I had a great time talking to a group of Stanford kids yesterday as part of a VC quick-start program where teams compete for spaces in a summer program that gives them office space and a bit of guidance toward building a company that they can then pitch to VCs at the end of the summer. Sort of like an entrepreneurial boot camp.
Let me state that these kids (and man did I feel old) are smart. Book smart, socially affable and well aware of how you become an entrepreneur in the Valley. They also are smart enough to recognize that developing software is a different game than it was 10 or even 5 years ago.
Only one group was developing code that would be installed as opposed to delivered as a service. The "enterprise" team didn't have much of a choice as their product was more software infrastructure/plumbing than it was a service.
As I drove back to San Francisco I thought through why the enterprise is really pretty boring, even if it pays better than anything else. Note that all of these words are mine and that we didn't cover this too much in the discussion.
So why does the new generation eschew on-premise enterprise software?
Enterprise software is slow-moving -- It's been argued that innovation in legacy products occurs on the fringe. This is exemplified in open source, where developers scratch their own itch as well as in software as a service, where Salesforce and other companies found weaknesses in customer delivery.
Installers, maintenance and professional services -- Unless you have experience already with any of these things they are not interesting. I'm not sure they are interesting even if you have experience (they're not, I'm being nice). Every VC will tell you that "pro serv" is not a good business model.
Colleges (and grad schools) don't teach software history -- The only slightly negative thing I can say is that the kids weren't terribly well-versed in software history. Of course, as good Stanford folk they knew every VC and were obviously aware of big companies. But they really didn't care. No one coming out of school today is looking toward behemoths for new ideas or even technological breakthroughs. That said, the enterprise is where the money is.
Basking in the warm glow of VCs -- Ask a recent Stanford grad about venture capital and odds are they can rattle off three or four VCs who spoke at their classes. Ask them who wrote Unix or where it came from and you get blank stares. I suppose it all comes down to what you want to retain, and the Valley is constantly reinventing itself but I miss the days when Dennis Ritchie was a star.
Enterprise = old people -- Sitting in a room as mid-thirties guy with a bunch of young twenty-somethings, I felt old. And not because the group was updating their Facebook status (they weren't) but because they weren't carrying any of the enterprise baggage that so many of us are saddled with.
When you think enterprise software do you think high degree of innovation or cumbersome and expensive?
My discussion with the group was eye-opening and makes me think that the Valley and venture capital, while certainly due for a correction, will continue to churn out great new technologies. My only regret is not forcing them all to give me stock in their new ventures.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
Monday's rumor that on-demand business intelligence provider LucidEra was shutting down has turned out to be true.
I received a number of pitches from competitors about why their solution is better, cheaper, etc., and one particularly well thought-out e-mail from Brad Peters, CEO of Birst, another on-demand BI provider. I've pasted the e-mail below with permission and it will end up on their blog sooner or later.
My understanding is that while LucidEra's shutdown is unfortunate and a bit of a drag for customers, there are multiple providers that customers can easily switch to and that LucidEra are being helpful with the data transference.
LucidEra, right and wrong
Brad Peters, CEO, BirstIt's always unfortunate to see a fellow startup shut its doors, even when you compete with it, since strong competition validates an overall concept--in our case, on-demand business intelligence. The benefits are real. The value to customers is real. Unfortunately for LucidEra, their particular approach--specific applications, instead of general BI solutions--proved weak in the marketplace.
... Read more
As the world pushes ahead with cloud computing and business users demand software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, many IT departments are struggling to keep legacy applications on life support. Many of these zombie applications are there only for storage and audit purposes, not for real-time data interaction.
Even if applications have been "turned off" the data continues to live on in databases and file stores, continuing to take up storage space and software licenses. The result is a state of paralysis, with application retirement merely a dream.
U.K.-based Clearpace recently unveiled a cloud-based data archiving service called RainStor. RainStor's technology is being used to solve a completely overlooked problem domain: application retirement. I spoke via e-mail with RainStor CTO Andy Ben-Dyke to understand how the service works and why it makes sense.
RainStor's Instant Application Retirement service works in 3 steps:
1. Send--Structured data from any RDBMS is automatically compressed by 40x or more, encrypted and sent to the cloud using a client-side software appliance. The extreme compression that is applied significantly reduces the time to transfer large volumes of data to the cloud.
2. Store--The encrypted data is stored in a private archive on Amazon's highly available and secure storage cloud (S3). Though compressed, the original schema format is preserved and RainStor is able to layer on additional archives which reflect any schema changes (e.g. add or delete of columns).
3. Search--Running on Amazon's highly scalable compute cloud (EC2) RainStor allows you to query data through any industry-standard reporting or BI tools over ODBC or JDBC with lightning speed. Providing "point-in-time" query capability based on its ability to store schema evolution changes.
The RainStor service can be had for as little as $1 per GB of data stored per month with no commitments, including Amazon storage and resource costs. Clearpace is also offering a 90 day free trial.
