September 30th, 2008

Zoho Marketplace: awesome

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:31 pm

Categories: Development tools

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Marketplace, Sales Force Management, Sales, Dennis Howlett

Awesome is not a word I use often but when I saw Zoho Marketplace, the sound of my jaw hitting the desk was audible in the next street. What better way to get its collection of services working as the hub for other services that might build from Zoho products? Larry Dignan offered this critique:

The bigger question is whether Zoho’s Marketplace can attract more developers to its ecosystem. Salesforce.com’s AppExchange has been a critical cog to its development and strategy. Zoho could do the same. For now, Zoho says its market “is not big enough for vendors to make a living and not small enough to ignore.”

It’s a good point. The way I’m hearing it, Salesforce.com’s marketplace hasn’t been super successful for the developer community. Zoho might prove different. It is appealing to a much broader swathe of customers than Salesforce.com which increasingly is trying to go up the enterprise foodchain. Zoho firmly positions itself as an SMB player so potentially has a huge global audience. Larger companies that develop solutions based around Zoho might choose to use the marketplace as a way of sharing what they have learned. If that happens then goodness gets spread around to much broader audiences. However, Zoho Marketplace still has to find its way in the world and if companies don’t ‘get’ the value of what Zoho is offering then it will have failed.

In the meantime, my colleague Craig Cmehil also thinks it’s awesome, describing Zoho Creator - the place where you can develop apps for Zoho and the foundation for the marketplace as:

For quite awhile I guess you could call me a “ZC Pusher”, it was like the little kid selling lemonade outside of their house for 5 cents or something like that. Zoho Creator captured my attention and on many levels still holds it fast. What started as me pushing for a roadmap, turned into a relationship with the Zoho folks that has been simply awesome over the years. They are responsive and interactive so it made it easy working with them.

In closing, Zoho never ceases to amaze me with its speed to market, its inventiveness and downright utility. It makes you wonder why the Microsoft’s of this world appear like lumbering elephants in all senses of the word.

September 29th, 2008

Zoho bitterness at the credit crunch...and a solution

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 7:54 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Capitalism, Financial, Alchemy, Wall Street, Zoho, Alchemy Analogy, Financial Accounting, Finance, Dennis Howlett

I have a lot of sympathy for Sridhar Vembu. CEO of AdventNet, the parent company behind Zoho. His last two posts reflect much of the fear and frustration behind what I am hearing in the startup world. But amid the gloom, Sridhar offers a glimmer of hope. A few snippets. From We’re all Japanese now:

…don’t confuse libertarian economics with the “free market capitalism” claptrap coming out of the Wall Street financial complex; when Wall Street gunslingers touted the miracles of “capitalism”, what they really meant was their government-conferred right to borrow easy money from the Federal Reserve, leverage themselves up 20 to 1,  even 40 to 1 while speculating with that easy money, paying themselves tens of billions collectively in bonuses, finally inflicting hundreds of billions, soon to reach trillions, of losses on the taxpayer when those speculations predictably failed . The Wall Street version of financial capitalism has about as much to do with real savings and investment led capitalist wealth creation as alchemy has to do with with chemistry. The alchemy analogy is particularly appropriate: much of the Wall Street “business model” was really transmuting pools of highly risky, toxic mortgages into nearly risk-free “golden” securities.

That’s one of the best summations I’ve read about the mess that is Wall Street today.  About the only thing it misses is the extent to which Wall Street financial engineers managed to swell their pockets by manipulating the tax system. But that’s for another blog and another day. As I’ve said elsewhere, even relatively simple control questions could have surfaced the problem. But they didn’t. This is the myopia that develops when money seems to be pouring from the skies. We eventually become blinded by the golden glow of a seemingly never ending stream of funds.

Roll back one post to Sridhar’s Surviving the financial crisis:

It seems clear that we are heading into another nuclear winter, this time led by housing and financials. It is going to impact the tech industry, but this time as suppliers not as direct bubble-blowers.  Companies that have a strong balance sheet (we prefer zero debt), and the ability to adapt and flex will survive the wreckage. Customers are hurting, so attractive pricing is a must - there is going to be price deflation in tech. These are the rules we live by at AdventNet & Zoho.

