Powers Unfiltered

There is a stirring moment in the movie version of the Return of the King in which Aragorn rallies his troops in the face of nearly impossible odds.  As the hordes of Mordor pour out of the black gate, he roars: 

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight!”

Facing similarly impossible odds during closing arguments, Ken Lay’s defense attourney Michael Ramsey borrowed from Aragorn’s playbook as he addressed the jury:

“There may be a court in America that bends to political pressure but it’s not this court! There may come a day when an American jury yields to a media mob, but it’s not this jury.”

Rhetorical similarities aside, the difference here, in my opinion, is that Mr. Ramsey’s impossible odds have been brought on by the actions of his own client.  Hey Mr. Ramsey — you’re defending the bad guys.  Don’t steal the good guys’ lines.

Now of course, my charge that Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling are “the bad guys” is just my opinion, but my opinion is backed up by considerable personal experience.  As many of you may know, I worked in the utility industry for many years.  I have heard the claim that Enron was made up primarily of honest, hard-working folks trying to earn a living, and I have no doubt there’s some truth to that — I met many at Enron who met this description.  But there were also many who did not. 

A few years ago I had the privilige of working on projects that helped to unravel certain aspects of the California electricity crisis of 2000-2001.  Enron’s part in that disaster is now a matter of public record, and some of the most directly involved plead guilty to wire fraud.  I got to see records of Enron’s trading practices firsthand.  I got to listen to recorded phone conversations of Enron traders firsthand (although I never heard this one; I’ll have to go hunt it down.  You used to be able to get much of the whole zillion-hour set at the FERC Web site; some of it is still here, but I thought there was more…). 

I still have friends at Portland General Electric — acquired by Enron when Enron’s market cap was soaring — who saw their 401Ks evaporate as Ken Lay extolled the virtues of Enron stock.  When I worked at PGE for three years in the early 80s, the company was a fine example of the type of ordinary, basically functional and professional organization that ran the utility industry for many decades.  In a period of less than 90 days in 2001, life savings were essentially wiped out. (You can read this and many other references for this sad story.) 

I am not following the trial of Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay in enough detail to have much of an opinion of their guilt or innocence of the specific charges involved; the feds have made their choices about what charges to bring and how to prosecute them.  But make no mistake — these two men led an organization that brought enormous harm to a very large number of people.  They set the tone for their many underlings, including Fastow and Causey and Belden and Richter and Forney and Boyle and the rest. 

The buck stops with Lay and Skilling.  A day may come when Mr. Ramsey can convince an audience otherwise, but it is not this day.

Greg Nawrocki, as usual, hits some good points today in his posting about Sun Grid.  His main point is that the key to grid adoption is available apps, and I could not agree more. 

This is exactly why we put so much energy and effort into our API, why we give away the Digipede Network Developer Edition, why I don’t leave the office without a few mini-CDs in my pocket to give to worthy developers.  (Apparently, a developer to whom I handed a CD last month posted about it today!)

My favorite comment, though, was Greg’s observation about a fundamental issue that keeps coming up about Sun Grid:

“…why would anyone want to contract for a service they generally already own, and if they don’t it can be had fairly cheap with the potential of a return on that investment[?]”

Why indeed?  Surely not for the reasons Jonathan Schwartz touted in his detailed posting back in March.  He hits all the right notes in describing how grid has been done to date, and then comes to exactly the opposite conclusion that we have.  If the problem is needless complexity and a lack of applications, his contention that it is somehow better to just hand over the whole problem to Sun may resonate with a few IT folks, but not many (as he pointed out himself).  More importantly, it will resonate with even fewer developers. 

It seems highly unlikely that most businesses will find it more economical to adopt Sun’s restrictions on application development than to deploy their own grid — especially as the options for deploying their own become easier and more flexible. 

Don’t take my word for it; see what the team at CRN Labs has to say about their experience adapting an application to Sun Grid, as compared to their experience adapting that same application to the Digipede Network:

The difference in ease of use in Sun Grid vs. Digipede was enormous. Because the Test Center designed an I/O-intensive test program to execute in parallel, the shell scripts required further development, so engineers did not complete the project originally intended to test the Sun Grid. The Sun job was completed after the Test Center contacted Sun’s engineers to help write scripts and compile the program.

