Powers Unfiltered

Apparently, Buzz Bruggeman was at the Microsoft WPC in Boston, blogging away, and I missed him again.  I am in danger of becoming the last person on earth he has not met.  Anyway, he has good posts about the event, including one about the presentation by Andy Lees I attended.

Not surprisingly, he liked the “Structured Networking” part of the show.  This is one of my favorite aspects as well, and one of the key reasons I attended this year — while learning where Microsoft is going is important, making new partner-to-partner connections is gold.  While there are minor kinks in the Structured Networking Web site, the value delivered by providing a convenient way to meet dozens of potential partners in three days is tremendous.

Thank you, Margo Day!

Margo is moving on, from VP of US Partners to Western Region VP of Sales.  She’ll be missed by the US Partner community, but as a Western Region partner, we’ll continue to work with her. 

Last night, she (and the Microsoft US Partner team) threw an awesome party.  I hope this tradition of good parties continues after Margo moves on; she understands that this stuff matters.  This is not a night to skimp or hold back; for a year, Microsoft and its partners work together.  For a night, we play together.  Period.  As we arrived at the venue (at the Roxy here in Boston, a converted theatre), a hundred of Microsoft’s marketing / partner staff lined up in two rows to form a path along the sidewalk and cheered and high-fived each of us as we ran through to to the club entrance.  This is such a positive signal to partners, and so much fun, that we thought about sneaking out the back and doing it again.

Now, if I say “the band was the Gogos, and they were great,” there’s a good chance you  will snicker.  But “great” does not begin to convey the level of energy and FUN in the room last night.  Dan Ciruli is not the only one with a long-running crush on Belinda Carlisle. 

Corporate gigs must be a special kind of hell for rock acts.  (On the other hand, I think it’s a lucrative hell.)  I’ve seen rock bands try to excite crowds of IT geeks at 8:30 in the morning (nearly impossible), or in outdoor venues better suited for a game of ultimate frisbee (where crowds wander away), or where they were competing with multiple stations of video games (good luck).  But the Gogos came out and rocked hard, and the crowd got into it quickly and stayed into it.

Add decent food and free beer, and the party was on.  So — thanks, Margo! 

I attended the keynote sessions again this morning at the Microsoft WWPC.  The highlight of the morning, for me, was Andy Lees, who talked extensively about the progress Microsoft had made in the server market.  He was quite clear about how he sees the high-performance computing (HPC) market, and the opportunity for Microsoft and its partners in this market.

Andy noted that the HPC market was growing faster than the x86 server market as a whole, and that Linux dominates unit sales in this market today; I’ve seen plenty of other research that confirms these facts.  The news to me was that, according to him, 40% of Linux servers sold today are sold in compute clusters – 40%!  With HPC representing 10% of the total server market (and growing), this is a significant part of the total growth of Linux in the server market.

Microsoft has not contested this market to date.  He estimated that Microsoft had no more than 6% of the HPC market today.  He declared that Microsoft would change that share dramatically with the new CCS offering.  He indicated that CCS provided a huge opportunity for partners, and we could not agree more.

Microsoft partners – listen to Andy!  HPC is a huge opportunity for Microsoft partners, and Digipede is ready to help you capitalize on that opportunity today.  Digipede is the only Microsoft Gold Certified Partner delivering a true grid computing solution built on .NET.  Tested and publicly demonstrated with Microsoft on CCS, the Digipede Network adds value to CCS in many customer scenarios.  When deploying .NET applications on CCS, Digipede is the natural choice.  When integrating CCS into a larger HPC grid environment on the Windows platform, Digipede is the natural choice.  For any Microsoft partners out there getting ready to take the new CCS into the market – call me.  Seriously.  We’ve done a lot of work on this, directly with customers and Microsoft sales teams, and we can help you:
 – Win new business against Linux competitors;
 – Shorten your sales cycle; and
 – Raise your margins.

What should you do?
 – Educate yourself about CCS.  (Microsoft Partners can get the RTM software here.)
 – Educate yourself about the Digipede Network.  Get the free Digipede Network Developer Edition here.
 – Become a Digipede partner.  Tell us how you want to go to market, and let’s make it happen.

(Composed Tuesday, 7/11/2006 at Microsoft WWPC)

I always enjoy Steve Ballmer’s presentations – he’s enthusiastic and loud, insightful and funny, and that works well with a big, supportive crowd.  He did well today, but I’ve seen him before, and I have to say he was not fully on his game today. 

