Digipede Evangelista Kim Greenlee will present at the Bay Area .NET User Group on Thursday, September 28.  The show starts at 6:30, at 1 Market Street (the “Landmark Building”) in San Francisco.  (Yes, that’s Microsoft’s office — go to the second floor, and score some free pizza.)  It’s an easy BART ride from wherever you  are (in the Bay Area), and it’s well worth the trip.  She’s talking about concurrency, a topic near and dear to the hearts of architects and developers everywhere.  Multi-threading, grid computing, clusters, grid objects — if you’re thinking about scalability and concurrency, this talk’s for you.  Details and registration — go here.

Tags: .NET, Bay-Area-.NET-User-Group, concurrency, Digipede, dotnet, grid-computing, grid-objects, Kim-Greenlee, scalability

Kudos to Dan Ciruli (our Director of Products, and also Product Manager for the Digipede Network, and also Bug Hunter, Documentation Czar, Demo Application Coder, Stand-in Sales Engineer, frequent Webcast Demo Guy and probably half a dozen other things I’m leaving out).  He’s been working late into the night on the release of Version 1.3 of the Digipede Network (as has everyone at Digipede with the possible exception of me).  And then he got sick (he’s got some moderately nasty cold he picked up from travel and late nights).  And now he’s got to sort out what might have to go into a 1.3.1, what can wait for 1.4, what’s 2.0 going to look like…  Basically, he’s pegged.

But while he’s pegged, and sick, he still just can’t stand it — he’s got to think of yet another way to show the world how insanely great the Digipede Network is.  So he’s crashed on his couch at home trying to kill this damn cold, and instead of (while?) watching poker reruns, he’s figuring out how to capture video of our Mandelbrot demonstration so that he can post it on YouTube and link it to his blog.  Basically, the demo is a drag race between a single machine and a testbed of five machines running the Digipede Network.  That demo is now accessible to anyone who has a minute and nine seconds to spare (go ahead, you’ve got 1:09 to spare — go look).

How cool is that?

Tags: Dan-Ciruli, demo, demonstration, Digipede, Mandelbrot, YouTube

I don’t know where I first heard the expression “pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land,” but it applies in a great many new businesses.  My hat is off to Sun for taking the roll of “giant pioneer” in the area of utility computing, with their SunGrid $1-per-CPU-hour offering that’s been in the headlines for months.  It certainly appears that they are taking their share of arrows (see, for example, today’s CNET article by Stephen Shankland).  “Sun is revamping Sun Grid, which has attracted more hype than paying customers.”  Ouch.  And apparently, they’re losing one or more high-level executives over the continuing apparent non-success of SunGrid.

The offering has been an enigma to me from the outset.  Great hardware (both servers and networking) from a great hardware company, which is certainly important.  Apparently good reliability in terms of keeping the service up and running, which is certainly important.  The missing link?  Applications!  (Here we go again.) 

I was at GridWorld 2006 last week, and there were Sun folks all over the place with signs up for their “Gridathon” where they were showing folks how to adapt applications to their grid, and the excitement was, well, let’s just say “under control.”  I didn’t see a lot of interest, and I think it’s about tackling the wrong problem first.  It appears to me that there’s a long hard hill to climb to get applications onto SunGrid, and until that problem is fixed, few will care if the price is a buck or a penny per CPU-hour, even if the racks are full of nice hardware.

Now a utility that used the simplest method available for adapting a wide array of applications to the grid — THAT would be something.  Any of you hardware / network / datacenter guys want to talk?

Tags: grid-computing, GridWorld, pioneers, Sun, SunGrid, utility-computing

OK, I don’t hype many of Digipede’s new customer announcements here, but go read this.  I’ll wait.

We are very excited to be working with award-winning visual effects studio Digital Dimension.  These guys get it, and are a lot of fun to work with.  Multiple rendering programs, multiple locations, multiple simultaneous projects — and a very keen sense of how to manage complex workflow.  Indeed, the key driver for this implementation is not raw computing power — a pile of hardware and a bunch of application-specific batch schedulers can provide that — but the IT agility provided by giving a clearer view into their entire production pipeline.

