Then I read a press release from Tripwire today which has them re-positioning themselves or what seems like a re-position to “Continuous Data Center Compliance” … and it makes you wonder whether it is an effort to reposition into the Data Center space from the compliance space.

Nice blog Erin… Just want to inform you that Tripwire has complete real time support. Feel free to keep saying that we don’t as it gives us a great opportunity to discredit you when you try to compete.

DJ Schoenbaum
Tripwire, inc.

Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

We (Solidcore) are smaller, younger and have state of the art technology. Our biggest challenge is how to get our brand name out so that we are invited to all the deals where Tripwire is being considered. Once we are in we tend to win 80% of the deals we compete in.

This is a classic battle studied in almost every MBA class: David versus Goliath.

One of the reasons we won deals against Tripwire was that they are not real-time. They have a scan and diff approach, while Solidcore is real time. Recently tripwire began telling customers that they have a real time version of the product. It works on only two versions of windows and no versions of Unix. This was a big victory for us as basically the market has spoken that real-time tracking of change is a critical requirement for PCI, SOX and ITIL deals and Tripwire was forced to accept it come on to the Solidcore turf, where they are newbie’s with little experience.

There are some golden nuggets in the book which get lost in the narrative. The one which I  agree with is that well rounded is not the way to being the best. I come from India where there is a large middle class … I think of it more like a frozen layered cake. If you are well rounded it will take you a long time to reach the top if you ever break though. However if you are laser focused for the first few years of your life you can cut through the cake and once on the top can open the umbrella and become as widespread and well rounded as you want. First you got to win at something and be the best at it.

 Basic Understanding

• To list on AIM you need to hire a banker in the UK
• The banker calls fund managers to sell your stock to them
• only funds, not inidividuals can buy or sell stock on AIM
• there is no “exchange” to match buyer to seller, if a fund wants to sell the stock in your company they contact your banker who has to find another buyer
• Thus once you are listed you have to retain a banker permanently (yearly fee)

Subtleties

• Bankers dont underwrite the offering, the cost of the roadshow etc is borne by the company without guarantee of listing (can be close to 1M)
• You can list without any revenue, but need to give clear guidance of milestones and then stick to them
• The CEO/Management team has to constantly sell to fund managers as it is incumbent on the company thru the banker to find a new buyer if existing shareholder wants to sell (or the share price can drop)
• US fund managers can’t buy or sell funds on the AIM market
• Funds which buy your stock dont have any representation on the board

It is an interesting vehicle to raise money for a private company, but it has its own nuances.

He made the picture above. When you build a new product, the first 10 customers or so like the idea of the product and the vision and buy it. Then come the implementations where rubber meets the road. The vision meets reality. The product always falls short. It has gaps, doesn;t work in all the cases etc. And usually the euphoria that came with the first 10 customers leads to stress and strain in the organization.

Someone in the audience asked, should you ditch the product at this stage or keep going with it. Amnon said the more the customer complain, the more you should build the product. Almost always the same customers will become your biggest champions once you have delivered.

We were having a polite talk about benefits and salary offered in India. When this person asks me out of the blue: Do you know what an MBA is? I replied, “what do you mean”. He replied, “Married but Available”.

I was somewhat taken aback. But asked him what the context was. He said well it was so much easier to go out with girls in Bangalore than it was in the US. And he went on and on. Now I am not sure if he was trying to impress me (would wonder why?) or this is just how it is. There is a large single population in Bangalore, which live away from home by themselves, have a lot of disposable income.

What do you think?

• is the market adopting this message?
• is it really what the customers need?

It is also interesting to see how they are positioning their product capabilities:
1. Solidcore: Real Time Change tracking
Tripwire: Continuous Scanning with Real Time Alerting

2. Solidcore: Pro-active Enforcement
Tripwire: Detection & Rollback (using 3rd party tools)

Ofcourse my views are biased. Should I feel happy that is recognition of thought leadership from Solidcore or feel enraged? What do you think?

– Dennis Fisher  Link to article.

For enterprises Change Control is a much better alternative than using A/V or other traditional security products. For consumers or home users it may still be ok. But organizations which care and control what programs can access resources on their corporate network … A/V will be a  thing of the past.

So I began asking our SEO specialists: Were the keywords we had chosen to blame, thats what google said anyway. If you didn’t bid more than $5 on them, then the keyword did not become active. So I began choosing obscure keywords, keywords for which searches on google did not display any ads. And google took several of those keywords and said $0.10 is too low, it should be atleast $0.50 or $0.25. Why should that be the case if it’s purely a bid system?

After asking around it seems how the google ad system works is a mystery. And part of their revenue growth comes from this mystery, because no one can challenge whether they are doing any manipulation or price fixing. Given that they are getting to the size of a monopoly one would think someone will go and check that they are not just ripping us off?

Accidentally I also read  in business week or fortune an article which said that several small retailers don’t find google profitable any more. Although Google spokesperson said that they were not experiencing this in a broad way. I decided to explore this further and went to adbrite.com and registered the keywords there at $0.10 cpc. The keywords got the same number of hits per day as they get at google and slightly better conversion rate.

Raises several questions: is google artificially raising bids? is it really the right option?

Many corporations have realized that traditional anti-***** products stop the “known bad” stuff from entering their infrastructure. But it is much easier to keep track of “known good” stuff  which provisioning systems like Altiris do. They make sure that only “known good” where good is defined by the corporate policy or by Dell for consumers is kept on the machines.

Solicore Systems is another example of this, where enterprise change control policy is used to ensure the known good state of the machine. If it came in via enterprise change control it is good, otherwise it is not.

If you can ensure that only known good stuff is on the machine, traditional anti-virus, anti-spam etc is dead.

800ceoread.com

This is an awesome article about startup mistakes (Link Here).

So why do CEO’s feel compelled to raise expectations:

• for most startup’s its because they want to increase the spend.
• feel like something will happen, so it wont be an issue
• over-confidence, in-experience, ego
• the board wants to believe it also, things will be great in the future

Are you setting the right expectations?

Here is Peter’s podcast.

Every now and then as a technology journalist, you’ll find yourself agreeing to participate in what is referred to a “Press Tour”. Vendors do these once or twice a year, when they have a shiny new product to talk about.

This means you sit in a room with them for 30 minutes to an hour and talk.

Link to the post.

From the wikipedia:

… a tax shelter is any organized program in which many individuals, rich or poor, participate to reduce their taxes due. However, a few individuals stretch the limits of legal interpretation of the income tax laws. While these actions may be within the boundary of legally accepted practice in physical form, these actions could be deemed to be conducted in bad faith. Tax shelters were intended to induce good behaviors from the masses, but at the same time caused a handful to act in the opposite manner. Tax shelters have therefore often shared an unsavory association with fraud.