Over the weekend, Jason Calacanis caused something of a stir with his long email newsletter that was posted to Silicon Alley Insider, only to be torn down later (and at Techcrunch) Calacanis predicts that 50-80% of startups will fail in the coming 18 months and that the ‘depression’ will last years. To his credit Jason offers a menu of sound advice - everything from belt tightening to hiring the best and generating revenue.

It is this last part that is a worry. Many of the startups we’ve seen in the last 18 months have been headed down the ad supported route. I’ve never believed that’s sustainable except for the very largest sites. The money simply isn’t there to go around.

By definition, that means very few survivors, huge cash burn for those that are building mind share but ultimately a two finger salute to the ‘build it first, figure out business model later’ brigade of VC buccaneers. If you have any doubt then check what the market thinks about Google’s near term prospects. (Hint: it’s trading at a 52 week low and as I write this, is off some 5.6% from the previous close.)

What about enterprise startups? Zoho is the poster child for bootstrapping, taking on the big boys and still managing to do well. Zoho has the benefit of having lived through a past storm, learning from the lessons such experiences deliver. The same goes for Jason Calacanis (and you wonder why he raised all that money?)

Survival will mean a sharpening of the price pencil. Services that today seem modest at $20per month compared to on-premise pricing will come under pressure. If Zoho can do it, so can you.

September 26th, 2008

Startup essentials: Dr. Pepper, coffee and accessories

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 8:07 am

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags: Dr., Beverage, Accessory, Food & Beverage, Manufacturing, Dennis Howlett

One of my Irregular chums started a GoogleGroup thread about what you need in a job that requires you work from a home office. The same can be said for the 1-3 person startup. The conversation immediately became a discussion of the merits or otherwise of different coffee making facilities and cold drinks. Given the coffee culture associated with startups (I know one guy who roasts his own blend) it seems fitting to let you in on Irregular secrets. After all, some have worked at startups and many of us are micro business people.

Jeff Nolan kicks off recommending  a Jura Capresso S9 espresso machine, 60″ plasma and a series III tivo HD. I’m sure there’s method in Jeff’s thinking, I’m just not sure how a startup person would find time.

Zoli Erdos always takes things that little bit further and suggested a poolside cocktail bar. Of course you need the pool first.

Jason Wood who has recently made a return to blogging after a nine month hiatus then turned the conversation to the merits or otherwise of Dr Pepper.  As a Brit I find this beverage the closest thing to vomit inducing since the days when my mom used to force feed me with cod liver oil. Not the capsules I might add but the real McCoy. I understand Dr Pepper is an iconic drink in the US and Jeff quickly chimed in with:

I was thinking of you last night when I was swigging my diet Dr. Pepper… “damn that Jason Wood for shining a light on how good Dr. Pepper is!”

Not to be outdone, Bob Warfield offered these pearls:

“DiDip”, as we used to affectionately call it in my college days.

Another fine Texas product, and, like anything else, it’s worth straying from the mainstream favorites to see what else is out there.  Try IBC root beer or Big Red, for example.

Sounds like a handy fridge in that home office is helpful too.

That’s one thing I can help with. I found a great second hand bottle bar. The only snag, you have to haul it over to the US.  Bob also offered culinary tips on making your own root ginger ale, a personal favorite of mine. While on the topic of Dr. Pepper, Vinnie Mirchandani came back with:

I am surprised Brian Sommer allows any shipment of the beverage to go anywhere but to his house…I think he likes the sugared version though.

When I went to school in TX it had a cult following. I lost interest when some smart ass twisted the jingle to “I am a pecker, you’re a pecker too”

By this stage I was feeling like I was being well and truly peppered (sic) but fortunately, David Terrar came to the rescue with:

No thanks on the Dr Pepper - I actually identify more with the Matt Albie character in Studio 60 - constantly wired with a Red Bull in hand whilst working. Which leads me on to the coffee - I had a Jura Impressa (personally imported from Switzerland) for a couple of years but couldn’t find anybody to maintain it, so gave it to a friend back in Switzerland.  Currently got a Siemens T55 (was £600 - about $1,100), which is a badged version of the original Gaggia Synchrony.  The outfit that services it says that we drink more coffee than any of his industrial clients.

