This is the final part of my series on Entrepreneurial DNA that was originally published on VentureHacks.  OK, it’s not really my final part.

I started with a Top 10 list for Nivi (at VentureHacks), but I couldn’t cram it into 10 so it became a Top 11 list.  I originally conceived it as the Top 11 things that I believe “all entrepreneurs need to succeed.”  If it stuck to this theme then I would stand by my top 11.  But Nivi envisioned it being the “Top 10 things I needed to see before I wrote a check.”  I think the title sounded better to him

This became comical as I published my “attention to detail” post because some people noticed that the Top 10 list had 11 items.  Made ME laugh, anyways.  So sticking to my definition of “attributes for success” it had to be my  Top 11 +1 rather than a Top 12.  There’s one attribute (coming soon) that I need to have in order to write a check but I don’t believe is vital for success.  It will be controversial – I know.

I’ll publish the final post in this series this week and then move on to my next series – sales & marketing.  I’ll be covering my PUCCKA sales methodology.  But I’ll probably wander around a bit before then as I tend to do.

11. Domain Experience – “Domain experience” means that the founders have worked in the industry before.  It isn’t a “must” for me but it’s certainly a huge positive when entrepreneurs have it.  When you’re researching a market you can spend a year putting your hypotheses on paper but you somehow never really have a handle on the minute details of the industry until you’ve lived in it.  It’s not an absolute requirement for me that you have domain experience but if you do it’s a HUGE plus.

Are you launching a mobile application?  If your last company was Apple, Blackberry, AdMob or JAMDAT and you have some experience in the sector then I know that your product will have your experiences baked into it.  When Evan Rifkin of .App/Ads launched a new ad network for iPhone (and soon to be other devices) applications I knew he would have a very strong offering out of the box.  He’s built two ad network companies – he knows what he’s doing.  I’ve now validated with 3 independent sources that he’s really on to something so if you have an iPhone app that you’re looking to better monetize you should check it out (no, I’m not currently an investor.  I’ll always point out when I am.).

I learned the domain lesson myself.  My first company launched in 1999 and we were offering a SaaS document management in the cloud (we were called ASPs back then).  I didn’t have first-hand experience in document management systems other than as a user and nobody had SaaS experience – the market was too new.  We made lots of assertions about what features we thought people would want, how to price them and how to overcome the objections that people have to managing data in the cloud.

When I began to hire product managers, sales reps and implementation staff from existing document management companies like Documentum and OpenText is when I got first-hand input into what lessons they had learned in their companies over the previous decade.  I know this stuff cold now.  So when I launched my second company which was also a SaaS Document Management company we already had a vision for what would do well in the marketplace.

Domain experience also brings relationships.  I have a good friend who spent years building relationships with senior executives at media companies.  He’s a star.  He wanted to launch his next venture in financial services because it was a bigger industry.  Fine.  But I pointed out that he would be up against competitors that had spend years building relationships with the big financial services companies (as well as channel partners) and he was going to have to start from scratch.  I’m not sure why you’d do that unless you had to.

Examples: There is a company called GreenLink Networks based in San Diego and Philadelphia.  Their first company was called Traffic.com, which they sold in March  2007 to Navteq for $180 million (not too shabby).  I met the CEO Brian Malewicz several times.  He’s a classic entrepreneur and exactly the kind of person I look to work with.  Traffic.com sold 10-second in-content advertising spots to local TV broadcasters.

They had built significant relationships with the local broadcasters and a knowledge of how to sell non-standard ad units.  So when it came time to start their next company the starting questions was, “OK, what big problem could we solve for local TV broadcasters?”  They’re taking on the declining revenue streams of local TV and creating new, measurable ad activities.  In no time after they had researched their market they were up with pilots with local TV stations in 3 key DMAs.  They had relationships – trust – that couldn’t easily be replicated.  I’ll be they’ll build a successful business.

This is exactly the reason I like people who present to me to start with their personal bios.  Before they’re presenting I want to know “what unique experiences you bring to the table that are going to give your business a faster time to market, a better designed product, more knowledge of your customers problems – a higher likelihood of success.”  It’s what many VC’s call, “An unfair advantage.”

Another example.  We recently met the management team of Assistly – CEO Alex Bard and COO Gary Benitt.  When I first met the team in San Diego they had only been working on their software for 5 months.  I was ASTONISHED (yes, it was worthy of all caps) by how good their V0.9 version of their product was.

Assistly is a customer support product designed to meet the needs of the current era of multi-channel touch points (think Twitter, email, chat, forum in addition to phone calls).  The exact same team had worked on 2 previous customer service startups (and 1 non-CS product).  So the whole customer development cycle is very streamlined.  I absolutely love their product, team and vision.  And the progress since my first product review is also great.

I normally don’t talk about specific companies we’re in the process of looking at but I guess when teams Twitter that they met your or check in on FourSquare it’s pretty hard to hide it  Note: every time I use CoTweet to find old Tweets (as I did with Alex’s Tweet that he met with GRP) I feel compelled to plug them.  I’m not an investor but the ability to so easily go back and pull up old Tweets is vital.

