I’m super excited to be part of the crew (along with Bootup Entrepreneurial Society) bringing the Startup Lessons Learned conference to town via simulcast this Friday April 23rd. For those of you who don’t know, the Lean Startup movement (a derivative of lean manufacturing) was kicked off by Eric Ries, formerly of Imvu. It has blossomed in a very short time into a global movement of entrepreneurs interested in how to build fast-cycle, highly iterative startups that learn fast and minimize wasted effort.

More information on the event is below.

• REGISTRATION: http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• PRICE: $25 (regular on-site SF price = $695USD so that’s a 96.5% discount not counting the savings in travel costs.)
• SIMULCAST LOCATION: Bootup Entrepreneurial Society, 3rd floor, 163 W. Hastings St., Suite 200.

Startup Lessons Learned, San Francisco (via simulcast to Vancouver)

Startup Lessons Learned is the first event designed to unite those interested in what it takes to succeed in building a lean startup. The goal for this event is to give practitioners and students of the lean startup methodology the opportunity to hear insights from leaders in embracing and deploying the core principles of the lean startup methodology. The day-long event will feature a mix of panels and talks focused on the key challenges and issues that technical and market-facing people at startups need to understand in order to succeed in building successful lean startups.

Confirmed Speakers and Participating Mentors:

• Eric Ries, The Lean Startup (@ericries)
• Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute (@kentbeck)
• Steve Blank (@sgblank)
• Randy Komisar, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
• Andrew Chen, Futuristic Play (@andrew_chen)
• David Weekly, PB Works (@dweekly)
• Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics (@hnshah)
• Cindy Alvarez, KISSmetrics (@cindyalvarez)
• Ethan Bloch, Flowtown (@ebloch)
• Timothy Fitz, IMVU (@TimohtyFitz)
• Drew Houston, Dropbox (@drewhouston)
• Ash Maurya, WiredReach (@ashmaurya)
• Dave McClure (@davemcclure)
• Sean Ellis (@seanellis)
• Laura Klein (@lauraklein)
• Damon Horowitz, Aardvark / Google (@iamnottweeting)
• Max Ventilla, Aardvark / Google (@ventilla)
• Brant Cooper (@brantcooper)
• Clara Shih, Hearsay Labs (@clarashih)
• Manuel Rosso (@manuelrosso)
• Rashmi Sinha (@rashmi)
• Dan Martell, Flowtown (@danmartell)
• Brett Durrett, IMVU
• James Birchler, IMVU
• Andres Glusman, Meetup (@glusman)

Agenda

• 8 AM – 9:00 Registration
• 9:00 – 9:30 AM Welcome
  *Eric Ries, Host, Startup Lessons Learned
• 9:30 AM – 10:20 AM Build Keynote: “To Agility, and Beyond”
  * Kent Beck, Three Rivers Institute
• 10:20 AM – 10:40 AM Continuous Deployment Case Study: WiredReach
  *Ash Maurya, WiredReach
• 10:40 AM – 11:00 AM Agile Development Case Study: Grockit
  *Farb Nivi, Grockit
• 11:00 AM – 11:30 AM Case Study: “But Does it Scale?”
  * Tim Fitz, James Birchler, and Brett Durrett, IMVU
• 11:30 PM – 12:15 PM But What about Design? Minimum Desirable Product
  *Andrew Chen (Futuristic Play), Laura Klein, Dave McClure, Rashmi Sinha
• 12:15 AM – 1:15 PM Lunch
• 1:15 – 2:00 PM Conversation: Getting to Plan B
  * Randy Komisar, KPCB
• 2:00 PM – 2:20 PM Minimum Viable Product Case Study: Aardvark
  *Max Ventilla and Damon Horowitz, Google (Aardvark)
• 2:20 PM – 2:40 PM Pivot Case Study: Flowtown
  *Dan Martell and Ethan Bloch, Flowtown
• 2:40 PM – 3:00 PM Pivot Case Study: KISSmetrics
  *Hiten Shah, KISSmetrics
• 3:00 PM – 3:30 PM Afternoon Break
• 3:30 PM – 4:15 PM Customer Development 2.0
  *Steve Blank
• 4:15 PM – 4:35 PM Is Customer Development Marketing? Food on the Table Case Study
  *Manuel Rosso, Food on the Table
• 4:35 PM – 4:55 PM Customer Development Case Study: Dropbox
  *Drew Houston, Dropbox
• 4:55 PM – 5:15 PM Customer Development Case Study: PB Works
  *David Weekly, PBworks
• 5:15 PM – 6:00 PM Customer Development Panel
  *Cindy Alvarez, Brant Cooper, Sean Ellis, Matt Johnson

This event is intended for people on the front line of delivering products. If you are a start-up founder, an employee engaged in customer or product development role at a company of any stage, or someone at a large company looking to bring the lean startup methodology to your company, we encourage you to attend the event.