I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again — small and medium businesses have a much clearer idea of how IT relates to their bottom line than most big enterprises.  With the right tools, Digital Dimension can turn CPU-hours into money.  We make it easier to manage their production pipeline, they make money.  We let them take on more projects (and/or bigger ones), they make money.  We help them adjust to changing customer priorities without disruption, they make money.  I don’t need to do their ROI analysis for them — they know it already.  It’s in their DNA.
Watch for more about this one.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, rendering, SMB, visual-effects

I always appreciate (crave?) recognition of Digipede’s accomplishments and role in the market.  I was very pleased and honored today to receive the GridToday Editor’s Choice award for “Best Price / Performance Middleware Solution for a Grid Implementation.”  Here I am with Tom Tabor, publisher of GridToday; thanks, Mitch, for taking the picture.

GridWorld shows promise as a conference.  Attendence is not huge, but enthusiastic.  Vendors are few, but good.  Sessions are mixed — some quite good, some pretty bland.  More later.

I gave a presentation earlier today, which actually went pretty well.  I packed four “mini case studies” into 45 minutes.  I had good attendence, good questions, and lots of interest afterward — so that counts as a success. 

Tags: Awards, Digipede, Events, grid-computing, GridToday

A few months back, when I wrote an abstract for GridWorld 2006 about “Grid Computing in Small and Medium Businesses,” well, suffice it to say that we had a few discussions before the presentation was accepted.  After all, everyone seems to KNOW that there’s no such thing as grid computing in small and medium businesses — everyone, that is, except Digipede and its many SMB customers.

In any case, a bit of gentle pursuasion got the abstract accepted, and I was given the plumb agenda position of — Dead Last, on the last afternoon.  Fine, whatever.

A few weeks back, however, the organizers called with an offer — would I like to trade Dead Last, last afternoon, for 10 AM Tuesday?  What?  Present while people might actually still be attending the conference?  Sure!  I went for it, and yes indeed, my talk is now 10 AM, Tuesday September 12.  Be there!

Now, my mom, dad, grandparents, and various other wise influences all taught me — “when it sounds too goood to be true, it probably is.”  And I don’t know why no alarm bells went off before I accepted this “too good to be true” offer.  But upon further review of the agenda, I’m not the only one with a great time slot.  Indeed, Papa Grid Ian Foster is speaking at the exact same time.  I suppose I can take some solice in the fact that everyone who knows jack about grid computing has already heard Ian speak (probably many times), but the fact remains — I’m up against pretty much the Number One name in grid computing, and I’m speaking on what many consider a pretty damn obscure topic.  Plus — I’ll have to miss Ian’s presentation!  Oh well — reading between the lines, it looks like Dan’s got it covered.

In any case, I’m looking forward to a good event — many grid luminaries, many good presentations, and Digipede will have some new announcements (watch this space).  All I can offer anyone who wants to skip Ian’s presentation is some real-world stories, a description of our recent work for Digipede’s largest non-finance customer, and no-holds-barred Q&A.  See you in DC!

Tags: Events, grid-computing, GridWorld, Ian-Foster, Presentations

Robert W. Anderson started his blog, currently known as Expert Texture, one year ago today.  He celebrates at with a divide-by-zero joke.

As Digipede’s oldest and best-read blogger, he’s an inspiration to us all.  Happy Birthday, E.T.

OK, OK, the joke is old — no Microsoft product is worth using until Version 3, har-dee-har, and maybe it’s a cheap shot at a product just awakening in beta.

But one of our favorite Microsoft smart guy bloggers, Don Dodge, is posting about AdCenter like it’s some kind of moneymaker for Microsoft, and I have to say — what? This is like waiting for Zune to move the dial for Microsoft’s stock. The umpteenth-place entry in a two-player market is not “big financial news,” and will not make a noticable impact until some major changes are made. AdCenter is a weak offering, MSN Search is losing market share, and the reason is performance. Neither AdCenter nor MSN Search work as well as competing offerings. The combination of the two is just not compelling for ad buyers.

Don notes that “the real money is made by delivering ads,” by which I assume he means “the real money is made when the ads delivered are so relevant and helpful that people click on them rather than just looking at the non-revenue search results.” In that regard, my experience indicates that Microsoft has a long, long way to go. Don (and Ballmer and Gates and everyone else) can tout the “rocket science” in search and ad serving all they want — they’re right, these are hard problems — but this Microsoft offering still needs more rocket scientists.

As a loyal member of the Microsoft Partner Community, I signed up for Microsoft AdCenter when it first became semi-open for business in June. The ads I placed on Microsoft’s service generate negligible traffic for us, while Google ads generate a ton and Yahoo ads fall somewhere in between. I use approximately the same words in each service, and the results are strikingly different. My semi-quantitative analysis shows that Google delivers far more hits — substantially more than I would expect just by allowing for the respective market shares of Google and Microsoft in the search market. (I say “semi-quantitative because my hit tracker gives incomplete results, and each service provides different reporting tools.)