So summarizing my message to you – I know that not every entrepreneur has deep domain experience when they launch their ventures.  That’s OK.  Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg didn’t really either.  Some people claim that too much domain experience can actually harm you because you become cynical of all the things that can’t be done – you’ve got the scars to prove it.  There IS some truth to this argument.

But if you have it – use it.  If you don’t have it – see if you can pick up team members that do.  There is no doubt in my mind that on balance it offers you a huge Unfair Advantage.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of theTable)

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Step 1: A Simple Plan

Here at GoodData, Customer Analytics is more than a good marketing spin, it’s how we will manage our business. We know that focusing on the metrics that drive our business is the key. Plus, we are inspired by three of our early customers – Enterasys Networks, TriNet and Gazelle – both of which embed analytics (and of course GoodData dashboards) throughout their core businesses. These companies have it in their DNA, from their leaders down to the front line sales, marketing and service folks.

We have come to realize that living the life of a metrics-driven business is deceptively challenging. Even as a startup – without too many people and processes, we are still awash in data and opinions as to which are the ones that really matter. Not to sound too Zen, but I firmly believe that Customer Analytics is about the practice, and not a magic destination or customer insight. After all, despite the promises of BI marketing for generations, metrics don’t make the decisions for you. That’s your job.

l will be blogging about GoodData’s journey to becoming a metrics-driven business as we dig deeper into the practice of customer analytics, throughout 2010 and beyond.

All we need to get going is a vision, some data and a simple plan:

• A Vision: we are fortunate to have a company culture that revolves around data (it helps to be an analytics vendor). We’ve seemingly always had a few GoodData projects with our Google Analytics and product stats in it. But honestly it’s been a back-burner effort as we built the platform and started the business. It took our founder Roman to really kick-start the effort. Look at this report that he created a few weeks back, nothing too fancy, but no one did it until he did. The next day, 4 or 5 other employees started analyzing the same data, and now we’re doing it with more focus and energy. Lesson learned: nothing helps drive a culture around data better leaders being metrics-driven themselves.

GoodData User Trends

• Some Data: even as a startup, we have plenty of customer data. Our mix of customer data comes from our website, our business apps (Salesforce CRM and ZenDesk), and most powerfully GoodData itself. We’ve instrumented our platform to capture the metadata that surrounds our customer interactions. Put into English: we can track when customers engage in our product, what features they use, where they struggle, when they abandon, when they load data, create reports, build dashboards, invite co-workers, and when GoodData becomes viral. That’s a lot of data….

Customer Analytics Data Sources

• A Simple Plan: So much data, so many neat and valuable ways to slice and dice it, let me write up the requirements and get our ops guys to get going on pulling the data in. I already know this will fail. Before I know it, the project will crumble from its own complexity. Sadly, I’ve been in too many Spruce Goose projects before around customer data. Here at GoodData, we are taking our success with agile development [production releases every two weeks] and applying it to customer analytics. So my simple plan is just to define a few sprints and get going.

In my next post I plan to talk a bit more about the simple metrics that matter to us, and talk about the first few sprints that we’ve defined.

Please let me know what you would like to hear about.

Recently ReadWriteWeb started a series taking a very high level look at online finance. One of the posts discussed the evolving online finance ecosystem. In the post, RWW editor Richard MacManus interviewed CEO of Xero (see disclosure), Rod Drury and repeated Drury’s assertion that online finance can be separated into four distinct types of markets:

1) Personal Finance (e.g. Mint, Wesabe, Yodlee)

2) Small Business Accounting (e.g. Xero, Kashflow)

3) Cloud ERP (e.g. Netsuite, Salesforce)

4) ERP (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle)

Which strikes me as a somewhat bizarre classification system, and not overly helpful in defining the marketplace. While it may seem a semantic discussion, to those of us who live in this world, it’s important to get this stuff right.

Looking at the four groups MacManus defined, it’s patently obvious that two of them distinguish different delivery mechanisms (cloud ERP and ERP), it’s wrong to separate them as the SaaS ERP players would point out rapidly that they’re seeing a major conversion of users from traditional ERPs – just look at the case studies put out by Intacct, Netsuite, Salesforce et al to see the proof of this. Add to this the fact that most of the traditional vendors are dipping a toe in the cloud space and you can see that the differentiation just isn’t there.

As for the rigid differentiation between personal and small business finance, when I posted about this nearly a year ago I said, and still believe, that it’s all just money:

the distinction between personal and business finance is pretty blurred. Almost all micro businesses I know use a personal credit card for business expenses – sure that can be solved via expense claims but that’s not really in keeping with the actuality. Similarly most micro businesses that require funding achieve it by using their personal equity to guarantee debt – again removing personal finances from this business finance model ignores this fact.

