Powers Unfiltered

Digipede’s trip to the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference went better than planned. With a presence in four locations (the Digipede booth, Microsoft booth, HP booth, and the Microsoft / HP “break room”), we were rocking pretty hard for three days straight.

If you have not been to this event, it is unlike any other trade show I’ve ever attended. Located entirely within the New York Hilton at 1335 Avenue of the Americas (between 53rd and 54th Streets), there are 7000+ attendees, and apparently an equal number of booths. There are booths in the ballrooms, booths in the exhibit halls, booths in the hallways, booths in the pretty much every location but the restrooms (and they crowd right up against those, too). In the exhibit halls, the feel is pretty much “big trade show;” in the hallways, the feel is more “Middle-eastern street market,” or, during peak hours, “mosh pit.”

Many of the major vendors have realized that the “mosh pit” environment is not optimal for a meaningful exchange of information, and have reserved meeting rooms on a separate floor of the hotel for more in-depth demonstrations and discussions. Microsoft and HP used such a room to good effect, with demonstrations of the Digipede Network running on top of the new Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 and HP Proliant hardware. Those demos generated lots of attention, such as Darrell Taft’s excellent eWeek article yesterday.

In addition to running demonstrations featuring the Digipede Network, Microsoft also lured visitors to their demo room with free copies of Samir Jayaswal and Yogesh Shetty’s excellent book, Practical .NET for Financial Markets. Yogesh, who was on hand to sign the book and discuss any .NET issue under the sun, is a great resource. I’ve plugged this book before, but if you’re in finance, or a .NET developer in any other field, let me repeat — check it out!

Other grid vendors seemed to have active presence here as well. In addition to the usual suspects like Platform Computing and DataSynapse, GigaSpaces looked like they had some interesting offerings, as did Scientific Computing Associates. I didn’t have time to check out some others, but there were also hardware vendors, integrators, and consultants all talking about grid projects. I’m told that there was a conference session in which somebody high up at Merrill Lynch identified grid computing as the Number One IT priority. That may be an exaggeration, but it’s clearly an indication of increased emphasis.

The message from this show, loud and clear, was that the securities industry’s appetite for grid computing is increasing, that the number of applications for which grid is applicable is increasing steadily, and that Microsoft is making good headway in this market. It’s going to be an exciting summer.

I’m at the Securities Industry Association (SIA) Technology Management Conference at the Hilton in midtown Manhattan this week.  I took the redeye on JetBlue last night to make it to a meeting that’s been canceled, I’ve been ineptly “helping” Dan and Nathan set up the Digipede booth (#4506), and have not slept in exactly 24 hours, but I’m STILL in a great mood because I LOVE NEW YORK! 

Born and raised in White Plains, NY (about 30 miles north of my current location), I came into the City many times as a kid.  It still excites me today.  I’m a fully naturalized Californian by now (marrying a California girl can have that effect), but there’s an energy here that does not compare to anywhere else I’ve been. 

We’re looking to make a bit of a splash here this week.  You can see our press release for some of what we’ll be showing, but if you’re in town, come see us in Booth 4506, or in the Microsoft booth (2211), or the HP booth (3106), or in the Microsoft / HP “break room” where we’ll be demonstrating the first .NET-based grid-enabled financial applications running on the new Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 (CCS). 

As Dan pointed out in a recent post, CCS had it’s RTM announcement and official unveiling at TechEd last week.  Kyril Faenov and his HPC team emphasized many important features and benefits of this exciting new product before the Microsoft faithful.  This week, we’ll take CCS into a less friendly environment, where Linux and UNIX still occupy much of the market.  We’ll emphasize many of the same points the HPC team did — plus a few more of our own.  We’ll show how to make CCS a key part of a larger grid, incorporating the rest of your Windows desktop and server resources into an unbeatable high-performance, high-throughput computing system — as financial services companies need.

But more on that later; I’ll also comment on the other developments I see here over the next few days.