Using the same test program with Digipede Team Edition, engineers compiled it using the DOS GNU compiler and were able to write the script in about a half-hour. The job wizard combines job creation with script development so developers need not to learn how to build scripts. Test Center engineers completed the Digipede job in less than one hour vs. five hours for Sun Grid.

Sun Grid will appeal to certain parts of the market, but Greg’s right — new infrastructure is just not very exciting.  New applications, and new ways to build those applications, and new ways to grid-enable those applications — that’s exciting.

We get questions about how the Digipede Network compares to Vendor X or Open Source Project Y pretty often; a recent example is from Matt Davey’s Tales from a Trading Desk, where Matt asked:

.NET Grid Computing. Not sure what it’s advantages are over and above
DataSynapse. Would be interested to know if anyone has reviewed Digipede?  

In terms of editorial reviews, you may want to check out a recent comparison of Sun Grid and Digipede in CRN by Mario Morejon, or Mario’s more complete review from last month, or Rick Wayne’s review in Software Development Magazine.

Nat picked up  right away on one of the leading points of differentiation — we’ve put a lot of emphasis on ease of implementation, ease of use, and especially ease of programming.  We’ve looked at a lot of other solutions in the market, and talked with a lot of customers and potential customers.  In our assessment, the main thing holding back the grid computing market is needless complexity.  From Day One, Digipede has made specific market and engineering decisions to strip away complexity.  If this means there are some bells and whistles we omit, great — we’ve yet to lose a sale over a missing bell or whistle, and we’ve closed sales based on our ability to implement our system quickly and painlessly for our customers.

Another key point is right there in Matt’s question — we’re focused on the Microsoft side of the market.  While there are many options on the Linux / Java / IBM side of the market, we’ve made the decision to focus on making the best tools available for Windows, which is the market and technology we know best.  DataSynapse has had a lot of success in the market, and they’ve got happy customers.  They work quite closely with IBM, and for customers who have made certain key platform decisions, that’s great.  For the increasing number of enterprises with a significant commitment to .NET, we offer the best available SDK for Microsoft developers, and the best available integration with the whole Microsoft stack.

There was also a comment about Alchemi on Matt’s blog, which included the statement:

My thoughts are that eventually we’ll see an Open Source product outstrip the main vendors, but that seems like a while off yet.

I have to say — there’s Open Source projects, and Open Source projects.  Linux, Apache, Firefox and others that have gathered a critical mass of users and developers offer some very interesting advantages.  Alchemi is a small project with few users and fewer developers.  It is an interesting proof of concept with some fine technical capabilities, and I’m sure it has some enthusiastic supporters.  I am NOT anti-open-source; find someone else to flame about that.  But when a business decides to adopt a software product (regardless of licensing model), the main costs are not in licensing but in the cost of implementation, integration, training, and daily user experience.  There has to be a certain level of QA, support, and commitment to a roadmap of future enhancements before most businesses will adopt any product, and Alchemi has not crossed that threshhold for any business we’ve encountered; we have yet to lose a sale to a business who was considering Alchemi. 

Those who wonder where the mainstream grid computing applications are may want to attend Dan Ciruli’s next Webcast today at 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Time.  Today he’ll talk about scaling out Web services using the Digipede Network, an area of interest for our customers (watch the Digipede Case Studies page for descriptions of current and future Digipede-powered Web services).

Dan describes the Webinar here, and you can sign up here.

OK, let’s start with something simple — my trip to New York City last week for the Microsoft Financial Developers Conference.  Microsoft gathered four hundred of the Best and Brightest from Wall Street, Redmond, and even Oakland, for two days of give and take at the Millenium Broadway Hotel.  I went with Digipede Product Manager Dan Ciruli.  My summary:  good content, good food, good partner opportunities.

Good content:  The Microsoft financial services vertical team (business and technical) put on much of the show, but they also brought in plenty of heavy hitters from the product teams (especially Visual Studio, SQL Server, and BizTalk) to discuss evolving best practices and give practical advice on a variety of development issues.

