We had 20+ people turn up with the exact mix I was hoping for:

• Start-ups like Pixenate, Roam4Free and LouderVoice
• consultants like Aonach
• some pure techies
• a bunch of budding entrepreneurs
• a development advisor from Enterprise Ireland
• Eileen from CorkBIC (Business Innovation Centre)
• Peter from CorkBIC Business Angel Partnership
• an industrial liaison officer from UCC
• two ex-Motorola people
• and several people who (rightly) came along to see what it was all about

Given that it was the inaugural meeting, I said a few words, got everyone to introduce themselves and mentioned the ShareIT initiative, some thoughts on Coworking and a desire to get more people from the investment community involved over time.

Of course OpenCoffee here is being driven by the opposite group to the original one in the UK. Over there it is the VCs and Angels pushing it forward, over here it is the guys in start-ups. I did invite one VC but he prefers to wait and see that OpenCoffee has some legs first, which I do understand. It’ll take time for the community to grow and for the reputation to spread. I’d love it (or whatever it becomes) to be a place where opportunities are found, networks are built and people have a social outlet in a business context.

Richard (who is building something in a similar space to ourselves) made the very interesting point that his community has always been a virtual one with his peers in the US, he simply wasn’t aware so much was happening in Cork. I hope more and more local entrepreneurs hear about us and turn up for a great cup of coffee and some start-up banter on Friday March 30th. And if you are just curious about the whole thing, head on down, we’re a friendly bunch and we won’t talk about Twitter too much

Several people requested a separate info page for OpenCoffee Cork so I’ll set something up next week and announce it here.

UPDATE 1: Saul has a list of all the recent OpenCoffee Clubs around the world. Damned impressive!

The storage industry has been built entirely on a foundation of proprietary technologies until quite recently. There are very few companies operating in this space at the top end; HP, EMC, IBM and HDS. These companies have spent many years in a constant leap-frog with each other in terms of high-end system performance. The mantra was always hardware performance, hardware performance. Bit by bit this has started to change.

With increased scale comes increased management complexity. One guy with a CLI and a batch file cannot manage 100 storage arrays. EMC in particular realised several years ago that software could be a big differentiator in addition to IO/sec. They now own the top-end of the SRM space. Everyone else has been playing catch-up. To our mind, the reliance by many of the other top vendors on third party SRM tools is deeply flawed. If you are all selling similar hardware with the same software, what is your USP?

The SMI initiatives have been well intentioned and all storage companies at least pay lip service to the concept of interoperability. Indeed, AppIQ built its entire SRM tool around open standards. However, it is still impossible to do end-to-end provisioning of one vendors storage by another vendors tool-set. With the recent purchase of AppIQ by HP, this is probably going to remain the case for the foreseeable future. It is clear that Mr Hurd understands how critical software is going to be in re-building HP’s storage business.

The reason we mention all of the above is that Mr Yoshida’s Blog is mainly about software. This is interesting for several reasons. HDS seem to have had a reputation in the past as a “hardware only” company where the OEM business was as important (or even more important) than their own sales – they had left the software leadership to others.

In a previous existance, we spent many years providing software services to Toshiba in Europe, USA and Japan. They were a fantastic customer and we worked very well together. It was very clear to us that Toshiba saw all of the value residing in the hardware of the products that we worked on for them. We don’t believe this was unique to them, it appears that many Japanese companies, even today, have a blind spot when it comes to software. We saw that the software was going to make or break the system they were developing. In the end the products were not a success in the market and the belated focus on software played a big part in this.

Looking at HDS, it appears they have learned the hard lessons of their Japanese peers and are now putting a big push on the software side. Like most of the players, they seem to be betting on storage virtualisation as the “next big thing”. In this area, more than any other previously, software will be the critical success factor.

A blog about software – not exactly earth shattering. But a blog in a secretive industry, about software, by the CTO of a traditionally closed Japanese-owned company; this is big news. We hope this is the start of a sea-change in the industry and we start seeing blogs by Ann Livermore/Bob Schultz in HP or Jeffrey Nick/Howard Elias in EMC. Jonathan Schwartz in SUN has shown that it can be done in such a way that you are not revealing your company secrets but you are showing some of the internal thinking of a company and bypassing corporate PR drones with their constant happy-clappy “all is fabulous” message.

Whilst it is very interesting to see such a big focus on software, it is also worth noting the moves being made on the services side. IBM has always understood the importance of the services business and recent moves by EMC show that they too see the potential value-add. The use of key partners by the big players is a critical part of them being able to offer a wide and deep service. The recent announcement by HDS of a partnership with Glasshouse shows that they also buy into this model. Their own service offerings look quite rich and Glasshouse will obviously be able to add to this in a big way.

Mr Yoshida clearly understands the importance of addressing your markets by whatever means possible. It is well worth reading his post and comments on The Value of Blogging and Where should Intelligence Reside. We’ll be reading his blog eagerly. As Robert Scoble says: Subscribed!