Here’s a simple illustrative example: When I buy the search phrase “grid computing,” I want people to click on a Digipede ad that leads here. With Google AdSense, buying that phrase costs a lot, and I get a lot of hits (249 clicks on our ad in a given recent period from that single exact search phrase, and we could have had more if I had not limited our budget). When I buy “grid computing” at Microsoft’s AdCenter, it’s cheap, and I get — bupkus, zilch, nada (ok, 7 clicks to be more precise, and that’s without coming CLOSE to our budget). Yeah, part of that is overall search market share, but part of it is clickthrough rate, and part is the profile of users searching for this particular phrase — and taken together, I do better on Google, by a lot. (Yahoo is somewhere in between; Microsoft is a distant last.) To me, just a big dumb entrepreneur buying ads, this looks like Google is doing a (much) better job serving my ads to an audience that cares. (Yes, these are Search Ads, not the newly available Content Ads Don posted about; we have no experience with the latter at AdCenter yet, but I look forward to trying them out. Note that this new offering, again, is strictly catch-up with long-established offerings on Google and Yahoo.)

Also the signup process was simpler at Google, and guess who’s legalese was less intimidating and obtrusive? And while I’m piling it on, Google and Yahoo have reporting that’s more intuitive (and in Google’s case, more responsive), Google allows integration with the very-cool Google Analytics service, both Google and Yahoo provide better control over where and when your ads run, and they make it easier to recover a lost password (I had to go back to guessing at AdCenter; I have no idea where my password was emailed by the AdCenter password recovery robot, but it wasn’t to me…).

In its current form, AdCenter is an also-ran, which is a shame — one might expect that the Microsoft-centric target audience I’m looking for would use MSN Search more often than many other audiences would. I will tell the “Chief Media Revenue Officer” (I kid you not) the same when her contractor gets around to sending the satisfaction survey she promised me.

I’ll be happy to post again after we’ve had some experience with the added content ad functionality Don reported. In the meantime — wake me when we get to 3.0.

Tags: AdCenter, AdSense, Digipede, Google, grid-computing, Microsoft, Search, Yahoo

Today marks the beginning of a new tradition at Powersunfiltered.  Each month (or more likely, whenever I feel like it) I will present the Powersunfiltered Ferdinand Foch Award to an entrepreneur whom I admire for, well… you’ll see. 

Ferdinand Foch, the French general, field marshall, and hero of World War I, issued a famous dispatch from the Marne, which translates (approximately) as:

“My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I shall attack.”

It is difficult to come up with a more fitting quote to put at the top of the entrepreneur’s day planner every single day.  “Good morning!  Everything still screwed up?  Cool.  We still badly outgunned?  Excellent.  Charge!”

(And for the PC crowd preparing to berate me on my lack of sensitivity to the horrors of war, I provide this convenient link to the definition of the word “analogy.”)

For August 2006, the entrepreneur who embodies this ”bring it on” attitude best is Mr. Matt Heaton of Bluehost.com.  I’m Matt’s customer at Bluehost; Digipede CTO Robert Anderson recommended Bluehost as a place to host my blog, and I know better than to debate Robert on such matters.  I don’t know Matt, and have never even corresponded with him — he’s got enough on his mind.  He’s got a new baby (about six weeks old), a growing business, numerous voracious competitors (large and small), puny margins, hardware failures, software failures, and a genuine customer service crisis.

There are lots and lots of value-added goodies that a hosting service can provide to differentiate, and Matt’s been very innovative in providing those; more are in the works.  But in the final analysis, hosting is about reliability — whatever I put online needs to be online, or nothing else matters.  Bluehost has had several outages in July and August.  Matt’s been beset by flakey routers, power failures, Linux bugs, firewall nightmares, and I think a plague of frogs.

Matt’s response?  Expand.

While buying replacement routers and compiling their own Linux kernel and changing out firewall software and generally rebuilding the plane in midair, Bluehost is also acquiring more space, more customers, more equipment, more employees.  Matt keeps his customers in the loop about all these decisions, through his blog and through direct email to customers.  He’s passionate, direct, and he’s this month’s winner of the Powersunfiltered Ferdinand Foch Award. 

I wish him all the best in delivering on his many promises — and in the meantime, keep your damn service up, OK Matt?

