PlateSpin Changes Hands Again

Posted on November 24, 2010 by admin

It’s hard not to comment on what has happened this week to the PlateSpin assets.  As Novell completes its transformation through the sale process to Attachmate, i can’t help but wonder if Novell is analyzing what went wrong. Why couldn’t it become more relevant in today’s market place, why, with all the money in the bank, was it able to make quality acquisitions but not turn them into something that transformed the company into a happening place. Recruiters don’t even want to try to poach senior management as they feel Novell is not current anymore, so the likelihood is neither are the management team.

It was satisfying to see PlateSpin have such prominence in much of the coverage of Novell’s sale. Will Microsoft want to take advantage of our vision, will Attachmate through its NetIQ business? Who knows. To the extent Attachmate knows and understands what it has bought, it should at least give a good run at making it all relevant again.

Best of luck to PowerConvert, PowerRecon and Forge — along with all the great technology added to it by the PlateSpin-Novell team — it’s fun to see it all still be relevant.

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Is Cloud Computing Cloudy?

Posted on November 19, 2010 by admin

The IT industry is famous for creating nebulous trends that consumers, even the most technical, are unable to digest. Cloud computing may be the pinnacle of this as the centerpiece catalyst to change the way IT is used. No one really wants to own IT infrastructure anymore, it’s always been a headache, serves no real competitive advantage and is becoming near impossible to fully understand and keep pace with.

Given Cloud’s buddy, that other nebulous term virtualization has come along, we really can take IT off premise and provide it in a utility fashion as was first envisaged at the start of this millennium. We only need to redefine what the purpose of the OS is — and who provides it, as well as how applications are built.

Once all those issues are solved, we can leverage the power of technology to aid our businesses and personal ventures to their max.

Rant, rave —

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The Folly of Advisors

Posted on October 30, 2010 by admin

Many young companies list a variety of industry known experts as part of their ‘advisory’ team. What that is supposed to mean is the management team (or perhaps just the CEO) is regularly receiving vital input from the advisors about key company decisions – perhaps product strategy, perhaps sales and marketing strategy. The customer feels good about companies who have these types of advisors as it indicates the chances of a company making fatal mistakes are reduced. Is any of this really true?

I’ve been part of companies who have had these lists of Advisors, and more recently, became an Advisor myself as part of my post PlateSpin career.  Do us Advisors really reduce the chance of a company making fatal mistakes? I doubt it — a lot of the value an Advisor brings is lost if the company does not actually engage the Advisor — something that happens commonly from what I can see. The companies I was with that had formalized advisor relationships hardly ever met with them, and if they did, they could only discuss extremely high level and somewhat generic issues so as to be of little value to anyone.

An ideal Advisor relationship would see sufficient contact with the company so as to be able to consult on real issues that affect the Company even in the short term. In my view, this means the Advisor and the CEO (or management team) have to be willing to communicate at least every two weeks, ideally every week. The format of the encounter can be informal where the CEO outlines key issues which get discussed as needed. The Company keeps the Advisor up-to-date on key issues by including them on appropriate internal communication including the bulk of material that would otherwise go to the Board (this assumes confidentiality is properly protected). Once this type of dialog is established, the CEO and Advisor for a bond that can greatly benefit the health of the Company.  As with all relationships, value is only gained if both parties put the effort into effective  communication. They fail when either one party is unwilling or does not believe the other can provide value or the two parties drift too far apart for any connection to be meaningful when they do communicate.

I think most startup CEOs need mentors and Advisors that can help avoid the many pitfalls that wind up being obvious to the experienced Advisor but not so to the people who have their nose up against the tree.

If you are a CEO or an Advisor and are looking for more detail on how to make this type of relationship successful, please take a look at http://www.insidespin.com/governance-advisors.php — feedback is welcome.

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Keeping You Head Down

Posted on October 26, 2010 by admin

One of the traps I find many leaders face relates to their approach to decision making in light of upcoming changes to their business, changes that are often out of their control. One common example can be drawn from the startup scenario where a new CEO is to be hired to bring more experience to bear than the original business founder.  One common mistake is that the founder starts to second guess how they otherwise manage, trying to anticipate how a new CEO would decide things, even though there is no candidate yet hired. For example, delay a key hire assuming the CEO would just hire their own person. The trap they fall into is that the hiring of a CEO is not a predictable event — it may occur, it may not occur, it may occur in the near term, it may take a long time to find the right candidate. Delaying a key hire likely hurts the development of the business, so why delay just because of an event that may or may not happen in a predictable time frame?

