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Application Development & Enterprise Infrastructure thoughts on the Emerging Business Team
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01:24 PM Friday, September 07, 2007
Sep
07
Fri
When I worked on the App Platform team, back in ancient times, an anecdotal assertion that kept coming up was that Microsoft software could not handle Mission Critical Apps. It was fine for departmental apps, you'd hear, but not something that made the mission critical cut. While an interesting anecdotal assertion, it was hard to crisply define what that meant. What does it mean to be mission critical to an enterprise? What technologies actually get used in those situations? So we consulted with some pretty respected analysts to get some definitions around that, and commissioned a survey to find out. The results were interesting & surprised us, and we've been doing a similar survey for a few years now to help keep track of trends. The latest iteration was commissioned by my colleagues, and their results are publicly sharable. There's even some comparison from 2005, when I commissioned the survey. Enjoy the data!
One thing about surveys - sampling matters a lot. Picking & choosing who you ask the questions to will end up stacking the results one way or the other. Guidelines are to sample as randomly as possible within your audience, and define your audience as crisply as possible. The methodology matters a lot too, as you can imagine. Good research shops know how to do that. Questionable ones will skew the audience/sampling/methodology towards a desired response. This methodology used in this research is disclosed up front - pretty solid research. Anyway, enough about that. Some nuggets to chew on:
- Email is the number one mission critical app for most people (it was special cased in the survey to avoid coloring the rest of the data). Accounting, EAI, Transactional Software & Data Warehousing round out the top 5
- 34% of mission critical apps had < 300 concurrent users. mission critical stuff turns out to be more than just high volume.
- 54.8% of the apps are run by a central IT team. 14% go live in < 6 months, 45.2% in < 9 months...the rest take longer
- Most projects use consultants (57.8%), but not as much offshore as you'd think (only 18%)
- I've left out lots of juicy numbers, so go to the webpage for the rest
If you're an ISV, VC, or finance person looking at opportunities in the enterprise space where a bulk of the spending on technology happens, I hope you find the data useful to help drive your thoughts & decision process.
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10:21 AM Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Aug
14
Tue
I had a 'duh' moment recently, and since they seem to be popular to blog about, here it is. I was researching some startups for a project I'm working on, and for the life of me I could not remember the name of a particular company. Maybe it was some other kind of moment. This is exactly what search engines are for, right - outsource your storage to the web. Why tax a cluttered brain when you can search instead? I ran a few queries on all the popular search engines, hoping this would present an interesting test case of which one did the best job of finding my particular startup. I though I tried some pretty good keywords, and stared hard at the organic search results, but they weren't giving me that company name I wanted. Lots of useful, related data on all the search engines, but still no company name I was looking for. And then, my duh moment happened - I looked at the Ads. I have learned to simply ignore them for the most part - my keywords usually get me what I need. But there it was, displayed proudly to the right on one of my searches - the company I was trying to find had advertised for one of my keywords. And I was off to the races. I'll let you guess whether this resulted in a clickthrough.
update 8/22 -
CNET published an article, highlighting Google's perspective on this. Marissa Mayer is quoted as below -
when it comes to targeting, Mayer added, "For me, search and ads are almost the same."
I wonder how they resolve the fact that one is paid, and the other is not ;)
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02:40 PM Monday, August 06, 2007
Aug
06
Mon
some interesting things on the radar for those keeping track of SaaS related things from Microsoft. we all love our services in the sky. some new, some old - but thought I'd bang out a quick post for it:
Hosted Data Services: This offers custom structured data stores (up to 100MB in size) on the web and access to them from anywhere you have Internet access. Project Astoria
Internet Service Bus: This offers hosted services to build composite apps. This one's important, so worth paying attention to how it evolves.
and to manage your agile/VSTS based development in the sky, there's some good partners - VersionOne & TFS Now to help you along with their hosted SaaS offerings.