Out of the blue, SAP’s Mark Yolton chipped in via Twitter saying:

@DT = I vote for diet Dr. Pepper as the best thing in the world, in case my vote counts among the Irregulars … and “Blue Bottle” coffee.

Just when I thought the conversation was taking on a real shape, Vinnie comes back with:

Craig (Cmehil), you could always drink the HP ink-Koolaid, At $ 5,000 a gallon it is supposed to be pretty damn smooth :)

Ever the man of wise words, Sig Rinde brought this rigorous discussion to a close with:

Wow, the “carbonated-sugarbomb subculture of telecommuting”… hope
there is much running and cycling happening to burn all that off!

No, ample supply of Badoit or San Pellegrino and Rosé should suffice.
And espresso of course (being lazy I do Nespresso).

So there you have it. The collective wisdom (ahem) of the Irregulars comes down to Dr. Pepper and whatever coffee machine your budget can afford. Still, I was a tad disappointed that we didn’t hear from Thomas Otter. In my opinion, he has written the definitive article on the topic: Simplicity, elegance and the Java bean. It’s a clever piece that ties this topic very neatly back to enterprise software.

What beverages would you recommend the aspiring entrepreneurial startup?

September 24th, 2008

Enterprise CRM "as in real life"

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:18 pm

Categories: Video

Tags: Customer, CRM, HereMe, Advertising & Promotion, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Software, Marketing, Software, Zack Whittaker

Last week I was told of the merging of HearMe, a leading desktop video/audio conferencing suite, and SugarCRM, an open-source CRM platform for improving relationships with customers; obviously really, that’s what CRM does.

Having a platform which allows customers to communicate with the providers of service is a massive improvement to after-sales and pre-sales service. Without these, the customer can feel alienated and without guidance; something an enterprise really wouldn’t want to happen. But by using a CRM solution to indentify customers, acquire customers, but also retain customers is something vital to an enterprise strategy.

CRM is evidentially popular in enterprise and business processes, because it’s a vital way of gaining and retaining customers. Not only that, having an audio and visual solution which complements the CRM literally gives customers a friendly face to be helped, guided and assisted where and when needed.

SugarCRM, even with its inappropriately frivolous name, seems to be unique to some extent by offering this to its customers. By integrating a video conferencing solution with a customer-relationship management solution creates an all-round service which you could only usually get if you acted like a total luddite on the shop floor.

HereMe has essentially taken off the front panel of itself and merged into SugarCRM, like a 30th-century DNA fusion experiment. The customer can now launch a meeting with a sales representative as well as share documents, such as a user manual or product factsheet with the customer.

By enhancing human interaction with voice and speech, text on screen and video, this solution can ease the customer through their purchases by having someone there to reassure them in what they want and need.

September 22nd, 2008

Smart Turn: blowing up inventory management cost

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 11:11 am

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Supply Chain, Inventory Management, Pricing Strategy, SmartTurn, Richard Yim, Pricing, Supply Chain Management (SCM), Marketing Research, Marketing, Enterprise Software

I recently spent time noodling around SmartTurn an on-demand inventory and warehouse management application. I also spoke at length with Jim Burleigh, CEO and Richard Yim, VP products and marketing.

Inventory and warehouse management is at once complex and costly, especially for tier 2 companies that have limited resources. An Aberdeen Group report published in late 2007 identified significant gaps in performance between best in class that make good use of technology to keep labor costs down and what they term the ‘have nots.’ An important barrier to adoption has been the high cost of traditional solutions. SmartTurn addresses this problem with a simple pricing model of $500 per warehouse per month, regardless of users and the functions they need.

That may sound too one dimensional to be successful in a world where we are accustomed to seeing multi-tier pricing but in the world of warehouse management software, (WMS) it makes perfect sense. It is impossible for instance to know with certainty how many users will be required for a given environment and therefore per seat pricing isn’t a viable option. Per warehouse pricing is much easier to understand yet also allows customers to share information with anyone they need to without hitting a licensing problem.