He hit on the expected themes around all the new releases, and also did quite a good job going over the trends in the industry.  As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, I was happy to hear him acknowledge in the first minute or two that partnering with Microsoft was a “bet the business” decision for us.  I was here, in part, to hear how Microsoft was addressing the big opportunities in the market today.  I liked what I heard, mostly.

I was not impressed, however, with how he addressed the delays in Vista and Office 2007.  There was no mention of dates (“around the turn of the year”), and no mention of the pain these delays have caused partners.  Steve made a lame joke about the releases being “a long time coming,” and then claimed “there will never be a gap between Windows releases as long as the gap between XP and Vista – count on it.” 

Count on it?  Really?  Why?  How?  When partners “counted on” Vista and Office being out already, and yet they’re not, what’s the answer?  A joke and oh well? This audience has long memories.  I’ve been working with Microsoft for more than 18 years, making choices to support Windows since version 2.0, and there are plenty in this room with longer histories still.  Delays matter, and the CEO needs to stand up and acknowledge them, and to be definitive about the release dates for these upcoming products.  There is still noise in the market about exactly when the products will be released, and he passed up a good chance to put that to rest.  Instead, it was all “rah rah” about the capabilities of these new offerings.  Enough – bring them out.

In addition to Vista and Office, he talked about new markets:  Business Intelligence, collaboration, search, unified communications, security, and Live.

He called Business Intelligence a “nascent” market for Microsoft, but hit on a number of products just released or coming in the next year that will make Microsoft a major player here; I agree, and we’re excited to be working with some of those teams.

His discussion of “People Ready Software” was well done.  Dan has posted about this here. 

Microsoft’s continuing increased emphasis on search was signaled by Ballmer’s choice of demonstrations.  He chose to carve out 10 minutes for a demo of SharePoint Search by Kirk Koenigsbauer, General Manager of Office Servers.  He was able to search a local machine (from the OS and from Outlook), and then search an enterprise via SharePoint 2007.  He showed a nice RSS feature built in, so you can subscribe to searches to be notified when new results appear.  The “search people” functionality was extremely interesting; the IDEA is that you enter a search term, and Sharepoint returns a list of people who have some knowledge or capability in that area, sorted by your “social distance” from that person.  There was no discussion of how the information about the “people” got populated, so exactly how SharePoint would learn that I’m a grid computing CEO / entrepreneur / father-of-three / Atlanta Braves fan who likes beer was not explained. 

Kirk’s demo of Windows Live Search, which goes to beta in July, showed a nice rich UI.  This looks to me like Microsoft’s latest attempt to be the UnGoogle – to present a rich UI (e.g., easily sorting of results) where Google is spare, and to integrate tightly with the desktop where Google remains desktop-neutral.  There was some very cool stuff here, but I was underwhelmed by Kirk’s presentation.  I will dig in deeper in the Microsoft area of the Expo today or tomorrow, because Kirk’s few minutes on stage were both dull and disjointed.  You could see Steve’s discomfort, trying to interject enthusiasm from time to time. 

Ballmer stressed this as a big partner opportunity – he wants to see zillions of SharePoint sales, right now, with Vista and Office 2007.  He announced 35 search partners who will be joining Microsoft to pursue what he claimed is a $13 billion opportunity.  I don’t doubt it.

He also carved out 10 minutes for Paul Duffy, Senior Product Manager of Real Time Collaboration, to show what Microsoft is doing in “Unified Communications.”  Paul started by handing a Windows Mobile phone to Steve.  Using a PocketPC, Paul sent an IM to “Kyle,” offstage, and received a reply.  It looked just like desktop IM.  He then switched to Exchange Server 2007 and Outlook 2007, showing unified email, fax, and phone messaging.  He showed that you can now phone, IM, or email a contact straight out of Outlook.  And then he replied to an email with an IM, and started a video session with “Mike,” and brought in “Kyle” into a three-way video conference, with “active speaker detection,” so only the person speaking appeared on screen. 

This session was pretty slick, until Steve got a bit carried away and decided to hold his part of the conversation with Paul entirely through the phone – which resulted in a one-second delay between what he was saying and when the AV system picked up the signal from the phone call, and you couldn’t understand half of what he was saying.  But it was an impressive demo, nevertheless.

Steve claimed that Live was “coming on strong,” with 20 new Windows Live services, 1,000 new users daily on Windows Live OneCare, and 100,000 Office Live subscribers.  How do partners play in the Live strategy?  Steve says there will be “services we host, and services you host.”  And there will be commission sales opportunities, and apdev opportunities, and so on.  He’s put together a partner advisory council around Live.  We’ll see how that works out.