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01:06 PM Monday, August 06, 2007
Aug
06
Mon
It is easier to make comparisons when framed by distinct, opposite choices. It's much simpler to visualize when the contrast is clear, and makes choices flows more naturally. In my job, I try to evaluate startups that are promising, and have a good joint value proposition with Microsoft. Our team picks the ones we think are the best in class, and then tries to make good things happen with them. As I've been been meeting & evaluating a few recently, it got me thinking - are 'old school' companies & entrepreneurs more likely to succeed, or is 'new school' entrepreneurship required? oh - and my son changed schools recently, so I've just been thinking about schools a lot. ;)
rather than talk about specific companies I've looked at lately, I'll offer up an example from recent events I've attended. I made it out to a local TiE event a while ago. I attend a lot of events like that, so I went in expecting more of the same. But Firoz Lalji was the keynote speaker, and offered something far from the same. He talked about his journey in business - he built & subsequently sold Kitz Camera, growing it to 150 stores - and he now runs Zones, a $500M+ business . Here was someone talking about cashflow, sales & diversification as being the most important things that helped him succeed. You know, old school. But an incredibly successful serial entreprenuer that anyone can learn from. Still - very little of the 'sweeping tech waves up-ending the playing field' type discussion, despite having been in the middle of some pretty dramatic shifts.
To balance that, many entereprenuerial events discuss the ins & outs of riding the edge of disruptive change. Big bets, managing the buzz, differentiating with cool technology, with fanatical customers driving viral growth - stuff that is the topic of many new business books. I never hear a lot of discussion about cashflow, or diversification in startups of that ilk - not as an indicator of success anyway. And while keeping costs low is cool with everyone, it is not the same thing as managing cash flow. And the point is that many phenomenally successful companies & entreprenuers come the new school of thought. Even though it is quite the opposite of the old school.
There's been some good recent discussion on similar themes from stars such as Marc Andreesen & Fred Wilson.Being a numbers oriented kind of guy, I'd love to see some numbers on how many in each category succeed - or data mining to extract the most meaningful differences - although defining success & the universe of interesting companies is hard to do. I don't think there any inherent magic to either old school or new - there's enough stories of success & failure on both sides of the aisle - even in my universe of software startups. It comes down to the basics - market/product/team/etc - and a good dose of randomness. But still, it is tantalizing to think of whether old school or new represents a higher likelihood of success.
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01:46 AM Wednesday, July 18, 2007
Jul
18
Wed
Once a year, Microsoft does a big partner shinding - the Worldwide Partner Conference. There's great information sharing & partner networking at this event typically. There's tons of Microsoft teams that present sessions covering their products, programs, etc - I've previously given talks there covering our app platform. And the partners also get great value from the networking - big chunks of the ecosystem are at the show. And no celebration is complete without the requisite awards . I missed the event (was out of the office - but then better late than never), so don't have any good Sally Fields style acceptance speech stories, but it was interesting because several of our emerging biz team partners were nominees for the awards.
Portfolio company Digipede took home the "ISV/Software Solutions, Innovation Partner of the Year" award. Check out their blogs too. They make the Digipede Network - a .NET based grid computing solution. It is complementary technology to clusters . Think seti at home style solutions for businesses (and research too) complete with agents, control servers, tools & an SDK - that can leverage existing desktops into a full on grid/cluster solution. And you can use it do real business application work - unless you really, really like the fractal demos. It is one cool app, and they deserve the award for doing something so innovative. Our emerging biz team has been working with Digipede for a while, and my buddy Don Rule even setup a Digipede Network in our office for his BioIT Alliance work.
Also award bearing was Rackspace - who won in the "Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Hosting Solutions Partner of the Year" category. They are a hosting provider who do a lot of SaaS & MS platform hosting - our team did a case study with them recently. And Workshare won in the "ISV/Software Solutions Partner of the Year" category - they do document & data security that works well with microsoft office/sharepoint - see our case study.
wonder which emerging biz team partners will be shortlisted for next year. ;)
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12:33 PM Friday, February 02, 2007
Feb
02
Fri
My last post was almost 2 months ago...I could blame the slumber upon the power outage in december, or the weather that shut down campus, or the holidays - but probably more accurate to just leave at blog slumber - or is that blumber?