Given that there is a untold fortune of hardware and software tied up in legacy apps waiting to freed up, turning off those apps and sending the data to "heaven" in the clouds just seems like a no-brainer.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
I just finished reading Dennis Howlett's excellent analysis "Surviving and thriving: or why MISO has it (mostly) wrong" in which he discusses the basic strategic mistakes being made by Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle. The net takeaway is that the companies have an unfriendly attitude toward customers and a focus on technologies that the market has not demanded.
Some key points that outline why MISO are going in the wrong direction:
- The egregious treatment of customers at the shrine of maintenance revenues
- The foundational technologies for what they deliver are all showing distinct signs of age, wear and tear
- The five year lifecycle of product delivery is all wrong in today's rapid development
One of the reasons we hear (and write) so much about open source and cloud computing these days is because customers want to be in control of their destinies as well as their infrastructure. MISO offer a great deal of lip service to new technologies but don't deliver an overwhelming wealth of new products or features that users actually want.
What's the point of selling me shiny new technology which I'm struggling to understand anyway when I need to pay the bills more efficiently but more importantly find new business.
Howlett wrote a lot of words, but it's definitely worth a read. The issues at hand with MISO provide enormous opportunities for start-ups to jump in and take market share while the big guys offer empty promises.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
Gmail may not yet have the same footprint as Microsoft Exchange, but megadeals such as a recently announced 30,000-seat installation at Valeo prove that large enterprises are comfortable running applications in the cloud.
Valeo, an "independent industrial group fully focused on the design, production, and sale of components, integrated systems, and modules for cars and trucks," is deploying Google Apps, supported by Capgemini, in a phased approach throughout 2009 ultimately serving the 193 Valeo entities in 27 countries. The adoption of Google Apps among those units is part of a program to reduce administrative expenses.
As a first step, users are being given access to Google sites, online documents, video management, and instant messaging, including voice and video chat, in order to improve teamwork. The new system will then offer applications to further enhance the company's efficiency, such as an enterprise directory and work flow tools to automate administrative processes.
In the final stage, users will benefit from Google mail, calendar, search, and online-translation solutions to reinforce personal efficiency. They will be able to access the applications from a desktop, laptop, or other mobile device.
It's not totally clear what role a systems integrator plays in this scenario--my guess is that Cap Gemini will do the initial work to build out processes and work flow, and then manage the e-mail migration as the company starts the deployment of Gmail to its staff worldwide. After that, the ongoing support would seem to be rather minimal.
Somewhere down the line, the necessity of SIs in relation to cloud solutions will become more obvious. There are a few companies, such as Appirio that specialize in the development and customization of on-demand applications, but so far, no single SI has figured out how to create a sustained revenue flow.
Of course, they probably shouldn't--a big part of why companies are choosing on-demand or cloud-based infrastructures is to remove the expense of the SI middleman, in addition to removing the overhead of maintaining the systems and software on their own.
(Note: I wrote extensively about moving entirely to the cloud in a December 2008 piece titled "Cloud computing to the max.")
Via Seeking Alpha
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
How many tech PR pros actually regularly read the content produced by the journalists they're pitching? Based on all the inappropriate e-mails I get, I'm guessing not many. And based on other journalists' feedback, the tools that PR pros use to identify targets aren't very intelligent either.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine decided to tackle this challenge of making tech PR pros smarter about how they identify and track appropriate tech authors for publicity purposes. It turns out it's a data problem--not stupidity or laziness (OK, maybe a *little* laziness)--that explains why PR people are so often completely off the mark when targeting and communicating with authors.
ITDatabase is launching Monday and tackling a very specific opportunity--get all tech news indexed in one place, and make it much easier for tech industry pros to analyze/aggregate trends about what's being said across all tech news. The company is starting with tech PR pros as the initial target customers, but believes the product offers a lot of research value to product managers and sales roles as well.
"There are thousands of tech authors covering tens of thousands of vendors and themes," said Travis Van, founder of ITDatabase. "Multiply them all together and you get a huge unstructured data mess, which largely accounts for why tech PR folks are often hitting the wrong journalists with the wrong content."
Like the vast majority of online start-ups, ITDatabase is built on an open-source stack:
- Wicket--a Java-based Web app framework
- Hibernate--Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework & JPA (Java Persistence API) provider
- Hibernate Search--provides ORM integration with Lucene
- Lucene--search engine
- MySQL
- Tomcat (behind Apache)
Van admits there's an enormous universe of data and that ITDatabase is still finding new/missing tech industry authors every day. "That's just the nature of an information product--we're always going to be finding new tech industry authors and sources," he said.
I think we often give too much credit to Google alerts and portals, expecting them to bring us all of the information. Services like ITDatabase can offer a wealth of actionable data to make you more efficient.
Disclosure: I am an informal adviser to ITDatabase.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom
Last week, Google updated App Engine with support for the Java programming language, opening up another chapter in the development-stack-in-the-cloud concept.
Still the most popular programming language--if only by a margin--Java support could mean potentially more apps being built and more developers using App Engine. Does this mean developers will simply be more productive and can deploy apps that just work? Or are there hidden issues in pushing those apps into the cloud?