I put this to Drury who countered with the sensible point that:

[the] Names probably are wrong but the distinction is
On premise and off premise currently
Netsuite, salesforce are midmarket SaaS – say 10k to 20k+ per year
SAP, Nav etc are Web based enterprise.  Minimum 100k – 1m starting, lotsa consulting
Big SAP will never be SaaS but they will have a midmarket product.

Which is still a little tenuous, but what Drury is getting at is the distinction between midmarket organizations (the $20k spend ones) and larger enterprise – the former definitely getting “cloudy” the latter less so. But again it’s a shifting space.

My classification of the online finance space is somewhat different and follows:

• Personal – products that are generally free to the user and subsidized either as a loss leader for a paid product or cross subsidized by partner organizations (Mint, PocketSmith, Xero personal)
• Micro business – a market of sole traders and freelancers, want a very simple application and don’t have significant money to spend on it – either economically price paid products or cross subsidized products (IAC-EZ, FreeAgentCentral, MYOB, Sage, QuickBooks, Xero)
• SMB – a market of businesses that need “real accounting” but in a simple way. They’re also driven heavily by price. Surprisingly enough this is one marketplace that is really under-serviced. Many of the micro-business products are slowly ramping up their feature set but this is the area of opportunity. Current best offerings are still desktop applications (Intuit (see disclosure), Sage, MYOB)
• Medium business – organizations with many employees, multiple branches and complex operations. Already heavily invested in IT and prepared to spend thousands of dollars on their finance apps (Intacct, Netsuite)
• Enterprise – the big boys, firmly wedded to large on-premises offerings and, frankly, not in a hurry to shift anytime soon. Best opportunity is for cloud providers to find “edge modules” to make inroads with them (SAP, MS)

None of these classifications are determined by the delivery mechanism of choice – many of them are services by both on-premise and cloud providers but, from what I see talking to businesses on a daily basis, this is a more accurate definition of the landscape.CloudAve is exclusively sponsored by

John Edwards and Tiger Woods. Both famous, powerful men who projected one public image while living a completely different life in private. Both certainly deserve our scorn for their behavior.

But the lesson to draw here is not that politicians are scumbags (though, by and large, they are) or that famous athletes are philanderers (though, by and large, they are). Rather, it's that for a skilled entertainer, it's possible to deceive a huge audience (an entire country!) about one's true character when that audience has only limited access.

We all like to think that we can look a man in the eye and know his character (as George W. Bush famously said of Vladimir Putin), but the fact is that our mind's willingness to fill in the blanks makes it easy to misinterpret a limited sample.

The same effect applies to investors and entrepreneurs.

If you're an investor, and you only see your entrepreneurs during pitches and board meetings, you have no guarantee that you really know who and what they are. That's like assuming that by watching Tiger's press conferences, or listening to John Edwards' speeches, you have a true measure of the man.

For God's sake, go and volunteer to spend a day at their companies, and see what it's actually like to work with them in their natural habitats. When you're talking about investing millions of dollars, shouldn't you have more to go on than three 1-hour meetings in your conference room?

If you're an entrepreneur, it's a little harder (let's see how far you'd get if you asked a potential investor if you could spend a day with them at their office!) but still possible. Invite them over to your company for an extended visit or working session. Talk with other people you trust who have had more interactions. You might even want to check their rankings at The Funded. (Congratulations to all the friends who made this list of top VCs!)

Ultimately, it doesn't much matter to us members of the general public whether Tiger has 14 or 15 mistresses, or whether we'll ever see that John Edwards sex tape. But when it comes to a critical relationship like that of an investor and an entrepreneur, don't settle for the surface story.

(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)

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This week I begin a new and exciting phase of my professional career by joining the NJVC Enterprise Management Team!

For those unfamiliar, NJVC is one of the largest information technology (IT) solutions providers supporting the United States Department of Defense. The company provides quality IT solutions to the federal government and specializes in supporting intelligence, defense and geospatial organizations, including its largest customer, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). NJVC has more than 1,100 employees located in three offices, including its headquarters in Vienna, Va., and facilities in Arnold and St. Louis, Mo.

In joining the company as an Engineering Fellow, my initial and complementary duties will be to:

• Serve as an Enterprise Management Officer on a team of watch officers responsible for delivering high satisfaction to our customers through efficient management of day-to-day activities; and
• Support the company's newly announced cloud computing solution, specifically designed to address the unique security requirements of the intelligence and defense communities.

As my regular readers know, the use of cloud computing technologies to support DoD and intelligence community missions is a personal passion. NJVC is realizing this promise by implementing a secure, reliable and cost-effective private cloud solution powered by the Appistry CloudIQ Platform. I am proud to join NJVC in providing this solution offering to its customers, allowing them to concentrate resources on their core missions. The value of the cloud computing approach was clearly demonstrated during a secure cloud computing pilot study at the company's Center for Technology Integration facility, which accurately simulates the enterprise environment of a large intelligence community network. Pilot result analysis showed astounding performance gains.