There's been a lot going on, but this post is not about that. We're doing a VC roundtable event on feb 8th at the microsoft campus here in redmond. My team routinely does similar events in the bay area, which has the highest VC density in the milky way. But we have not done one of these up in redmond in a while - so we're looking to get that started up again. The event is a way for us to have a dialogue with the VC community - we share our product plans & strategy with them & solicit feedback. The event runs in the morning 8:30-11:15. We've already hit out attendance goals, and have some heavy hitting speakers lined up -
Emerging Business Team for VCs & Startups
Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic and Emerging Business
The Software + Services Opportunity
Charles Fitzgerald, General Manager
Cliff Reeves, General Manager
Merger & Acquisition Strategy
Amy Hood, General Manager, Microsoft Business Division
That last topic always gets the community excited - can you say exit? ;). Drop me a line if you are a VC or Investor who should attend, or know someone who absolutely should attend, but have not received an invite.
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01:41 PM Tuesday, December 05, 2006
Dec
05
Tue
The wires have been abuzz yesterday with the announcements re: the Expression Studio tools, and WPF/E (codename). Many folks ,& big players and the media have commented on this already.
from Scott Guthrie's blog:
"WPF/E" delivers a small client runtime that enables AJAX developers and designers to deliver richer, cross-platform, interactive web experiences. It will allow applications to go beyond what can be done with pure HTML today, and will enable sites to significantly improve the client user experience by blending HTML UI, Dynamic Vector Graphics, Animation and Media into a seamless cross-platform browser experience.
from Soma's blog:
Expression Studio is an integrated suite for professional designers and includes Expression Web (which is shipping today), Expression Blend, Expression Design and a new tool, Expression Media, which provides digital asset management and unifies team workflow across the suite.
Rory Blyth's comments provide the briefest summary of that - (I've edited a bit):
Expression: Tools (Design, Blend, Web, Media)
XAML: Modelling & Markup
WPF/E: Cross-platform UI engine
Here's what I see as the 2 key-points:
* The set of technologies announced utilize an underlying model & tools to exchange information across project lifecycles & roles. It makes the notion of models more pervasive across development lifecycle - it has not been so intergrated with design before - thus moving forward the Domain Specific Languages & tools vision. The ability to communicate using models is key. Better communication = more successful projects
* Leverages a common set of skills - this is a practical concern in many shops, and folks doing windows based web apps & visual studio development will now be able to extend their reach to richer internet apps
<edited typos>
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02:26 PM Tuesday, November 14, 2006
Nov
14
Tue
Dan'l just published an article at Always-On-Network detailing some outcomes from our team's work with startups. Ravenflow and Ideablade are highlighted - both companies in my portfolio that I think have some great technology solutions. Seven startups were highlighted in total, and the article talks through some of the work they did with our team. From the rest of the field in the article, Fractal:Edge and Tableau are also companies I got to spend time with when they were up here in Redmond working on their Windows Vista certification. It's nice to have a gig like mine where you get to spend time with cool companies.
Ravenflow's products target the Requirements area - specifically communication gap between the business and application delivery sides of IT shops. Their core product enables you to elicit, specify, analyze, and validate requirements (the 4 phases of requirements development) - a Requirements Authoring & Validation ENvironment. You type in english (with some limitations) into the tool, and it produces models & visualizations from that. You can then validate the requirements for completeness & consistency. The good part about it is that the requirements roll right into Visual Studio Team System, where the project team can start working on it. Plus their team portal is built using Sharepoint. I could show you screenshots & such, but they've already done a great job with the demo on their home page.