In most organizations when you want to make a change you need to fill out a change request form. The change request form states what needs to be accomplished, but does not concern itself with how the change is to be carried out. It usually contains when the change should be made and to which machines in the infrastructure. The change requests then go to the change
Again from the wikipedia
Change requests typically originate from one of five sources: (i) problem reports that identify bugs that must be fixed, which forms the most common source, (ii) system enhancement requests from users, (iii) events in the development of other systems, (iv) changes in underlying structure and or standards (e.g. in software development this could be a new operating system) and (v) demands from senior management
Almost every IT administrator I have met hates to fill out requests for change. Several of them see this as a TAX that they have to fill in addition to working 24×7 to get the work done. Now most administrators are smart people and they either created or found their own tax shelter: the Emergency Change.
When a change is labeled as an emergency change most organizations allow all the procedures of filling out a change request and approval to be bypassed, hence avoiding the change management tax. Just like IRS’s tax shelter some of which are perfectly legal and have legitimate uses, the emergency change is required for the proper functioning of the infrastructure; but like several illegal tax shelters it can be used and abused.
Recently a large retail company had outsourced their e-commerce website to an managed service provider (like IBM SO, EDS, Verizon etc). The outsourced service provider had very strict change management procedure, which they had developed over the past several years to ensure highest availability and uptime on the revenue generating sites. But ofcourse there was the change management tax shelter: the emergency change. After about an year of signing the contract, one of the outsourcer’s executives reviewing the retailers account found that 70-80% of all changes presented by the team at the retailer were emergency changes with no documentation or approvals. This was clearly and abuse of the tax shelter.
He called up his counterpart at the retailer and explained his analysis and why their performance fell short of the SLA. The VP of e-commerce operations was a reasonable person and admitted that he was between a rock and a hard place. His development team had revolted that if they had to follow the process and pay the change management tax they don’t have enough time or resources to get he site up before the Christmas season and he had let his operations team use this tax shelter in the contract.
What should we do? They could not come up with a solution at that very moment. Now the person at the outsourcer wanted to help his customer the VP at the retailer. So he got his team together and said we have got to figure out a way to this problem, because we look bad in front of the customer by not meeting our SLA and we are loosing money on the account also.
His team worked hard and came up with requirements: What they really wanted was something that could let the customer just do the change and then pick up all the information for the change and create the necessary documentation. Thus from the customers perspective they got rid of the tax but from the outsourcers perspective they still got the documentation needed and if there were exceptions that would be flagged. If someone could figure out a way of doing that with the IRS we would all save tax and the government won’t go into deficit.
Once they knew what they wanted they began looking into the market for solutions. The first one they encountered was from Mercury (Kintana), now part of HP. This solution would fit well with the development system that the developers were using. But it only took care of changes from the development system; if someone used some other system it would not work.

Next they looked at Bladelogic & Opsware, both tools used for pushing out the changes. Now these tools could detect if a server had been changed and what the changes but they had no idea who made the emergency change, when it was made or how it was made. The integration with their change management system was also not easy. Both these systems could provide some of the documentation required for the process, but not all of it. Then they came across Tripwire. Tripwire could also be run periodically and it would detect what had changed, but it could not provide who made the emergency change (which was a problem, because it was important to show that the change had been made by the retailer) , also there was no SLA on when the change was made and when the documentation would be complete. The other problem they found with the above systems was that when they created tickets from change the volume of change was so high that the tickets created were meaningless.

Finally they looked at Solidcore. Solidcore could tell them what changes had been made, who (user) made them, what application was used to make the change, when the change was made. It could also connect back to the change ticketing system. Before the changes were put into the ticketing system, Solidcore clustered them to find units of change. This dramatically reduced the number of tickets created and also there was more meaning to each ticket.
The next morning the VP @ the retailer received an email: we have discovered a legal tax shelter for you: Solidcore and would like to discuss and mutually agree to discontinue the use of the illegal tax shelter: the emergency change.

A number of engineering people I have talked to have mentioned that Google’s  strength is the distributed application environment they have built which allows people to develop scalable new applications very quickly. The question is whether newer technologies erode the advantages that google has and almost make them like yesterday’s technology when it comes to applications over the web.

The generally held consensus is that Citrix’s current architecture would never scale to something serving millions of people around the world. But that is of their current architecture. The advantage that citrix like approach is that you can take existing applications and just plop them in and they work.

The first question is whether being able to deploy current applications for use over the web be a strong differentiator. I think it will be. The next question is whether it can give Yahoo, Google or Microsoft (or Akamai) a lead over the other. I again think the answer is yes. Microsoft’s live initiative is heading in that direction although it will run into resistance from the cash-cow products of the company.The other angle this competition could come from is from the people who are putting a box in your living room …

That brings us to the question whether a virtualization based approach will get us there. I recently came across a company called Atlantis Computing which  has the technology working. They signed up for the Amazon’s grid and have signed up over 5000 users all over the world for their beta. So while Citrix may not get there … the approach will definitely and it will turn the advantages of today dis-advantages of tomorrow for companies like Google.

Now as IT organizations look at ITIL, how could we describe it in a simple phrase like “removing variability from repeatable processes? What is the equivalent statement describing the ITIL philosophy?

When I searched on the web, here are some interesting possibilities:

- separate administrative tasks and technical tasks

- develop a common-lingo for communication about process and solutions
- automate repeatable process

- get budget from the CFO, wait for the next wave

- provide a service (like a resturant), not technology (cooked food).

What do you think?

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Shel Israel
Date: Jan 14, 2007 9:43 PM
Subject: RE: Proto.in Presentation Tips
To: Vijay Anand

1. Be humble but proud. Remember the star of your presentation is the product not you. Your audience wants to see the technology. Spend as much time showing it as possible.

2. It is far more memorable to make one point very well, then to make several points.

3. The objective of a good presentation is to get the people who matter most in the audience to want to come up to you after your talk and say, “tell me more.”

4. Remember to always play nice. Your worst competitor in today’s conference is tomorrow’s business partner, employer or employee.

5. Speaking without hype, in a style that is authentic and in the tones you would use when meeting a new business partner.

6. If there are potential investors in the audience ignore them. They are going to follow the buzz you make with the technologists in the audience. Focus on the technologists.

7. If you are a star of the conference, remember that you just did well at one event and on one day. If you do poorly remember that you just had a bad day and the world has not collapsed. In either case, you will have learned a very valuable lesson to take with you moving forward.

8. You, your product and your company are being judged at every minute during the conference, not just when you are speaking from the dais. The conversations and networking are the most important part of any business networking event.

9. Do not exaggerate what your product can do. Do not be overly optimistic about when it will be ready.

10. Make it clear that you want as many partners as you can get.

–~–~———~–~—-~————~——-~–~—-~

One of the important things about controls is whether they are pro-active and reactive. Reactive is do something after it happens: like MTV & CBS apologized for Janet’s failure.  Pro-active is what is done before … a system which would have not aired the snafu.  The Janet Jackson’s control failure highlights that in some cases having reactive controls is just not good enough. The damage has been done.

Yet if we look at the IT world most of the process inside organizations to control change are reactive. They do-stuff after the change has happened not before it. They are waiting for a Janet Jackson control failure?

Should you control change pro-actively on some of your infrastructure?

” Lately in a wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened a belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was dound afterwards at the bottom. Now as he was sinking — had he got the gold or the gold him?

– John Ruskin, Unto his Last

VP of IT Operations at a Fortune 1000 company mentioned that the way he figures out whether there is going to be downtime after a change window is to look at the pattern of change events during a change window (using Solidcore). He says good change windows have the pattern of a lot of change in the begining and then nothing. Bad change windows have two peaks: a lot of change in the begining, then a lot of change in the end. I know at that point Has he the change? Or the change him?

Read the article at the data center journal.

By Rachel Konrad
Updated: 7:08 p.m. PT Jan 3, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO – Foreign-born entrepreneurs were behind one in four U.S. technology startups over the past decade, according to a study to be published Thursday.