[Nominations for future awards are welcome; keep in mind this award is for both attitude and achievement — few would now remember Foch if he had not attacked, but no one would remember the quote if he had lost.  The awards committee is me.  I accept nominations from anybody, but I actually pay attention to nominations of entrepreneurs by other entrepreneurs.  All decisions by the awards committee are capricious, arbitrary, and final.] 

Tags: Award, Awards, Bluehost, hosting

I spent portions of the last three days at the Visual Studio Industry Partners (VSIP) summit in Redmond.  Thanks and congratulations to the whole VSIP team for a worthwhile and fun event!

VSIP is another of the Microsoft partner programs that can deliver great value if you’re patient and willing to work a bit.  As a continuing public service, I will now distill the information about the program you SHOULD be able to get from the VSIP Web site, but you can’t, because their Web site is almost as bad as the main Microsoft partner program site. 

(Without breaching the fearsome Microsoft NDA, here’s some feedback from a Microsoft manager at yesterday’s morning session, who shall remain anonymous:  “I would rather swim in a vat of squid than use the current VSIP Web site.”  Believe me, I can’t make this stuff up.  But at least THIS team is aware of the problems and is working to fix them; is anyone listenting at partner.microsoft.com?) 

VSIP is for partners that extend the capabilities of Microsoft’s Visual Studio and related development products.  There are various levels of program participation, and you get more benefits by moving up from Affiliate to Alliance to Premier.  There are a variety of ways to “extend the capabilities” of VS, from integrating new programming languages, to providing macros and add-ins, to delivering UI components, to writing libraries with new capabilities.  The Digipede Framework SDK, for example, extends Visual Studio through libraries that enable developers to write grid-enabled applications using the same tools and programming paradigms they already use.  (It’s part of the free Digipede Network Developer Edition — ask for one here today!)  You can read more about VSIP here, or at least that link works as of this moment, but navigation beyond that is at your own risk.

Now it’s certainly true that Digipede fits as closely with other Microsoft products as with Visual Studio.  So why do we spend our precious limited bandwidth with VSIP? 

Because these guys get it.  They listen.  They work hard to provide value for partners.  They understand that Visual Studio wins more market share by having great extensibility and great partners helping to extend it.  They are building a great ecosystem where partners really matter.  They have access to millions of developers on the Microsoft platform, many of whom we’d like to reach, and the VSIP team is both responsive and proactive in helping us reach those developers.  When developers have more choices and better tools, everybody wins. 

And by the way — Note to Allison Watson — THESE GUYS know how to feed partners!  Allison, see if you can recruit Laura Templeton and Amy Bang to help manage the next Worldwide Partner Conference.  (If you’ve missed the reference here, the definitive description of the packs of hungry partners prowling the halls of the last WWPC can be found in Dan Ciruli’s now-classic post, “Allison Watson Owes Me Lunch.”) 

When I say “these guys listen,” that was reflected in the way they approached this entire summit.  At some (ok, many) Microsoft meetings, a typical one-hour session is 59 minutes of PowerPoint and fast talk, concluding with a URL (that might or might not point to a valid address) where you can get more information.  While there was a bit of that in some of the VSIP presentations, mostly there was a fair bit of give-and-take with the attending partners.

My favorite presenter at this event, Luca Bolognese, is apparently well aware of this phenomenon.  He began the last 45-minute section of the day as follows, absolutely deadpan:

“I have four hours of material to present, and I will try not to go over four hours.  My presentation is in three parts, any one of which I may easily screw up, so please hold your questions until the end so I do not have to start over.” 

His presentation was actually excellent, he took questions as he went along, and he finished on time.  I can’t tell you what he’s working on, but he can, and it’s slick.  Check out his blog (although it’s not updated recently), or check out the LINQ Project, and if you have a chance to hear him speak, do it.

Other slick things I can’t talk about are talked about by Microsoft bloggers like Paul Andrew , who is overseeing the wonderful new Windows Workflow Foundation, and Richard Turner, who manages the invaluable Product Formerly Known as Indigo (Windows Communication Foundation).  These are two core pieces of .NET 3.0.  Let me second Robert W. Anderson’s request:  Free .NET 3!  Paul and Andrew — somehow, please find a way to  release .NET 3 independent of (and before) Vista! 

I’ll wrap this up by saying – if your product touches Visual Studio in any way, this is a program worth considering, and a team worth getting to know.  
 

Tags: .NET, .NET-3.0, ISV, Microsoft, partner, Partnering with Microsoft, Visual-Studio, VSIP, WCF, Windows-Workflow-Foundation, Workflow