I look forward to continuing this ongoing dialog with you, my readers, and welcome your comments and/or inquiries.

Our commitment is unwavering.
Day in and day out, our 1000+ dedicated and talented employees go to extraordinary lengths to provide the best IT services possible, so our customers are free to concentrate on their mission. NJVC provides a full lifecycle of secure, innovative ITIS solutions for some of the world's most demanding customers. With a passion for doing things faster, better and smarter - and technical expertise to deliver - NJVC is driven by your mission.



( Thank you. If you enjoyed this article, get free updates by email or RSS - KLJ )







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When I first tweeted that Jack Trout's new book "In Search of the Obvious" had arrived from Amazon, my mate @euan suggested his (excellent) blog is actually easy to find.  He called it "The Obvious" because when he started writing about the application of new technology and social media in organizations, he felt that, actually, he was saying pretty obvious things - even though they are important, and often missed by the many.  Jack Trout's book has a similar theme around today's complex marketing mess and era of killer competition that we now live in.  A good marketing strategy should be founded on an obvious idea that makes common sense, when too much of today's marketing messages try to be clever, and complex, with advertising that is more like entertainment.

If you haven't read Jack Trout, you have been missing something.  Jack Trout and Al Ries have written some of the best and most influential marketing books of the last 25 years.  They wrote Positioning, and Marketing Warfare, and the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.  Al went off to write some excellent books with his daughter Laura, and Jack carried on with things like Differentiate or Die.  A lot of the key   themes and case studies here in The Obvious come from, or are an extension of what Jack wrote in the earlier books.  If you haven't read them, then this book would be a good place to start and get a refresher on the laws of practical marketing.  If you have read some of the others, this is still an excellent and entertaining read.  He has related the messages of focus, leadership, resources, category divergence, and differentiation to the main theme - your strategy should be obvious and full of common sense.  He quotes Robert R. Updegraff writing in 1916 to set the scene in the first chapter:

"The trouble is, the obvious is apt to be so simple and commonplace that it has no appeal to the imagination.  We all like clever ideas and ingenious plans that make good lunch-table talk at the club.  There is something about the obvious that is - well so very obvious!" The book expands on Updegraff's straightforward messages from all those years ago, and Jack's earlier ideas contrasting the clever and entertaining ads that might be very memorable (but do you remember the product?), with the boring or even irritating ads which definitely leave you with the product in mind.  He shows same great examples of confusing and wordy mission statements that are so generic, they could be any company doing anything.  I wrote earlier about one section on the law of the ear - does a picture paint a thousand words?  The book is full of good case studies, and spot on analysis of the current state of Wal-Mart, Coke, newspapers or the beer business.   It has some great guidance on how you should be thinking about getting back to basics, and constructing sensible and obvious strategies.   I think it is a great antidote to some of the current muddled thinking that you see from some marketing departments - an entertaining read that is well worth tracking  down.

(Cross-posted @ Business Two Zero)

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That was the fun part.  After all, it's Sunday.  Now read the story here:

• News Analysis: SAP’s CEO Léo Apotheker Resigns
• SAP: Apotheker gone, co-CEO's appointed
• “Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul”
  

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According to Sage Circle, Forrester is telling all of their analysts that have their own personally branded research blogs that they must either take them down or re-direct them to the Forrester site. Apparently Forrester feels like they can provide more value to their clients if they aggregate all of the content into one space, that place of course being Forrester’s site.  My favorite comment on this issue came from Dave Mcclure who said:

“What is the downside for Forrester? Likely not much unless there is a big stink in the blogosphere…”

Seriously, you think that’s the only downside? How incredibly short-sighted. This is the corporate research equivalent of suicide.

Clearly, no analyst with a shred of talent or ambition will ever likely choose to work for Forrester, assuming this policy is enforced. Best of luck to the remaining losers who decide it’s a good idea to tuck tail between legs and go silently into the night to work as a faceless drone for FR. why not require everyone at FR commute to work by horse & buggy while you’re at it.

Forrester was absolutely idiotic for not taking more advantage of the incredible talent of folks like Charlene Li & Jeremiah Owyang while they were on staff at Forrester, and for not realizing how HUGE a benefit blogging & the visibility created by those folks was to generating business for Forrester. It’s no surprise they chose to break away and start their own firm, which appears to be growing leaps & bounds.

I can’t think of anything more likely to hobble and kill the spark of innovation and curiosity that most research analysts have in their DNA than to require them to publish as a no-name entity.

what an incredibly stupid & self-damaging move.”

