News item on IBM Fellow C. Mohan in India's Economic Times
9 December 1999

If you are a techie at IBM, the ultimate accolade is when you are made an IBM Fellow. An act so tough, only 155 people have made the grade. The prestige attached to this can be judged from the fact that five of the 155 have received Nobel Prizes and four have been inducted into the national inventors Hall of Fame in the US.

Of the 155 Fellows, 48 are currently with IBM. And it shouldn't come as any surprise that four of the 48 Fellows are Indians: Dr C Mohan, Founder and Team Leader, Dominotes Project, IBM Research; Dr Gururaj Rao, Hardware Chief Engineer, IBM S/390 Division; Dr Ramesh Aggarwal, who works on parallel technical computing and Dr Arvind Patel, an expert on data storage.

Fellows work on both research and product areas. And to make it, you have to pass tough tests. Accomplishments must be backed by the candidates' strong potential to make continued contributions to the business and industry. Candidates are nominated by a divisional vice president or general manager and reviewed once a year by IBM's seniormost technical executives. Less than a third of the people nominated have actually been appointed.

It is famously said that IBM Chairman Lou Gerstner "grills the nominating executive on the nominees but doesn't disagree with them".

Mohan and Rao were recently in Singapore to participate in the IBM Technology Week. Mohan, who is with IBM Research - Almaden in San Jose, is very clear on what he does not want to be -- a 'manager'. When your work has a bearing on one of the hottest trends in the world today -- 'e-business' -- it is an easy decision to make.

Mohan is a 'transactions management' expert and e-commerce is nothing but management of billions of transactions. "Unlike in the good old days, availability and reliability are as important to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) as they are to large, well established enterprises when you are Web-based".

SMEs today require industrial strength systems as much as huge insurance or airlines companies because the consumer demands the same level of service -- that their transactions be executed instantly.

This brings the challenge of large scale data management to the doorstep of organisations, large and small. "With so many users accessing the same data and the ever present threat of systems failures, reliability and high performance are critical. If your e-commerce site fails, you lose transactions and hence revenue, which would create customer and even publicity problems", says Mohan.

To address these issues, he has created transaction management technologies that deal with failures and improve data and system availability. His current project, 'Dominotes', aims to introduce traditional transaction systems recovery algorithms into Lotus Domino with appropriate extensions.

Mohan's pioneering work on ARIES (Algorithm for Recovery and Isolation Exploiting Semantics) has been incorporated into many IBM products, including the database management systems and messaging line of applications (DB2 and MQSeries) as well as Lotus Notes.

Mohan joined the Almaden Center in 1981after completing his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. He was named Master Inventor and IBM Fellow in 1997.

IT floklore has it that mainframes, famously called the 'Big iron' in their heydays were the reason for IBM's stupendous rise and on their downturn for its fall. Now that irons are hot again, Rao is a very happy man.

Rao is credited with being a key technical leader responsible for S/390's resurrection. Having seen its revival, he is now working on solidifying its position as the backbone for e-commerce and articulating a long term strategy for it.

The mainframe's comeback is linked to big corporations' need for servers accomodating demanding e-business applications. Rao's vision and perseverence brought this workhorse back to centerstage and helped return IBM to its leadership position in this market.

Rao, who did his graduation from University of Mysore, Master's from Indian Institute of Science and PhD from Stanford, combines a competitive approach to research and product development. Soon after joining IBM, he led the implementation of systems leadership functions aimed at differentiating IBM's mainframe from its competition.

Rao, who was an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Rice University before joining IBM, became a Fellow this year. "Life", he says, "only gets tougher once you join the Fellow club as the pressure is high".