Read the article at MSNBC.

Rob: whazz up man … did they let you in?
Tony: yes man … but I got very confused there. They use this thing called tripwire … but it doesn’t trip. Someone could cross it a million times but it trip’s only when the manager decides to go run it.
Rob: that wouldn’t work.
Tony: nope. It will be like having chains … you got to go check each time.
Rob: I can’t imagine using chains on all the machines they have, no wonder they look beat like our referee’s with everyone shouting at them
Tony: It gets worse. This Tripwire they use doesn’t even tell you who crossed it. Or it kind of does, it tells you the last person who crossed it.
Rob: but we would want the first person wouldn’t we?
Tony: yes we would and also not just one person … but every person who crossed the line with the ball.
Rob: so this Tripwire stuff can’t tell you who or when they crossed … what do they use it for?
Tony: I don’t know man …
Rob: maybe your guys are not upto snuff on this stuff … I have a friend who works at this big company and he does something to do with SOX. I remember he was up one night and mentioned tripwire … maybe they already have something like that in baseball … I will check him out.
Tony: later dude
Rob: cya

…to be continued …

• How many people had deployed a CMDB? One hand went up.
• How many folks had actually seen a live CMDB? Only one hand went up.
• How many folks had projects to evaluate a CMDB? Entire room put up their hand.
• How many folks think that these projects would lead to implementaion? About 4 hands went up.

One of the things which came out of the meeting was people were struggling with what to put in a CMDB. Most people felt that ITIL was synonymous in most organizations with either service desk, incident management or change management. But how that translated into a CMDB was not clear.

At some point or another in the life of a startup, the question gets asked: why dont you outsource your development to India (or China)? And ofcourse everyone on the board talks about how this would save money and reduce the burn rate.

These days my advice to most companies is don’t do it. For most companies the length of the development cycle more than doubles when they outsource, because of the communication overhead and the distance eliminating hallway conversations and face to face interaction. So even if you reduce your engineering burn to 1/3 (which is roughly what it works out to be), the total cost of the product is increase in cycle time * burn = only 2/3rd of the original cost.

In addition it also slows you down, which coupled with the fact that you are spending some money on other functions also, may cause the total cost over a product cycle to achieve the same results be higher than without outsourcing.

2. We will do joint projects

One of the most common pitfalls is people say lets get a few people at a outsourcing vendor to be part of this project. This ican be a fatal mistake. Defining the boundary between the team in India and US is a very key part of ensuring success. The boundary should be drawn to minimize communication and dependepency: crossing the 12 hour time difference introduces inefficiencies. The only cases where it seems to work is where the Project Manager is really good and extremely detail oriented.

 3. Microsoft, IBM are moving thousands of jobs, it should work for my company also

The dynamics of outsourcing are changing rapidly. I heard recently there was a rally in Bangalore to protest against jobs moving to China from Bangalore. The reality is that costs in India have risen substantially (as happened in Israel a decade ago). Real-estate today costs more in Bangalore than Silicon Valley, so does electricity. Good people cost about 60,000 USD. — which is not much different than North Carolina.

For companies like Microsoft and IBM it makes a lot of sense as their cost of employee in the US is about 200,000 – 300,000 USD per year, because there is usally a high overhead in addition to salaries in big companies.

But for a startup, where the overhead is minimal the equation has changed dramatically over the last few years.

4. It is just an engineering thing

There are companies with 50-100 people in India, where the CEO has never been to India. Even if these people are employees of some outsourcer, this simply boggles my mind. If you are going to outsource especially in software, these people are part of your future. They need to see the executive team often and require communication about the company as much as the folks in the US. If you are not prepared to travel as a CEO don’t outsource.

5. Let’s try it for six months

Outsourcing is a long term investment. If you go in with a six month philosophy it will become a self-fulfilling failure. It is the wrong thing to do, when you are out of cash to extend your runway. It is a long term thing, which requires investment of time and energy to succeed.

… Out of the nearly 5.6 billion people in the world, 1.2 billion own television sets, 800 million have phone lines, and less than 200 million have access to the Internet. One way broadcast of video, therefore has a large and well established audience. However, TV broadcast is economical only when each channel is viewed by millions of people. In contrast, with the Internet, we believe that channels viewed by hundreds or even a few thousand geographically distributed viewers are economically viable. Moreover, the Internet can support tens of thousands of simultaneous channels and other multimedia content associated with video. We call the one way delivery of video content on the Internet “Internet TV”.

…

Video on demand requires quality of service guarantees as it attempts to provide VCR functionality over the network. Supporting operations like fast-forward or rewind requires the applications to rebuild the video playout buffer. This requires bandwidth and delay guarantees from the network.

[ ... which is difficult for the Internet to provide ... ]

In view of the above arguments it seems unlikely that video on demand will succeed on the Internet. On the other hand broadcast television without VCR controls is a one way transmission from the TV station to the viewers, and is more tolerant to delays in the work[1]. One-way transmission leverages the strengths of the Internet architecture and is a more realistic model to send video on the Internet.  

Figure 1.1 Premium paid for the timeliness of video content

But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications. 

But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications.Figure 1.1 shows that people are more willing to pay a premium, or be more tolerant about video quality, for watching movies in theatres or for watching events live. Although live events with large viewer populations can be broadcast efficiently on the television network, it is uneconomical to do the same for small viewer populations. Television channels have three main sources of revenue: (1) subscription fees, (2) advertising, and (3) pay per view. For channels with comparatively small viewer populations the bulk of the earnings come from the subscription fees. Only channels with 80 to 90% market penetration earn significant advertising revenue. It seems unlikely that it would be ever economical to broadcast to an audience of 1000 to 2000 viewers.

On the contrary an audience of 2000 viewers is considered large for the Internet. The Internet will have a distinct advantage over the television network in broadcasting live events to these small viewer populations. We also believe that there will be a large number of events of interest to only small audiences. The Internet already transcends national and international boundaries and united people with similar tastes and interests across geographical boundaries. Several events can therefore be broadcast live to these small communities.

Further, video from these events can be integrated with other media to build powerful applications. For example, the live broadcast of a chess championship may be accompanied with a chat-session with the leading chess players of the world. Internet TV allows video to be treated as a data type to build larger applications.

To summarize we believe that Internet TV will have the most impact to broadcast live events, video in conjunction with other media types, to a small geographically distributed audience. This thesis addresses the problems encountered in making Internet TV feasible. This chapter presents an overview of the various problems.

[1] As a existence proof note that the radio and the television networks already have different amount of delay. The viewer receives the same event being broadcast on both the networks at different times. 

But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications. 

But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications. But the television network already does this reliably and efficiently. In order to be successful Internet TV should either reduce the cost substantially or offer value-added services. Internet TV has two major advantages over broadcast television. First, the pricing model of the television industry makes it difficult to broadcast programs to small viewer populations. Second, Internet TV is able to integrate other media with video enabling a large class of applications.

The first conference is to be held Jan 20-21, 2007.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6909078385965257294

he has also written some interesting books:

http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/bio.html

The contrast became very dramatic when a few years later I ended up in Cornell and there was no talk about companies … but everyone talked about grades. Actually most of the undergrad population had friends who were in MIT and their constant effort was to show that they are better than their MIT friends ….