Dennis Howlett calls this move an Epic Enterprise 2.0 Fail by Forrester.  Dennis and Dave both echo my sentiment.  Needless to say, I don’t agree with this move by Forrester and here are a few reasons why:

• The time spent on branding and marketing the analyst’s website is lost, Jeremiah Owyang for example has a very loyal reader base.  He would have to redirect them all to the Forrester site and then if he left somehow re-direct them all back to his personal site?
• SEO value for individual sites is now lost (and gained by Forrester), for example, Google “social media consultant” whose site do you see?  I would never want to lose that.
• Creativity and innovation is now going to be stunted because instead of having the feeling of ownership for anything analysts create, they are instead going to have to pass everything over to Forrester.  I think this is also going to hurt morale a bit as well.
• I feel like analysts have greatly contributed towards the brand visibility and credibility of Forrester  since they were able to share their own ideas and thoughts, now that everything is “Forrester” branded that feeling diminishes.  After don’t we trust individuals more than we trust companies?
• Individual personality and voice is also going to be diminished now that the individual brand is going to become a corporate one.

What do you think about this?  Is Forrester making a good move by asking all analysts to either take down or re-direct their own personally branded blogs?  As an analysts what would you do in this situation?

(Cross-posted @ Social Media Globetrotter)

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Listen to Sam Boonin, GoodData’s VP Marketing on the Cloud Computing Show. Pretty fun podcast with Gary Orenstein about Cloud BI and how to get started with analytics in your company.

You can download the podcast here, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or visit the Cloud Computing Show blog.

Some our “young adults”, others look more like kids – they are teenagers, and while the official age limit is 13, I’ve seen tweets from 12-olds boarding their planes for the Teens in Tech Conference.  Yes, they are not “normal” kids – if normal means hanging out in the mall or video arcades.  They are the Digital Teens – more tech savvy than I am, many are entrepreneurs, having started a business or two.

It’s happening today, and you can follow it right here, thanks to UStream.tv.

Free live streaming by Ustream

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Even as Oracle kills off the critically acclaimed Sun cloud offering, it prepares a PR blitz to proclaim its cloud strategy: the software arms dealer to the cloud-computing stars.

Last month we announced the forthcoming release of the Kindle Development Kit, a suite of programming interfaces, tools, and documentation that allows you to build active content that you can promote in the Kindle Store. I travel a lot, and I'm seeing more and more Kindles every time I fly. Kindle owners never hesitate to tell me how much they love their devices and its capabilities -- the long battery life, an easy-on-the-eyes display, an incredibly convenient form factor, the instant gratification of accessing and downloading new content on-the-go whenever something strikes their fancy. Now you, as a developer, can tap into this enthusiasm and create compelling active content.

Today we're pleased to announce open enrollment into the Kindle developer beta program. Read more about the program here and sign up here. We'll ask you to briefly describe your idea during the enrollment process. Enrollees receive information on how to download the development kit, how to receive support from us while you develop your project, and how to submit your finished project to the Kindle Store. The development kit includes a Kindle simulator (both 6" and 9.7") that works on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. You can also register up to three Kindle devices through the developer portal; the owners of those devices will receive invitations to download and test your active content.

The Kindle as a platform offers your customers a great user experience, including its large e-ink display and access to its always-connected wireless Whispernet with no monthly connectivity fees or contracts. The Kindle Store provides you wide exposure to make your active content discoverable and accessible to a very large community of enthusiasts. We're looking forward to seeing some great innovation!

> Steve <

We are polishing up some great enhancements to GoGrid and the results of our efforts will be live shortly. To that end, please be notified that we are performing Scheduled Maintenance in order to roll out new functionality and features which does require some downtime of the GoGrid Portal. This information has already been delivered to existing GoGrid customers via email and is also available on the GoGrid Status Blog.

Scheduled Maintenance Details

Infrastructure Update:
Tuesday, February 9th, 19:00 – 23:00 PST
(Wednesday, February 10th, 03:00 – 07:00 GMT)

Customer Impact:

The GoGrid “my.GoGrid.com” customer portal and API will be unavailable for up to 4 hours while we upgrade our infrastructure. There will be no impact to existing GoGrid VMs, load balancers or cloud storage during this time.

Maintenance Details:

GoGrid is making software improvements to the GoGrid customer portal and API.

Inquiries:

If there are any additional questions before, during or following the maintenance, please direct them to the GoGrid Support Center at 877-946-4743 or +1-415-869-7444, or contact us via the customer service portal at https://my.gogrid.com. (Note: during the scheduled maintenance, you will NOT be able to access the GoGrid Customer Service Portal for support so we recommend using the phone numbers listed above.)

For the latest details on GoGrid’s systems & Data Center status, please visit our system status blog: http://www.GoGridStatus.com

For More Information

Once the release is completed, we will be updating the GoGrid blog as well as the GoGrid Wiki with information about the new features and enhancements. Be sure to subscribe to the blog feed for up-to-date information. You can also get email delivery of blog posts by subscribing here. Lastly, you can get real-time information from our Twitter stream by following @GoGrid there.