UPDATE: Literally an hour after this was posted we found out about Dave Hitz’s Blog. He is the founder and Executive Vice President of NetApps. This is a superb blog with just the right tone to make it a must-read. He mentions competitors very often and is unafraid to be complimentary about them. This is one of the main reasons Scoble’s blog is so popular. A company that should never be under-estimated and a blog well worth adding to your aggregator.

Technorati Tags: Hu Yoshida, HDS, Hitachi Data Systems, EMC, IBM, HP, NetApp, Network Appliance, Dave Hitz, Storage, Services, Partners, Glasshouse

From this he makes some very interesting predictions which are very close to what we have been hearing anecdotally and which are supported by many of the moves in the enterprise space in recent times.

The main factors causing the shrinkage that he identifies are:

1. Software is moving from growth to value. In particular he mentions the current focus on maintenance pricing and services revenues.

We are seeing this everywhere. More and more high-end enterprise software products are seeing their growth slow. In many cases, the mid-end has turned out to be “good enough” and is cannibalising high-end sales. One often hears comment about “dying” products despite continued massive revenue because they are not growing the way they used to. In fact, we know of several enterprise software systems which struggled to get any market foothold, were de-featured and re-launched at a lower price point and are now market leaders. It is not quite the RyanAir model but it is not far off.

Our niche is the services area, we currently do not have a product offering. More and more, we are asked to take mid-range industry standard products licensed by our clients, customise them and integrate sets of them together for their unique needs. Thus they can avoid having to pay for the big uplift to move to either the next Tier in their vendors product suites or they can avoid moving to the next generation of product which simply does not meet their needs.

2. Open Source and SaaS. Here the issue is that many companies are unwilling to pay out huge up-front fees for proprietary software in the first place. The trend is now to reduce upfront license fees and increase maintenance charges. Software as a Service allows companies to purchase software “on demand” over the web.

Again, this is a big area for us. We have worked on one customer-built system which in itself was not very complex but which required a $40K Oracle licence to run. We were able to re-target it to MySQL and re-build the entire system using Open Source tools. This enabled them to roll the system out across multiple sites at minimal incremental cost to themselves.

We have previously mentioned the move in BI world to the Open Source reporting solutions and we expect that trend to accelerate as clients become more comfortable with paying annual fees.

To be honest, SaaS has not really been an issue for us to date.

3. No big platform transition.

The drip drip drip move to platforms such as Linux provides great opportunities for small nimble companies such as ourselves. It is of no help to the big guys. The letters WS- are almost the kiss of death at this stage. We have no idea when/if there is going to be “the next big thing” – there is always plenty of money to be made on “the current thing”.

4. Networking companies are encroaching on software company turf.

Not really an issue either way for us.

5. Being public ain’t so great. Software companies are seeing their margins hurt by higher compliance costs and steep charges for options.

Compliance is a pain for everyone and a big opportunity for any company in the business of helping clients get a handle on their data. We continue to see this as an opportunity.

A few recent news stories back up many of the points Bill makes. The most apt being the announcement that Business Objects want to grow their services business. There are also some good comments on TDWI on the commoditization of the BI market by Microsoft and Oracle (again the idea of “good enough”).

37 Signals has an excellent short post on this topic too. Unfortunately for many of the big guys they are right on the mark when they say that in the near future “enterprise means bulky, expensive, dated, and golf.”.

And finally, Vinnie Mirchandani is right on the money as far as what is important when he says “Much as I love Google, it cannot process BOMs for the average manufacturing company. Much as my daughter loves her iPod, it will not process insurance claims. Whoever does whatever with AOL will not improve supply chain logistics at UPS.”

We particularly love his comment about a type of company that we, in our infancy, are striving to become: “A generation of appligators will emerge – small systems integrators which specialize in innovation areas like web services or telemetry and willing to work with clients in small, intense teams”.

Technorati Tags: enterprise software, predictions 2006, Open Source, SaaS

Whilst none of the Open Source tools have the breadth and depth of Crystal’s capabilities, in many cases they are “good enough”. Whilst we have been happily using Crystal and Crystal Enterprise/Server for quite a while now, the Open Source alternatives are becoming more and more attractive. It looks like the BO move is particularly targetting BIRT which is integrated into Eclipse, has a solid business model behind it and for which paid support (a must for many large enterprises) is available.

We have built our own capabilities with some of the leading products such as JasperReports (and related tools like OpenReports and iReport) and BIRT. Our developement services can now provide any of the above as part of an engagement.

The importance of an enterprise reporting system cannot be understated. To many people, reports mean bureaucratic paperwork for middle-management. But an accurate Business Intelligence System (an overused but accurate term) can mean the difference between running your infrastructure at 40% utilisation or 80%. It can allow you to plan asset purchases in advance based on usage trends rather than always having to be done during a fire-fight. In fact, a well-targetted BI System with both historical and up-to-date data will reduce the number of those fire-fights because you always know where you are and where you are going.