Since then several years have passed by and I had a similar experience in Bangalore. I was sitting in Bangalore club with some of my mentor-partner friends and listens to enterprenuers pitching their ideas. And the contrast was striking … in the valley most peoples ideas start with the PC, Storage…, now the web … in Bangalore most ideas start with phone, phone and phone. When people want to do a company, they think phone. The eco-system is “early-adopter” mentality, Bharti, Reliance and others are open to launching 3rd party applications on a revenue sharing basis.

Again the contrast was sharp and stark.

A story is told of a tourist in Paris in a bar one night. He got talking to a young Parisian and they hit it off. As it got late, the tourist said “I must go now”. The Parisian replied, “Let me walk you home”. “You don’t even know where I’m staying”, said the tourist. “You don’t need to tell me, I’ll take you there”, said the Parisian. Intrigued, the tourist accepted the offer. The Parisian took the tourist’s elbow and led him out of the bar. He then proceeded to walk the tourist home by exactly the same route that the tourist had walked home the previous two nights. The bemused tourist asked. “How did you know where to lead me? Have you been following me?” “I didn’t lead you” replied the Parisian. “You led me”.

How did the Parisian take the tourist home? What he did was actually quite simple. After exiting the bar, he applied slight pressure on the tourist’s arm as if to turn left. The tourist’s home was to the right, however. The tourist reflexively reacted to the pressure negatively by pulling his arm slightly away, and the Parisian was able to correct his course and turn right instead. Similarly, at each intersection, he guessed which way to go, and was able to correct his course based on the tourist’s reaction to the pressure he applied on his elbow.

Thus, through a simple process of hypothesizing where to go, validating the hypothesis, and correcting his course, the Parisian was seemingly able to lead the tourist home.

Lead, listen, learn, iterate.

John,

Read your article about India VC. I want to thank you for increasing the awareness of what is happening in India. Please don’t take the following as a criticism, but more as an informed opinion.

Everyone who goes to Bangalore for the first time does the same thing: they go an meet the Silicon Valley bank officials, meet Sridhar Mitta (with TIE) and a couple of VCs. While for the first time visitor this gives them some perspective but it is a one-sided point of view.

I think almost all US-connected firms with India funds are completely screwed up. Their structure is determined by the needs of the partners in the fund rather than the reality of the environment

Most funds in the US are built on 2% management fee and a 20% carry on the profits. So if a fund is $100M the management fee will be 2M and the carry is on the profits earned. (NEA is one exception to this – it is cost based – which allows them to raise very large funds.) On an average a US general partner in a fund makes $400K-$1M in salary per year. Thus a $100M fund can have 3-4 partners and the rest for expenses. Most US funds for India have the same or similar economics.

…
So we have funds which have USD 100M-150M under management. Such a fund can support 3 GPs. A fund is typically invested over 4 years in the US (there are several around which have a 3 yr investment cycle). If we assume the same for India, this means that 25M a year is being invested. You would invest 5M/company that’s 5 companies a year among 3 GPs which is reasonable. But consider that you can invest 2M/company, that’s 12 companies a year … that’s a bit much.

Now let me ask the key question: what is invested in each company is determined by what the company needs or what the VC needs to invest to make their model work? Why are the US-connected Indian VC’s more keen in investing in companies which can gobble up 5-10M? Why are they investing in real-estate and hotel companies? Most companies in India need an initial investment of less than 1M.

This is one of the problems: the US-India funds are based on the needs of the individuals and the funds rather than the needs of the companies.

There are several other problems with the models which exist today. Most companies over their life time in the US end up using $25M+ of cash, and companies in the India are not going to be very different. The eco-system in India today can’t fund individual companies to that extent (round C, D, E). You have people like Warburg who will do later rounds, but they only do certain kinds of deals. So if I do round A and B in India there is no bridge to US for getting the later rounds done. Infact it is going to be a struggle. In addition, most of the people who would be GP in an India fund, would not be on equal footing with GP’s in the US (not from a compensation perspective), but from a relationship, clout perspective. So if you are a GP in India and your company needs more money, can you swing the partnership into funding a tough situation: unlikely.

My opinion is that it is not the entrepreneurs in India which need to be frugal, it is the VCs. They need to have an economic models which meet reality of the market, and a cost basis which makes it possible. We have a long way to go.

Rosen Sharma
–
President & CEO
Solidcore Systems
www.solidcore.com

Software which starts with the applications, like Asset Management (for example, Mercury Asset Management…) and Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury) all have one common characteristic … the need a white list.

Niether this guy nor I have used all these software, but a cursory look at their description seems correct … they all need a pre-configured list of things which they should track. If you think from an application point of view this makes a lot of sense … once you know it is Hyperion, you can enumarate all the files and configuration settings for example with Hyperion and track changes to that.

This clearly has several advantages and dis-advantages. First advantage, since most of the above software (except Relicore/Symantec) scan the system, this reduces the time and resources required for the scan. It also presents change data in an applicaiton context which is more useful for the end-user. The

The dis-advantages are same like with other white-list approaches, they need to be constantly updated, also may not be available for older/newer versions of the software. What do you do for custom software … user has to input all this stuff etc.

Here is an excerpt from the begining which I thought was simple and insightful …
“The organization formerly known as the help desk is growing up. Under the moniker of “service desk,” it is expanding its footprint and adding such functions as problem, change, and configuration management to its previous incident-focused role. The classic help desk was somewhat limited
in its scope and parochial in its focus: Users would call with a problem, and technicians would endeavor to fix it as quickly as possible. Help desk software would track incidents and open tickets as responsibility passed from one person to another. Once solved, reports would point out potential hot spots for further study and possible proactive action. Only rarely would the help desk have incidents opened directly from systems management utilities or be tied into any formal change management process.

As processes and procedures for ensuring the continuing health of the IT infrastructure developed, more complex workflows and organizational handoffs were required. Enterprise-class tools to support this service management followed. Common structures and practices added a framework for further refinements. Today, there is widespread acceptance among larger and more complex organizations of a structure following the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) model for service management, and tool vendors have followed with products that assist in ITIL implementations.

Smaller organizations and those not ready to make wholesale change to structures and processes nevertheless want tools that are robust, simple to install and configure, and easy for technicians to use. For these organizations, incident and problem resolution remains a key focus, often with an additional emphasis on desktop life-cycle management, with (but not at the expense of) workflow, tracking, and reporting tools.“

The company liked opsware as a deployment engine. It had simplified thier life considerably. But it had complicated thier life considerably when it came to reconciling change with the change tickets.

The VP mentioned that there was no easy way to integrate the two systems. Also the volume of change which was bieng reported by Opsware was so large that it made their earlier procedures which were manual just infeasible.
Opsware had taken them almost a year to rollout and they wanted to quick fix to this problem. Has anyone else seen this problem? Have any suggested solutions?

One explanation which comes to mind seems to be, that for a long time software developers have used source code management systems, which had versioning tools like CVS or SVN would naturally extend their value proposition to change management.

If you look at the vendors out there, it seems that there are two different directions people are coming after change management … one is starting at the Application layer and the other is starting at the system layer. The following picture from Mercury Interactive’s web site provides a similar layering.