The right approach is to keep your head down, focused on the strategic goals set out — look up only when the event occurs and decide at that point what changes are needed to how decisions are made. Obviously some common sense should prevail, if you have a CEO candidate and they are starting in two weeks, they should be fully into the loop of hiring a key resource. But if they are nowhere in site, the current CEO is being paid to make the best decisions they can — and should be made.

For clarity, I am not saying you should ignore future events when running your business. You should always look ahead in your thinking approach and incorporate what might happen into how you manage and make decisions today. But I am saying while you are in charge, you should be fully capable of exercising that authority. It is often to the detriment of the Company to start second guessing yourself when these important events happen.

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Run Your Own SAS Model

Posted on October 22, 2010 by admin

I have increasingly fallen in favor of companies exploring entering the SAS market — i don’t mean just selling their solutions to ISPs/SAS, etc but becoming a SAS vendor themselves. Many products in the systems management arena lend themselves well to SAS-style offerings, even as an adjunct to standard enterprise licensing models. Virtualization combined with the web have made becoming a SAS vendor practical in many cases — of course there are many complications to consider around the complexity of the business services involved, but the upside– even aside from revenue streams — is great:

  • control over the software implementation — you can be your own best case study, learning from practical implementations of your software
  • gain access to broader range of customers — those who otherwise want nothing to do with certain aspects of IT operations
  • build sustainable revenue streams from subscription models (often multi-year in nature)

Companies have built the biggest businesses around service models, smaller companies can as well. The hurdle to get started is a lot smaller than it ever was. You can even use someone else to host your hosted offering!

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Workload Portability – is it the Backbone of The Cloud?

Posted on October 20, 2010 by admin

For those who know the history of PlateSpin, the term Workload Portability is synonymous with much of its product strategy. An idea that surfaced almost 10 years ago, came to fruition in the height of PlateSpin’s success, is enjoying a renaissance at Novell and perhaps finally being recognized as one of the underpinnings of the ideal Cloud architecture. It’s personally satisfying to see the vision we all shared come to be a valued core of where the systems management market is heading — albeit under many banners and confusing terminology.

In short, workload portability essentially makes it possible to migrate elements of a business service (e.g. an instance of an application+OS+data) to the appropriate infrastructure so that it can service the needs of the user. Given user need change over time, both short and long term time frames, the more portable the workload the more flexibility the IT service can leverage to satisfy customer needs. The more flexible, the more economically efficient the service operates which is the pinnacle goal many CIO’s and service providers chase.

For those who spend time thinking about how to make workloads portable, there are many challenges to overcome — some already addressed and others yet to emerge in a reliable production-ready form. The newest need seems to be coming from a desire to move workloads in and out of external Cloud services. Using workload portability vernacular, let’s denote that as P*2*C or V*2*C (e.g. physical or virtual to/from Cloud). We may also need C’*2*C” if we don’t trust the Cloud provider and need a way to move workloads between Cloud providers. The alphabet notation can get confusing but the essential functionality is the same — pick up the OS, applications and data and deposit them somewhere else in the web-connected infrastructure and set it running. Ideally this all occurs with little to no user interruption, but crossing the various infrastructure boundaries without down time is essentially a pipe dream with today’s complex and non-standard-conforming run-time environments (I will give that you can create use cases where down-time is all but eliminated, but that’s not the general case, not yet). A great problem to solve would be virtualizing network connectivity on a global basis, standardizing disk architectures and normalizing CPU instruction sets — down-time would largely be a thing of the past — oh, forgot to mention the need for a CMDB to hold all the relevant knowledge needed to make workload portability transformations possible.

I see a few new companies emerging focusing on the broader problem of workload portability as it relates to large scale business service management. I also see some of the incumbents starting to address this as well — one thing that is clear, unless they internalize a multi-infrastructure approach to their architectures, they are not likely ready to fit into the dynamic nature (oh i meant hodge podge nature) of most enterprise IT environments.

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Two People or Three

Posted on October 16, 2010 by admin

I find critical meetings always need more than two people participating to get the result — the role of the 3rd person is several fold:

1. Observe whether communication is occurring. How many times have you been in a meeting when two people talk but are not connecting on the same issue? I see this almost every day. The one person is answering a different question than the other asked but is not aware. Poor listening skills are usually the cause, skills which often get lost amongst the emotion, nerves and excitement of the meeting (or the rush to say something before the other person finishes). The 3rd person can jump in and either adjust the conversation track and hand the floor back to the first person or fill in the missing pieces themselves. When in a critical business meeting, it is important to make sure all parties are talking to and agreeing to the same things, so that 3rd person can be handy.