George Laszlo has responded to my comments about about his earlier post, regarding the Microsoft BioIT Alliance.  It’s easier to just reproduce most of his response here:

First, please note that my primary concern is the welfare of the client who buys hardware, software or services from any vendor. My experience tells me that while vendors always have good intentions, they are primarily concerned with selling whatever they have and that may or may not be in the best interest of the buyer.

Don’t get me wrong, the tools that the BioIT Alliance is building and selling may be great but that does not mean that either the Alliance or the individual vendors will stand behind them. If critical mass is not achieved, it is likely that the larger vendors will simply pull out. You know as well as I do that what a small company may think of as financially viable and even enviable, a larger company may consider an unsupportable rounding error. I can cite you many examples of this and would be happy to do so in a conversation with you. I am not, however, going to put it in a blog since it’s not my intention to hurt any given vendor.

Related to the latter point, my intention is to make the buyer aware of the pros and the cons of making a buy decision. I have seen them go down the wrong track countless times and see more failures than successes when it comes to application software. This is why it’s important that anyone evaluating any offering from the BioIT Alliance proceed with caution and ask themselves not only what benefits will be delivered by the solution but also what the short and long-term risks are to the organization. A Microsoft-centric focus, in my mind, is one of those risks.

So, my post is not about the quality of the relationship between Microsoft and its partners (a topic that you also discuss in other posts on your blog) but the potential effects of the BioIT Alliance on its customers.

P.S. – On my comment about disappointing the Alliance members, no amount of interviewing on my part would have been of use in this case. The Alliance is simply too new to see what the relationships will be like in two, four or six years. And that is the time horizon that is relevant for the members and their clients.

If Mr. Laszlo’s point is that he can’t tell if anything will succeed for two, four, or six years, then fine. I think every member of the BioIT Alliance would agree that this is a long road, and the success of this effort will be measured years from now. If Mr. Laszlo wants to advise his clients to “proceed with caution,” that’s certainly fine advice. No one (Microsoft included, I suspect) expects customers to jump up and buy products based on the announcement of a new alliance alone.

But if a Microsoft-centric focus is a risk, so is an IBM-centric focus, and so is a “roll-your-own” focus, and so is a “best-of-breed” focus, and so on. The risks of a Microsoft-centric focus have proven time and again in other industries to be lower than other risks, and to be outweighed by the benefits delivered. I agree that life sciences customers have made many wrong turns in buying application software, and in fact see improvements in this area as a real market opportunity. In my view, the BioIT Alliance announcement provided the market with a statement of intent from Microsoft and its partners. The statement says to the market — here we come. This is good news for the clients Mr. Laszlo seems intent on protecting — more choice, from an industry leader with lots of staying power and lots of partners.

Mr. Laszlo’s implication that BioIT Alliance vendors may not stand behind products is just old-school FUD. Because the alliance is new? By that logic, nothing new should ever happen, because we can’t trust new things. Because Microsoft is too big, and will get bored with this tiny little market? By that logic, no one should buy from big companies because we can’t trust big things.

I think Mr. Laszlo may need to look more closely at the capabilities of the Microsoft partner community, not just Microsoft itself. Microsoft is a platform company, and it builds fine platform products. Microsoft partners shape and adapt those products for different markets, and provide feedback to Microsoft about how best to address specific market needs. This model serves customers well in numerous markets, and I have confidence it will serve customers well in the life sciences market as well.

I just posted some advice about the benefits of partnering with Microsoft.  Those benefits are real.  Now, for an equally real rant.

It’s not until you’re fully engaged with Microsoft, and you are in fact working like hell to make the most of that relationship, that you realize just how fully maddening their Partner Web site really is.  The company that brought us Passport clearly has no idea how to use it.  You’re logged in, but oops, now you’re not, better log in again.  You’re logged in, but THIS part of the site wants you to create a new (non-Passport) login and password.  I have created and forgotten more IDs and passwords on the Microsoft Partner site than on all other Web sites on Planet Earth combined.  I have lost more data entered by myself and others on our staff on the Microsoft Partner site than I can even begin to list. 