Local Simulcasts

For those outside of the Bay Area, we will be offering simulcasts of the event. Official simulcast hosts can be found below – make sure to sign up using one of the links below:

Africa

• Cape Town, South Africa http://sllconf-capetown.eventbrite.com

Asia

• Tokyo, Japan http://startuplessonslearnedtokyosimulcast.eventbrite.com

Europe

• Barcelona, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/638921030
• Birmingham, UK http://sll-birmingham-uk.eventbrite.com/
• Bucharest, Romania http://sllconf-bucharest.eventbrite.com/
• Budapest, Hungary http://sllbudapest.eventbrite.com
• Cambridge, UK http://startuplessonslearnedcam.eventbrite.com/
• Copenhagen, Denmark http://sllconf2010copenhagen.eventbrite.com/
• Delft, Netherlands http://sllconf-delft.eventbrite.com/
• Edinburgh, Scotland http://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=652392323
• Gothenburg, Sweden http://gotsllconf.eventbrite.com/
• London, UK http://www.meetup.com/agile-entrepreneurship/calendar/12944310/
• Madrid, Spain http://www.eventbrite.com/event/640820712
• Munich, Germany http://www.eventbrite.com/event/650629049
• Timisoara, Romania http://www.meetup.com/The-Timisoara-Agile-Software-Meetup-Group/
• Vienna, Austria http://at.amiando.com/sllconfstream.html

North America

• Atlanta, GA http://atlantasll.eventbrite.com/
• Austin, TX http://www.meetup.com/Austin-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13090413/
• Boise, Idaho http://sllconf-boise.eventbrite.com/
• Boston, MA http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Circle-Boston/calendar/13093640/
• Boston/Cambridge, MA http://dplc-lessons.eventbrite.com
• Boulder, CO http://sllconf-boulder.eventbrite.com/
• Chicago, IL http://www.meetup.com/Chicago-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13056515/
• Cleveland, OH http://startuplessonslearneduniversitycircle.eventbrite.com/
• Cleveland, OH http://sllsimulcastcleveland.eventbrite.com
• Grand Rapids, MI http://startupgr.eventbrite.com
• Los Angeles, CA http://www.meetup.com/Los-Angeles-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13082783/
• Monterrey, NL México http://www.eventbrite.com/event/654293008
• Montreal, QC Canada Chttp://leanstartupmontreal.eventbrite.com
• New York, NY http://dplny-lessons.eventbrite.com/
• New York, NY http://www.meetup.com/lean-startup/calendar/13102326/
• New York, NY http://sllnyc.eventbrite.com
• Omaha, NE http://sllconf-omaha.eventbrite.com/
• Providence, RI http://sllconfprovidence.eventbrite.com
• Provo, UT http://wsg-lsc.eventbrite.com/
• Raleigh, NC http://www.meetup.com/lsc-rtp/calendar/13161035/
• Redmond, WA http://www.eventbrite.com/event/648075411
• San Juan, Puerto Rico http://startups.eventbrite.com/
• Toronto, CA http://startuplessons-toronto.eventbrite.com
• Twin Cities, MN http://www.meetup.com/Twin-Cities-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/12849312/
• Vancouver, BC Canada http://sllyvrsimulcast.eventbrite.com/
• Washington DC http://www.meetup.com/DC-Lean-Startup-Circle/calendar/13068744/

Oceania

• Syndey, Australia https://s.eventarc.com/event/view/597/entry/startup-lessons-learned-simulcast-conference
• Wellington, New Zealand http://www.meetup.com/Lean-Startup-Wellington/calendar/12624714/

South America

• Belo Horizonte, Brazil http://sllconf-bhz.eventbrite.com/
• Buenos Aires, Argentina http://buenosairessll.eventbrite.com/
• Florianópolis, SC, Brazil http://www.meetup.com/Floripa-Startups/calendar/13090194/
• Santiago, Chile http://sllsantiago.eventbrite.com

It allows all of the stakeholders to have a dashboard that lets them input their goals, and then track their progress towards those goals.

Congrats VS team and City of Berkeley on the launch!

]]> http://www.troyangrignon.com/2010/02/17/city-of-berkeley-launches-their-climate-action-plan-using-vancouver-based-visible-strategies-see-it-wow/feed/ 0 http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/11/16/appirio-sponsors-updated-cloud-computing-ecosystem-map-released-today/ http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/11/16/appirio-sponsors-updated-cloud-computing-ecosystem-map-released-today/#comments Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:04:13 +0000 Troy Angrignon http://www.troyangrignon.com/2009/11/16/appirio-sponsors-updated-cloud-computing-ecosystem-map-released-today/ Hey everybody, I’m excited to let you all know that the newest version of the cloud computing ecosystem map has been released.

