Digipede announced another customer win today.  III Offshore Advisors, an innovative hedge fund that uses a lot of computing power in their pricing and risk management models, selected the Digipede Network for their grid.  You can read about it on our Web site; GridToday also picked up the story. 

Financial firms are famously competitive, and no niche is more competitive today than the hedge fund market.  While the secret to success of most hedge funds is just that — a secret — most start with a small core team that says:  We can do better.  We know (through math, intuition, research, hard work, or all of the above) how to make a better investment, a better trade, a better judgment than our competitors.  When we show what we can do, our investors will be rich — and so will we.

Many of the investment and trading strategies employed by these firms are developed through cutting-edge mathmatical modeling.  Some of the brightest minds in the world are drawn to this competitive and lucrative market, and regardless of the models employed, they all cry out for — more computing power.  And it’s not just for one or two applications.  In our experience with hedge funds (and we work with quite a few), even a small fund encounters computational bottlenecks in: 

• Risk management
• Fixed income pricing
• Trading analytics (including liquidity depth analysis, inter-portfolio correlation analysis, and more)
• Pricing of exotic derivatives, and more

Eliminating these bottlenecks can open up new trading opportunities sooner.  If putting in a grid this month lets you start trading in new markets next month — that’s an easy decision.  If putting in a grid this week lets you out-trade your competitor next week — let’s go. 

So how did the Digipede Network become the grid computing software of choice for hedge funds?  I’ll tell you in Part II.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, hedge-funds

I post a lot about our experiences as a partner and customer of Microsoft, and anybody who cares to go back and count knows that most of my posts are positive.  For whatever reason, my complaints / rants tend to get more attention, so I want to re-iterate – our experience with Microsoft is on balance largely positive, and we remain an enthusiastic Microsoft partner.

With that out of the way – LiveMeeting has to go.  It’s great software, and good, reliable service – with no understanding of business whatsoever.  The treatment our company  has received from the Microsoft Office LiveMeeting organization (still referred to within Microsoft by its old name, Placeware), has ranged from comical to appalling.  Today, we reached appalling.

In 2005, we started experimenting with LiveMeeting as a way of demonstrating our software to prospective clients.  There were pluses and minuses, but on the whole it proved to be an effective tool.  For a while, we mooched off a friend’s account at Microsoft, but by spring of 2006 we settled into a pattern of bi-weekly Webcasts, and got our own account.  My partner Dan Ciruli set up that account; the only form of payment they offered for this type of account at the time was to put the monthly charge on his credit card, so he filled out the necessary forms and received confirmation from Microsoft.  So far, so good.

Then, Microsoft never billed him.  Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time reviewing my credit card statement for transactions that aren’t there.  And apparently, neither does Dan.  So he did not notice that Microsoft was NOT billing us for this service.  And neither, apparently, did Microsoft.

Then somebody from Microsoft popped up in February 2007 and said to Dan HEY YOU HAVEN’T PAID US and Dan said “so take the money already!”  He completed a second credit card form, and was told (again) that everything was fine.  Then the exact same person from Microsoft popped up in March 2007 and said the exact same thing, as though he’d never had the previous exchange, and Dan forwarded all the exact same information, and got the same response – oh, sorry, everything is fine now.  It became a running joke in the office, wondering how they made any money.

And then in April, somebody new at Microsoft woke up and said HEY YOU GUYS OWE US A WHOLE TON OF MONEY.  Always a great day when that happens.  So Dan and I researched it and sure enough, we had been getting free LiveMeeting service for almost a year.  So I called the friendly and helpful person at Microsoft (all names withheld on this one) and asked if we could just pay by check (a) for the outstanding balance, and (b) monthly thereafter.  She agreed, and said she’d send (a) an invoice for the outstanding balance, and (b) a monthly invoice thereafter.  And everything was fine again.

Then, Microsoft never billed us.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time searching the mail for bills that aren’t there.  You put a valid invoice in my hand, I pay it promptly.  You don’t, oh well.  I pay a lot of invoices for other parts of Microsoft – most departments / divisions / business units / subsidiaries / whatever at Microsoft are pretty competent at getting a valid invoice to my desk, and I pay ‘em right quick.  But the LiveMeeting group apparently has not mastered this Business 101 concept. 