I just got back from an action packed week of meetings in Shanghai, China. Shanghai is one of the more exciting cities I've visited recently as they prepare for the World Expo in May as well as the upcoming Chinese New Year festivities. As a city Shanghai is a bustling modern metropolis. A city that in a little over thirty years has gone from a small village to mega city of more then 30 million people. In talking with the people I met in Shanghai I quickly came to realize that like myself, most people in Shanghai were not originally from there, most had recently moved there from other areas of China for "economic opportunities" the city now offers. Looking around the city you'll notice a level of wealth on par or better than most western cities. In a nutshell the reason I found myself in Shanghai was for the very reason the Chinese are now pouring into the the city, the opportunity to capitalize on the new Chinese dream.

As many of you know I've been a big proponent of Cloud Computing in the PRC for quite some time. Not withstanding that China is among the fast growing and largest economies on the globe, China has a significant data center hosting ecosystem made up of a small group of very large state sponsored telecom organizations which makes selling [hosted] Cloud services in this market a challenge to say the least. Fortunately for me their overwhelming need to equip a new and rapidly growing underlying network infrastructure is a huge opportunity, something that myself and Enomaly seem uniquely qualified to offer.

Unlike other markets around the globe the Chinese hosting business lacks any sort of small or middle tier of hosting providers, yet the country has upwards of 40 million small businesses. In my discussions with several of the largest Chinese telecom providers the opportunity is simple, to help a equip these emerging small businesses to become part of the larger global information / internet environment. Yet another driver for the use of cloud based infrastructure in China is the the rapid development found in the data center real estate market. Like the booming real-estate market itself, data center space and capacity is growing at an exponential rate. All this new space means new capacity, capacity that needs to be managed in an adaptive, energy efficient and continually evolving way. Something that cloud computing is ideal for. Also, with the development of a country wide wireless Internet infrastructure, it seems that cloud computing will play a major role in how people access applications and information in China.

How do you say Cloud Computing in Chinese you ask? 雲計算 yún jì suàn -- The reason I mention this is because to do business in China today, you must first understand the way the Chinese do business. Culture is an extremely important part of all aspects of the business environment. As for Enomaly in China. We now count several of the largest Chinese Banks, Power/Energy utilities, Regional Telecoms and even a local police force as ECP customers. What is interesting is we seem to have found ourselves a sought after niche in the Chinese market. A particular niche that has been overlooked by most in the technology world -- that of cloud enablement. Some of the reasons are simple others are more complex but it mostly comes down to market access. Things like culture, language and relationships play a hugh role in how business is done here.

To be honest, we were extremely lucky in that we found a major partner in Intel who provided us with on the ground support and introductions to some of the largest players in China. Without the know how and help of the Intel China team I doubt we would have had the opportunities that we now enjoy as a small company in this very large market. So my suggestion to any upstart trying to gain a foot hold in the Chinese market is to first find an established player with a local team. And second, do not build you're own data centers, local IT policies really don't make running your own data center a reasonable option. Of those who have tried they typically do so under the rationale of "Disaster Recovery" which limits your ability to act as a production hosting facility.

In closing, when it comes to doing business in the PRC, the sky is the limit, keep watching you'll see some exciting Enomaly related news in the very near future.
Announcing The Enomaly Cloud Service Provider Edition | Twitter Me | Get Linkedin | Contact Reuven | Disclosure Policy

ChannelWeb today posted an article on the opportunities in the cloud as they relate to public and private clouds. This discussion hearkens back to the old days when we were still debating if anyone would ever want to run their applications on the web. What year was that? 2002?

But there is clear trend towards SaaS and the Public Cloud, especially when businesses require higher productivity for less investment as we move to all things digital and accessible.

From where LongJump sits, we do see Private Clouds still being necessary. That’s why we do have an option for ISVs and partner businesses to fully install our entire platform and host it themselves. There is just some information you can’t put into distribution that even hint at a security compromise, whether it is sensitive financial information, intellectual property, health records, or legal information.

Obviously the attraction of Public Cloud solutions is clear:

• No IT commitment or investment
• Highly scalable and encourages growth
• Recurring revenue
• Remote management

In the end, the question for VARs, MSPs, and solution providers is: “What will my customers be willing to do to save some serious money?”

If you have both, find a partner who can do both.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, crn, hosted software, isv, msp, private cloud, public cloud, saas, var

Let me throw some things against the wall and see if anything sticks.

This week I confirmed Chris Messina (of OAuth, and now Activity Streams fame) and Jeff Lindsay (who gave an awesome talk on Webhooks last year) to speak at Gluecon. Simultaneously, I’ve been reading blog posts like this — where the punch-line is:

“Jump to the future when all of your favorite sites implement programmable hooks. The pipedream, holy grail, end result is that you no longer even need Twitter, because it’s become a protocol. Just like blogs happily send pingbacks, you can install a Twitter-speaking, open sourced package on a Slicehost account that is your own personal Twitter…It’s a decentralized, pluggable architecture, and it integrates with any site using web hooks. At your service.”

Further, we’re starting to see news around Twitter and OAuth Delegation. Add it all up and what do you get? The power lies in the API. Or maybe, more pointedly, in the terms of service that large players choose to impose on their API.

