Powers Unfiltered

I went to Microsoft’s Mountain View office last week, where I did an interview with William Leong, Microsoft ISV Evangelist.  We talked about Digipede’s market, products, and the need for grid computing in businesses of all sizes.  We even talked about IronPython, and how a last-minute addition to a recent version of our software has been driving new business for us.

The video of that conversation is now on Channel9; you can watch it here.

We’re offering developers who watch that video (and even those who don’t) a free copy of the Digipede Network Developer Edition — go to this page to get yours today.

Many thanks to  William and the rest of the Microsoft Evangelists for giving us this opportunity to get the word out about how Digipede and Microsoft work together to make software run faster and scale bigger!

Who says there’s no good news for financial companies?

Penny Crosman provided some good news for banks, hedge funds, and other money managers in her article today in Wall Street & Technology — good news for financial developers and IT professionals who need to access more processing power without complex application re-engineering. 

You can read the article for yourself — there are good quotes from AVM CTO Paul Algreen, a longtime Digipede customer – but from my perspective, the gist is this:

• CPUs are getting faster these days almost exclusively through putting more cores on a chip. 
• Hence, when you buy a fancy new server, performance only improves for applications that take advantage of multi-core architectures. 
• Yet most applications are single-threaded, leaving all but one core doing, umm, nothing. 
• AVM noticed this problem more than two years ago, and started using the Digipede Network to address it. 
• They’ve adapted compute-intensive legacy applications to run on a grid of multi-core boxes without expensive re-engineering, seeing huge performance gains. 
• Thanks to the intuitive programming model offered by the Digipede Framework SDK, AVM has added more and more applications to the grid since then, and they haven’t looked back.

This is quite typical of the experience many Digipede customers have had — that for most applications in financial services, multi-core and grid computing can be handled most effectively as two cases of the same general distributed computing problem.  

And yes, I’m going to plug our now-famous four-minute video on this topic again — you can watch it here.  Then you can request a free evaluation copy of the Digipede Network, and try it out on your own compute-intensive applications.  Because Intel and AMD aren’t waiting for the world to re-tool a few million enterprise developers; they’re banging out chips with more and more cores with every new generation. 

But with the right tools, you can take advantage of all that power — and that’s a welcome dose of good news for Wall Street!

Just saw a good article in Dr. Dobb’s about multicore OO development by John Gross and Jeremy Orme of Connective Logic in the UK.  A very different approach from Digipede’s; it may be possible to combine the two (haven’t dug any deeper yet).

For our now-classic discussion on a closely-related topic, you can start here.

I have blasted Microsoft (more particularly, the Microsoft Partner team) about their Partner Web site in the past, and was particularly vocal about the problems with the process of renewing our membership as a Gold Certified Partner in January, 2008.  (You can see my rant here, and my follow-up rant here.) 

In the spirit of giving credit where credit is due – kudos to the Microsoft Partner team for improvements to the re-enrollment process AND the stability of partners.microsoft.com.   I recently re-enrolled Digipede as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and the process went without a single hitch this year. 

Clearly, there are still lots of improvements that can be made to the Partner Web site (my suggestions from last year are still relevant), but streamlining the re-enrollment process and improving the stability of the site are much appreciated.  Thank you!

I’ve written here about Digipede’s financial services customers (about half of Digipede’s business is in that market), but today I’ll talk about an interesting project from the other half of our business. 

We did a press release today  about the recent sale we made to the US Navy.  You can read that here, so let’s go a little deeper. 

The Navy has access to huge volumes of very accurate geodetic data — information that tells the location and elevation of every point on earth.  (I never knew much about this area until this year, but a lot of decent public information is available.  You can look at this Wikipedia article if you’re interested, and dig around from there.)  Processing geodetic data is a very compute-intensive process.  Combining that information with 2-dimensional image data is even more complex. 

One application for this data is “terrain generation,” a process of converting raw data into a format useful for visualizing terrain in flight simulations.  A group at Lockheed Martin develops specialized software for this purpose; we’ve been working with their TOPSCENE group for some time. 

That group approached us for assistance in increasing the speed of their terrain generation process.  They’ve been great to work with — they’ve put the Digipede Network to work on their problem, and have achieved great results.  Their own press release  about the Digipede-enabled version of their software documents a 20x speedup in processing for our mutual customer at the US Navy.   

We’re excited about this application, for a variety of reasons.

