Powers Unfiltered

Well, we must be doing something right; or at least Microsoft seems to think so.

Microsoft has named Digipede as one of three finalists for “Innovation Partner of the Year” in the ISV/Software Solutions category.  As the only Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with a grid computing solution built on .NET, Digipede is a natural complement to a wide variety of products in the Microsoft stack.  It’s good to see that so many folks at Microsoft are starting to realize that.

Thanks to the growing Microsoft Chapter of the Digipede Fan Club, we were selected (with two others) out of 1800 entries as finalists in this category.  All the more reason to look forward to the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver on July 10-12 — where the winner will be announced!  (If you’re going to be there, let me know.)

You can read more about it in our press release. 

Derrick Harris of GridToday wrote a nice piece this morning about Digipede’s recent momentum.  He’s been following us since we launched the Digipede Network almost two years ago, and he hits the highlights in his article today. 

Derrick interviewed me by phone for the story, and I guess I must have let slip that the Digipede Network Version 2.0 will be out this summer.  So watch this space in the coming weeks for more leaks and details on this important release, as we build on the momentum we’ve generated over the last year.

So how did the Digipede Network become the grid computing software of choice for hedge funds?

The three primary value propositions that we’ve been emphasizing from the beginning resonate particularly well with hedge funds. For those of you who are new to the Digipede message, those propositions are: Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. And if you don’t believe me, then go read what hedge fund CTO Paul Algreen is saying in GridToday. Go ahead — I’ll wait.
Now — Let’s look at how hedge funds respond to three bullets from an early slide we’ve used since before we released the first version of our software:

Performance: “The Digipede Network delivers dramatically improved application performance at any scale.”

Lots of people think “at any scale” is some sort of bragging about the ability to manage thousands or tens of thousands or gazillions of compute nodes — and of course it is. But just as importantly, “at any scale” means that we are able to scale DOWN as efficiently as we scale UP. Most hedge funds (even some whoppers) are NOT huge enterprises — they are small-to-medium businesses with some extremely compute-intensive applications. Our hedge fund customers have all found that they can get up and running with a “starter kit” of 10 or 20 nodes, verify the benefits of “dramatically improved application performance” at that level, and then scale up from there — adding more nodes, more applications, and more users as needed.

Simplicity: “The Digipede Network is radically easier to buy, install, learn, and use than competing grid offerings.”

That looks like marketing language, and it is. But before this sentence was ever used in marketing, it was an internal mantra at Digipede that drove literally hundreds of specific design and engineering decisions. (It’s still taped to the wall in our original conference room.) Hedge funds don’t have big IT staffs, and they don’t go for years-long big-budget “grid-enablement” projects. They need something that gets their best ideas for trading and risk management into the market now, not after they figure out how to implement some needlessly complex monstrosity. And they certainly aren’t going to wait while they re-train all their developers to learn new and alien programming paradigms. So hedge funds appreciate how naturally the Digipede Network fits with their current IT environment, and their current development practices.
Microsoft focus: “The Digipede Network is the only commercial grid computing product built entirely on .NET.”

And while THAT one raised some eyebrows when we first came to market (I’ve lost count of all the times I heard that there was “no such thing” as high-performance .NET computing), this has been a great decision for us. Hedge funds work in Windows, period. (OK, of the 10,000 hedge funds out there, I’m probably wrong about one or two. Deal with it.) There’s no room at a hedge fund for a “high-performance computing” group working on an entirely different platform than the “all the rest of the computing” group. Developers at hedge funds use a wide variety of tools and applications — .NET, COM, stand-alone executables, third-party libraries — but everything runs on Windows. Digipede’s early decision to let competitors pursue the false goal of “inter-OS” deployment while we integrated deeply at multiple points in the Microsoft stack has paid off well in this market.

So — it’s no secret. Performance, Simplicity, and Microsoft focus. Simple, but effective — now to spread the word to those next 9900+ funds…

Microsoft’s huge TechEd conference is in full swing in Orlando this week. 

Actually, no one from Digipede is physically at TechEd — but if you’re there, look in your bag!  See that VSIP Partner Resource DVD?  We’re on there!  You now have your own free copy of the Digipede Network Developer Edition — install it, try it, and see what all the excitement is about.