Ideablade's products target developers. They extend the .NET framework in the areas of UI dev, data binding, ORM, persistence, caching, connectivity, security and offline scenarios. Others have pointed out that they serve a similar purpose in .NET as Rails does for Ruby - an illustrative, if not accurate analogy. They also have a business object server that serves up and deploys objects & lets you take them offline. It's all integrates with Visual Studio, and is focused on providing a productivity/quality boost. Again, I could try to show you screenshots, but their demos are better at that.
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05:12 PM Tuesday, November 07, 2006
Nov
07
Tue
As you might guess, the title is with toungue firmly in cheek - and since I don't want to injure toungue nor tooth, I'll keep the post short.
Today, Microsoft announced the SaaS Onramp Program. It is a discounted licensing program designed for customers looking to get started with SaaS. It offers up to eight Windows Server CPU licenses and two SQL Server CPU licenses at a heavily discounted rate. Pretty useful for those who want to do SaaS, and are looking for a break on the pricing. The holiday season is the best time to do this kind of shopping and spread the cheer ;). From the press release, we learn:
"The current software development landscape presents a tremendous opportunity for vendors to expand their business with SaaS,” said John Zanni, director of Worldwide Hosting at Microsoft. “Microsoft recognizes that many smaller ISVs and startups lack the essential tools and resources necessary to adopt the SaaS business model. With the SaaS On-Ramp Program, Microsoft can help ISVs enter this industry by reducing the cost of technology needed to support hosted software offerings and improving access to other resources.”
and
The Microsoft SaaS On-Ramp Program provides ISVs with the Windows Server® license for up to eight central processing units (CPUs) and Microsoft SQL Server™ license for up to two CPUs. In addition, participating vendors will receive the benefits of the Microsoft Services Provider License Agreement, a licensing program that enables ISVs to license Microsoft products on a monthly basis to offer services and hosted applications to their end customers. The many benefits include access to the latest versions of Microsoft software, the ability to grant customer demos for 60 days, and 20 licenses for datacenter administrators at no cost
I've talked about other SaaS resources here. Add this to the list of SaaS related resources and programs from Microsoft.
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06:05 PM Friday, October 27, 2006
Oct
27
Fri
You want to be a SaaS ISV. It enables you to get steady monthly revenues, and allows you to pay-as-you-grow. But your architecture is not ready for it. It is going to take a long time - much longer than your startup can afford - to re-architect & re-build you application suite to do SaaS 'properly'. What's a startup to do?
In my recent meetings with startups around SaaS, it's been interesting to discuss this. Sometimes the startups have this issue themselves. Sometimes they are selling into enterprise accounts who want to integrate SaaS solutions with traditional site-installed solutions, but can't invest in rearchitecture. Turns out many of these folks end up using virtualization based solutions to work around this. Virtualization is a core technology pattern, and has multiple uses - add SaaS to that list. The ability to sandbox an application in a virtual environment is useful - multiple instances of the application can be setup for multiple tenants without interefering with each other. no reachitecture necessary. It may not be the most resource efficient nor the most elegant. The virtual sandbox can consume a lot of resources, but it can be a good solution in some scenarios. With all the effort vendors are putting into virtualization - all the way from the hardware to the very tip of the software stack - you can expect the choices & options to grow over time. Virtualization can be hard to grok - there are several levels at which things can be virtualized in the hardware/software stack. Fred has put something out there that addresses the various kinds of virtualization options. It's a pretty good way to think about the space, and how it can be leveraged for SaaS. Dana Gardner had an interesting post about this a while back, highlighting the potential platform tensions virtualization can generate and how ISVs can leverage it to embrace both SaaS & Onsite installation.
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05:42 PM Monday, October 23, 2006
Oct
23
Mon
NYTimes writes about the Silicon Valley effect again. Don blogs about it, asking why there are more startups in the valley? He then answers that question, pointing out that the answer lies in the scale. Things like universities, money, people, infrastructure are at scale in that places synonymous with their field - and once the center of gravity is established, there's a whole lot there to attract even more. As I've blogged about before, there are other startup hubs that are competitive - but a garage in the Silicon Valley area is still the gold standard for startups. Don riffs that when you think startups, you think Silicon Valley, just like when you think films, you think Hollywood.