Navigation changes are implemented capriciously, so what I finally found three months ago can never be found again.  Links do not connect.  Search tools do not find.  Hands down, the best way to find anything on the site is to go to Advanced Search in Google, put in your search terms, and enter the domain partner.microsoft.com. 

You enter information about your products and services, and it is never seen again.  Oh, you wanted that information in Windows Marketplace?  That’s different.  Enter it again.  Oh, you wanted it in Channel Builder?  No, no, you don’t understand, that’s different.  Enter it again.  Oh, you didn’t say you wanted to enter a Solution so the field can see it.  Enter it again.  Oh, now you’re in the VSIP area — enter it again.  Oh, a specific vertical market?  Better enter it again.  Any way to tell if anyone has ever seen what you entered?  Nope.  It’s an act of faith.  Ever made a sale to anyone who found us there?  Nope.  Found a channel partner?  Nope.  Had a serious inquiry?  Nope.  A casual inquiry?  Nope.

Earlier this year I got so stuck in a loop in the Parnter site that I actually had to pay twice to re-join the Microsoft Gold Certified Partner program — that’s $1,576.88 (with tax) on my personal American Express card, twice, and the only way to get it back was to contest the charge through American Express (and yes, that was the Microsoft-recommended solution after a phone call to my Partner Account Manager (who is awesome), and the Partner Web Site Team, and Accounting and on and on).  Yes, I got my money back, as I knew I eventually would, but come on.

So I need to amend my earlier comment — the more work you  put into a relationship with Microsoft PEOPLE, the more you gain.  The more work you put into the Microsoft Partner Web Site, the more time you waste.  You need to accept the fact that it’s a one-way channel for information FROM Microsoft TO you, the partner; for that, it can be useful.  For anything you want Microsoft to know about you as an ISV partner — forget it.  Pick up the phone.

Oh — And WHILE I WAS WRITING THIS, my partner Robert W. Anderson, Digipede CTO and 18-year veteren of Microsoft partnering adventures, came over to me and explained that for each of the three “Ascend” programs in which we participate (Ascend for Longorn Server, Ascend for Vista, and Ascend for Office 2007, don’t ask), we’ve received an invitation to a corresponding replacement “Airframe” program, the benefits of which appear to be that we get to re-enter all our information for products, release dates, etc. AGAIN.  And they promised him a “cool gift” in exchange for signing up.  New login and password?  You betcha.

This is madness. 

Microsoft MAKES the database products and Web servers that should make such practices obsolete.  I’m not even talking about “Microsoft,” I’m talking about a single part of Microsoft that is dedicated to working directly with partners.  Fixing this would not require Microsoft Legal to talk to Microsoft Product Development or Microsoft HR to talk to Microsoft Research.  Fixing this would require the Microsoft Partner Program to talk to itself. 

The Microsoft Partner Programs are really, good — well conceived, well designed, well implemented (excluding the Web site).  The PEOPLE I have met in the Microsoft Partner Programs are really, really good.  How they can possibly go back to their offices and specify the electronic systems they do is absolutely beyond me.

I’ve accepted an invitation at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Boston next month.  Guess what I hope the topic is?

Don Dodge and Cliff Reeves of the Microsoft Emerging Business Team (EBT) continue to crank out good advice about partnering with Microsoft, especially for ISV startups — but I think it’s time for some of us ISV startup partners to weigh in, too. 

“Partnering with Microsoft” is an easy thing to say, and, superficially, an easy thing to do.  The basic decision process for an entrepreneur should be:  Am I developing at least in part for the Microsoft platform?  If no, go away.  If yes, become a Microsoft Registered Partner.  There’s a mildly maddening Web enrollment process, then you’re done.   Then join Empower; it’s the “starter” program for ISVs, and you can get a little bit of software and some other excellent resources for $375.  If you’re on the Microsoft platform, it’s the best bargain in town. 