2. One person can take the role of minute taker making sure proper notes and action items (if relevant) are captured. This way one person can focus on the conversation (swaying the customer/opponent) while the other tracks the progress for later review.

3. A 3rd person often causes the discussion dynamics to change. People think more about what they are going to say, play off each other, etc. You can have a more useful and in-depth discussion as a result. Two people, if left on their own, tend to poorly manage the conversation which can lead to saying things they would not normally.

More than three people can overload a meeting but obviously can be necessary if several roles need to be played out. The next time you have an important business meeting and are considering doing it alone, think about the value of having a colleague attend, if for no other reason than to provide a proper account of what happened.

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Parents and Facebook

Posted on October 13, 2010 by admin

It seems like the world is documenting itself via Facebook — at least the world under 25 or so. Between Facebook and Twitter, everyone is living in or watching a reality show. How do us parents connect in to be part of the reality show?

It seems like our kids don’t really want to accept us as Friends (even though we all desperately want to be their friends more than their parents). Perhaps Facebook can add a new attribute to a Friend denoting the parental relationship. This way they can block certain posts from parental viewing while still allowing others. Us parents have to be aware of the privilege this would provide and not feel inclined to make silly parental comments each time our kids post something counter to our wishes — maybe parents can only view and not post.

Anyway, it’s time for the social network wizards to accommodate the older generation — surely they owe us this for bringing the younger generation into the world?

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Focusing on year end

Posted on October 13, 2010 by admin

I often see teams focusing diligently on year end with such zeal it makes me wonder why they do not have that same zeal throughout the year.  Funny thing about time, it marches at the same pace throughout the year, if you let too much of it pass by in the early parts of the year, there does not seem to be a way to get extra time as the year nears the end.

Sales people live in this wonderful world where the buyer is conditioned to make a disproportionate amount of purchasing at the end of key calendar periods,  such as a month, quarter or end of year.  Many companies build this assumption into their forecasting creating enormous pressure for sales teams to achieve a high proportion of their quota in a short period of time.

Some companies operate on a more even keel — the secret here is to understand with more depth the nature of a typical sales cycle.  Once understood, I have found that you can often plan to close more sales in those other parts of the year just by making sure the sales cycle moves along as it is supposed to.  This typically means getting your leads qualified when you need them, so they move through the steps in an orderly (and timely fashion).  Of course, the customer has to go along with this, some do insist on waiting until the end of the time period to buy, so it’s not always in your control — but what is surprising, most sales people never ask the question so they forecast closure without a key piece of data — when does the buyer typically buy?  I see this time and time again.

Success can come for many reasons but it often does not come if you do not know how to go get it.

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Creating your own S&P Index to measure weight of sales forecast

Posted on October 13, 2010 by admin

I have seen many sales teams struggle regularly to come up with succinct ways to determine if the typical forecast report is a reliable way to measure the likelihood of achieving short term revenue targets. It takes oodles of time to review and is often filled with emotional claims of progress (or lack of). One common element of most sales systems is to tag each opportunity with its stage — presumably a way to confirm progress is being made in a formalized way. What is surprising is that the stage view is not often used to assess the strength of the forecast as it relates to upcoming targets.

With this in mind, it strikes me that the stage may actually be a key indicator to overall forecast health. I relate this to the various stock market indices that are used to indicate economic trends — the Dow Jones, S&P, Nasdaq all amalgamate a variety of key stock indicators into one lump to track market trends. Everyone is familiar with the daily reports of the Dow and Nasdaq averages — up means increased wealth creation, down means troubled economy for all. If we took the same approach with forecasting, we could bring together the top N (perhaps 25) opportunities into one numeric measure by simply adding up all the stage values. A high number means we are deep into those opportunities increasing the likelihood of reaching a sales target, if they total a low number, we still have lots of work to do before end of financial period. Choosing a proper value for N would relate to how many opportunities need to close to make the upcoming target.

I like simple measures. This single numeric measure of the forecast — an S&P index (perhaps stands for Sales and Pipeline) — would go a long way to providing senior management a simple way to determine if sales targets are on track.

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