But then, I happen to watch movies from Bollywood too. How significant a role do the rest of the places play? In Friedman's 'World is Flat' scenario, geography matters less, correct? So does that mean that the valley will matter less going forward? well yes & no (I used to be a consultant, so I don't see a contradiction in that statement ;) ). The ecosystem has grown larger & more diverse. It's like the economy - back in the day of the late 1800s/early 1900s, the richest men accounted for a very large % of the economy. Forbes all-time richest americans lists Rockefeller has having 1.53% of the economy, and Vanderbilt as having 1.15% of the economy of their respective times. Switching to the current richest person for comparison, Bill Gates comes in 5th on that list at 0.58% of the economy. So my take is that the valley will continue to be the biggest single influencer, but it's percentage of the total will become smaller as startup ecosystems flourish elsewhere.
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05:14 PM Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Oct
17
Tue
Paul Graham has an interesting post out on what causes startups to die . Nice timing, considering my previous post talked about startup survival. He makes some good points in the 18 long list he has put together. As a prior startup founder, some of the points resonated. It's always a pleasure to read some well thought out considerations.
But...and you knew this was coming - some of the issues are two sides of the same coin - e.g. point 11 is raising too little money v/s point 13 is raising too much money. Point 8 is about being slow to launch, point 9 is about launching too early. I think he could have narrowed the list down by 7-8 points and still said the same things - but then I guess top 10 is a cliche as a literary device. Regardless, there's some good stories and points made. The issues cluster under - wrong people, wrong focus, wrong timing, wrong finances and wrong execution.
There some points I didn't quite see - e.g. point 1 is that having just 1 founder kills. While I agree that in general it takes more than one, I'll have to ask Michael Dell if he agrees. or Henry Ford. But Paul really stretches when he says:
"For example, I think a lot of startups during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based applications on Windows. Hotmail was still running on FreeBSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because Windows couldn't handle the load."
now I work for Microsoft, and so am generally expected to say good things about them...but how does Paul jump to these conclusions? I see more of point 4 (Derivative Idea), and point 5 (Obstinacy) in this assertion than facts. Windows was successfully running very large sites (like MSN) at the time. I ran a technology lab during the end of the Bubble, and we focused a lot on performance & scalability - Paul would have done well to see the number of scalable applications that went through the lab. And does anyone believe that load/performance was the real issue blocking Hotmail's migration? With regard to choice of platform, the technical founder's skills & familiarity with the platform are far more relevant - platform choice is rarely based purely on capabilities of a technology, and rarely a dominant cause for success or failure. To me, platform should be determined by what you know, and what is best suited to filling the business need. What do you think?
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02:13 PM Monday, October 09, 2006
Oct
09
Mon
I just read Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales. It's a book about life & death - literally. The author covers wilderness survival, air & sea accidents, wartime dangers and more. The tagline is 'who lives, who dies, and why' - with fascinating, well written stories analyzing what happens in times of peril. Not a book about tech, or business, or startups - although the author helps make the connection.
When confronted with a life-threatening situation, 90% of people freeze or panic. That usually ends unhappily. The remaining 10% of people stay cool, focused and alive. These are the survivors. Mind you, they are not heroes in a traditional sense. But these are the ones that make it through. Pretty similar for startups - most are in a state of peril, and most end up defunct - mauled by market forces when they freeze and panic. So startups that want to survive should pay attention to what the author says.
For fans of top X lists, the author distills his book into the 12 rules for survival. here's my quick take on the list -
1. Perceive and Believe: Be open to input. Use hard data to shape your perceptions. then believe you can do something to affect the situation. to use the author's terms, don't 'bend the map' to see what you think you ought to see. startups need to see the market for what it really is, and to then chart their way through it.