Burleigh asserts that the WMS market of today resembles the CRM market of 1999, a time when he was employee number six at Salesforce.com. The industry analysts have yet to be convinced there is enough uniformity in the market to allow for a saas offering but as Burleigh says: “With over 100 customers and 30 employees, we’ve proven them flat out wrong.” SmartTurn has addressed naysayers early concerns by providing a strong interface to bar-code readers, a staple tool in the warehouse environment.  

SmartTurn won’t be suitable for very large facilities. Instead, it is positioning itself  for networks of facilities that are likely to be 200,000 square feet or less operated by the lower half of tier two down to tier four operators. It is what SmartTurn calls the ‘dark spot’ in the supply chain, that traditionally exhibits low levels of automation. Industry wise, it is better on the sell side of logistics and in discrete manufacture and FMCG.

SmartTurn solves the problem of communications within the network of tier two to four facilities by point and click permissions granting. That means the outbound shipment from one warehouse automatically becomes the inbound shipment to another in the network. At a stroke, this eliminates much of the errors that arise where manual systems are deployed.”That’s a natural by-product of having a multi-tenant system,” says Burleigh.

At a more general level, I was concerned to discover how SmartTurn plans to make the saas model work, given the nature of the solution is more attuned to a traditional sale with RFP’s, bag carriers and the like.

Burleigh and Yim insist the model works well because they can afford to turn to prospects and offer then a 30 day trial for free. “We’d rather let them try the software for themselves than go through some 50 or 100 page RFP. At this level, it either suits them or it doesn’t,” says Burleigh. Yim adds that: “Many companies we come across are frustrated they cannot get access to the technology so having a saas offering at $500 a pop with nothing to install, it’s easy for them to get going. Right now we’re growing organically within large companies too. There is so much unattended need out there we can have a very good business with what we’re offering.”

I like what SmartTurn is doing. This is a piece of the supply chain pie that has long been ripe for a radical injection of innovation, especially for the beleaguered tier two and under players. Attending to the basics that WMS should address with a saas model that tears down the barriers to adoption while offering collaborative opportunities is a great place to be. It sucks cost out at the point where the chain is mostly likely to be stressed. That’s genuine goodness and always welcome.

September 17th, 2008

Boingo - a traveler's lifesaver

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:00 am

Categories: Mobile

Tags: Boingo Networks, Network, Laptop Computer, Notebooks, Networking, Hardware, Notebooks & Tablets, Dennis Howlett

I’ve been road testing Boingo on both my laptop and N95 the last few months. It’s great. In short, Boingo provides subscribers with an easy way to avoid all those ludicrous $X per day charges that hotels and airport operators try to gouge out of you when on the road and especially when out of range of your home network provider.

In my case that means any airport in Spain plus the rest of the world, especially if I want to use the laptop rather than simply collecting and answering email over the N95. Given that I make a foreign business trip almost every month, that can quickly add up to a lot of money. As an aside, remember that Blackberry is not as popular in Europe as it is in the US where every other business person I come across seems to be thumbing their Blackberry.

Boingo’s attraction comes in two forms. First the laptop subscription cost at $21.95 per month after the teaser rate of $7.95 for use in the US is easily recouped against hotel and airport charges. The $39 global rate is even better value for money when you consider that a hotel in Amsterdam can charge as much as €24 ($34) per day and one in London £12.00 ($21)per day.

Second, the Boingo network is growing well with more than 100,000 locations spread around the world. So for example last week, I was able to connect at an Ibis Hotel in the UK - something I would normally have done directly through the Orange network. If I’d had time, I would have checked out the connection at Manchester airport. While on a layover in Atlanta, I noticed that Boingo is the preferred partner for a number of alternative providers at the airport.

The proof of the pudding comes in the quality of the WiFi connection. So far I’ve experienced no problems. This is in sharp contrast to the issues I usually have at conferences when WiFi networks are under provisioned.

My one nit is the fact I need separate subscriptions for laptop and the N95 which comes in at $7.95 per month. I’d prefer to have an all-in-one deal but I guess that will come in time as the network expands and Boingo is able to bundle services more cost effectively.