The latter is more likely, says Ben Chelf, CTO and co-founder of Coverity, which is set to introduce a new offering Tuesday to tackle these hidden issues. "There's a lot to consider when moving apps into the cloud. Race conditions, deadlocks, and performance problems due to poor locking decisions--these are the 21st century problems multithreaded applications face and you've got to be ready for them when you move to the cloud."
If applications aren't designed to be executed in a massively parallelized environment like the cloud provides, they could have flaws--flaws that while hidden in the comforts of your own home desktop, will be exposed to their very core when running in the cloud. A lot is going to come down to the execution of the application. Here are three areas that Chelf thinks developers need to consider to build their application right for the cloud:
- Will the application be run satisfactorily if each thread runs slowly? While your desktop machine might be screaming with processors churning at 3GHz or more, the situation up in the cloud might be different. You don't control the processor speed. You just get lots of them.
- Will the application be OK if it runs in parallel 10 ways? 100? The cloud affords you the luxury of potentially running your applications in a highly distributed environment. This means coordination between threads to ensure you don't corrupt memory as dozens of threads are simultaneously carrying out the work you've so carefully programmed them to. Is your application ready for that type of scale?
- Will the application scale? Imagine having thousands, tens of thousands, or more people pounding on your application. With the cloud, now you are not limited by hardware as much anymore, but will the performance of the app you've developed handle that type of usage scale?
When we talk about what can go wrong with cloud computing today, we typically blame cloud service providers and their uptime, infrastructure, and scaling capabilities. What if the app just wasn't built for the cloud to begin with?
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Microsoft became a true cloud provider this past weekend as it experienced nearly 22 hours of downtime on its fledgling Azure Services Platform. The cause of the outage has not yet been disclosed to the general public or the Azure user community.
In contrast to on-premise systems, in which the user is responsible for dealing with infrastructure problems, a big part of the appeal of the cloud is the fact that you don't have to manage your own systems, or deal with the inevitable failures that occur.
It's easy to go off on a tangent about the necessity of monitoring the cloud, but the real issue is one of communication. If Microsoft wants to be taken seriously as a hosting provider--especially one defining a very nascent wave of technology--there needs to be more information beyond what a single admin updates on an MSDN forum.
Of course, we would also assume the same thing of other cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, and Salesforce.com, all of whom only provide the most basic uptime details (green=good, red=bad) with little to no explanation as to what exactly is being monitored. The obvious argument is that users don't need to know...until something goes wrong and information is scarce.
Third-party services such as Hyperic's Cloudstatus.com provide additional insight, but cloud vendors themselves have to become much more ardent about system status and the implications. How can vendors help to assuage issues related to outages?
... Read moreOver the last 10 years, IT has moved further and further outside the firewall. Starting with ASP (application service providers) and moving to multitenant SaaS (software as a service) on-demand applications, and now into cloud-computing environments, the status of on-premise IT has shifted from being a necessity to an option.
An interesting factor in this shift is the customer assumption that SaaS, like open source, has an assumed value, but ultimately, the fact that it's cheaper to run and manage is what will continue to drive adoption.
I had a good conversation at the SaaS Summit on Thursday with Treb Ryan and John Rowell, respectively CEO and CTO of OpSource, a provider of SaaS and Web applications for companies offering on-demand services.
The big question for me was, what is SaaS when cloud is all the rage? Is it a subset or just another classification for the same thing?
Ryan told me that "SaaS is the business version of cloud computing," meaning that cloud services such as Amazon.com's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) offer great value but lack features required in the enterprise. Service-level agreements and compliance are simple examples.
... Read more
We're joined on February 26, 2009 for Episode 6 by Neil Erickson, Senior IT Director at a Fortune 500 company. Neil brings some much needed reality to our discussion, reminding us that enterprises are trying to solve problems, not obsess about open versus closed. Neil also calls us the Gwar of open source, bringing back lost memories of my youth.
Recording with Skype remains a pleasure/pain that aches for a better solution. But since Matt is in Utah and I am in my secret lair, we have no choice. And no, I can't explain why sometimes the podcast works in iTunes and sometimes it doesn't. That's just one of many reasons we're moving it to CNet.
Listen now: Download today's podcast
You can also grab the mp3 or Ogg.
The topics of discussion:
- Open Core licensing--how do enterprises feel about mixed-source/hybrid models?
- Contributions are tough to pull off in many cases even if the enterprises want to give code back.
- Who is the likely vendor to get contributions--can Red Hat make something big happen?
- If not open source or SaaS, how do you do a software company?
- Does proprietary still work given the challenges of the economics?
- Should Matt get his faucet fixed by a plumber or just buy a washer?
- Will Microsoft customers ensure that they don't destroy open source?
- What about Yammer and private Twitter? Does it make any sense for the enterprise?
- Matt forgets about OSBC, the conference that he started.
Apologies for the heavy breathing. It's Matt, he's notorious for it--Ashlee Vance would never let that behavior fly. And thanks to Neil for shining some true enterprise light on our discussion. We've got a bunch of guests in queue from our slack time. More soon...
Previous episodes are still available at opensources.com
Follow us on Twitter @daveofdoom and @mjasay.