2. Stay Calm – Use Your Anger: Startups need calm leadership to deal effectively with crisis. startups need some 'familiarity with pain', and the ability to channel that energy into action.
3. Think, Analyze, and Plan: The discipline involved here is good for startups. getting granular about this keeps the focus on the right tasks that help the company survive.
4. Take Correct, Decisive Action: Startups need to take bold action and keep moving. Don't get caught in analysis-paralysis, or get stuck thinking about the enormity of the problem. Of course 'correct'ness is only visible in hindsight. So take smart risks.
5. Celebrate your success: Even small victories are cause for celebration. morale goes a long way in small organizations.
6. Be a Rescuer, Not a Victim: Startups need to think about more than themselves. They succeed when they help customers, not when they blame others because they are not as successful as they'd like to be.
7. Enjoy the Survival Journey: Startups need to be fun places to work. With long hours, and limited resources, people will burn out or leave if they can't enjoy their work.
8. See the Beauty: This is related to seeing things as they are. No situation is completely ugly. Startups that can see the beauty in the situation are usually the ones who are thinking clearly about what they are dealing with.
9. Believe That You Will Succeed: A positive vision is essential to startups. You just know you will succeed when you believe in that vision.
10. Surrender: Realistic startups accept that success is not a given. There are situations in which they cannot win. This balanced perspective helps them through the tough times.
11. Do Whatever Is Necessary: Startups should leave it all on the playing field - and most do.You don't need it if you don't survive...
12. Never Give Up: Startups can't be easily discouraged by losing a customer, or intense competition, or generally having things go wrong. Persistence breeds success.
Note that it is a different approach than many startups will have - it's about survival as the primary mandate. Many startups would rather go BIG or go under. That is a different strategy, and perhaps the subject of a different blog post. The trick is to find an exit before you perish - if the startup can do that, then the strategy has paid off. And even if the startup perishes, luckily most founders survive :). With sufficient resources, they can then create new startups, and get another shot at the circle of life. But survival has its rewards - and you have to survive long enough to find that exit.
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05:42 PM Thursday, October 05, 2006
Oct
05
Thu
I spent some time in Vegas last week, speaking at the Flatburger ModSoftCon - a small gathering of a very cool community of developers. The community builds add-ins to DotNetNuke (aka DNN), and Flatburger is a startup helping them bring those components to market - by helping with QA, Licensing, Hosting and other services. To use Bill Phelan's analogy(he's the CEO), think eBay Powersellers and the services they need. DNN is an open source framework designed for Enterprise Web Apps - and a vibrant community exists around it. The devs at the conference create plug-ins which add functionality, skins, or extensions to DNN. Many of them sell their modular software on Snowcovered. There were pure component developers who had 1000s of customers, professional services providers who primarily consulted around their components & extensions to DNN, Designers who specialized in the look-and-feel aspects of the apps, and hosters who worked with these folks.
I was there to talk about what Microsoft is doing around SaaS, with a focus on pricing. I discussed the SPLA licensing we offer, and also ended up talking about Office as a development platform. Given the devs in the room all pay their bills by selling modules/components/services on the platform, it led to some pretty good discussion. An unexpected treat was the inspiring stories about their backgrounds & how they formed their companies - which the audience got to hear when some of them presented their solutions. Can't wait to see how far this community goes!
and my wallet was grateful for the brevity of the trip - the conference kept me busy enough that I didn't lose much money gambling in Vegas.
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02:42 AM Thursday, September 21, 2006
Sep
21
Thu
catching up with the goings-on in the SOA developer space - I recently read that Webmethods acquired Infravio. a while ago, Progress/Sonic acquired Actional . Mercury bought Systinet. Oracle's been buying , as have IBM , and BEA (continuing a trend) in this space. and that's just a partial list. You'd think we were seeing consolidation in this space that is still in the hype cyle .some people were always skeptics. but then, were they envisioning SOA 2.0?
Microsoft has built some core technologies that address the space. no SOA related acquisitions, in keeping with the thinking about acquisitions.
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