If you approach this from the application side, then the change cycle starts with a developer making some changes in response to a request by the busines unit. These changes are tested in staging and then put together in a release which is put into production. All of which fits neatly into ITIL Change Management/Release Management world. Mercury fits this point of view very well.
The next set of tools which view change management from the perspective of the application are the “application dependency mapping” folks. I guess they originated from the problem that companies face when putting things in production … changes interact with each other. Especially if you are in the Java world, there are a lot of files, classes, settings etc, which depend on each other. So knowing the dependency between one application and another and also having a preview as to what are all the things one change can effect seems valuable. Most of the major players in this space have been gobbled up by larger companies: Relicore (Symantec), Collation (IBM), nLayers (EMC), Cendura (CA), Appilog (Mercury).

It seems like most of the above companies discover the applications by doing a scan and then figure out the dependencies between them also. The scanning gives people the ability to determine what has changed.

I guess the application view has its benefits in the sense that it sits closer to the business user and the business use. The other companies which came up on google for change management start more at the systems layer … next next next.

1. Swivel chairs with wheels
2. Laptops
3. Elevators
4. SAP Implementors
5. ITIL Consultants

When I think about this problem it is similar to the GM and the Auto workers Union (UAW) settlement. GM was asking for some really tough concessions from the UAW, so they brought a UAW representative inside GM and gave him access to all the financial infromation. He was not allowed to communicate this information, but he could see how serious and real the situation was. This helped GM and UAW engage in meaningful dialog.

Another CIO I met mentioned that if Central IT and the Business Units could see what each other was doing that would go a long way to build trust. If there was some way to have autonomy but visibility that would make the organization really efficient.

Don’t know maybe the movie business doesn’t pay that well anymore

Apparently her marriage consellor sent her here

Hmm… and why would that be
Tom and she need to reconcile their differences

Pre-automation there were several manual steps which inherently created barriers for the failures to cascade and also in some sense partitioned the infrastructure. Several examples came out

• Active Directory/DNS: since the directory auto-replicates, if you make a mistake it propogates relatively quickly
• Production and Disaster Recovery: auto-sync between these two can bring down both
• Network: this is the classic because routing changes propogate quickly
• Any clustering solution

We had an interesting discussion about what to do in this case. Clearly you want automation, introducing a human in the loop is not an option in many cases. But how do you solve this problem?

One of our colleagues at a large minufacturing facility had solved this problem in an interesting way. He took one node in a cluster or active directory and used to keep it disconnected!!! and the manually connect it once in a while.

That was very interesting because he had figured out a way to technically enforce a change window which opened by him connecting and dis-connecting to the network.

• IBM Rational: the link takes us to Clear Case which is a source code management system.
  
• Sunview Software: lets you define workflows for different change types and then users to use them
• www.seapine.com/SCM: development tool to streamline software development
• www.bmc.com leads to a form which leads to a link to a whitepaper again about defining the business process and keeping track of a change request/project as it completes various phases
• www.Pega.com seems to be process definition and automation
• Solidcore: track and enforce changes on systems
• Opsware: provisioning system to push out new software to endpoints
• MetricsStream: quality management process

I refined the search to IT Change Management and the following other companies showed up:

• nLayers (EMC): application discovery and mapping tool for cmdb

Okay, so if you were looking for change management you could buy a software development system, process automation/ticket system, provisioning system, change tracking and enforcement, discovery and mapping tool. There seems to be no relationship between them but their marketing messages seem identical: conrol change, follow process, increase performance, be compliant … blah blah blah

So which one makes sense? (to be continued …. in part III)

“hey, I heard we are being federated,” sd

“and what does that mean,” cm

“we will need to communicate to each other,” sd

“as if we don’t do enough of that,” cm

“honey, communicate is different than talk,” sd

“how so,” cm

“we will need to re-concile our differences,” sd

“you met the marriage counsellor, didn’t you,” cm

“yes i did, but he is now an ITIL consultant,” sd

Well it turned out that one of the software on these machines had the capability to download and self-update. The retailer was not only unaware of this but certainly believed that no such thing could be happening…Their normal change procedure was to copy every single file and keep several versions of it before making changes.

But it was happening … and did cause downtime every now or then … which was in the past attributed to flaky behavior. Do you have software which can auto-update in production: anti-virus, windows update, management packs are some examples where this commonly occurs.

So as s a first step I decided to go search for change management, service desk etc and see what articles came up …. the following I thought were interesting (of the links that were not not blatantly vendor specific)

• T. Malarselvan ppt on “Service Desk Tools: Comparison & Recommendation”
• Compares BMC Remedy, CA Service Desk, HP Open Service Desk, HP Peregrine, Front Range Heat
• Blog on Change and Configuration Management
• Couldn’t find the author, but the person writing it seems interesting and knowlegeable, although the last post is over a year old … so not sure whether it is being updated
• Change and Configuraion Management @ Blogspot
• This seems like a evolution of the previous blog (I got the link from there)
• Evergreen Systems Survey on Change Management Maturity in Companies
• The survey highlighted some important areas of progress:49% are using a Change Management application as an IT workflow tool.;72% have 30% or more of their IT staff using a Change Management application daily.; Almost half are using Change Management to plan and execute Release Management activities.;39% integrate Change Management into their portfolio of project management tools.;59% employ Change Management as a single, enterprise-wide IT Change Management policy and system.
• I also like Gene Kim’s articles about visible ops
• An introduction to visible ops
  
• IT Controls Benchmark Survey Results

The above were great exposition of the problems associated with change management or why you needed change management. But except for the first presentation by the gentleman from TCS. It was not clear what do about a change management system.

What else could we search on? Any insights and additional links would be great. I am going to attack this next from reading the vendor material: Part II: Exploring more vendor specific content (will add a link once I make some headway).

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/07/in-search-of-a-change-management-system-part-i/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/06/waiting-in-line/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/06/waiting-in-line/#comments Tue, 07 Nov 2006 02:29:36 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/06/waiting-in-line/ Two changes standing in a long line

“Man, this will take for ever”

“I told my boss, I will be in by end of the week”

“may be your boss should declare an emergency”

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/06/waiting-in-line/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/wineries-%e2%80%9cchange-management%e2%80%9d-system/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/wineries-%e2%80%9cchange-management%e2%80%9d-system/#comments Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:33:50 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/wineries-%e2%80%9cchange-management%e2%80%9d-system/ I visited one of the larger (top 5 by revenue) wineries in Napa. And heard a very interesting story. Apparently most wines these days are made from grapes from a couple of places if not more. And the law requires that you have to keep track of exactly what volume of crushed grapes has done into a particular barrel, and where did the grapes come from etc. This is done with “Grape Crush Management System”.

If the wineries don’t keep track or for some reason the data gets messed up or the system goes down, they can sell the wine as $2 generic wine in a low end store. So this is very important.

The grape crushing lasts only for 2-3 months of the year. So what a lot of wineries do during this period is first to take the system off the network … so no one can log into it. Second all login’s except like the COO are disabled. You can only access this from a room which is under lock and key.