(I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — VSIP rocks.  The program, the people, the exposure, the focus — it’s all good.  Pound for pound, it’s the best partner program at Microsoft, period.  If you make software for the Microsoft platform, find a way to make it touch Visual Studio, and join VSIP now.  Even their Web site sucks less than it used to.)

And if you’re NOT at TechEd — find one of those DVDs!  Microsoft makes zillions of them.  Or just get the Digipede Network Developer Edition freshly brewed on the Digipede Web site here.

OK, we do a lot of Webcasts, and I don’t plug most of them here, but I’ll call attention to this one.  Dan and I have an MSDN Webcast called “Scaling SOA in Financial Services with Grid Computing for .NET” on June 12 at 10:00 AM Pacific time — mark your calendar now.  Here’s the MSDN description:

Enterprise architects in financial services are looking to service-oriented architectures (SOA) to address many real-world problems – brittle systems with tight interdependencies, data stuck in single-purpose silos, and applications that don’t scale to meet growing demand, to name a few.  But implementing an SOA can also expose new scalability issues.  New high-performance computing (HPC) offerings from Microsoft and its partners are ideally suited for scaling out compute-intensive components of an SOA.  Using real-world examples from financial services companies, this presentation will describe how to grid-enable compute-intensive analytic services for use in an SOA.  

You can sign up for the event here.  (True, somehow all references to Digipede, John Powers, and Dan Ciruli are omitted from this description, but it’s us nevertheless.)  Hope to see you there!

Digipede announced another customer win today.  III Offshore Advisors, an innovative hedge fund that uses a lot of computing power in their pricing and risk management models, selected the Digipede Network for their grid.  You can read about it on our Web site; GridToday also picked up the story. 

Financial firms are famously competitive, and no niche is more competitive today than the hedge fund market.  While the secret to success of most hedge funds is just that — a secret — most start with a small core team that says:  We can do better.  We know (through math, intuition, research, hard work, or all of the above) how to make a better investment, a better trade, a better judgment than our competitors.  When we show what we can do, our investors will be rich — and so will we.

Many of the investment and trading strategies employed by these firms are developed through cutting-edge mathmatical modeling.  Some of the brightest minds in the world are drawn to this competitive and lucrative market, and regardless of the models employed, they all cry out for — more computing power.  And it’s not just for one or two applications.  In our experience with hedge funds (and we work with quite a few), even a small fund encounters computational bottlenecks in: 

• Risk management
• Fixed income pricing
• Trading analytics (including liquidity depth analysis, inter-portfolio correlation analysis, and more)
• Pricing of exotic derivatives, and more

Eliminating these bottlenecks can open up new trading opportunities sooner.  If putting in a grid this month lets you start trading in new markets next month — that’s an easy decision.  If putting in a grid this week lets you out-trade your competitor next week — let’s go. 

So how did the Digipede Network become the grid computing software of choice for hedge funds?  I’ll tell you in Part II.

I post a lot about our experiences as a partner and customer of Microsoft, and anybody who cares to go back and count knows that most of my posts are positive.  For whatever reason, my complaints / rants tend to get more attention, so I want to re-iterate – our experience with Microsoft is on balance largely positive, and we remain an enthusiastic Microsoft partner.

With that out of the way – LiveMeeting has to go.  It’s great software, and good, reliable service – with no understanding of business whatsoever.  The treatment our company  has received from the Microsoft Office LiveMeeting organization (still referred to within Microsoft by its old name, Placeware), has ranged from comical to appalling.  Today, we reached appalling.

In 2005, we started experimenting with LiveMeeting as a way of demonstrating our software to prospective clients.  There were pluses and minuses, but on the whole it proved to be an effective tool.  For a while, we mooched off a friend’s account at Microsoft, but by spring of 2006 we settled into a pattern of bi-weekly Webcasts, and got our own account.  My partner Dan Ciruli set up that account; the only form of payment they offered for this type of account at the time was to put the monthly charge on his credit card, so he filled out the necessary forms and received confirmation from Microsoft.  So far, so good.