Finally it’s worth thinking about the loyalty angle. Many of my friends detest their day to day provider. This is because they get stung with roaming charges out of all proportion to the value they deliver. Network of network providers like Boingo offer a different, more convenient experience. I sense that is likely to keep customers more loyal, especially for the increasing numbers of road warriors and Starbucks style startups.

September 16th, 2008

Seesmic layoffs and a new reality?

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 9:22 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Layoff, Social Media, Valleywag, Workforce Management, Human Resources, Dennis Howlett

Valleywag’s somewhat unkind depiction of the layoffs at Seesmic: Seesmic’s newest feature: layoffs is but the latest in an emerging trend of Silicon Valley startups reigning in their spend. Over in Denmark, a remarkable account of failure has emerged. Earlier this week, I debunked some of the talk around ROI, scalability and sustainability while over at Mashable, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins takes a long winded way to say what many of us inside the enterprise have known for a long time: The Wisdom of Crowds - at least as re-interpreted by many in social media - is nonsense. Along the way, he makes a number of interesting points. This caught my eye:

Crowd wisdom has this sort of philosophical feel that “cloud computing” does. It’s a catch all term that broadly describes the bulk of what’s produced in the Web 2.0/social media world. I think the best thing that can be done to solve the problem is for a more thorough understanding of crowd wisdom to be kept in mind by those who design these systems in the first place (that is, if they are designing these systems to be anything more than white-noise generators).

Buzzword bingo has been with the IT industry more years than I care to remember, predicated as it is on the idea that what catches on as a trend is indicative of the fashionista nature of the biz. You sure as heck don’t find any wisdom there. On this occasion I suspect that much of what we’re seeing in the new critiques is exposing the poverty of social media I wrote about in April and kindly reminded by John Reed. At the time I said:

In any business, power relationships are what provide the hidden glue that makes organizations develop hierarchies and structures. We see this reflected in almost every major form of software you care to examine. From process workflows that mange order to cash, through problem resolution in the call center and out to procurement. We have baked those relationships into the structure and organization of everything we see as providing the means of operating successful businesses. Then all of a sudden, business leaders are asked to forget everything they know, accept that structures can and will be subverted but that it will all be OK because people will naturally want to collaborate to get things done. This is a fundamentally incorrect assumption.

If my observations about the way structures operate in the enterprise is correct, then my remarks of six months ago are equally valid today. Add in recent events in the financial markets and it is easy to see the ripple effect of a cold winter of investor retrenchment coupled to a re-examination of some of the more outlandish claims made for SocialAnything. It can’t come a moment too soon.

The firehose blast of half baked pseudo science that pervades so much of social media blogger diatribes has reached the point of drowning in its own stupidity, especially as it applies to the enterprise. More to the point, the fact Mike Arrington appeared to be nursing the hangover from hell following the TechCrunch 50 tells me one thing: the party’s over. I hope all those advertising based startups are watching carefully. Which begs the question: quo vadis?

Jason Perlow talks a lot of sense about SMB saas, virtualization and consolidation of the data center, concluding with a question:

Will the economy force us to do more with less and use radical enabling technologies to help us accomplish it?

Clearly it will. That should benefit the innovators, especially the saas business apps operators who are prepared to charge for their services. I’d go further and say they have little choice. As the investment dollars dry up, you either sink or swim based on your ability to generate enough sales to cover costs. Charging models that make sense to the enterprise must come onto play. It is therefore no surprise to see more services coming out the gate with a charging model. Good for them. Equally, it is good to see Seesmic finally getting ready to open up a revenue generation steam. Not before time and back to commercial reality.

UPDATE: Duncan Riley says in relation to the Lehman Brothers’ collapse:

Across the country, Silicon Valley may seem far removed from the mess. The startups in Palo Alto go on, and on Sandhill Road, the VC’s are still turning up to work. Although we may not see the links to Wall Street on the surface, they are strong, and Silicon Valley is not immune to the crisis.

