Archive for March, 2010

I am a descendant to a long dynasty of rebels. If everybody goes right, we go left. Why? Just because.

My grandmother, who was the lead spirit of the clan for some time and who passed away last year at the age of 97, would always curse my father whenever he misbehaved (and you can rest assured that happened quite a lot) that his kids will treat him the same way. Well, I like to think he was luckier than that.

The other day my daughters were playing and dinnertime came so I announced with all my charisma and authority that they need to clean up and then they can eat. My oldest, 5 years old, immediately obeyed, cleaned up and sat at the table. My youngest, 3 years old, ignored me, refused to clean up and just went and sat at the table waiting for her food. When I firmly told her no food until she cleans up, she slowly and elegantly got off her chair, stood firm in front of me, looked up straight into my eyes and said, “you are not my friend. I am going to sleep!” She walked upstairs to her room, got undressed and into her pajamas and went to sleep! She is three! I hope this is instead of the teenage rebel. If this is just the preview, I am doomed.

Well, I guess that I, who is blamed for being stubborn and needs things to go my way and my way only, deserve it. I guess there are lots of investors, board members, VP’s, employees, consultants etc. who are laughing their heads off reading this post, saying “serves you right dude.”

In management school (life for me, I am a horrible academic student) they teach us that to delegate responsibility and think strategically is the right way to run a business or any other organization, and in general I would agree, but why then are the most successful founders and CEO’s all detail-oriented in a way that can drive you crazy and cause an MBA professor to jump off a cliff? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Allison, just to name a few.

I am spending the last week accelerating our marketing activity to ride the tremendous swell of success we are experiencing. The amount of details one needs to master and pay attention to is always mind-boggling, and as always, god or the devil is in the details, depending on how good you and your team are.

Marketing, like anything in a business, doesn’t work if you are good only in volume and process. Success depends on the very small critical things. First and above all clean, sharp , attractive copy and design of everything you do, banners, landing pages, Adwords, website, presentations, product UI and much more. Second is focused, specific, narrow detailed targeting, to understand the very intimate details of whom you are targeting and how. Third is accessibility. Getting to and doing anything with your company or your product or your services should be the most accessible, easy to do thing on the face of this earth.

When you try to apply these principles to a task list like the one bellow, you end up with lots of details, details, details.

Lead generation campaigns

Integrated campaigns
Webinars
Blasts

Events

Events
Road shows
Local groups

Web advertising

Google Adwords
Banners and landing pages at key media by keyword
Banners on competitor key mentions

SEO

Keywords
Rankings

Social media

Blog
Twitter
Facebook
LinkedIn
YouTube
Other

Web site

Design
Landing pages
Social media
More videos
Use cases
Wider Solution option

PR

Cloud
More
Talkbacks

Analysts

Regular briefings
Every six months, a day with Forrester and Gartner
White papers
Webinars
Case studies
Twitter
Webinar and blasts invites

Sales support

Sales presentations
Specific solutions presentations
Demos
Collateral

Strategic

X integration with
x
y
z
(Marketing censored the actual names, how do you like that they pay attention to details!)

ECO System

So who is right,  MBA schools or Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Steve Jobs? I will always go for the latter. Well, the truth, like everything in life, is somewhere in the middle. You need to be able to go very high and strategic and at the same time very low and detailed. When you go low and detailed do it in a coaching way, in a way that builds the foundation for you team to continue being detail-oriented and care about every bit, even when you are back to strategy.

To succeed, you must have GREAT people and a talent in passing the spirit of what you are trying to achieve, not only the tactics and process. A practical suggestion? Never compromise in hiring, lead by example, dive into details and care about them.

Long day.

We ran a great webinar today with Dr. Thomas Mendel at Forrester, discussing cloud and IT Financial Management. Thomas does a great job bringing clarity to the world of cloud, describing the different types of clouds: Infrastructure, Application and Business Process as well as the level of sharing: private, public and hybrid.

I subscribe to his point of view that the biggest growth in the next few years in the enterprise arena will be in private clouds. We had ~400 listeners on the webinar – that is a great show up. Cloud is definitely a point of interest to many folks out there. For the first time in a long time we reactivated Web advertising. 100 registrants came from an InformationWeek banner, a pleasant surprise.

Cloud is definitely here and with it Web marketing! I wonder if Thomas and I will need to start having our Spring German White Asparagus dinner over the web as well. I hope not.

The other day I took my family and some friends to visit the village my wife and I grew up in. My friends were stunned by the simplicity and modesty of my childhood.

I grew up in a 2-bedroom, 570 sq foot home. At one point we were 5 siblings in one bedroom and we loved it. We had no TV at home – only in the central social club, but we did not need it. We hung around the trees, bushes, springs and nature. When my mother wanted to call her parents, she had to go to a central payphone.

I am always amazed at the distance between the life I live today, on the high-tech highway, and the rural farm-oriented village I grew up in. I enjoy stopping for a moment and thinking about the things I would like to maintain from that way of life and the things I am thankful for in my new way of life. I like to think I can bring the good from both together, but let’s not kid ourselves.. OK, maybe just a sprinkle.

Do you go wide or specific?