LinkedIn is famous in some circles (no names) for not playing so nice with their API. According to their terms, you can’t store anything other than a profile or ID –which is to say you can’t store the most powerful/useful thing about LinkedIn — the connections. Beyond that, their TOS says that you can’t use their API and “compete” (though it never defines what that is). And, to put the icing on top, they gain the right to “audit” you if you use their API.

Are these things reasonable? Do they compare unfavorably with Facebook, Twitter, etc? I don’t know. But it’s a conversation worth having.

You see, the goal of “the cloud” isn’t simply putting all of your stuff into some stored space for access. It’s connecting your “stuff” — your apps, data, networks, etc. The how, if, why, when and where of that connecting (you could call it, for lack of a better word, “glue”) is wholly dependent on the terms of service around APIs.

Here’s what I’m not suggesting: I’m not suggesting that companies don’t have to right to limit how you use their API (of course they do). I’m also not suggesting we build a “standard TOS for APIs” (although I have little doubt that some working group in some association somewhere is talking about just that). I am suggesting that it’s time to start digging into what all of this means for actually building things.

So while guys like Chris and Jeff are out building the guts of how to do callbacks and streams and whatever else, we also need to be thinking through what “terms of service” really means in a “post-cloud” world.

And we’re gonna do that at Gluecon.

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Siri provoked a flurry of interest last summer, and presumably not just because CTO Tom Gruber took part in one of my podcasts. With their genesis inside a big DARPA-funded Artificial Intelligence project, their talk of emergent Virtual Personal Assistants and their slick iPhone-powered demonstrations, the company ticked more than enough of the right boxes to get the semantic technology community positively drooling for more.

And then things went quiet.

Fast forward to 2010, and Siri is back. The back-end technology is faster, more robust, and fuelled by loads more data. Robert Scoble has been amongst those dropping not-so-subtle hints on Twitter for days, and other big names in and around the Valley have also been targeted in a carefully orchestrated programme of pre-briefings and beta invites. That all ends today, as the iPhone app is now out of beta and available this morning from Apple’s App Store. Versions for Android devices and the Blackberry are coming along close behind, and the company has big plans for building upon what they already have.

I got my hands on the app earlier this month, and put it through as many of its paces as I could from 3,000 miles outside the US market for which the current app and data are optimised.

I’ve written up the results of my play (and my conversation with Siri’s other two co-founders) for ZDNet, and look forward to trying it for real on my next trip to the States.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Siri: Your Personal Assistant for the Mobile Web (readwriteweb.com)
• DARPA-based Siri virtual assistant hits the App Store, smartphone sentience can't be far behind (video) (engadget.com)
• A Personal Assistant on Your iPhone (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Siri launches an iPhone personal assistant that actually works  (venturebeat.com)

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I’m a big fan of the work that Esteban Kolsky has been doing with Social CRM and he recently stated that he is going to be branching over towards the Enterprise 2.0 space.  Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0 efforts need to work in conjunction with one another and that’s what this whole post is about.  Dion Hinchliffe recently wrote an article stating that Social CRM is Ground Zero for Enterprise 2.0 and I couldn’t agree more.  This is why I have been working with Esteban Kolsky on thinking through some of these ideas and developing frameworks around them.  I’m working with Esteban on a Social CRM presentation that I’m going to deliver for the New Communications Forum towards the end of April which should be quite interesting.  The idea of the Experience Continuum is taken from one of Esteban’s older posts, we just worked together on designing the new visual for it which I am going to go through and explain.

I’m sure Esteban can do a much better job of covering the details and concepts behind this but I’ll just provide an overview.  The key to this framework is to understand that the process between SCRM and E2.0 is never ending and that they both integrate into one another.  The feedback and the knowledge that is obtained from SCRM is then fed back into the Enterprise to be acted upon.  Once action is taken the customers once again provide feedback and so the process continues.  This never ending sharing of information and customer empowerment is what is referred to as the experience continuum.

Let’s briefly identify the four key areas within the continuum, keep in mind that the same structure exists for both internal E2.0 and external SCRM efforts.

Biz function

• This refers to who is going to take the specific action and receive the information.  Is this going to be handled by the customer service team or by the marketing/pr team?

Rules

• Every business function has it’s own set of rules and governance for how to various initiatives are to be approached and executed.  For example Comcast uses their customer service team to front end their social media efforts, from there any issues that cannot be covered by their team get ticketed and forwarded to the correct team in the correct department.  Having a set of rules and processes in place is a necessity.  Keep in mind the set of rules also applies to anything that goes on internally within the enterprise.

Channel

• This is the method of communication and execution.  How is the response/action going to be handled and through what channels.

Community

• This is the final process that actually deals with execution and community interaction.  Again this can be the external community of users or the internal community of employees and stakeholders.

As I mentioned this is the basic high level overview of the Experience Continuum.  I’ll let Esteban get into more detail and will perhaps update this post with his notes, but for now I’m curious to hear  your thoughts and ideas.  Please feel free to poke holes, analyze, and critique all of the above and we will make changes that make sense.