September 16th, 2008

A moment of lucidity

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 5:53 pm

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Sustainability, Scalability, Social Media, ROI, Shel, Roi/Tco, Finance, Managerial Accounting, Dennis Howlett

It is not often I agree with social media people. Most of the time I find they’re full of it and return pointed questions with dopey answers. Today is an exception. Shel Israel, one of the earliest and most prolific arm wavers for all thing social has finally ‘fessed up on the question that vexes many: ROI for social style applications. In a revealing post he says:

For the past two years, the Sphinx Riddle for social media proponents has been ROI. Despite whatever compelling arguments we had for social media in the enterprise, failure to answer this question in a way that satisfied the cross-armed skeptic was pretty destructive to our cases.

Back in 2005, I used to reply with glib answers like, “the same as the ROI on a press release or a telephone line or an email account.” This pleased those who already agreed with me on social media. But it did little to persuade the doubters. I knew that but it was the best I could do.

Let’s cut to the chase. Shel is basically saying: “We had no idea but couldn’t lose face.” I have no argument with that, recalling well the conversations I had with Charlene Li when she was at Forrester and grappling with the ROI of blogging. Forrester continues to madly arm wave, in latter times through the efforts of Jeremiah Owyang, whose insistence on using his blog as a ‘research’ gathering tool beggars serious belief, based as it is on the bubble crowd in Silicon Valley.  In fairness to Jeremiah, he’s the first to admit that his focus is on the narrow area of external facing, marketing driven efforts in the social media space. Back to the plot.

Shel goes on to acknowledge that ROI is ‘not a resolved issue’ but then spins his argument to discuss scalability and sustainability, basing his argument on the thinking of KD Paine:

In fact, scalability may not even be the right term for the emerging issue. KD Paine, one of my favorite thinkers on issues like these told me, “I think scalability is one thing and sustainability is the other side of the coin.”

I disagree. Scalability is all about the ability to ramp up and sustain a working platform with large numbers of participants and coping with spikes in demand. It is a technology issue. Sustainability is a completely different concept. That’s about ensuring the people within a particular network are able to grow and sustain their efforts over time. This is where life gets awkward for the social media folk because the underlying assumption seems to be that social networks operate on a continuum. I believe that’s a false premise. At least when viewed through the enterprise lens to which these writers refer. Let’s deconstruct this.

The notion that hordes of people inside the enterprise will spontaneously emerge and virally form groups is patently absurd.  The silos that operate inside the enterprise are as strong today as they ever have been. Erosion may occur at the edges but that’s all we’ve seen - to date. Instead, I find the idea that small groups with a common interest as emergent far more compelling.It is about the notion that content with context and purpose has meaning. Anything else is time wasting.

If you believe as I do that 80% of what people are likely to be doing in a process driven world is problem solving then it makes a huge amount of sense to consider the network as a resource through which I can discover people who can provide answers as an effective alternative to the watercooler effect. But these are temporary requirements. Once answers are found, people go back to what they were doing until the next time.

The crucially important sustainability question comes in being able to archive the discussions that sit around a topic area for later re-use. Moving on.

Another underlying presumption is that once connected, people will maintain those connections. Not true. In life we sustain very few relationships over long periods of time. Look at the trend towards serial monogamy as an example. It therefore makes far better sense to think in terms of continually evolving and then dissolving groups with only a small core of people with whom individuals are likely to remain connected.

I like to think about the people inside the Irregulars as my ongoing example. I have relationships with them all but only a a very few are on my regular list of people that I would personally contact when requiring assistance. Sustaining those relationships is far more important to me than attempting to do so in the wider group. Indeed, I regard such a thought as intellectually abhorrent because it simply isn’t possible to do that without expending more effort than the value that might be derived. Hence a clear ROI.

Next time your Something 2.0/Social WhatNot 2.0/Twitter Clone etc startup pitches with the ‘viral’ message be warned. I ain’t buying it. At least not from the sustainability viewpoint.

September 16th, 2008

PacketTrap gives enterprise "Perspective"

Posted by Zack Whittaker @ 2:58 pm

Categories: Office productivity

Tags: Administrator, Disk, Network, Disk Usage, Servers, Networking, Hardware, Zack Whittaker

Computers are strange beings. Sometimes they stop working for no apparent reason, sometimes they work so well they don’t need to shutdown or stop processing, and some literally blow up in your face. Dealing with one computer can be troublesome enough, but how do those like enterprise managers, IT and network administrators face the task of being a lifeline to x number of computers ranging from usually 20-10,000 computers?