All because they don’t want anyone to make any changes during this time period.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/wineries-%e2%80%9cchange-management%e2%80%9d-system/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/talking-to-strangers/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/talking-to-strangers/#comments Mon, 06 Nov 2006 01:35:58 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/talking-to-strangers/ Baby Server said to Mr. Change, “I don’t know you”

“That’s because I am un-authorized”, replied Mr. Change

“My parents asked me not to talk to strangers”, said Baby Server

“I will take you where you have never gone before”, replied Mr. Change

“I will be scolded if my parents find out”, said Baby Server

“They will never find out, I will change my name to your uncle — Mr. Admin”, replied Mr. Change

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/05/talking-to-strangers/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/what-can-itil-implementations-learn-from-six-sigma-adoption/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/what-can-itil-implementations-learn-from-six-sigma-adoption/#comments Sun, 05 Nov 2006 01:41:13 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/what-can-itil-implementations-learn-from-six-sigma-adoption/ There was a lot of hype and hope when six-sigma was the “thing”. Now ITIL seems to be the “thing” and there is a similar kind of hype associated with it. There was a study couple of years back (I can’t find the link — will post it when I do) which compared what organizations adopted six sigma well and where it did not go anywhere. Jack Welch also talks about the same theme in his book.

What they found that a lot of companies did they following: bring in consultants, and they will tell us our six-sigma strategy. The consultants who were knowledgeable in most cases came and prepared a plan. Then the top management spent a lot of money implementing this plan. Usually most of these implementations stalled and failed to realize benefit for the companies.

The other way of doing six-sigma was to understand the essence of it: how do we drive variability out of a repeatable process. And then ask managers if this was applicable to them. That is did they have repeatable processes and if so how could they reduce variability. This approach was way more effective. One it got buy in from the grass roots and created small success stories, which had direct impact to the top and bottom lines.

I see the same kind of struggle with ITIL. There is industry pressure to do something about ITIL in your companies. What is the essence of ITIL? How do you get buy-in from the grass roots in your company? How do you create the short wins?

Those are the critical questions.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/what-can-itil-implementations-learn-from-six-sigma-adoption/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/how-would-rudy-giuliani-implement-change-management/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/how-would-rudy-giuliani-implement-change-management/#comments Sun, 05 Nov 2006 01:17:01 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/how-would-rudy-giuliani-implement-change-management/ In Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell talked about how they brought crime under control in New York City. They began arresting people who were jumping the ticket turnstiles and booking them on the spot. How would this help with anything … people would have thought? But it so happened that several of the people they arrested were responsible for other larger crimes in the city. And slowly but surely this improved law and order dramatically.

One of the things I see organizations struggle with implementing change management or ITIL in general is where to start. Usually organizations emark on large projects which take a long time to realize the gain.

One thing we can learn for the NYC example is that we should begin monitoring the small infractions (unauthorized changes) in the infrastructure and it will have large impact on service availability. As some of those small infractions lead to much bigger crimes!

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/04/how-would-rudy-giuliani-implement-change-management/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/at-the-movies/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/at-the-movies/#comments Fri, 03 Nov 2006 14:17:29 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/at-the-movies/ What did the small change say to the big change?

“I don’t need a ticket. I will slip in behind you.”

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/at-the-movies/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/tickets-for-the-show/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/tickets-for-the-show/#comments Fri, 03 Nov 2006 14:14:31 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/tickets-for-the-show/ He said: I got two tickets for the show. It starts in 45 minutes.
She said: Fantastic. Let me go change.

He said: Honey, we don’t have time

She said: I am not requesting, but informing

He sighed: just like at work

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/tickets-for-the-show/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/oracle-unbreakable-oracle-vs-redhat/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/oracle-unbreakable-oracle-vs-redhat/#comments Fri, 03 Nov 2006 09:21:25 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/oracle-unbreakable-oracle-vs-redhat/ Oracle’s “unbreakable” campaign is mostly mis-understood. To get enterprise customers to commit to Linux, Oracle promised them that if any bugs came up they would fix them within the SLA provided. Oracle had a few thousand (speculation) programmers and the way it worked was that Oracle wrote the code, give it to customer and provide the fix to RedHat which pushed it out.

So Oracle providing support for RedHat is not something completely alien. Whether their motive is really to provide support or this is first step in a multi-move chess ending to buy RedHat only Larry knows?

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/03/oracle-unbreakable-oracle-vs-redhat/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/married-women/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/married-women/#comments Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:19:40 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/married-women/ She said: married women don’t change their name these days

He said: yeah … they don’t like to follow process

She said: the article said, most people don’t want to go through the paperwork

He said: really, filing a change request at work is more complicated than that.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/married-women/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/what%e2%80%99s-for-dinner/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/what%e2%80%99s-for-dinner/#comments Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:18:12 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/what%e2%80%99s-for-dinner/ He said: what’s for dinner?

She said: how about something from the ITIL cookbook?

He said: there should be about 50 people

She said: i would recommend the Pink Elephant

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/what%e2%80%99s-for-dinner/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/you-got-another-ticket/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/you-got-another-ticket/#comments Fri, 03 Nov 2006 04:18:01 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/you-got-another-ticket/ He said: you got another ticket?

She said: no way

He said: see they sent a snapshot of the back of your car with your license plate, jumping the red light, from those camera

She said: honey, what day was that

He said: it says last tuesday

She said: hmm… you were towing my car that day. Snapshots never tell the true story.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/you-got-another-ticket/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/change-management/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/change-management/#comments Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:57:26 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/change-management/ She said: why are you always talking about change management?

He said: because it is so difficult

She said: well I bought you something which can solve the problem

He said: what is it?

She said: surprise



]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/change-management/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/potty-training/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/potty-training/#comments Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:51:55 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/potty-training/ She said: Bob and Joan are struggling to potty train Jack

He said: they should send him to the ITIL class

She said: why?

He said: it is all about release management

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/02/potty-training/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/you-look-beautiful-today/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/you-look-beautiful-today/#comments Thu, 02 Nov 2006 03:24:05 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/you-look-beautiful-today/ He said: you look beautiful today

She smiled: thank you. What’s different?

He said: I can’t remember what you wore yesterday

She said: What #$! you only scan me once a day….

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/you-look-beautiful-today/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/change-related-processes-itil/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/change-related-processes-itil/#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:27:59 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/change-related-processes-itil/

This picture is off the whiteboard of a the person responsible for ITIL implementation at one of the largest utilities in the US. I found it to be a simple and succint explanation of how things worked and inter-operated with each other.

Click on the picture to see animation about how change approval, staging & test, release management, configuration management and CMDB work together

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/change-related-processes-itil/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/to-be-fathers-1-cause-of-downtime-at-hospital/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/to-be-fathers-1-cause-of-downtime-at-hospital/#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 14:59:48 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/to-be-fathers-1-cause-of-downtime-at-hospital/ At one of the hospitals in the Bay Area, when you check in to deliver your baby, they ask you if your husband is an engineer or works in hi-tech. If the answer is “yes”, you get a long and stern lecture from the person at the station checking you in, not to play around and change settings on the monitoring machines in the delivery room.

Apparently people going in and plaing with the monitoring equipment is a big cause of downtime on the monitoring equipment, which is a pain, because then the nurse has to rush to the room to see if it is dis-connected or something else is wrong.

The would love to lock the equipment or the father down and keep the key — both work

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/to-be-fathers-1-cause-of-downtime-at-hospital/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/availability-depends-on-the-location-of-the-coffee-machine/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/availability-depends-on-the-location-of-the-coffee-machine/#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 13:54:56 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/availability-depends-on-the-location-of-the-coffee-machine/ I was with a large company in San Fransisco, talking to the VP of IT operations. They were in the middle of a moving sun machines from corporate to a data center. About an year they noticed that suddenly a set of servers were having problems, they had couple of failures within a week. These machines had been untouched for a long time. Then nothing happened till 3 months later and they had couple of failures again.

