Time to discover Zero again

I am sure many agree that while Aryabhata (a 5^th-century Indian mathematician) is attributed to the invention of zero, it is equally acknowledged that other civilizations during and before his era did use something else in place of the number. For example, Babylonians and Cambodians used a gap and a dot ( .) to reflect the feature of zero. However, structuring the concept and making it systematic made the invention of zero momentous. And for that, all of us owe thanks to Aryabhata and Bramhagupta.
In our world of IT operations, from the time we started using computers and applications on an industrial scale, umpteen ops managers and leaders have wanted to deliver services without any outages or dedicated support staff. Today, start-ups exist and thrive with only a few designers who take full responsibility for the code they create, the systems they deploy, and the changes and releases they implement – in most cases, taking so much care that the system runs by itself (autonomous) as much as possible.
Thus, a new ‘zero’ exists amongst us. Like many other good things that need time to become visible, zero ops/no ops is now getting attention, thanks to new-age mathematicians (read technologists, the likes of Google, etc.). With new processes like SRE, no code/low code, and Agile methodology to help us channelize our teams and operations to deliver 'ZERO' RUN, we seem to have a structure and method to this madness.
With this renewed push toward autonomous operations (driven chiefly by cost) and mature, practical uses of automation, Zero ops could very well be a reality soon. Adding more mettle to this concept is the rocketing self-run capabilities and enhancements in the cloud and traditional hardware vendors making their TIN more programmable and AI-aware.
Zero will become an important term in our IT services work-lives again; as before, it will be a great discovery (finding something that existed) and not necessarily an invention (finding something new).

About The Author

Lakshmanan A V (Laks)
General Manager and Global Head for Wipro’s Datacenter & Hybrid Cloud Services.

He has over 22 years of Infrastructure transformation experience specialized in organization and technology design, solution assurance, business development, and program delivery across all global regions. With a transformation program delivery background as core, he moves across various portfolios, the most recent being the global lead for transformation services for the cloud and infrastructure business for Wipro. He has incubated new practices, such as E2E Service management and Cloud automation, during this tenure at Wipro. Working across regions and with organizations with a pan-geo presence has given him good exposure to working cultures and an ability to navigate the best value for the efforts. He also specializes in Commercial models and business case analysis, essential for driving ROI/TCO for large transformation programs, securing budgets for clients, and adopting modern technology practices and new ways of working in large client engagements.