Then if you’re serious, if you’re using Microsoft’s development tools, if your main target is Windows, you should become a Certified Partner.  This requires a few more bucks and a bit of work on certifications, plus some additional maddening Microsoft Partner Web Site experiences, but you’ll get through it.  Then you get all kinds of goodies.  Microsoft showers you with software, and newsletters, and meeting notices, and training offers, and so on.  The software alone is worth vastly more than the price of the program.  So sign up.

But do more than sign up.  One of the benefits you gain is access to early releases of upcoming Microsoft products — pay attention to these!  Cliff tells a chilling tale:

Just this week, a VC contacted us to get an opinion on a company (let’s call them X) looking for funding. The company had a great product and had made a big sale at Global 50 company. Unfortunately, some of the features overlapped what we have announced for the next release of Office — Office 2007. Our partners have been getting code drops and detailed product plans on Office 2007 for a year or more, but X hadn’t joined our partner programs and hadn’t realised the overlap.

So sign up — AND pay attention, or you’re quite likely to get hit by a train.  (Seriously — Cliff is right.  Some team, somewhere at Microsoft — right now – is working on something much too close to your idea for your own good.  It is YOUR job to find out who it is, and be nice to them, and study their roadmap.  And duck.  Find a way to add value to what they’re doing, or prepare for trouble.)

But that’s the easy part.  The big decision for a startup ISV is this.  Are you joining the Microsoft partner community to get some free / discounted stuff (and to watch out for the occassional oncoming train), or are you partnering with Microsoft?  If you’re really going to partner with Microsoft, then you have to work like hell to get attention (guess what I’m doing right now?), work like hell to bring value to Microsoft, and work like hell to extract value in return. 

Partnering with Microsoft is like any other business relationship — what you get out of it is proportional to what you put in.  The people at Microsoft are like people everywhere — eager to help those who are engaged, and mostly too busy to bother with those who are not.  When I ask for help from someone at Microsoft, I might get it, and I might not.  But when I take the time to understand who that person is, what he or she can gain from working with us, and how I can help them — we’re off to the races. 

If you want to really engage with Microsoft, and really reap the benefits that they can provide — in terms of access to customers, access to product roadmaps, access to other partners at the right levels, and more — then it’s worth becoming a Gold Certified Partner.  The benefits of being a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner are nominally not all that different from being a Certified Partner — but the signal it sends internally at Microsoft is powerful.  You get preferential treatment, which is better than free software any day.

If you “go for the Gold” AND work like hell, there’s no better partner in the tech world than Microsoft.  While partnering with Microsoft sounds easy, it is actually only easy at a superficial level.  Do the easy stuff, because it’s useful.  But do the hard stuff, and then you’ve really got something.

And lest you think I’m just a pawn of the Microsoft machine, please read the NEXT post, too!

 

 

 

I have a better-than-usual relationship with my current laptop — a Dell Lattitude D610.  It’s my one work machine — at the office, at home, on planes, at conferences, etc.  It’s a year-old, right-down-the-middle combination of fast-enough and light-enough and nice-enough-screen to be a good place to put my work life.  It’s been very reliable (ok, I guess that proves I’m not superstitious), and on top of all that it has had very, very good battery life.

But one way it likes to achieve that very, very good battery life is to dim the screen instantly whenever it is unplugged from AC power.  This is fine in the office — if I care, I can just move my power cord — but sometimes annoying on planes, and often annoying at home.  Today, for example, I took it outside while I was half-watching my kids play in the pool — and of course, it’s too dim to see very well, even in the shade, on a bright sunny day. 

On at least four or five occassions in the past, I have looked in the control panel for power management, and the control panel for display, and deep inside device manager, and all over the place without finding a way to control screen brightness.  So today I finally asked for help.  I Googled a few combinations of D610, power, dim, brightness, battery, etc., and in a minute or two found an answer on a Dell forum:  power all the way down, restart, go to the bios, jump through a bunch of hoops, and voila.  “Stupid that you have to do all that,” thought I, “but I suppose . . .” 

As I was contemplating the number of programs I had open, weighing all the work I’d have to save before shutting down, and the stupidity of having to go through this nonsense just to control screen brightness, I chanced to see the NEXT entry in the same forum:

Alternatively, you can also change the brightness while the system is up and running by pressing the Fn and up or down arrow.  This will change the brightness on both AC and battery power, depending on what the system is running on at the time you adjust it.