Last week I spoke to Matt Bolton, VP of Products at PacketTrap Networks, about a new version of their enterprise and network monitoring utility, “Perspective”. Although I didn’t think much about the name, I tried out the software after a cut-short live meeting (bomb alert at work), and it clearly gives a perspective on your network like no other. It’s rather genius, I must say.

PacketTrap launched their network diagnostic tool suite in March 2008 and have registered more than 80,000 users (although only about 40,000 of them use the tool suite daily). This has been done with only submissions to freeware sites, with no business partnerships, and no marketing budget to speak of.

Perspective gives the administrator an easy view of the entire enterprise from a single window, allowing IT staff to identify and fix problems quickly reducing downtime on a server or network portion. The usability is excellent, the performance is extraordinary, and the utility itself is highly customisable to what the administrator needs to see, wants to see, and can even be configured to automate certain processes.

The software is best run on its own dedicated server, or even PC if you wanted it to, and doesn’t require anything else to work really. Of course, there’s little point installing it on an Exchange server, because if that server goes down, then you might not know about it until somebody calls you.

You don’t need to run client installs, you don’t need to configure a whole load of client settings to get it working. It works by using SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) to communicate with the client machines, and that’s usually enabled on Windows machines.

It could take me all day to run through everything this software has, so I’ll just whiz through a few of the main features, plus the ones that really stick out to me as “really rather cool”:

• SMTP support for emailing the administrator errors if they occur when they’re out of office
• Multiple network discovery techniques, including MAC scanning, pinging computers and SNMP.
• Fast and responsive network discovery, allowing to wildcard search IP addresses and ranges, subnets and even domain names.
• Full details on IP addresses, DNS names for the corresponding servers, which protocols they support, which operating system they run and if possible, the main role for the server.
• Policy management, allowing administrators to monitor different kinds of devices other than servers on the network, with full Windows support; SQL Server, Exchange, Active Directory, Windows background services, Active Directory, POP3, NetBIOS and SMTP.
• Full customisation of alerts which allow administrators to see performance exceeding the “benchmark” (see below), and diagnose network, disk usage and memory usage issues on individual servers.
• Actions which can be performed, automating the process; eg. if a Windows service has stopped and can’t be restarted, restart the entire server so everything starts working again.
• A dashboard view which allows you to see pretty much everything you might want to see in your network, fully customisable of course.
• Groups of network devices and servers, allowing you to separate multiple branch offices, campuses and buildings if you wish.
• A full set of tools including WHOIS, enhanced ping, wake-on LAN, trace route, MAC scan, port scan, DNS audit, graphical ping and ping scan, although another complimentary product is needed for this.
• Linux support!
• Live system information displaying IP, roles, operating system, processor and memory usage, disk usage with pretty little graphs and red/orange/green colours for quick looking.
• Availability chart with graph showing response times and any latency.
• Software inventory of all installed products on that server, and process viewer displaying all the services running on that server.
• Reports view, allowing you to see the “most of” or “least of” item/device/configuration in your entire network, to see which servers are the most or least of something.

What seems to be unique in Perspective is the “benchmark” facility. It can monitor the steady, stable state of a server - network usage, disk usage, and memory consumption and work out an average over a period of time. Sure, a server running with 80% memory churning up for a week isn’t the best thing to have, but if it works then best just leave it to it. If once the benchmark is calculated it suddenly drops to 20%, that would presume maybe a vital service has stopped working, thus causing effect on the rest of the network.

The benchmarking facility can come in handy later is when creating alerts - emails or messages to alert the administrators when something doesn’t appear right, depending on how the administrators configure them. You can set, say a file server, to send an alert when it’s equals to or greater than the benchmark disk usage by x percent. Of course a file server would be always spinning and throwing data to clients left, right and center, but if it’s getting to the point when it’s dangerously high “even for it’s own limits”, it can let people know before any downtime comes their way.