First, Lockheed Martin is the largest independent software vendor (ISV) we’ve worked with, and they’ve validated our premise that ISVs would find the Digipede Network (and particularly the Digipede Framework SDK) the best choice for grid-enabling complex applications.  This is an important point for us.  ISVs can work with other vendors, or build their own application-specific distributed computing solution, and Lockheed Martin certainly has the resources to pursue either path — but they chose Digipede, and have achieved great results. 

Second, we see many, many more applications in processing geodetic data.  We’ve already made other sales in that area to government agencies outside of defense (no announcements yet, but stay tuned!), and we see increasing interest from commercial customers in this area as well.   

Finally, as many financial customers struggle with market issues (some of our clients from 2007 no longer exist in recognizable form), it’s important that Digipede diversify and demonstrate growth in other markets.  Customers like the US Navy certainly help with this important goal.  While government purchases can be  slow, we’ve been quietly working this area for years, and it’s great to see results we can discuss. 

Now that the big announcements about Microsoft’s cloud computing platform are out at PDC, I can finally talk about stuff formerly under NDA.

All I can say is — wow.  The Microsoft transition from cloud-absent to cloud-giant has begun.  There have been hints and leaks and guesses for quite some time now, but the announcements today have begun tying all the pieces together and clarifying the overall strategy.  The best news — it’s clear that Azure is aimed squarely at .NET developers, and that the services provided are amazingly rich. There’s lots of work to do in explaining this multi-faceted new platform to the market, but Microsoft is off to a great start.

I’m not at PDC, but Digipede CTO Robert Anderson is; his more-thoughtful take on today’s PDC announcements is here.

More to come…

OK, it’s “Blog Against Poverty Day,” and while I rarely participate in such blogging “days” (mostly out of disorganization), this seems a good time to share my experiences with Kiva.

This month, we are all learning (often to our dismay) just how connected our financial well-being is to decisions made by far-off strangers.  We can see now that poor decisions in New York and London can lead to financial pain around the world – and in our local communities.

But fortunately, the opposite is also true – a few good decisions locally can lead to great benefits around the world.

Early this year I heard about an organization called Kiva, which helps to organize loans for small businesses in developing countries – a practice known as “microlending,” part of the growing area of “microfinance.”  What interested me about Kiva was its funding source – individuals, recruited through its Web site.  I checked it out – and was soon lending money to store owners in Tanzania and farmers in Peru, a few dollars at a time.  I recently made my 100th loan on Kiva – many of which have already been repaid in full, and none of which have defaulted to date.

Through a combination of their growing army of individual lenders and their association with local microfinance organizations, Kiva has opened up a new way for entrepreneurs in developing countries to access the capital they need to grow their small businesses.  And those connections start here – I’ve seen other lenders on Kiva.org from my own home town of Lafayette, and from other nearby communities.

I really like what Kiva is doing – but more than that, I also really appreciate the fact that many, many organizations throughout the world are not waiting for a government bailout, are not intimidated by the scope of the problems they face, but instead are bringing innovative solutions to every corner of the globe.  As a result, while we may be connected to AIG and Lehman Brothers in ways not of our own choosing, we can also choose to connect to a store owner in Tanzania or a farmer in Peru.

After two years of testing the promises, wishes and hopes of the Microsoft AdCenter team, and thousands of dollars spent to no avail, Digipede is done with Microsoft’s online advertising.

I, CEO of a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, do hereby proclaim my opinion, based on firsthand experience, that Microsoft AdCenter is entirely without value to our company, inferior in every measurable way to competing offerings from Google and even Yahoo, and a time-and-money sink of unusual scope, even for Microsoft.

I ran the campaigns myself, took advantage of consulting and optimization offers, tweaked and twiddled the knobs and dials on all three platforms, spent money on all three platforms, and Microsoft is — third.  Distant third.

I posted about AdCenter more than two years ago, and the improvements since that time have been numerous — and meaningless, from the perspective of actual business performance.  I’ve heard Gates and Ballmer and others brag about newer and better algorithms for their advertising platform more times than I can count, and I’ve seen no improvement in clickthrus from prospective customers.

Microsoft’s search engine is fine — it’s come a long way in the last few years, and is now nearly as good as Google in most ways.   But something is desperately wrong with (a) the ad placement algorithms or (b) the way those ads are displayed or (c) the audience that uses Live Search or (d) all of the above, because the right people click through to us from ads placed by Google, and they don’t from ads placed by Microsoft.