Someone pointed out that during both those weeks the coffee machine on the floor below was not working so people had been coming upstairs to get coffee. They figured out that people would walk past these machines and see the disk light on or some light blinking and would log in to see what was happening. Tinker little bit … And this caused downtime!!!

That was one of the factors in moving the servers to the data center as people felt the tinkering would go away and increase stability.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/availability-depends-on-the-location-of-the-coffee-machine/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/what-comes-after-birth-control/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/what-comes-after-birth-control/#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 12:28:48 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/what-comes-after-birth-control/ She Said: what comes after birth control?

He said: change control

She frowned: Wrong. Babies you idiot.

He said: are you pregnant?

She said: I thought an ITIL guru would know “unfreeze, change, freeze“

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/11/01/what-comes-after-birth-control/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/why-did-bmc-buy-remedy/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/why-did-bmc-buy-remedy/#comments Wed, 01 Nov 2006 01:18:02 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/why-did-bmc-buy-remedy/ Why did BMC buy Remedy?

“Because they were in pain”

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/why-did-bmc-buy-remedy/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/musings-should-opsware-be-bought/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/musings-should-opsware-be-bought/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 23:29:37 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/musings-should-opsware-be-bought/ I was talking to a senior analyst (non-financial) and they mentioned that it is a possibility that someone may buy Opsware. There are several large companies who are not as strong on the datacenter/provisioning side of the business. Opsware and Bladelogic are the two strong companies in that space. Who ever might buy them, needs a fat checkbook though — so has to be one of the big players like MSFT, HP, CA, EMC?
]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/musings-should-opsware-be-bought/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/who-is-in-control/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/who-is-in-control/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 09:45:36 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/who-is-in-control/ She said: Who is in control?

He Said: You Are

She Said: Thank You

(Kids heard laughing in the background)

… They think they are in control …

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/31/who-is-in-control/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/what-can-itil-learn-from-american-gas-stations/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/what-can-itil-learn-from-american-gas-stations/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 04:22:09 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/what-can-itil-learn-from-american-gas-stations/ As an immigrant to the US, it took a while before I got comfortable using the bathrooms in the gas stations on long drives. In most other countries, the bathrooms tend to be unusable. In Britain you have to deposit money to use them and the auto-clean can be interesting experiences.

My wife and I always talked about how they managed to keep those things clean. And it occurred to us one day that it was all because of the long unwieldy things the key is attached to. You can’t loose the key or leave it in the lock.

As I sit in a lot of these ITIL conversations around change management, I find myself smiling. Only if we could maintain the same process around our infrastructure, like the gas stations have around their bathrooms, availability would jump another 9 atleast. Keep the infrastructure locked, till there is an approved change (like the guy who bought gas at your station) and then give them the key with a really long handle, so they can’t loose it or forget it or pass it to someone else

There are some great ideas and parallels in the book by Suellen Hoy

Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness (Paperback)

Enjoy!

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/what-can-itil-learn-from-american-gas-stations/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/the-change-process-as-%e2%80%9cunfreezing-changing-and-refreezing%e2%80%9d/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/the-change-process-as-%e2%80%9cunfreezing-changing-and-refreezing%e2%80%9d/#comments Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:37:05 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/the-change-process-as-%e2%80%9cunfreezing-changing-and-refreezing%e2%80%9d/ IT Change Management can learn from what has been learnt about change management more from a people and organizational perspective. Here is an excerpt from “Change Management 101: A Primer” available at http://home.att.net/~nickols/change.htm

Section III: The Change Process

The Change Process as “Unfreezing, Changing and Refreezing”

The process of change has been characterized as having three basic stages: unfreezing, changing, and re-freezing. This view draws heavily on Kurt Lewin’s adoption of the systems concept of homeostasis or dynamic stability.

What is useful about this framework is that it gives rise to thinking about a staged approach to changing things. Looking before you leap is usually sound practice.

What is not useful about this framework is that it does not allow for change efforts that begin with the organization in extremis (i.e., already “unfrozen”), nor does it allow for organizations faced with the prospect of having to “hang loose” for extended periods of time (i.e., staying “unfrozen”).

In other words, the beginning and ending point of the unfreeze-change-refreeze model is stability — which, for some people and some organizations, is a luxury. For others, internal stability spells disaster. A tortoise on the move can overtake even the fastest hare if that hare stands still.It gets more interesting for organizations if the people doing the unfreezing and refreezing are different than those making change. Then this is very powerful insight.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/30/the-change-process-as-%e2%80%9cunfreezing-changing-and-refreezing%e2%80%9d/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/15/musings-should-intel-buy-nvidia/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/15/musings-should-intel-buy-nvidia/#comments Mon, 16 Oct 2006 00:00:42 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/15/musings-should-intel-buy-nvidia/ I was recently at a talk by Dave McQueeny, CTO IBM Federal, where he talked about some interesting trends in the industry. One of the things he mentioned was that for some time now it has become difficult for chip companies like Intel to increase the processor speed year after year by 30%.

So it is speculated that Intel stopped marketing giga Hertz as the main reason to upgrade and being smart has shifted the focus to number of core’s in the CPU. AMD has made heat consumption an issue, which again Dave mentioned is an issue because now the power consumed by a processor when its idle versus when it is working is roughly the same and so it never gets to cool down.

Another impact of this shift may be in how ODM’s select chipsets to put on a motherboard. Since they wont be touting giga hertz, they are also shifting to heat consumtion, number of cores etc. Will the graphics capability become an important selling point? You do need sophisticated graphics cards to work with 24″ or 30″ displays.

What do you think?

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/15/musings-should-intel-buy-nvidia/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/08/rumor-opsware-to-buy-tripwire/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/08/rumor-opsware-to-buy-tripwire/#comments Sun, 08 Oct 2006 14:36:41 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/08/rumor-opsware-to-buy-tripwire/ Opsware stock is trading roughly 10x revenue, high for its sector? Good time to buy companies. Tripwire had about 35M in revenue in 2005 as reported in the Portland Business Journal (http://portland.bizjournals.com/portland/stories/2006/06/05/daily51.html). If revenue this year is around 50 that would be a significant increase for Opsware. If they pay 200-250M for the acqusition the stock should go up 50% because of the revenue jump … making it effectively a 375M acqution … which should be a good outcome for Tripwire … which has raised about 60M.
]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/08/rumor-opsware-to-buy-tripwire/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/04/rumor-emc-to-buy-bmc/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/04/rumor-emc-to-buy-bmc/#comments Wed, 04 Oct 2006 14:55:10 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/04/rumor-emc-to-buy-bmc/ Ok. Its not driven by the alphabet soup. The rumor abounds though after EMC purchase of nLayers which got them into the CMDB space. There have been rumors about IBM buying BMC and of BMC being taken over by private equity. But EMC buying them may make some sense.
]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/10/04/rumor-emc-to-buy-bmc/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/26/nortel-to-buy-force10networks/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/26/nortel-to-buy-force10networks/#comments Tue, 26 Sep 2006 09:35:27 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/26/nortel-to-buy-force10networks/ Thats the word on the street … Check out http://news.tmcnet.com/news/2006/09/18/1901468.htm
]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/26/nortel-to-buy-force10networks/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/rumor-hp-to-buy-ca/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/rumor-hp-to-buy-ca/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:25:44 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/rumor-hp-to-buy-ca/ That would be a big one. But people say that HP today can’t fight IBM in mainframe territory. Almost every IBM mainframe account uses CA. So the acquisition can give HP access to most IBM accounts. Also CA’s stock is relatively cheap.
]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/rumor-hp-to-buy-ca/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/should-exxon-mobil-buy-general-motors-or-ford/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/should-exxon-mobil-buy-general-motors-or-ford/#comments Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:21:31 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/should-exxon-mobil-buy-general-motors-or-ford/ Market Cap of Exxon Mobil: $404B; Market Cap of GM: $17B

They could buy them wothout blinking an eye. Think of the cell phone market, the phones are sold or leased by the carriers, not by the phone manufacturers. Sprint, Verizon, ATT sell us phones, not Qualcomm or Motorolla. Similarly Exxon could sell you cars and fuel at a monthly lease price.

