Powers Unfiltered

Digipede is growing again. While not yet the size of some grid competitors, we’ve hit a very interesting inflection point this year. There are many clear signs, but I’ll talk about one that may not be visible — except from my desk.

At my desk, the phone is ringing and my email box overfloweth — with consultants and systems integrators. A couple of years ago, when we launched the Digipede Network, I could not get a call back from an SI or IT consultant larger than two guys and a dog. Now, everybody from high-end boutique consultants to the world’s largest SIs are calling — for all the right reasons. They’ve got a customer. They want training. They need more technical details for a project they’re specifying. They need help responding to an RFP. They want, suddenly and very urgently, to be providing grid solutions that are radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use than competing offerings.

This sudden popularity comes from a at just the right time for us.  We’re adding staff (recruiters, please don’t call me — how often does cold calling actually work for you? It won’t work here…), but we’ve said from the beginning we don’t want to build a big staff for its own sake. We don’t want to be in the consulting business — I often refer to myself as a recovering consultant, and I someday hope to declare myself cured — and I’d much rather work with motivated SIs and consultants who WANT to build a great grid consulting practice.

How does the Digipede Network qualify as the most SI-friendly grid offering around? Well, let me count the ways. Price. Platform. Performance. Reliability. Security. APIs. Manageability. Support. Documentation. In other words — the same things that appeal to our rapidly growing customer base. That’s because good SIs want happy customers and painless implementations just like the rest of us. More importantly, they know that a successful grid project almost always leads to additional high-value projects with the same client. (This is in marked contrast to not-so-good SIs and consultants, who seem to want to milk a single grid engagement for every hour of consulting they can get — those guys can call our competitors, whose needless complexity often makes a great fit for greedy consultants.) 

My dance card at the upcoming Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver is rapidly filling up with more of the same — which is fine with me.   The market for the world’s only .NET-based grid computing solution is large and growing rapidly, and we have no interest in becoming expert in every vertical market or horizontal application to which we can sell our product. 

So meet me there, or call me here — we’re a partner-friendly organization, and we’re expanding our role in the Microsoft partner ecosystem.