Every start up at some point faces the dilemma whether to be very specific in its messaging or go broad. Specific is good. It is simple, to the point and great for lead generation and sales. On the other hand, wide sets a vision and defines a category which helps with investors, bankers etc.

My opinion is very clear: describe what you do in a very specific, easy to understand way, and good things will follow. The majority of successful software companies started very focused and with a very simple message. Mercury interactive- testing, Success Factors – employee performance management, Oracle- data base, Salesforce.com- sales force automation and the list goes on, I apologize in advance to those I did not include…

Broad messages and 3 letter acronyms are for well-established companies. Mercury at above $400M allowed itself to try Business Technology Optimization BTO. At that size, you can try. SuccessFactors, after going IPO and passing $100M in revenue mark, allowed itself to shift from “employee performance management” to “Business Execution Software (BES).”

That’s all great, but not for start-up companies. Keep it simple! Just imagine a kitchen Utensils Company would position itself as Lifestyle Optimization Solutions (LOS). They wouldn’t sell even one food processor. Customers will always reward you for no fluff, straight and to the point practical communication.

The mission is easily defined: create a software solution that a potential buyer will get an evaluation login for, and after a week playing with the software, she will choose to buy a subscription to use the solution.

Simple ha! Simple to set as a mission, very tough to execute on.

The way to success goes through intimately understanding your customer and use cases, a simple design, a clean look and feel, lots of “no we are not doing that,” out of the box content, data cleansing and mapping automation.

My product management and engineering teams are getting there very soon. We are leading the way as the first non-contained software, software that relies on enterprise data, to-go SaaS – and successfully.

Stay tuned. Amazing stuff is about to come!

Had a great conversation the other day with Milind Govekar at Gartner. Conversations with him are always a pleasure – he knows the industry and is exposed to tons of customers, which obviously brings lost of value to me. OK, enough with this – I am losing credibility promoting Gartner.

Millinad nicely put it that at the heart of what my company does, IT Cost and IT Financial management, is usage-based IT Cost allocation.

At the core of it is the fact that as IT becomes more centralized and based on shared and virtualized resources, one must easily allocate costs based on actual usage. Why? Simply because if you can’t do that, then you can’t accurately and predictably know your operating costs and therefore your P&L reporting is going to be all wrong, inconsistent, unjustifiable and unpredictable and that is simply unacceptable.

I love those moments when you have a great revelation in understanding something. I had one of those today.

For some time now we’ve been trying to figure out why Business Unit Visibility into IT Cost, or IT cost show back, is one of the main drivers for our business.

We are of course aware of the opportunity to optimize IT costs by gaining visibility. We also know that visibility to business units creates responsibility and ownership over IT spend – we have seen it happen many times with our customers who are using our IT Cost Management solutions.

But there was something else we were unaware of. The type of functionality our customers were looking for – what-if analysis, IT forecasting, re-forecasting – these all drove us to feel there was something additional, a need of our customers that we were missing.

Well we found it.

Profitability Predictability!

IT is highly unpredictable when not managed correctly. IT spend is a small but a growing part of operating costs, and it is the most unpredictable part. The result: IT is an area of risk and surprises for business units who must be able to predict their profitability.

This core need of a Business Unit for predictability is driving the need for easy-to-use IT cost transparency solutions and analysis, such as those offered by Digital Fuel.

I love it when it all becomes clear!

In the last few years it seems like clouds are filling our IT skies, bringing with them the promise of many cost-effective IT alternatives.

What is this cloud computing? Is it real? The answer is yes, it is very real and it is here to stay. So what is it? In very simple words, cloud is a code name or a buzzword for IT and Business process capabilities delivered over the Web.

Some, amongst them Larry Ellison, will say so what? Nothing new, we’ve been doing that for ages. They’ve got a point of course – especially when you remember the days of centralized computing and IBM terminals – but still, there are some fundamental changes.

Virtualization, Multitenancy, computing and communication technologies have advanced so much, enabling realization of centralized, shared over-the-web computing like never before, driving high adoption and the biggest change in the technology world in more than a decade. The result: major changes in delivery models, in business models and in purchasing and consumption models.

To borrow from President Obama’s “This is what change looks like,” this is what cloud change looks like:

1. Multiple alternatives.
2. Multiple vendors.
3. Easy and quick to buy and to activate, or to disconnect.
4. Multiple mix-and-mach options to deliver the required business value at an effective cost.

In this new world of cloud computing, the CIO can’t just focus on operations – he or she must manage business alternatives. The good old cost value economic decisions need to be made every single day.

Lucky enough, this is what we at Digital Fuel do for a living. Whether infrastructure, application, business process cloud; private, public or hybrid, in-house or external, we help enterprises manage IT cost and value.

These clouds are shedding blessed rain on our fields. We are very grateful for that.

For some time now, my marketing folks have been nagging me to start blogging and I continued pushing back, claiming it’s not my style. I am a farm boy and view myself as an industrialist, focused on creating new great products solving real problems. Where I come from, talking and writing is not work.

Well, I guess I am old fashioned and it is time to get on the bandwagon and share with you what we are doing at our company, share my views, ideas and doubts as they relate to Business, IT Finance and IT Cost Management and above all just life. Hope you will find it interesting.