He announced Dynamics CRM Live, calling this “perhaps the single most inevitable announcement in the history of Microsoft.”  He had Brad Wilson from the CRM team come out and do a demonstration of this offering, which is scheduled for Q2 2007 availability.  Just as Outlook can talk to Hotmail for email, now Outlook can talk to CRM Live for CRM.  Brad’s demo included some integration with other Live services, like a Windows Live local map, and further integration with RSS feeds of home prices.  This has some potential, but he was clear that his demo required significant customization and coding (he pitched this as a “partner opportunity”).  Brad also had some gadgets on the desktop that picked up key indicators from CRM Live – a simple idea, but nicely implemented and quite cool. 

Overall, Steve did well, but not great.  I was at the Microsoft WWPC in Minneapolis last year, and the energy during Steve’s keynote there was definitely higher than here.  Nevertheless, I look forward to a worthwhile event.

 

(Composed Monday 7/10/2006 en route to Boston for Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference.) 

I’ve mentioned my happy relationship with my Dell Latitude 610 laptop, and that relationship continues today on the plane to Boston.  If I choose my tasks appropriately, I’m just as productive in an aisle seat on JetBlue as I am in the office (maybe more — no phone interruptions up here!).  This machine’s got awesome battery life, so it’s coast-to-coast work, which I need today. 

Except…

OK, I’m listening to music, and I’ve got more crap open than I “should,” but it’s nothing that should eat battery life.  I’ve disabled wireless, dimmed the screen a bit, and I’m pounding away at a presentation when I look down and my battery icon says 33%!  Where did 67% of my battery power (two fully-charged batteries, nice ones) go??

But I already know, it’s happened again, something has run amok, and I know with near certainty what it is.  OK, Task Manager, what’s up?  Yes, indeed — OUTLOOK.EXE, 90+% of the CPU, so my CPU has been running at 100% nonstop for the last 40 minutes, making the bottom of my laptop hot enough to use as a welding torch.

Earth to Microsoft…  this is intolerable.  This is not Dell.  This is not third-party software.  This is not spyware, viruses, or other malware.  This is Microsoft Outlook (fully patched) talking to Microsoft XP Pro (fully patched).  Outlook has had this problem for (at least) this entire century.  How is it possible that this is still going on?

Have I seen this with other programs?  Yes — second most common is IE6, followed by Word, and once in a while even Firefox will go nuts and peg the CPU indefinitely.  But Outlook leads the league by a wide margin, and it’s unbelievably frustrating — I (and a few hundred million others) leave Outlook open nearly all the time, and it mostly works.  So I get lulled into believing I can work without paying attention to Outlook’s occassional tantrums, and then WHAM, my batteries are gone and half my trip is spent watching Cartoon Network. 

This matters.  Hey Office 2007 Team — this matters.  Hey Vista Team — this matters.  You can Google [Outlook CPU 100%] and related permutations as well as I can — this is not my imagination.  You can look in your own huge incident database about this.  Please get this fixed, OK?

 

Don Canning describes “how a startup becomes an industry success,” providing his own take on our recent demonstration of the Digipede Network running on Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS) at the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference. 

When Don says:

Microsoft as a team is working closely with Digipede Technologies to enable seamless programmatic integration between .NET applications and cluster resources,

He’s not kidding — many, many thanks to the Microsoft Financial Services Group, the CCS team, the Office 2007 team, and the .NET team for their enthusiastic support! 

(Dan Ciruli also has some additional information on additional integration we’ve demonstrated since that event, in his post on “Putting a grid behind Excel 2007.”)

Don is also correct in pointing out the numerous compelling advantages this Microsoft / Digipede solution has over Linux grid solutions; I’ll have more on that in subsequent posts.

Thanks to Don and the whole Emerging Business Team for continuing to open doors, at Microsoft and beyond, to help this startup become an industry success.

In his blog “Tales from a Trading Desk,” Matt Davey poses some interesting speculation:

Will any investment bank has the guts to deploy Mono on its servers to run .NET trading software? I’m not sure. If the bank has already deployed Microsoft .NET to all its workstations why wouldn’t it just use Microsoft .NET on the server unless it explicitly wants to use a non-Windows OS which is unusual since the only banks who really deploy .NET servers are the Microsoft shop banks. However, if just one large bank moving into using Mono, the ripple effect could happen very quickly. Investment banks like to follow the leader.

We certainly follow Mono with interest; it’s a neat project, and we’re as curious as Matt about significant commercial adoption.  But the reasons to adopt it for server-side .NET grid projects are dimishing day by day.  With the release of Microsoft’s Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), the OS is becoming more and more capable for heavy-duty grid computing projects.