And sure enough, there on my up and down arrow keys are little blue icons that look for all the world like “brightness up” and “brightness down” symbols, right where they’ve been for a year.  So not only does it pay to ask for help, it pays to listen to more than one answer. 

I have been thinking about what this means about how we as designers of products hit the right balance of usability, documentation, feature set, and so on — not to mention how we as users of products decide where to spend our efforts on improving our own experiences with a product (or not). 

But mostly, I’m glad it’s easy to ask for help, I’m glad there are folks out there willing to provide help, and I should quit being so bullheaded and take advantage of the resources available. 

And — look for more outdoor posting ahead.

I spent the day yesterday at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose where Dow Jones is holding an event called “Enterprise Ventures,” a matchmaking event where many VCs get together to hear many startups give short pitches.  I gave two 20-minute presentations about Digipede this afternoon, which is never bad practice, and I ended up with quite a few new contacts as a result.  (Many thanks to Cliff Reeves for making introductions on our behalf; the Microsoft Emerging Business Team rocks!)

As I was sitting in the “wrap up” session, half-listening to some VC heavyweights (Raj Atluru of DFJ, Jeffrey Beir of North Bridge, Jeff Fagnan of Atlas, Mark Gorenberg of Hummer Winblad, and a couple of Dow Jones moderators), half checking email and trying to catch up on a few crisitunities, I heard the following analysis from Jeff Fagnan (more or less):

“I was looking to see what company was doing the best job of using Internet-enabled sales methods, and I’d say it was Digipede.  And they’re in grid computing!  You never would think of grid computing as being something you could sell online.  But they’ve done a great job of locating leads, making sales, and doing implementations, all without site visits.  They’ve figured out how to sell for a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, in a market where you usually think of half million dollar sales with long sales cycles and top-down selling.  And this makes Digipede one of the only grid companies that’s positioned to bring grid computing to small and medium businesses.  There’s a nice business to be made there.”

And then the rest of the panel jumped in to add other favorable points about Digipede, including the Microsoft leverage provided by our choice of .NET, the ability to move upmarket to enterprises (more easily than moving down from enterprise to SMB), and many other positive comments.  Many thanks, guys!  It’s good to hear we’re getting our message across.

George Laszlo just posted about Microsoft’s recent announcement of the BioIT Alliance.  His post includes the sort of positioning that makes no sense to me.  At one level, Mr. Laszlo presents some quotes from the press release, and some reasonable commentary thereon.  It could well be that Microsoft is “…simply playing catch-up here with IBM,” as Mr. Laszlo’s analysis says. 

But Mr. Laszlo appears to have made little effort to understand what Microsoft is doing, and he throws innuendo around without citing any first-hand sources.  “Hopefully they are serious about this and will not disappoint the alliance members.  We shall see.”  Has he talked to disappointed alliance members?  He doen’t say.  “…exactly what chance will other software or service providers have to break into this club?”  Has he asked to join and been turned away?  He doesn’t say.

So — firsthand, Mr. Laszlo — let me answer your questions.  I am the CEO of a founding member of the BioIT Alliance, not in any way affiliated with Microsoft.  I  have worked directly with Don Rule, who has been leading the charge at Microsoft on this, and he has in no way “disappointed” this partner.  He’s energetic and determined, and has been a pleasure to work with.  For that matter, Bill Gates’ own views and commitment in this area date from long before this announcement — as anyone “following the discovery space for the past 5 years” should know. 

Oh – and I “broke into this club” by asking to be invited.  I articulated a vision of how our products and services can advance the (extremely worthy) goals of the organziation, including those articulated by Mr. Gates in the original BioIT Alliance announcement.  Before breaking in, try the front door.