If you think you may have an Reporting/BI requirement and wish to discuss it further then don’t hesitate to contact us. Even the smallest SME can benefit from having a better insight into the core metrics of their business operations and planning.

Technorati Tags: Business Objects, Crystal Reports, JasperReports, iReport, OpenReports, BIRT, Eclipse, BI, Reporting, Business Intelligence, Infrastructure, Data Center, Open Source

Whether IBM will succeed (with the help of the OpenSource community) or not is obviously the great unknown. In any other sector the chances would be good but so many initiatives in this area have started with grand hopes and ended up as yet another niche product optimised for a small set of specific hardware. We’ll obviously know more when it moves from the realm of vapourware and we can start looking at the architecture of system.

Technorati Tags: aperi, srm, ecc, appiq, ibm, hds, emc, hp

Whilst it does appear that CMDBs are all the rage right now and that inflated expectations will (as ever) lead to half-baked solutions and disappointed customers, we have seen plenty of benefit being gained right now in the implementation of limited scope CMDBs targetted at particular technology-business relationships in IT Service Management and Delivery.

We spend most of our time developing custom solutions for clients who have made large up-front investments in enterprise applications and now want to maximise the return on that investment. In some case, this may simply be a case of extracting out data in a summary form from these systems so that they can make informed planning decisions. In other cases, we are building BI applications which aggregate data from multiple systems to allow clients to get a deep understanding of their cost base and how they can better utilise existing assets.

The key word is “Custom”. No two engagements are the same, no two customers use the same tools in the same way. As long as the enterprise software vendors keep providing the enabling technologies, we’ll be able to provide the glue.

Chip’s other comments about Verticals and Open Source also resonate very strongly with the direction we are currently taking.

Technorati Tags: bi, custom, integration, businessintelligence

We believe there is a good opportunity for smaller companies such as ourselves to partner with some of the big guys to enable them to provide implementation services so that they can present themselves as more of a one-stop-shop whilst not losing focus on their own core competencies.

The points regarding competition from Microsoft are not particularly well made by the interviewer. The new features in Reporting Services for SQL Server 2005 look like they could have a mjor impact on the BO bottom line in Microsoft-only accounts. The near-zero price of Reporting Services is something BO can have no answer to, without doing something extreme like OpenSourcing Crystal. Obviously, BO will continue to thrive in heterogeneous and non-MS environments but I know we cannot be the only ones looking at MS Reporting Services as a potential replacement for Crystal moving into 2006 for some engagements.

Now BO have released Crystal Server XI on Linux, so in theory we will be able to offer solutions buuilt on RHEL (or similar), Oracle and Crystal Server XI. The important thing here is not the technology but the fact that the customer gets more of a choice.

Business Objects Launches BI Platform for Linux

Our usage of Crystal over the past few years has gone from simple embedded SQL queries inside the RPT to major Stored Proc development as a back-end to the RPTs. Whilst we love Crystal for its ability to get things developed quickly and allowing new users to come up to speed almost instantly, it simply does not scale for large data sets and requires more and more back-end implementation.

Our biggest criticism of Crystal is much more basic – since BO took over last yeat, it is impossible to track all of the versions and naming schemes going on. In fact, when we talk to BO staff, they are often unsure themselves. As an example, if you ordered Crystal Enterprise 10, you were looking at somewhere around $7k for a base install. Now, if you ask for the default price on Crystal Enterprise XI (which hilariously they call X I rather than eleven), they quote $70K as that is now the name of the high-end system. You now need to request Crystal Server XI to get the basic functionality. I am convinced this is losing them sales. On a side note, they have probably lost a ton of sales in Ireland as the number they quote on the web-site sends you to a voicemail blackhole from which you never get a call back.

Having said all of that, we still love using the product and generating customer solutions which just work.

EDS’ Next Big Thing Blog

OPSWARE INTRODUCES NEW GLOBAL SHELL TECHNOLOGY FOR CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT OF LINUX, UNIX, AND WINDOWS

You don’t see much in the way of innovation in command-line shells but this looks extremely powerful. Cross-platfform, remote automation, supports all the leading current shells. Definitely worth a read if the scripted management of large-scale heterogeneous environments is something which daily breaks your heart.

We started playing with VMWare Workstation when it was still in Beta back in the Integral Design days. Even then, it was obvious that it was going to be a world-beater. ESX is just incredible. Add in the VMotion tool for remotely deploying VMs and you have a system which genuinely increases productivity by a huge degree.

It is still surprising that Microsoft have failed to produce anything remotely competitive to these products. One would think that controlling the OS and buying Connectix would provide a big development advantage, but clearly that is not the case here.

Update: Further coverage and links on Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Update 2: Further coverage and opinion (including Xen) on CNET and eWeek