Powersunfiltered readers know that I’m a believer in the effectiveness of marketing events — but only with sufficient planning and preparation.  (For a refresher course in the Powers School of Events, start here.) 

As reported here last week, Digipede had a station in the Partner Pavillion at the Windows Server 2008 launch in LA last Wednesday.  I watched Ballmer (good), some Microsoft’s demos (pretty good), and learned yet more about the latest huge wave of innovation coming out of Redmond (excellent). 

But mostly, we were at the event to show and tell, not just listen and learn.  Any investment in a booth or station at an industry event has to be weighed at least in part by the exposure gained and leads gathered — and in my judgment this one was a success, thanks to some innovative preparation by the Digipede team.

First of all, we decided months ago to time our press release announcing Version 2.1 of the Digipede Network to coincide with the Server 2008 launch.  That involved some careful product decisions (hard, but essential anyway), doing a press release (easy), getting Microsoft’s approval and participation in that press release (time-consuming, but feasible), and earning the Certified for Windows Server 2008 designation (hard, and quite time-consuming, but worthwhile in the love ). 

We have been talking about making stickers out of the Digipede logo for some time — our logo looks cool, and just seems to belong on a sticker.  Robert Anderson sent around an innocent note about a month ago, which said, in its entirety, “Should we get some Deatle stickers made for the launch?    They can’t be too expensive.”  (Deatle is the name of the creature on our logo.)  The idea of seeing lots of Digipede stickers at the Server 2008 launch suddenly became compelling to all of us, and we set about making it happen.

There followed several rounds of innovative sticker design (by our own Nathan Trueblood and our wonderfully patient and creative graphic artist Norma McDonough), which resulted in the blue-and-silver oval seen here. 

But even stickers as lovely as this don’t just display themselves, and my suggestion of sneaking in early and plastering them on every wall and post was wisely overruled (as uncool, quite possibly illegal, and certainly easily traced).  So — Where could we reasonably put hundreds of stickers without incurring the wrath of the LA Convention Center?

Dan Ciruli’s elegant solution was to get the attendees to wear them at the event, using the time-tested technique of bribery.  “Wear a Digipede sticker for a chance to win a Zune” was the original idea.  We thought about an XBox, but those are quite a bit more expensive and harder to ship…  But as luck would have it, I attended another Microsoft partner event up in Bellevue in mid-February, and actually WON an XBox in a drawing.  I re-gifted XBox to Digipede for use at the launch, on the condition that none of my partners could tell my 12-year-old twin boys that I had owned an XBox for half an hour and not brought it home.  (They don’t read this — so everyone shhhhh.)

It turns out that in a room full of Windows developers and IT geeks, you definitely want to be giving away an XBox.  At first, traffic was a little light, and nobody was taking the stickers.  But within the first half hour of the event, as soon as a few people were wearing the stickers, other attendees got wind of the contest, and traffic picked up.  The rules were simple — if a Digipede spotter sees you wearing a Deatle sticker at an undisclosed time and place in the LA Convention Center, you’ll win the XBox. 

These few rules got people thinking — I have to wear this sticker somewhere visible, and I can’t just restrict my movements to hanging around the Digipede station (or even the Partner Pavillion).  At the Digipede station, people were putting stickers on their jackets, on their backs, on their backpacks, on their laptops, and more creative spots.   Soon, Deatles were crawling everywhere.  By early afternoon, even when I was out of the Partner Pavillion at lunch or in the halls or in the Microsoft Pavillion, people were walking up to me and asking — “I see those stickers everywhere; what the hell is Digipede?”  This was definitely working.

All the while, at Station 56 in the Partner Pavillion, Dan, Nathan, and I were keeping reasonably disciplined about striking up a brief conversation with each and every visitor.  Anyone who ONLY wanted a sticker for a chance to win the XBox was more than welcome to it; but many others stopped long enough to engage about the amazing grid computing software we were demonstrating as well.  (Some of the demos we did were similar to this.)  We gathered many leads this way, all of whom were at least partially qualified in person before scanning their badges (we did not scan those who just wanted a chance at the XBox – they don’t need to receive more emails from us, and we don’t need to fill our CRM system with them). 

There were LOTS of other giveaways going on throughout the Partner Pavillion – but they were all of the type “dump your card or scan your badge here and you might win a something.”  This is a popular approach, and no doubt the folks running these will think they got “more” leads than we did — but in my experience, a card dropped in a bowl (or a badge scanned for a prize) is not nearly as useful as a badge scanned after a qualifying conversation and/or demonstration.