The CIO blog post is here, the release notes are here, the press release is here and the map is here.

(By the way, I’d like to thank Felipe (at) Liquidbook.com for his kick butt work on the flash application. If you need any development done, call him. He was a treat to work with.)

As I look at two trends that I’ve been part of in the past couple of years, I see Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 which was about reaching out beyond the firewall and interacting across boundaries, and I see cloud computing which is about moving systems and applications outside of the firewall into “the space in between.” Now we have both desire/intent (enterprise 2.0) and ability (cloud) to enable much broader and deeper integration of networks of actors, be those vendors, suppliers, partners, or press.

I thought it seemed appropriate to write Jeffrey a good-bye note here. I couldn’t write it yesterday as I had too many things going on in my head so here it is:

-

Dear Jeffrey:

Well, that damned cancer finally caught you. That’s rotten. I knew something was up when I saw MCB’s facebook posting a couple of days ago and then Jeff Clavier’s comment yesterday. Of course that led me to the lovely “Goodbye Jeffrey” post that your family posted on your blog which was really just perfect. I’ve never met Jessy, Brittany, or Mac but since they were your family, they must be cool. I’m sending them my hugs from afar.

Reading the comments over on that blog post made me think back to when I met you and the various interactions I have had with you over the past few years. I’m not sure if you remember but you and I first met in January 2007. I had just posted a blog post about wikis and you had responded, thoughtfully and with gratefulness for the positive comments and for the criticisms that would make your company better. I remember meeting you shortly thereafter at some industry event and as we both skimmed each other’s name tags and recognition registered on both of our faces, we both lit up as we remembered our recent exchange. I remember that moment so clearly. I remember thinking as we spoke, “this one is different.” You spoke passionately about Atlassian but also about music and blogging and building businesses and connecting people. I wasn’t meeting The President of Atlassian, I was meeting Jeffrey Walker, renaissance man, who played music, blogged, hacked, and was also the leader of a great little startup company.

I regret that we never got to spend a lot of time along the way although we would cross paths at the various enterprise 2.0 conferences and I would always feel like I was catching up with the old friend I never really made, if that makes any sense. I was always happy to see you anywhere we met up because you were just so darned friendly and authentic in the way you communicated and connected. I got to know you through your writing more than time spent together and then our paths diverged for a long while. When they reconnected, I learned about all of your trials with cancer and the impact that your writing had had on so many others. That prompted our final brief email discussion about this last round and how you were heading into it the same way you had the others, head held high, nice clothes on, new sunglasses on the head, and guitar in hand. And yes, that picture of you in the hospital in your cool new shirt and sunglasses does make you look bad-ass. I love it.

Then in a blink you were gone and we’re all now trying to figure out what that means and what to do with the hole you have left in so many different communities: your family, your Atlassian family, the greater Atlassian community, the Enterprise 2.0 community, the blogging community, the music community, and the entrepreneurial community. I know you will be missed in all of them.

Well, I for one am done with mourning and am moving on to celebrating and acting. You’ll be with me when I’m attending a conference and talking to my 200th (or 500th!) person and I remember that the most important thing I can do is be authentic and interested in them and in the world around us. I’ll also think of you when I continue to work on things I love with people whose company I enjoy,  and I will think of you when I put that work down for the day to go spend time doing other things I love to do like my sports and playing outside, remembering that work and family and creativity and friends all need to be blended together, just like your life and your blog.

Jeffrey, we didn’t spend enough time together but I want you to know that you had an impact from afar and that I’ll miss you and not forget you. I expect that where ever you are, you’re getting to play on an even larger stage, hack the universe and not just computers, and continue to build community. With any luck you’re up on some stage, jamming with the greats.

Rock on brother.

There are more but those have been the ones I have spent the most time immersed in this last couple of years. I have worked quite intensely in teams that have used all three of these modes:

• Phone (audio)
• Google Talk (live chat) and Phone (audio)
• Skype (live and persistent chat and audio and video)

The experiences are all very different and it has become more pronounced for me lately. I wonder if anybody has had similar experiences. First, it helps to set some context. Every tool addresses a slightly different X/Y where X is persistence and Y is dynamism.  Bob Serr has a slightly fuzzy but interesting graphic of this on his site that I’ll link here:

Phone and video and IM are highly transient and very dynamic in nature. Intranets (particularly old-school ones!) were very persistent and static. That’s changing with products like Google Sites, Microsoft Sharepoint, ThoughtFarmer and MindTouch. Documents are moving up the dynamic scale too as they move out of Microsoft Office and into Google and Zoho Docs where they can be more dynamically updated. But you’ll find something called “Persistent chat” up in the corner and it’s something that has been around in many applications for years but it’s not something that people think much about.