(Cross-posted @ Social Media Globetrotter)

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As a follow on to Cloud Camp Seattle, I met two particularly distasteful people, Mr. Snake Oil Salesperson and Mr. Know it ALL. Both are doing a disservice to everyone, and here is why these people should not be involved in your cloud computing project.

Mr. Snake Oil Sales Person

This is a huge problem because companies are looking for products that work, do what they are designed to do and solve a problem. Unfortunately, there are a number of products out there that are not suited or suitable for the cloud computing environment. They claim to solve a problem, but in reality will cause more problems than they solve. The process involves a sales person who knows all the right buzzwords but does not understand the fundamental concepts behind them, nor can show where their product solved a similar or same problem for another company.

Mark Suster has a great piece about this: “Danger of Crocodile Sales”. Cloud computing is rife with companies in Alpha, Limited Beta, Beta, or selling product that simply is not up to the tasks in cloud computing that companies are looking for to manage and scale systems. The immature products that are out there right now will solve some problems, but not some of the bigger problems out there for audit, control, CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, and Accessibility) policy management, or even simple system administration. Right now we have a pile of old data center model software that is being cobbled together to putatively support the cloud. This is a bad thing for companies who are looking to purchase software to manage their cloud environments.

These people are more of a danger to the cloud computing project for a company than a help. These people are a danger to any project being undertaken by a company. The reason for being dangerous is that they are going to sell a product or service that is not suited for what the company is doing. When things start to fall apart the sales person will make wild offers to “customize it for you” when really what they are doing is using you as a learning experience to make their product better, or even just make a product for the cloud environment. You are paying them to develop a product for you that they are going to turn around and revise to sell to other folks. There are better ways to do product development, and most companies are not “software development test beds” for software manufacturers.

Mr. Know it ALL

These folks are even more dangerous than Snake Oil Sales People because no one knows it ALL, and certainly not in cloud computing. They tend to try to dominate the discussion and tell people all sorts of arcane and useless knowledge to show that they know it ALL. (The caps are intentional here, I subscribe to the belief that no one ever knows everything or that anyone is ever 100% right all the time, it is statistically improbable that anyone knows it ALL or is right 100% of the time). There are some very smart people out there, but Mr. Know it ALL is busy dominating the discussion, talking about useless bits of information that do not apply to the project, or otherwise obfuscating what should really be going on with a cloud computing project in that everyone in the organization will have a stake in this.

The reason for the danger is that they really do not know it ALL, rather they rely on bluster and volume to make a point that could cost the project a consensus on a truly important point. Like the workflow for the Cloud Environment, the way to store crypto keys in a cloud environment, how to ensure CIA, and other important things to discuss and reach consensus on. Rather they are busy discussing how long it took them (a year and a half) to discover the actual VM use in a cloud computing environment and the pain and suffering it took to discover this. How they slaved day and night because knowing the VM is an important fact, it is something that we all should know and how dare the cloud computing service company obfuscate that knowledge. (This is an actual event, which was painful to sit through). They are not helping; rather they are seeking to manipulate the needed and necessary group consensus for a cloud computing project to their own ends, or to inflate their own self-esteem and/or ego. This can come at a steep cost to a project, as they will cause delays in implementation spending a year and a half seeking to find the VM used by a service provider. No project can afford this kind of delay or obfuscation of the truly important part of getting a service or product into the hands of users to make the company more competitive.

If you see any of these people in your project then the company or project manager needs to nip this process in the bud. Unfortunately, they are hard to spot as there is a value to them generally, but the risks they bring to the project far outweigh any derived benefit that they bring to the project. Companies still deal with a phenomenal rate of project failure, these might be two of the causes, which are somewhat easy to eliminate from a project. This is more of a cautionary note based on my experience, but one that is well worth noting because in the end, a company cannot afford the cost or time overruns that these two people bring to the table.


(Cross-posted @ IT Toolbox)

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Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with a great t-shirt is a prime candidate to have a great product also. Click here to see the series.

If you’d like your t-shirt reviewed, flick me an email to arrange things. The judges decision is, of course, final and very little correspondence will be entered into (perhaps). 

defrag 2009, occupying a prominent space in the expo area, software vendor (and creator of well known editing software Camtasia) TechSmith demos it’s new visual collaboration offering, Jing and, more importantly, it’s new t-shirt design.

In an edgy move, the TechSmith shirt features a WWII bomber run, dropping parachutes underneath which float slides and filmstrip – it’s a somewhat whimsical and pretty cool approach.

Hot

• The front design is actually pretty cool – kind of Bauhaus, kind of retro and kind of whimsical
• I like bby blue, it brings out my complexion or something (actually it just makes a change from black)
• 100% Cotton

Not

• Way too many logos on the back
• Made in Mexico… but I’ll accept that the fight against third world manufacturing is a battle I’ll never win

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