The structure of the lease also would fit well: fixed number of miles and if you go above it there is some charge. Also concepts of roaming etc. fit well … and the economics should work given mostly people are local or withing state. Further with the availability of technologies like OnStar you can prevent theft etc.

Don’t know if it would trigger any anti-trust regulation. But it would surely change the auto-world as we know it.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/16/should-exxon-mobil-buy-general-motors-or-ford/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/06/rumor-motorola-to-buy-juniper/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/06/rumor-motorola-to-buy-juniper/#comments Wed, 06 Sep 2006 12:03:09 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/06/rumor-motorola-to-buy-juniper/ This is a wild one. It has been circulating for some time. I can’t say I understand it, except that maybe Zander does not like Chicago and wants to move back to the Bay Area. It does make sense from a market perspective: both the companies sell to carriers … one for the core of the wired network and one on the wireless side. But they are still selling to the same companies.
From a core technology point of view, I am sure Juniper stuff can be used on the wired and wireless part of the network. So maybe the combination creates a one-stop shop?
]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/06/rumor-motorola-to-buy-juniper/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/04/should-apple-and-google-merge/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/04/should-apple-and-google-merge/#comments Tue, 05 Sep 2006 06:19:23 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/04/should-apple-and-google-merge/ Should they? They both have a common enemy. Google for the longest time has been trying to get consumers to park more of their data with google. All efforts like 2GB storage with gmail or desktop search, or hosted office seem to be steps in that direction.

Apple offers a very different solution: iTunes today indexes all the music files, videos and also your contacts and calendar. It is trivial for it to do email and other files on your desk also. People who use iTunes and iPod swear by it and really trust and like it. If that becomes a conduit to google that could be powerful.

What would Apple get out of it?

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/04/should-apple-and-google-merge/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/rumor-oracle-to-buy-redhat/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/rumor-oracle-to-buy-redhat/#comments Mon, 04 Sep 2006 05:48:22 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/rumor-oracle-to-buy-redhat/ There has been a rumor going around that Oracle will buy Redhat. When you ask people why — the responses are very random at best. Some say Oracle has a banking mindset now with Charles Phillips is President … so they are looking for companies with good maintenance revenue streams and are looking at it as a financial transaction.

There is also some talk about this being an extension of the Oracle Unbreakable campaign. That campaign is widely mis-understood … what Oracle was offering there was 24×7 support with SLA that a problem will be resolved in certain amount of time. If a customer reports a problem, the open source community may not address the issue for months, so Oracle said we will fix the problem and give the code back to the open source community. This was to give customers confidence to adopt Linux as their platform.

There are some interesting symbiotic relationships in the open source space. SAP is supposedly a big promoter of MySQL. One view of this is that it is advantageous for a company to commoditize the stack beneath it. As the dollars charged for the stack below would naturally flow to the application and also returned to the customers. From this point of view it might make sense for Oracle to buy RedHat as most of its implementations today run on Solaris or HP-UX or even AIX. And it could offer the OS stack for free, get a maintenance revenue stream and also make the oracle solution more cost-effective with little impact on the price of Oracle.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/rumor-oracle-to-buy-redhat/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/ibm-buys-mro-non-it-it-asset-convergence/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/ibm-buys-mro-non-it-it-asset-convergence/#comments Mon, 04 Sep 2006 05:12:31 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/ibm-buys-mro-non-it-it-asset-convergence/ IBM’s acquisition of MRO for $740M took some people by surprise. On the surface it was not clear why IBM paid a premium: it shared a large percentage of customers with MRO. Also Tivoli does have enterprise asset management capabilities. As several news articles reported MRO was strong for non-IT asset management: physical assets like tractors,
factory equipment, carts etc. The real question was why get into that business?

Party conversation says IBM is just trying to catch up with HP, after selling off its PC business to Lenovo, HP is ahead in terms of revenue to be the largest computer company. But that can’t really be the reason, can it?

In an insightful conversation with a senior executive, he pointed out that the non-IT assets are getting similar to IT assets. For example, Caterpillar is adding capability to track tractors using IP address and RFID tags, and several IT assets are becoming like non-IT assets. The two business seem to be converging and over the next 10 years or so they will begin to look very similar.

A completely disconnected event: it is rumored that one of the bidders in a recent Service Desk bid was PeopleSoft (or Oracle) bid along with Microsoft. Where they were using PeopleSoft’s system which tracks chairs and tables along with employees as the base to extend to IT assets also.

But maybe it does make sense.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/03/ibm-buys-mro-non-it-it-asset-convergence/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/02/is-aim-a-viable-option-to-go-public/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/02/is-aim-a-viable-option-to-go-public/#comments Sun, 03 Sep 2006 01:40:59 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/02/is-aim-a-viable-option-to-go-public/ Every month or so someone talks about going public on AIM (Alternative Investment Market) in UK. The requirements to go public are less strict: there is no SOX requirement, no minimum revenue etc. Almost every investment firm also has a “AIM” specialist you can talk to.

The conversation almost always drifts to liquidity and the general belief that the market is not liquid. So it depends on why you want to go public, for some companies they are looking for currency to buy other companies, or simply because larger companies like to buy from public companies. Those objectives are not met by getting listed on the AIM. Or atleast that is what the impression seems to be.

It does help with personal liquidty, but I haven’t come across a company which has done this yet. I am not even sure it is better than doing something like a DPO (direct public offering) which you can do both in Canada or the US. It is rumored Google contemplated doing a DPO. But in the long term investors prefer that someone has benchmarked the company to not be a fly-by-night operation.

]]> http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/02/is-aim-a-viable-option-to-go-public/feed/ 0 http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/01/is-tech-a-buyers-market/ http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/01/is-tech-a-buyers-market/#comments Sat, 02 Sep 2006 08:00:47 +0000 Administrator http://think-smarter.com/rosen_sharma/2006/09/01/is-tech-a-buyers-market/ I heard recently “to go public these days you need the unbounded potential of the dot-com days and the solid fundamentals of large company”. That comment crystalized several disconnected snippets of conversations over the past several weeks. During lunch a CEO was said his company is doing 20M annual booking but where should it go next? Sarbanes Oxley has raised the bar to 60-70M but even then unless you have a strong quarterly growth and good visibility into future quarters it is tough to get out.

So where are the exits? The larger companies are acutely aware of these facts. Coupled with the presence of a large number of companies with similar technology, it seems like for the next couple of years tech will be a buyers market.

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