Mr. Laszlo also states that his “…personal concern is that the alliance will be swayed to use Microsoft products and thus become ‘closed minded’ when it comes to finding the best solution to a given problem.”   Is it so shocking that Microsoft would put its money, reputation, and partners on the line to demonstrate that its product groups and partner ecosystem might actually be able to contribute more to this field?  Is it so concerning that Microsoft and its partners would put forward an initiative to serve an important and growing market with products that can be adapted for that market?  And if those products are indeed, as Mr. Laszlo suggests, not currently “…the best, most elegant or cost effective” way to meet the needs of that market, is it so surprising that Microsoft and its partners would choose to improve those products through direct engagement in the market? 

I find Microsoft’s growing commitment to serving this market most encouraging.  Mr. Laszlo is right in implying that BioIT Alliance members will only succeed in this initiative if we bring forward solutions that are “…the best, most elegant, and cost effective.”  Will we succeed?  “We shall see.”

I went yesterday to a breakfast organized by the Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs, SVASE. 

For those of you outside the Bay Area, you have no idea the number of “networking opportunities” there are for startups around here.  There are literally at least a dozen organizations that organize these events on a regular basis, and many more on an irregular basis.  You can pretty much spend your life having breakfast / lunch / nasty appetizers with other entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, angel investors, advisors, consultants, accountants, lawyers, recruiters, marketing specialists, sales specialists, HR outsourcers, bankers, presentation coaches, life coaches, and more lawyers.  The quality of these events is, to put it mildly, highly variable.

So it is always a pleasure when one of these events goes right.  SVASE does better than average, so when I saw that they’d lined up Will Price of Hummer Winblad to meet with a handful of entrepreneurs, I signed up  for a slot.  Will is one of the growing number of venture capitalists who blog, and he’s better than most.  There were eight of us entrepreneurs, a couple of sponsors (Deloitte hosted, providing a great venue, good bagels, and an inadequate quantity of coffee), and almost none of the usual hangers-on (zero life coaches, zero lawyers).  Will gave a 10-minute introduction, providing a mix of information (about what Hummer Winblad is looking for), advice to entrepreneurs (in how to find the right investment partner), and analysis of where the software market is heading.  He was clear, direct, and insightful; if you read his post entitled “Questions to Ask,” and then poke around at other recent posts, you’ll get the general idea.

After the introduction, several of us each got 10-15 minutes to give a short presentation about our company (no slides, just talk), and to take questions from Will.  This is a very useful, low-risk way to get feedback from a VC without blowing your “one shot” in the VC’s office.  Will was patient with all of us, giving constructive comments to each company.  Even with just seven entrepreneur presentations, there was an incredible diversity of content, stage of company, polish of presentation, software architecture choices, delivery models, etc.  You could see Will trying cut through all these issues to find value, while giving his own views on the issues each entrepreneur will face in raising money. 

Kudos to Will for a job well done, to David Whitney of Deloitte for an event well hosted, and to Zoli Erdos of SVASE for an event well organized.

The grid computing world is abuzz — Sun has announced the Cool Apps Developer Challenge, with $50,000 in prizes available to developers who put their applications on the Sun Grid Compute Utility.  

Haven’t we been here before?  And more importantly — haven’t we gotten beyond this yet? 

Since early 1999 (at least), there have been prizes related to grid computing.  There were prizes offered by RSA to crack various encryption methods.  There were prizes offered by the Electronic Frontier Foundation to find the first prime number with more than a million digits (and there’s still one for ten million digits outstanding).  There were bubble-era startups that offered cash prizes for participation in other grid projects while they fumbled around looking for an actual business model. 

Enough already.  It’s 2006.  Grid computing is for getting work done, not for winning prizes.

Here’s our promotion (yeah, we’ll announce it officially Real Soon Now, but in the meantime just contact us…) — get our Digipede Network Developer Edition, including the Digipede Framework SDK, for free.  Use it to grid-enable your application.  (CRN says you’ll have an easier time doing this than building a prizewinner on Sun Grid!)  Go sell your application (and ours, if you like) to your customers (we’ll help).  Win profits, not prizes.  Make your customers happy, not your PR people.   Be successful, not famous.