Then, Microsoft never billed him.  Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time reviewing my credit card statement for transactions that aren’t there.  And apparently, neither does Dan.  So he did not notice that Microsoft was NOT billing us for this service.  And neither, apparently, did Microsoft.

Then somebody from Microsoft popped up in February 2007 and said to Dan HEY YOU HAVEN’T PAID US and Dan said “so take the money already!”  He completed a second credit card form, and was told (again) that everything was fine.  Then the exact same person from Microsoft popped up in March 2007 and said the exact same thing, as though he’d never had the previous exchange, and Dan forwarded all the exact same information, and got the same response – oh, sorry, everything is fine now.  It became a running joke in the office, wondering how they made any money.

And then in April, somebody new at Microsoft woke up and said HEY YOU GUYS OWE US A WHOLE TON OF MONEY.  Always a great day when that happens.  So Dan and I researched it and sure enough, we had been getting free LiveMeeting service for almost a year.  So I called the friendly and helpful person at Microsoft (all names withheld on this one) and asked if we could just pay by check (a) for the outstanding balance, and (b) monthly thereafter.  She agreed, and said she’d send (a) an invoice for the outstanding balance, and (b) a monthly invoice thereafter.  And everything was fine again.

Then, Microsoft never billed us.  Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t spend a lot of time searching the mail for bills that aren’t there.  You put a valid invoice in my hand, I pay it promptly.  You don’t, oh well.  I pay a lot of invoices for other parts of Microsoft – most departments / divisions / business units / subsidiaries / whatever at Microsoft are pretty competent at getting a valid invoice to my desk, and I pay ‘em right quick.  But the LiveMeeting group apparently has not mastered this Business 101 concept. 

And of course, there’s only one way these things can end – we found our LiveMeeting account deactivated seven minutes before our scheduled Webcast this morning.  With attendees invited everywhere from here to India.  No warning emails, no onscreen notice that the account will be suspended in the future, no reason given on the Web page that says we’re dead, no “pay to reactivate” option, just — dead.  I don’t get real upset in the office very often, but I hit the roof. 

I called the toll-free number helpfully posted on the deactivation notice “for immediate service,” which presents a robotic phone tree with four options none of which are “TURN ME BACK ON NOW.”  I punch 4 to “talk with an attendant.”  I am transferred to Microsoft tech support, and am told I need to “talk to Placeware.”  I’m steaming now.  Four minutes and counting.  I call back and punch 2, “sales,” because in my experience humans usually answer when you talk to sales.  I get a human who is sympathetic, but says I need to call tech support; I get a new number to try.  Three minutes to go.  I call the new number, and find out the name of my account representative, and am transferred to him, but it turns out to be someone who sits near him, and eventually I reach my account representative.  Nope, I am assured that there is no way no how no human on earth who can turn my account back on in two minutes; my partner sends a note canceling the Webcast to all participants.  We look like idiots, and I am seriously pissed.

I stay on the line with my account manager, who asks many questions about who I had been working with previously on our account and billing issues (we find a couple of names, one gone and one still there).  I vent some more at him, and he’s sorry, and we’re done. 

The urge to open a WebEx account is now quite strong, but we suddenly realize we’ve got ANOTHER LiveMeeting with an important prospective customer later today.  Time for a deep breath.

I call the person who had previously promised to send me an invoice by mail, but never did.  I explain the whole situation again – she was “just talking with” my account manager.  I ask “did he mention that I ripped him a new one?”  She laughs nervously.  Between further apologies and digging into records, we eventually just put the whole bill on MY credit card, and she promises (really) to send me monthly invoices from here on.  Within an hour, the account is turned back on, and we’re good to go.

So – if customer service is “falling on the grenade,” these folks get a B+.  (To get an A, I had to be back up and running for the FIRST meeting we had scheduled.)  For processes and procedures – F.

Now we’ll see if I ever get a monthly bill – and yes, this is one I’ll be watching for.  And the Webex experiement begins in parallel next week.

The Microsoft Emerging Business Team (EBT) has been a staunch supporter of Digipede for the past two years.  The EBT is run by Dan’l Lewin, sometimes referred to as Microsoft’s “Ambassador to Silicon Valley.”  As Digipede has grown from a raw startup to the leading provider of .NET Grid computing software, the EBT has provided guidance and support — inside of Microsoft and out. 