The point of this software is simple; it makes life easier for the system/network administrators, and can allow them to pre-empt issues before they even happen. In some cases, with the reporting and feedback tools, the administrators could even fix problems before anybody notices and calls the helpdesk.

To have a 20-day trial go with the software, just check out the website and have a spare computer free. It’ll work on XP, Vista and Windows Server 2003 without a problem.

I actually can’t find anything bad to say about it - except the price, it starts from $1,995, but in an enterprise setting, that’s thruppence. Sorry, had to get something British and whimsical in there somewhere.

September 11th, 2008

The enterprise startup conundrum

Posted by Dennis Howlett @ 6:06 am

Categories: Social computing

Tags: Silicon Valley, SAP AG, Twitter, ESME, Enterprise Developer, Operational Planning, Team Management, Roi/Tco, Business Operations, Management

Larry Dignan’s article about enterprise startups is an excellent primer for those wanting to pitch Zack and I but there are other issues I’d like to surface. Especially that which talks to the Silicon Valley echo chamber.

This week, Yammer took top honors at TC50. I have no direct insight into why because for me it falls squarely into the trap of riding a hype cycle but without clear differentiation as an enterprise offering. On the other hand, ESME flopped (comparatively speaking) at SAPTechEd 2008 DemoJam despite there being broad agreement among my peers that it was the most innovative ‘thing’ on the competition roster. Check for yourself and see what you think when lined up against the others.

The point being that what the Silicon Valley blogerati believes will make a great bet and what those who are living with enterprise code think are two very different things. There are many ways to argue the DemoJam case. One view proffered by Vinnie Mirchandani as we came away from the hall: “When you look at most of the demos, they were really filling in gaps that SAP should have already filled. In that sense, they are something of a smack in the eye to SAP from its own developer community.” My take is a little different.

A straw poll among that audience, those in the Community Clubhouse and elsewhere demonstrated that 90-95% of attendees have never heard of Twitter or its growing list of clones. Simply explaining the microblogging/microsharing concept is much tougher than people think. I know because I spent time with people who were curious. The first question was almost always: “How is this different from IM - we’ve been doing this for years?” I have a solid answer for that but the fact remains I still have to go through a BIG hoop just to get to the starting blocks.

Enterprise developers are far more discerning and knowledgeable than many might believe. They know their stuff and are not easily fooled. They are time constrained and won’t waste time on anything that doesn’t have an obvious ROI. They won’t even try something new out unless there is clear utility. It’s not worth their attention.

When I think about the team involved with ESME it is easy for me to argue they are at the forefront of thinking in the enterprise world. Some are Irregulars who bring ‘code’ skills to our merry band. All are folk who are hungry for innovation. A good number are SAP Mentors, people who freely give huge gobs of time and expertise to the 1.3 million strong SAP developer and 300,000 strong business process expert communities. They are in a sense a highly distributed micro version of Silicon Valley’s hotbed of invention.From a project perspective, they are a dream team.

Many will say “You would say that,” (Disclosure: I’m involved with ESME.) But when one of the folk turns up showing a new, elegant and working WebDynPro interface developed on the plane ride to the event, it’s hard to argue against that position. Or how about the two guys who spent a few hours hooking up ESME to an SAP CRM system so we could show SAP code running behind ESME and so show a business scenario context? These are just two examples of folk who are heroes in my eyes because they get things done that matter to the enterprise but with the innovator’s twist.

I have always said that the new breed of consumery applications can work in an enterprise context. But enterprise as a whole is years behind the consumer curve. Enterprise has bigger fish to fry. Virtualization, prediction markets and sensor technology figure far higher on the enterprise radar than the next Twitter clone.

Enterprise won’t come kicking and screaming into the enterprise 2.0 world unless content, context and purpose are aligned. You’ve got a new Twitter? Get in line. So has everyone else. Even Oracle.

Therein lies the conundrum. Developing a new Twitter is easy. Developing one that as enterprise context is and order of magnitude harder. Consumery mashups look tasty but they need a business context to become marketable. And all these applications need to compete against technology that is delivering against immediate business need. Not one that is manufactured by someone who thinks social anything is the next big thing.

All of which means that this week has put the enterprise/consumer market divide into sharp relief. There are lessons for us all in there.