Of additional concern is the apparently defective billing mechanism, which (in my experience) continued to bill my account after all campaigns have been paused.  (OK, possibly I screwed up in some way using the less-than-intuitive AdCenter interface, which I find clumsier than its competitors, and somehow missed pausing something — although I doubt it.)  Last week I finished working through this last minor billing issue with a very helpful and friendly Microsoft representative (I’m screwed, but only out of about $80 — nothing compared to the losses from legitimate bills), and have shut down our account.

Anyone from Microsoft is free to call me about our experience with your online advertising service — I’m at 510-834-3645 ext. 101 — just so long as the call does not present me with new opportunities to use this offering.  We’re done with it.

OK, this one came out while I was on vacation, so it’s a little old, but I can’t let it pass.

The new head of Red Hat, Jim Whitehurst, says “The clouds will all run Linux.”

Really? What’s next? The head of Boeing telling us that all transportation will be via 787s? Or maybe a statement from OPEC saying that cars will all burn gasoline?

Get serious. “The Clouds” will run Linux and UNIX and Windows and OS X and whatever else paying customers want.

“The Clouds” are already running more than just Linux, and if cloud computing is going to grow beyond today’s super-early-adopter proof-of-concept market, it’s going to get more diverse, not less.

Every time there’s a new IT buzzword (oops, I mean “revolution”), some market-oblivious engineer or attention-deficit analyst declares that finally legacy computing is dead, a new paradigm is here, there’s One Right Way to do everything now, the open-source rapture is at hand, you’re free from your chains, yada yada yada.

But a guy like Jim Whitehurst should know better.  Yeah Jim, “the clouds” are going to kill Microsoft. Yeah Jim, “the clouds” mean Oracle is finished. Yeah Jim, “the clouds” will all run Linux, and Slashdot will replace all other news outlets.

I’ll have lots more constructive things to say about cloud computing soon here, but for now let me just say: the cloud computing offerings I’ve seen so far look a lot like computing. There’s hardware infrastructure, there are operating systems, there are development tools, there are applications, APIs, and user interfaces. There are administrative tools, management consoles, and buckets of kludgy tricks to make anything actually work the way you want it to work. Different vendors expose different parts of all this to their users in different ways as they struggle to differentiate. But anyone who believes that “the clouds” will “all” standardize on a single OS (or database, or programming language, or much of anything else) is just blowing smoke.

The San Francisco Chronicle is not exactly the planet’s leading source of technology news and analysis.  So many of you probably haven’t yet seen Deborah Gage’s excellent article today about Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s ambassador to Silicon Valley.  Dan’l is among our most important contacts (and favorite people) at Microsoft, and despite his high-visibility role, many people (including many entrepreneurs) still don’t understand the value he can bring to a startup.

In a single sentence containing at least three significant understatements, Ms. Gage writes:

Microsoft still gets criticized sometimes for being slow to the Internet or hard to do business with, but Lewin has won praise over the years for his courtesy, efficiency and ability to connect outsiders to the right people inside Microsoft, which is not an easy task.

Whew.  Let’s parse that.

“Microsoft still gets criticized sometimes for being . . . hard to do business with . . .”  There is no question that doing business with ANY huge company is hard.  Building a close relationship with Microsoft (or any tech giant) is not for the faint of heart.  Microsoft presents some special challenges that I could go on about at length (oh wait, I’ve done that multiple times…), but let’s just stipulate that some of these criticisms are justified while some are not.

“…but Lewin has won praise over the years for his courtesy, efficiency and ability to connect outsiders to the right people inside Microsoft…”   Bingo.  Dan’l Lewin has done more to expose the helpful side of Microsoft to startups, entrepreneurs, and VCs than anyone would have thought possible just a few years ago.  His Emerging Business Team is the API for startups that want hooks into Microsoft.  Digipede has received numerous tangible and intangible benefits from working with the EBT; the group brings the attitude that they can’t wait to help interesting startups, and it’s Dan’l who sets the tone and agenda for that critical group.

“…which is not an easy task.”  No kidding.  I’m back to my API analogy.  If you would rather to try to reverse-engineer the Microsoft org chart from the outside, good luck — but a single call to the EBT can get you to the right person within Microsoft faster than any other method I know.

The Bay Area is teaming with “experts” who would have us believe that Microsoft has become irrelevant.  In my experience, entrepreneurs ignore Microsoft at their peril.  Far better to understand what they’re doing and why than to pretend they aren’t there.  Dan’l and his team are great resources for entrepreneurs who want to understand and work with Microsoft.  So — good job, Ms. Gage, for profiling Microsoft’s local champion of innovation.  Well worth reading.