They just featured us in a success story on their excellent Web site.  I think the story  came out well.  The only thing I regret is mentioning how many paying customers we had when their writer interviewed me — because we’ve got a LOT more now!

If you’re a startup looking to partner with Microsoft, run do not walk to the Microsoft Startup Zone.  Lots of good advice, provided by people you should get to know.

It’s been a year since I started blogging.  Powers Unfiltered has provided me with a number of unexpected benefits and consequences. 

First, it has put me in touch with more customers, partners, and prospects.  Given how erratic I’ve been with my posts (in timing, topics, and quality), I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the real business benefits I’ve seen.  The grid community remains open and accepting of new ideas — hopefully, so am I — and I see this conversation growing month by month.

Second, some of the most interesting and engaging conversations have erupted over a single topic — partnering with Microsoft.  I’ve tapped into a very interesting intersection of frustration / confusion from fellow partners and good will / bright ideas from some of Microsoft’s best people.  Something good may come of this.

Finally, the left-field crap has been fun.  I think several dozen people have learned how to adjust the brightness on their laptops thanks to my description of my own ineptitude.  I found a whole mess of people who are pissed at Velocity Micro (sorry, I’m closing off that topic, no more whining please.  My VM box works great now, and I’m a reasonably happy customer — end of story, at least for now.).  And a few folks are impressed with my quarters trick (ok, very few). 

So I’m ready to try this for another year — expect the unexpected, and thanks for all your encouragement and support!

John Dvorak’s column in the back of the May 22, 2007 issue of PC Magazine (and online here) points out the “Windows’ Words of Doom” that he “dreads to hear” which are:  “Preparing to Copy.”  He goes on to lament the decades-old problems that Windows users encounter in moving or copying files (or more accurately, folders full of files).  And while I take issue with one or two minor points in his rant, basically he’s right — the process of selecting one or more folders and dragging them someplace is fraught with far more peril than necessary. 

So don’t do it. 

Since 1999 (or maybe earlier), Microsoft has included a full-featured but lightly-publicized tool for handling heavy-duty file copying chores.  It’s called Robocopy, and it’s as brilliant and elegant and reliable as the “select and drag” method is perilous.  (Robocopy is one of the few truly useful bits of technology I discovered before Robert Anderson, who now uses it regularly — it saved his bacon again this week, but I’ll let him relate that story.) 

Robocopy started as a command-line tool with enough readable documentation to make anyone a copying wizard in just a few minutes.  It solves most of the seven “idiotic Windows glitches” Dvorak cites in his article, although it does not help with estimating the total time to copy (a harder problem than Dvorak cares to admit).  It is especially useful for copying chores that take a long time (like the one Dvorak describes), because it never pops up a dialog box to ask a stupid question in the middle of the activity (so it’s safe to walk away in the middle of the process!). 

No, it’s not as “easy” as just selecting and dragging — but spending 10 minutes figuring this out once will elimnate headaches for years to come.  Or you can just take my word for it that the following is sufficient for 99% of home copying chores: 

Robocopy source destination /S /E /W:3 /R:2 

I still use the command-line version, but there is also a Robocopy GUI (as described in this Microsoft Technet article). 

Robocopy is available for all versions of Windows since 2000 (and I think even NT 4.0).  The best version for XP is buried in the “Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools” (where else would you put a useful tool for Windows XP?).  Earlier versions are also tucked away in obscure “resource kits,” but it actually ships with Vista.  It may very well be on Dvorak’s hard disk right now, hidden in plain sight.

Dvorak makes a final observation:

We’ve all experienced [these problems], wondering to ourselves “Gee, does this ever happen to Bill Gates?  And if it does, why doesn’t he do anything about it?!”  I have no idea. 

More mysterious to me, however, is why Microsoft does not TELL anyone that this problem was solved many years ago.  Microsoft seems to think this is the sort of tool that only an enterprise system administrator should want — but anyone who has seen the “preparing to copy” message should go get it now.  You’ll be glad you did.