The combination of CCS, Windows desktops, any other available Windows servers, and the Digipede Network (yes, yes, I’m the president of Digipede) gives an investment bank the ability to put together a .NET grid that will blow away Linux-based grids, enabling .NET developers to create grid-enabled applications in the same familiar tools and programming paradigm they already use today.   Despite Mono’s improving capabilities, the process of creating a heterogeneous grid of Linux and Windows machines is not nearly as smooth.
I agree with Matt’s last point — the first bank that takes THIS step could cause a very significant ripple effect!

If you’re a Microsoft partner, (specifically, in the Visual Studio Industry Partners, or VSIP program), and you have any sort of free offer, you owe it to yourself to check out something called an MSDN Flash.  (It is, of course, not easy to find this opportunity on the dreaded partner.microsoft.com site.  Searching on “MSDN Flash” finds a single document, completely unrelated to the process of submitting content for an MSDN Flash, but stay with me.  Go to http://www.vsipmembers.com/partner/content/msdnFlash.aspx, and fight through all the conflicting login requirements.  Once you get in, the process is simple — you  give them a title, a 20-word description, and a link, and they’ll get you into an MDSN newsletter if they like your offer.)

We did one at Digipede this week — I submitted a short description of our free Digipede Network Developer Edition, and pointed recipients at our download page.  

The results have been quite good – Monday and Tuesday, we had more than double the average daily number of visitors and pageloads on our Web site, and we’ve fulfilled at least five times the normal volume of requests for our software from architects and developers who fill out our request form.

The VSIP program has other benefits, but this one is quite tangible – a measurable uptick in customer and partner leads.

Many thanks to the VSIP and MSDN teams!

 

Here are a few more observations based in part on Digipede’s experience at the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference in New York this week. I posted about this earlier today; this post is less fact, more perspective.

For a small company like Digipede, a trade show can be a frightening investment. Travel is expensive, and disruptive – taking three or four people away from other activities for three or four days can throw off schedules for weeks. Booth space is pricey, the booth itself is pricey to buy or rent, shipping the booth and any other equipment and collateral is a pain, and renting a big monitor and power and internet connectivity and chairs and tables and trash cans and whatnot is vastly more expensive than it ought to be. (OK, we’re not crazy — we used other vendors’ trash cans.)

And for what? What will we demonstrate? Will anyone care? Who will attend? Will there by any potential customers, or just “vendors talking to vendors?” Will the press be there? If so, will they notice us? Is it really worth it?

Having represented small to medium growth companies at trade shows for 15+ years, John’s One and Only Rule of Trade Shows is as follows:

Work it, or it’s not worth it.

I see firms put up a nice booth, and then wait for a stream of juicy leads to walk up and present themselves. They staff the booth with folks who sit around and say “there’s no traffic” or “there are no buyers at this show” or “we should get a better location next year” or more likely “what time does the bar open?” Losers. I love it when these folks ask me why so many people are talking about us.

Any startup that commits to a trade show had better work hard to make the investment pay off. I’ll give you a few examples of what we did before, during, and after this particular event to make it pay off for us.

We decided on a message right up front, before we even made a final commitment to go. Our message was “extend the cluster.” We wanted to take full advantage of the release of Microsoft’s new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, which was to be demonstrated to the financial community at this event. We decided to emphasize the compatibility of our own product, the Digipede Network, with CCS, and to show how we add value to this new offering from Microsoft. We knew Microsoft would be spending big bucks to unveil their new product to an important market, and we wanted to leverage our own puny investment with theirs.

As a result of my incessant whining and begging and pleading and favor-cashing, Microsoft provided us with a kiosk in their large booth on the main exhibit floor. (I made the first request for this a full year in advance, and was still begging right up until the last slot was filled.) We got our own little booth, too, where we could do more in-depth demonstrations.

There were 11 Microsoft partners in their booth, none of whom compete with us, so during the introductions before the exhibits opened, I promised the other Microsoft partners that we’d refer relevant leads to them and hoped they’d do the same for us. By the end of the show, that simple step generated several additional visits to our booth, and one qualified sales prospect – someone who would never have found us otherwise.

We wrote special demonstrations that would appeal not only to the potential customers at the event, but to our partners Microsoft and HP. We helped our contact at Microsoft load and test those demos on a new cluster, and debugged interactions among our own product, the just-released Windows Compute Cluster Server, and the not-yet-released Excel 2007. We arranged a pre-event press release with authorized quotes from both Microsoft and HP (try herding cats THAT size some time). We got into the Microsoft show press release. We arranged to be not only present, but featured prominently, in the presentations given by Microsoft’s Financial Services Group in the special Microsoft / HP break room. We chased the press around for a week before the show, and a few ended up at the reception Microsoft threw on Wednesday evening. We ended up with favorable coverage.