(Note to the Microsoft organizers of this event – you did a PERFECT job with the partner lead collection system.  There was none of the insane doublespeak about who gave permission to share what leads with which partner — everything worked exactly as the partners and attendees would expect.  No doubt Microsoft’s legal legions are wringing their hands over the idea that Microsoft partners collected leads from Microsoft customers at a Microsoft event using a lead collection system featuring badges created by Microsoft — but unlike prior events, this was very well done!)

About 10 minutes before the Partner Pavillion closed, Dan and I went out to the main escalator, picked a random number between 1 and 60 (using a handy random number generator I wear on my left wrist — the number was 16), and started counting Deatles.  I would estimate that OUTSIDE the Partner Pavillion, about one in 10 attendees we saw was wearing a Digipede sticker.  (This means that no attendees with their eyes open could have missed seeing quite a few of these stickers.)  When we reached the 16th sighting, we awarded the XBox to a lucky Glendale-based IT professional, who was appropriately excited and appreciative.

So what did we get out of all this? 
1.  A large number of partially qualified leads with whom to follow up.
2.  A lot of brand awareness among Server 2008 users, buyers, and technical influencers.
3.  Additional visibility with the Microsoft Server team.

Worth the trip?  We think so, but as always, we won’t know for sure until we’ve worked the leads some more.  John’s One and Only Rule of Trade Shows — “Work it, or it’s not worth it.”

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, Launch, Los-Angeles, Microsoft, Windows-Server-2008, XBox

Dan Ciruli, Nathan Trueblood and I will be at the Windows Server 2008 Launch in Los Angeles tomorrow.

Wear our sticker at this event — you could win an XBox 360!

Digipede has a station in the “Partner Pavillion” in the LA Convention Center, at which we will be demonstrating the only grid computing solution Certified for Windows Server 2008.

We’ll also be handing out the highly coveted Laptop Fashion Statement of 2008 — an oval sticker featuring the Digipede logo. A randomly selected attendee spotted wearing this sticker (on your laptop or anywhere else!) will win an XBox 360, so stop by our station and wear your sticker proudly!

We’ll be showing cool grid and multi-core demos like this one, too.  If you’ll be there, contact me, and we’ll meet up.

Tags: Certified-for-Windows-Server-2008, Digipede, grid-computing, Launch, Microsoft, Server-2008, XBox

I am in Bellevue, Washington today and tomorrow for a meeting of Microsoft partners in financial services.  The meeting is in one of Microsoft’s many local offices.  (If any of my loyal Microsoft readers want to get together, please contact me and we’ll work something out.)

The financial services IT market is going through some interesting times at the moment (in the Chinese curse sense of the phrase).  Opportunities abound — but they’re shifting.   At Digipede, we only see a small piece of that market.  I’m looking forward to learning how our colleagues among other Microsoft partners (and in the Microsoft Financial Services Group) see that market — and how we can go after new opportunities together.  

Tags: Digipede, financial-services, Microsoft

Dan and I will be at another one-day conference in New York on Monday, February 11 — this one is Web Services / SOA on Wall Street, at the Roosevelt Hotel.  We’ll be in booth 211.

I’ll be interested to see what the crowd is like.  While the broader IT world remains somewhat divided on how widely applicable service-oriented architectures really are, we’ve seen many of our financial services clients moving quite rapidly toward SOA.

We’ve been helping these clients build scalable services using grids based on the Digipede Network.  And, as Rob and Dan said so well in their now-classic Dr. Dobb’s article on grid computing and SOA, ” You can’t build a scalable SOA on top of services that don’t scale.”

We’ll have some nifty demos (as always), and some new customer stories (ditto), and some controversial opinions to contribute to the conversation (no surprise there, either).  If you’ll be there, contact me and we’ll find a way to meet up.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, scalable, SOA, Web-services

I will be attending an event called “Advancements in Quantitative Finance,” sponsored by Microsoft and its partners, on Wednesday 12/12 in Midtown. Information on this free event, including how to register, is found here:

http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032358329

The agenda looks good; the presentations appear to be primarily financial customers and academic experts, not Microsoft or other vendor staff (although Microsoft is providing the MC and one other speaker).

I’ll have a table, and some good stories to tell about the quantitative financial applications our clients are running on the Digipede Network.
If you’re going to be there, contact me.