And of course, there’s only one way these things can end – we found our LiveMeeting account deactivated seven minutes before our scheduled Webcast this morning.  With attendees invited everywhere from here to India.  No warning emails, no onscreen notice that the account will be suspended in the future, no reason given on the Web page that says we’re dead, no “pay to reactivate” option, just — dead.  I don’t get real upset in the office very often, but I hit the roof. 

I called the toll-free number helpfully posted on the deactivation notice “for immediate service,” which presents a robotic phone tree with four options none of which are “TURN ME BACK ON NOW.”  I punch 4 to “talk with an attendant.”  I am transferred to Microsoft tech support, and am told I need to “talk to Placeware.”  I’m steaming now.  Four minutes and counting.  I call back and punch 2, “sales,” because in my experience humans usually answer when you talk to sales.  I get a human who is sympathetic, but says I need to call tech support; I get a new number to try.  Three minutes to go.  I call the new number, and find out the name of my account representative, and am transferred to him, but it turns out to be someone who sits near him, and eventually I reach my account representative.  Nope, I am assured that there is no way no how no human on earth who can turn my account back on in two minutes; my partner sends a note canceling the Webcast to all participants.  We look like idiots, and I am seriously pissed.

I stay on the line with my account manager, who asks many questions about who I had been working with previously on our account and billing issues (we find a couple of names, one gone and one still there).  I vent some more at him, and he’s sorry, and we’re done. 

The urge to open a WebEx account is now quite strong, but we suddenly realize we’ve got ANOTHER LiveMeeting with an important prospective customer later today.  Time for a deep breath.

I call the person who had previously promised to send me an invoice by mail, but never did.  I explain the whole situation again – she was “just talking with” my account manager.  I ask “did he mention that I ripped him a new one?”  She laughs nervously.  Between further apologies and digging into records, we eventually just put the whole bill on MY credit card, and she promises (really) to send me monthly invoices from here on.  Within an hour, the account is turned back on, and we’re good to go.

So – if customer service is “falling on the grenade,” these folks get a B+.  (To get an A, I had to be back up and running for the FIRST meeting we had scheduled.)  For processes and procedures – F.

Now we’ll see if I ever get a monthly bill – and yes, this is one I’ll be watching for.  And the Webex experiement begins in parallel next week.

Tags: LiveMeeting, Microsoft, Placeware

The Microsoft Emerging Business Team (EBT) has been a staunch supporter of Digipede for the past two years.  The EBT is run by Dan’l Lewin, sometimes referred to as Microsoft’s “Ambassador to Silicon Valley.”  As Digipede has grown from a raw startup to the leading provider of .NET Grid computing software, the EBT has provided guidance and support — inside of Microsoft and out. 

They just featured us in a success story on their excellent Web site.  I think the story  came out well.  The only thing I regret is mentioning how many paying customers we had when their writer interviewed me — because we’ve got a LOT more now!

If you’re a startup looking to partner with Microsoft, run do not walk to the Microsoft Startup Zone.  Lots of good advice, provided by people you should get to know.

Tags: Danl-Lewin, Digipede, Microsoft, startup

It’s been a year since I started blogging.  Powers Unfiltered has provided me with a number of unexpected benefits and consequences. 

First, it has put me in touch with more customers, partners, and prospects.  Given how erratic I’ve been with my posts (in timing, topics, and quality), I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the real business benefits I’ve seen.  The grid community remains open and accepting of new ideas — hopefully, so am I — and I see this conversation growing month by month.

Second, some of the most interesting and engaging conversations have erupted over a single topic — partnering with Microsoft.  I’ve tapped into a very interesting intersection of frustration / confusion from fellow partners and good will / bright ideas from some of Microsoft’s best people.  Something good may come of this.

Finally, the left-field crap has been fun.  I think several dozen people have learned how to adjust the brightness on their laptops thanks to my description of my own ineptitude.  I found a whole mess of people who are pissed at Velocity Micro (sorry, I’m closing off that topic, no more whining please.  My VM box works great now, and I’m a reasonably happy customer – end of story, at least for now.).  And a few folks are impressed with my quarters trick (ok, very few). 