We created new collateral, including a new white paper, a new brochure, a new press kit, and a new datasheet describing how you can buy our product bundled with an HP cluster (OK, it’s pretty loosely bundled, but it’s progress!). We burned a zillion mini-CDs with everything an architect or developer needs to get started with our software — a complete installation of the Digipede Network Developer Edition (free!), full documentation, informative videos, white papers, and so on. We brought seven out of a zillion back home with us. (Contact me if you want one!)

Naturally, we gave demonstrations in our own booth — but we also flagged people down in the Microsoft booth, HP booth, and anywhere else we could find them to entice them up to our inconveniently-located booth. We knew we had a crappy location, so before we left Oakland we printed up stickers to put on the literature we handed out from the Microsoft and HP booths — “come see us in Booth 4506 on the third floor.” People did.

We found time to take an important client out to dinner, to meet with a prospective future employee, to pitch to a new prospective investor, to line up a new consulting partner, to identify several likely ISV partners, and to check out our competitors’ offerings. We used the show’s buggy lead retreival system, annotated each lead with specific information on the spot, expanded those annotations on the plane in Excel on the way home, coaxed all of the leads into our CRM system the minute we got back to the office, and started banging away at those leads right away — ninety-nine of them, I believe, excluding the usual recruiters, outsourcers, marketing consultants, foreign-subsidiary-creation facilitators, life coaches, and the like. And it still might not be enough.

So a trade show is like anything else — it’s an opportunity, and you get out of it only what you put in. Many thanks to our friends at Microsoft and HP, who provided generous support and exposure, and gave us every chance to succeed.

Was it worth it? Ask me in six months.

Well, it looks as though the Linux community has noticed Microsoft’s entry into the HPC market. 

In reviewing Tom Groenfeldt’s financial services blog on MSDN, I ran across a comment that led back to a longer post by Brad Chamberlin, expressing his incredulity that anyone could take an HPC offering from Microsoft seriously.  Brad’s comments are typical of the Linux community’s response to Microsoft’s Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS), and they are as predictable as they are one-sided. 

What a joke, how can you “take back” market share you never had in the first place.  

Besides that, $469/node vs. FREE????

Certainly, Brad is right in pointing out (pedantically) that Microsoft can’t “take back” market share that it never had.  As this is the first dedicated HPC product Microsoft has launched, Brad knows this is a bit of sloppy reporting by the original source he cites.  Brad provides an analysis of the respected Top500 list, and concludes:

So as you can see with this little jog through the top500 list Microsoft Windows market share in HPC is NILL, NOTHING, NONE, NON-EXISTANT, NADA. You can’t take back something you never had!

I am sure with it’s $469/node price tag Linux has a lot to be worried about. I wouldn’t be surprised if by 2007 Windows holds 2, maybe 3, whole spots on the top500 list.

But if Brad is so convinced of the future market share to be held by the Windows OS in HPC, then why choose the Top500 at all?  As a measure of market share, this is specious; the Top500 list, by definition, rounds to approximately zero percent of the market for high performance computing.  Also, it represents the zero percent that Microsoft specifically identified as outside its target market. 

With Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, Microsoft is going after not the Top500, but the next 500,000.  Microsoft has been very open about this, saying they would bring HPC into the mainstream.  And if the HPC market in 2007 is still mostly Linux, well, they’ll be around in 2008 and 2009 and 2010 to keep bashing away. 

Brad’s point about Linux being “FREE” is also the same simplistic argument that’s been beaten to death — in most enterprises, a supported version of Linux is not free, and the OS cost is a tiny fraction of the total cost of ownership, so it’s really about value delivered, blah blah blah.  So the comment “$469/node vs. FREE????” adds nothing new — yes, Brad, at $469/node, there are definitely businesses that will want the Active Directory integration, ease of deployment, compatibility with a wide range of Windows software, and other nice features that Microsoft has put into CCS. 

The battlefield is littered with folks as complacent as Brad who underestimated Microsoft’s persistence, resources, and market savvy.  While CCS has some rough edges, it’s better than most “1.0” products, and it’s only going to get better.  When Microsoft enters a market, they don’t always dominate, but it certainly does not pay to be complacent.   Rather than dismiss CCS, let’s watch and see what Microsoft and its partners can do in this market.  Brad may be surprised.