Good venue:  The Millenium Broadway gets high marks for the funky Hudson Theatre (where the tonight show began, 50 years ago), the helpful staff, and the good eats (ok, ok, I only ate there once, for the Microsoft-hosted buffet lunch – the rest of the time I ventured out into Times Square to continue my search for the Perfect Pastrami Sandwich, but more on that another day).  Host your next event there, if it’s not huge.

Best of Show:  Sapient.  If you have not heard Naresh Bhatia talk about model-driven development, you’re missing out.  His passion for tools and techniques that increase developer productivity and product quality reminded me of Digipede CTO Robert Anderson; I look forward to finding an opportunity to work with him.

Good Opportunities for Partners:  On the whole, Microsoft does a good job with its partners, and this event opened a lot of doors for us.  Our friends in Microsoft’s group provided Dan Ciruli and myself a great opportunity to be part of the Capital Markets keynote presentation.  Kenny McBride and Stevan Vidich did a great job updating the attendees on how Microsoft’s new and upcoming product releases will benefit the financial developer community.  They also held a brief but interesting discussion with Yogesh Shetty, co-author of a new book Practical .NET for Financial Markets.  Stevan noted that there were some light-weight “learn to program if you’re a finance guy” books out there, but this isn’t one of them.  Yogesh co-author Samir Jayaswal have put together the first such volume for sophisticated developers already working in Finance – if that’s you, check it out.

Then it was time for the John and Dan show.  Stevan introduced us, and I put up a few slides, but as the last third of a 75-minute presentation, I wanted to make sure I left time for Dan to do a demonstration.  I kept my remarks short, introducing a realistic financial example that would benefit from distributed computing using a grid or cluster.  I did fine, and then had to do a bit of “just keep talking” work, as Dan performed that familiar-but-nerve-wracking presentation maneuver, the “laptop swap.”  I had the slides, he had the Visual Studio installation and Internet connectivity (trust me, I know it doesn’t SOUND like we needed two laptops, but we did).  So I’ve got the audience’s attention, and I’m even managing to field a question or two from an audience of 100+ developers, when I see 100+ pairs of eyes swivel away from me and up to the screen.  CODE! That’s what these guys came to see – not slides, not some guy waving his hands telling them to imagine using grid computing – CODE!

So Dan deftly guided a room full of hardcore developers through the steps of going from a .NET application to a grid-enabled .NET application in about 20 lines of code, which took less than eight minutes (and he was taking his time – I’ve seen him do it in five).  Then we took more than a dozen intelligent questions, and the session was over.

Now comes the interesting part.  I’ve given hundreds of technical and business presentations in front of audiences larger and smaller than this one; sometimes I kill, sometimes I bomb, usually somewhere in between.  One good measure is the two minutes after the presentation – how many people come forward and hand you business cards?  How many ask additional questions, or grab your freebies if any?  At this event, we’d made some mini-CDs with our Digipede Network Developer Edition on them to hand out to interested developers at this event.  I had 30 CDs in my pocket when our presentation started; I left with my pockets empty of CDs and full of business cards, plus a list of additional developers who started a signup sheet for additional copies.  So when I say Microsoft does a good job with its partners, that’s what I’m talking about.

Today I join the conversation.  Thanks to Robert Scoble and Shel Israel for Naked Conversations; I only got through about 50 pages before I said “alright already, I get it, I’m in.”  (Not to worry, Robert — I’ll finish it….)

Thanks all the more to fellow Digipede bloggers Robert W. Anderson, Dan Ciruli, and Kim Greenlee, whose fine example I hope to follow. 

I am the president, CEO, and occassional coffee boy at Digipede Technologies, a grid computing software company in Oakland, California.  I’m also plenty of other things — energy nerd, recovering consultant, opinionated audiophile, father of a teenage girl and twin 10-year-old boys, husband of a noted health policy wonk, and so on.  While you may read my official disclaimer, the basics are familiar — I’m me, I speak here as me, and I represent myself, not my company, family, friends, or anybody else.

By blogging, I hope to listen more than I speak, to share what I already know and what I learn, to post regularly, to blog smart, and to draw on the collective wisdom of the marketplace.  But I wouldn’t count on it — I’m likely to end up saying the first thing that comes into my head.  We’ll see.