So I’m ready to try this for another year — expect the unexpected, and thanks for all your encouragement and support!

John Dvorak’s column in the back of the May 22, 2007 issue of PC Magazine (and online here) points out the “Windows’ Words of Doom” that he “dreads to hear” which are:  “Preparing to Copy.”  He goes on to lament the decades-old problems that Windows users encounter in moving or copying files (or more accurately, folders full of files).  And while I take issue with one or two minor points in his rant, basically he’s right — the process of selecting one or more folders and dragging them someplace is fraught with far more peril than necessary. 

So don’t do it. 

Since 1999 (or maybe earlier), Microsoft has included a full-featured but lightly-publicized tool for handling heavy-duty file copying chores.  It’s called Robocopy, and it’s as brilliant and elegant and reliable as the “select and drag” method is perilous.  (Robocopy is one of the few truly useful bits of technology I discovered before Robert Anderson, who now uses it regularly — it saved his bacon again this week, but I’ll let him relate that story.) 

Robocopy started as a command-line tool with enough readable documentation to make anyone a copying wizard in just a few minutes.  It solves most of the seven “idiotic Windows glitches” Dvorak cites in his article, although it does not help with estimating the total time to copy (a harder problem than Dvorak cares to admit).  It is especially useful for copying chores that take a long time (like the one Dvorak describes), because it never pops up a dialog box to ask a stupid question in the middle of the activity (so it’s safe to walk away in the middle of the process!). 

No, it’s not as “easy” as just selecting and dragging — but spending 10 minutes figuring this out once will elimnate headaches for years to come.  Or you can just take my word for it that the following is sufficient for 99% of home copying chores: 

Robocopy source destination /S /E /W:3 /R:2 

I still use the command-line version, but there is also a Robocopy GUI (as described in this Microsoft Technet article). 

Robocopy is available for all versions of Windows since 2000 (and I think even NT 4.0).  The best version for XP is buried in the “Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools” (where else would you put a useful tool for Windows XP?).  Earlier versions are also tucked away in obscure ”resource kits,” but it actually ships with Vista.  It may very well be on Dvorak’s hard disk right now, hidden in plain sight.

Dvorak makes a final observation:

We’ve all experienced [these problems], wondering to ourselves “Gee, does this ever happen to Bill Gates?  And if it does, why doesn’t he do anything about it?!”  I have no idea. 

More mysterious to me, however, is why Microsoft does not TELL anyone that this problem was solved many years ago.  Microsoft seems to think this is the sort of tool that only an enterprise system administrator should want — but anyone who has seen the “preparing to copy” message should go get it now.  You’ll be glad you did.

Tags: copy, dvorak, file, file-copy, Microsoft, robocopy, Windows

OK, I’ve posted about our positive experience at a recent Microsoft conference, and I meant every word of it — it was a great event, and we had great treatment by all the Microsoft folks in attendence.  Now I want to address an issue about how policies attributed to Microsoft Legal have the (possibly unintended) consequence of reducing value for partners and customers.  (This is FAR beyond the control of individual event coordinators at Microsoft, who deserve both praise for their performance and sympathy for having to deal with misguided Microsoft corporate policies).

Here’s how the partner lead generation at a recent Microsoft event was organized (others are similar). 

• All the partners were given a badge scanner, with which to scan the bar codes on attendee badges when an attendee comes to the partner booth. 
• Any attendee who gets his or her badge scanned by at least half the partners at the event is entered into a drawing for some cool Microsoft thing (an XBox or a Zune or whatever). 
• Wonderful.  This helps to drive traffic to the partner booths.  cool.  Partners love traffic.
• But then Microsoft keeps all the attendee information (which it already has), including who was scanned by each partner, and does not share this information with the partner.   

What?

Yes, that’s right — the partner gets none of the contact information for the attendees scanned by the partner, in the partner’s booth.  Because this would somehow constitute inappropriate sharing of secret information provided by the user to Microsoft and Microsoft only.

