Oracle 9i
Oracle 10g
Oracle 11g
Oracle 12c

10. Exhibit: Mobile Technology Evolution
http://www.slideshare.net/cpqd/1-a-vision-on-the-evolution-to-5-g-networks

11. Exhibit: AWS Pace of Innovation
http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/spot301-aws-innovation-at-scale-aws-reinvent-
2014

12. Exhibit: AWS Services

13. Yahoo Stream Ads
45 days to execute
- create the format
- bootstrap demand
- create the buy side
- book-to-bill flow
- serving side arch
- instrumentation
Launched in 43 days
Product with revenues
projected greater than
Twitter!!

14. Re-Invention

15. ReInvention Cycle - Long (10 Yrs)
UDB
•K-V Store
•Commodity Storage
•Geo-Replicated
•Lumpy Scalability
•Consistency
•Durability
•JSON
•Ordered Tables
•REST APIs
•Pluggable Storage Engine
•Eventual, Timeline Consistency
•Quorum vs. Message Bus
•PNUTs
Sherpa
•Elastic Service
•Structured Storage
•Geo-Replicated
•Multi-Tenant

16. Virtuous Cycle - Quick (1 Yr) Sherpa
•Elastic Service
•Structured storage
•Commodity Storage
•Geo-Replicated
•Cost per writes
•Disk Latency
•Automation
•Low Latency
•Write heavy workloads
•Inter-operability with Hadoop
•LSM Engine
•Zero MQ Messaging
•Protocol Buffer
Sherpa LL
•Low latency
•High throughput
•In-Memory
•Memcache
•Redis
•PCIe

17. “Open Source” Research

18. History of Innovation

19. Internet Age of Innovation
Voldemort

20. Research Model

21. Which Model Works?

22. Traditional Avant Garde Best of Both Worlds
● long term view 10-15
years out
● academia-like, pioneering
work
● “Research”
● Publications
● short-term view mostly*
● “blurry line”, “not treated
as a separate activity”
● “Engineering”
● Product
● mid-term view 2-3 years
● “importing new ideas and
implementing them”
● “Science”
● Impact on Product
*
Comparisons

23. Observations

24. ■ Close-ended Research: Proliferation of niche problems. Niche
problems need niche solutions
■ Shrinking time-to-market: Product and Innovation time has shrunk
from decades to years to quarters to months to weeks/days
■ Continuous Feedback: Services oriented world allows for Research
to get inputs quickly and innovate
■ Collaboration and shared problems: leading to “Open Source”
research models
■ Traditional Industrial Research model is dead