Tags: Digipede, finance, grid-computing, Microsoft, quantitative-finance

Dan and I arrived in Scotland on Monday after a long but trouble-free journey (thanks, British Airways and BellaTerra Travel). After attempting to catch up on sleep Monday night (I can’t sleep on planes, day or night, no matter how long the trip…), we attended Day 1 of High Throughput Computing Week at the UK National eScience Center facility at the University of Edinburgh.

The mix of attendees was interesting — but not as diverse as I had hoped. One idea of this event was to bring together business and academic users of high-throughput computing solutions. There are a handful of business speakers (including me and Dan), but I did not see many other business attendees. The attendee population seemed primarily UK academic.

Day 1 presentations included the incomparable Miron Livny, father of Condor and the leading academic in HTC. While he’s given similar presentations before, I learn more each time I hear him speak. You can hear the frustration creeping into his voice as he describes the current grid computing movement — because there is so much re-discovery and re-invention and re-defining of concepts Miron has worked on for nearly three decades. His insights are excellent, and anyone serious about HTC needs to listen — carefully.

One benefit of attending events like this is that I get to meet people with whom I’ve only corresponded via email before. For example, Professor Antonio Mungioli of Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil, came to our Web site and asked many good questions last year.  He also gave an excellent presentation on Day 1, describing his experiences with grid computing in the state of San Paulo.  Like Miron, he emphasized social and organizational issues over technology issues — in his view, cooperation and collaboration are more important to a project’s success than any specific technology choice.

We were also fortunate to have Akash Chopra of Barrie & Hibbart present on Day 1.  Akash described some of the compute-intensive calculations his insurance customers must perform, and how he used the Digipede Network to grid-enable their Economic Scenario Generator (ESG) software.  He also discussed some of the real-world problems associated with bringing grid computing to his customers, who in most cases have very limited and specific requirements for application performance.  He encouraged the audience to think from a customer perspective, and to focus on short-term value delivered to those customers, rather than getting caught up in the dream of “the grid” as a worldwide plug-in computing resource.  His perspective was a refreshing dose of reality.

There were also several other interesting presentations by academic HTC users, by the Condor team, and by Jason Stowe of Cycle Computing.  But if I wrote about everything, I’d never finish this!

We went out for some authentic Scottish food with about half the participants (it’s better if you don’t read the definition of haggis until after you’ve eaten it), and had a fine evening.

Day 2 was entirely devoted to two hands-on workshops — the morning one by Digipede, and the afternoon one by the Condor team.  As improbable as it sounds, Dan and I were both pretty coherent considering the Digipede half of the day ran from 1:00 AM to 4:30 AM Pacific time.  I gave a short introduction to Digipede’s space in the HTC world, and then we moved downstairs to a lab / classroom with 22 user workstations (several participants had to double up — we had good attendence).  Dan gave a more technical introduction to Digipede, then led the participants through a “hello world” exercise.  After that, we let them figure out a more realistic eScience application mostly on their own (code used in high-energy plama physics experiments, courtesy of conference organizer David Wallom).  All the participants successfully completed this second exercise in less than an hour, so we had plenty of time left for code demos — and even in this crowd of (nearly) no .NET developers, the audience immediately saw the benefits of the Digipede programming model.

(The Condor guys did a workshop too — it also went very well, but I was unable to attend much of the afternoon.)

I missed the morning on Day 3 (out visiting partners / clients, and seeing Edinburgh Castle along the way), but the afternoon was all about requirements gathering for HTC in the commercial sector.  This was interesting, and I participated enthusiastically (not surprisingly, I have some opinions on this!) but I’ll leave it to conference organizer David Wallom to  synthesize the results.

It’s clear to me that the area of High Throughput Computing is not exactly the same as grid computing, high-performance computing, cluster computing, or any other area.  When it comes to mapping specific products to these areas, however, there are limits to how useful these distinctions are.  There are some workloads that will run about equally well on HTC, HPC, grid, and/or cluster products.  The current version of the Digipede Network falls closer to HTC and grid computing than to HPC and cluster computing, but like many other vendors we’ve been known to creep across boundaries as required to broaden the problem-space that we address.

I’ll also miss the last day of HTC Week — I’m going to London for more partner and client meetings — but it’s been quite worthwhile.  I will try to distill a few conclusions on the way home this weekend — watch this space.

Tags: Digipede, eScience, grid-computing, high-throughput-computing, HTC

I have been invited to speak at a conference on High Throughput Computing at the UK National e-Science Center in Edinburgh next week.  This is extraordinary on a number of levels.