Yes, Microsoft uses partner presentations and booths as an added draw for propective attendees when promoting their events.  Yes, Microsoft gets partners to pay a good chunk of the cost of this event (my back-of-the-envelope says maybe $60-$70K for this recent event).  But no, attendees may only (conveniently) share their information with Microsoft, not partners.  
  
Microsoft product teams (and others) go through detailed and valuable customer profiling and use case modeling exercises, doing their best to look at Microsoft’s products from the viewpoint of the user.  Let’s try this for the event process as well — here, I’ll start.  From the viewpoint of the conference attendee, here’s what’s happening. 

• I register for a conference.  Through this registration process, I give the conference organizer my contact information.
• I get a badge with a bar code on it.  I know this code allows me to be identified by a scanner.
• I visit a sponsor booth.  I see something that interests me.  I ask for more information.
• The sponsor scans my badge, and when I get back to my office after the conference, I have an email with the information I requested, and I am able to follow up as I see fit.

This use case has been mastered by conference organizers with far less experience and technical sophistication than Microsoft.  But Microsoft Legal has convinced itself that Microsoft events are different — that Microsoft is barred from sharing ANY attendee registration information with partners, even when the attendee specifically requests it from the partner.  No, the attendee must IN WRITING request FROM MICROSOFT that the partner be allowed to send any followup information.  No, the request by the attendee to the partner to scan the attendee’s badge and send information is insufficient.  
 
So here’s the surreal attendee use case we encounter instead at some Microsoft events:

• I register for the conference.  Through this registration process, I give Microsoft my contact information.
• I get a badge with a bar code on it.  I know this code allows me to be identified by a scanner.
• I visit a Microsoft partner booth.  I see something that interests me.  I ask for more information.
• The partner asks for my card.  I say I’ve run out (hey, I’m a developer, on the average day I give out zero cards, I probably forgot them in my office).
• I ask the partner to scan my badge instead.
• The partner hesitates, saying, “um, this scanner goes back to Microsoft and I can’t get the information off it.”
• I am confused.  This partner must be mistaken.  I say “no no, I gave Microsoft my information already, you don’t need to scan me for them.”
• The partner, now trying to avoid getting into an argument with a potential customer, must further explain:  “Actually, if I scan you here, you could win a prize from Microsoft.”
• I say “OK, scan away, I love prizes.”  I still don’t understand that the partner won’t get the information — I’ve been to 100 other conferences, and at each one, I get scanned and the firm doing the scanning is the one that sees my contact info.  (But the prize is also the escape clause for Microsoft Legal — no, Mr. Partner, the attendee might not want to hear from you, he or she might just want a Zune, so it’s inappropriate to share that contact information.  No, Mr. Partner, you can’t get a separate scanner to collect information for yourself — the scanned information must be linked back to the database we’ve collected and can’t share.  Catch 22.)
• The partner scans me, and as I turn to go, says awkwardly “err, could you just write your contact information on this notepad here?”
• Now I’m just irritated.  Maybe I write my contact info, maybe I don’t, but all convenience and familiarity has gone out of the interaction.
• And I get back to the office and maybe I have the follow-up information I requested and maybe I don’t — the transfer of information via notepad scribbling is slower and more error-prone than the scanning process.  

Hey Microsoft — Partners drive sales.  Partners drive 96% of your sales.  I read that on a poster in Redmond.  I heard that from executive after executive at the Worldwide Partner Conference.  And we drive sales by talking to customers and prospective customers.  You should be jumping at every chance you have to facilitate this process. 

If I scan the badge of an event attendee, that attendee has the reasonable expectation that he or she is providing contact information to me (I’ve heard the arguments to the contrary, and do not find them plausible). 

I understand that Microsoft Legal wants to protect customer privacy, but in my opinion they’ve overdone it in this case.  There are better ways (e.g., a partner code of conduct, an event-specific agreeement with partners, a clear statement to attendees in advance about contact with partners, or even a simple note about the rules of a particular giveaway at the conference — use your legal imaginations).  This can be fixed — let’s fix it.

Comments from Microsoft, partners, and customers welcome. 

Tags: conference, Event, Microsoft, Partnering, Partnering with Microsoft, partners