• First, the event is called “High Throughput Computing Week.”  If someone had told you five years ago that there was a “High Throughput Computing Day,” you might well have asked “how will they fill the afternoon?”  But there will be four days packed with great content at this event.
• Second, I am an economist, not a computer scientist.  I am likely to be among the least knowledgeable attendees along a number of important dimensions, yet I will be expected to provide some useful information.
• Finally, I work with very few scientists; most of Digipede’s customers are mainstream enterprises running relatively mundane production applications.  The field of e-Science is of interest, but definitely not the primary focus of our firm.

Yet I accepted the invitation enthusiastically, and went the extra mile to commit to a three-hour workshop (which meant “volunteering” Dan Ciruli for the trip as well).  To be sure, part of the value of this trip will be seeing customers — we have two current Digipede customers and one partner in Edinburgh.  But I also think we’ll have something interesting to contribute to the event; many of our customers use the Digipede Network to solve high-throughput computing problems, and I think attendees will be interested in hearing about that experience.  We’re also pretty excited about the opportunity to learn more about what leading academic and business HTC users are doing. 

I’ll report more from the show.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, high-throughput-computing, HTC

I am back home from SC ’07, my fifth Supercomputing conference. I saw some really impressive new technology from market leaders old and new. I heard remarkable claims and forecasts from analysts, pundits, and marketing flacks alike. I learned a lot, and contributed what I could.

Yet at this conference, full of the so-called thought leaders in high-performance computing, I once again ran into many instances of unthinking knee-jerk Microsoft bashing. While much of the IT world has come to grips with the fact that Microsoft (like gravity) is likely to be around a while, the Supercomputing crowd still has some holdouts. Literally, I heard people claim that “nobody” would use Windows for high-performance computing (provably incorrect), and that positive coverage of Microsoft’s HPC offerings was “bought, not earned” (unsubstantiated rubbish). Another blogger in this field (John West of insideHPC.com) told me that he’s had “…readers take the time to send me an email saying they would never read my stuff again if I kept covering MS’s CCS products and their entry into HPC positively.” What?!?

It is amazing to me the level of religious ferver that Microsoft still inspires. The bashers out there can be perfectly calm and reasonable about a wide range of topics – but say the word “Microsoft,” and they turn bright red and irrational. I have watched this phenomenon for years, and still find it inexplicable. Microsoft is a company. That company makes software. Some of their software is very, very good. Some of it is remarkably bad. I don’t understand why some people find it so hard to remain objective (or even civil) when discussing their products and market presence.

Many Microsoft bashers think that all of us at Digipede are mouthpieces for the Evil Empire, and that we are just pawns of the Microsoft machine. On the other hand, while we have plenty of fans within Microsoft, there are also some Microsoft employees who think we are difficult annoying troublemakers (especially me).

In fact, none of us at Digipede love or hate Microsoft – we work with Microsoft. We do so for real-world business reasons that help us change the world for the better while building a great company. We work with other companies too, but Microsoft occupies a special place in the technology landscape, and we work very, very hard to understand how to work with them to our mutual benefit. There are some great people there doing great things, and the bashers only hurt themselves by blinding themselves to these very real contributions.

Microsoft’s HPC initiatives in the past three years have greatly increased their presence in the HPC market at a time when that market is expanding rapidly. Their HPC offerings have some advantages and disadvantages compared to other products in the market, and should be evaluated on those terms. Microsoft bashing lowers the level of discourse to a useless level, at a time when we can all benefit from a more objective and reasoned discussion of how they affect our market.

I’ll stop there for now, and climb into my asbestos suit…

Tags: HPC, insideHPC, Microsoft, SC07, Supercomputing

I am at the Supercomputing conference in Reno Nevada today and tomorrow.

If you’re here and want to meet up, please call my cell — 510-326-1761.

Much of the time I’ll be in the booth of our partner AMD (thanks guys!) showing off the latest version of the Digipede Network running on Windows Compute Cluster Server (CCS) on some very cool hardware from Scalable Servers. Come and see!

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, HPC, Reno, SC07, Supercomputing

Dan Ciruli and I will be at HPC on Wall Street at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City next Monday (September 17).

We’ll be releasing Version 2.0 of the Digipede Network, and meeting with many analysts, press, customers, prospects, partners, and bartenders.  Since some of that could be pretty time consuming, we’ll also be in town September 18-19 for Microsoft meetings and more of the above.

If you’ll be there, let me know and we’ll find a way to meet up.

Tags: Digipede, grid-computing, HPC