My point is this: your collaboration platform dictates your collaboration space – how much area you cover in this graph. More is better.

My experience in working with Group 1 (phone people) is that it’s okay but human English language is not that great at describing things so I often have to share documents or my screen out so that the people on the other end of the call can really understand clearly what I’m discussing. It’s okay but it’s very limited and I often try to move these people towards more collaborative tools.

My experience in working with teams that are using AIM, Gtalk,  or MSN (does anybody use MSN any more?) is that we can have great one-to-one communication (open channel, ping person, chat, optionally move to phone, close conversation, close channel). Moving from that to group chat is simple enough (add a person to the chat) but isn’t frequently done because group chat was only added recently, so users are not accustomed to it. Most of the GTalk users don’t know that there IS a group chat or that you can do audio and video because those features have been slowly rolled into the product but since it was always used as a one to one chat channel, it’s kind of hard to envision as anything but. It’s a chat tool trying to move upstream to become an audio/video tool and it’s not getting there very quickly from a user adoption perspective.

My experience working with teams living in Skype is materially and significantly different. It’s like going from 1940 dial phones to 2020 Star trek video phones. You might think of it as “the way to make free international phone calls” but it really is much, much more. Firstly, the whole company can have an open “watercooler” channel for trash-talking and cross-company live chatter. It’s like the kitchen of the virtual office. It’s always there and you can wander in anytime to see who’s around or even what was said hours ago. That is the power of persistent chat. Second, you can instantly set up and tear down group chat rooms, sort of like pulling four people away from their desks and ducking into a meeting room at a real office. Third, if there’s a reason to do so, you can just hit CALL and all of the attendees are now on speakerphone. Ta-da – instant voice conference without having everybody dial into a freeconference on-demand line. Fourth, you can leave those rooms open sort of like project “war rooms” so that people can have discussion in there about the project and it doesn’t have to pollute other group chats. This is really just another persistent chat, but this time narrowed to a subset of people in just this one project. The great thing about persistent chat rooms is that if you’re logged off when people are chatting, the next time you log in, all of the missed conversation will be replayed for you. This is powerful stuff. Sixth, because video is built in and works very well, people tend to set up their laptops (or purchase new ones) with cameras and actually USE them. In a prior company, we bought all employees new MacBook Pros so that everybody had instantaneous access to skype audio and video without saying “oh hang on a sec – I have to find my camera and headset and plug it in.” Heck, even the new base 13″ MacBooks have them for $1000 each! Seventh, Skype now offers one-way screen sharing which means one less application to fiddle with if you just want to jump on a screen to demo something. It actually works pretty well. That to me is a bonus because there are definitely better screen-sharing applications out there.

Running distributed project teams is hard but it’s becoming the norm. Buying centralized real estate doesn’t make sense for a whole team anymore, not when you’re hiring people all over the globe in order to get the best people for the job. My recommendation is this: if you’re running a distributed project team, figure out how to ensure that they all have machines with built-in mics and cameras and use Skype. Set up a company wide room and a room for every project team. Teach your team how to quickly assemble ad-hoc team rooms and how to make team audio calls. It will give your team a sense of connectedness and the ability to assemble ad-hoc teams that is really really hard to achieve using anything else out there at the moment.  It’s hard to run a distributed team at the best of times. the more barriers you can remove (time-wise, setup-wise, technology-wise, excuse-wise), the better the communication, and the better the business can run.

Please add your thoughts to the comments below. I’d love to hear other people’s experiences here.

Google’s Enterprise strategy so far hasn’t produced much traction — and I’m pretty sure this new plugin isn’t a silver bullet either. If businesses find out about it, this new plugin may be enough to get some companies to switch from Exchange to Google Apps, but there are several larger issues that need to be addressed before there is any kind of mass adoption.

Letting users use what they want to use (Outlook) while being able to use a back-end from Google that allows 25GB per user (and not the fantastically annoying 100 MEGA bytes offered up by most in-house Exchange admins because they want to make their lives easier and their users lives hellish) is absolutely brilliant. This is about lowering barriers to adoption and user behaviour change barriers are a big deal.

With this move, IT owners now get to provide better uptime (Gmail’s effective 99.9% uptime is frankly higher than many corporate email systems or at least close to par), more storage (250x more on average),  a much more functional web interface than Outlook Web Access, and native Blackberry push email all while saving 66% of their operational costs. I believe that enterprise adoption of Gmail will begin to increase rapidly.

I made a couple of posts the other day (post 1, post 2) about my (our collective) nightmare with respect to calendar and contact and social network management. Boris Mann responded with:

Google Wave, under all the magic, is actually based around XMPP. I’ve been predicting the second coming of XMPP as a protocol to rival HTTP since before it was called that (or, about 3 years).

I have some ideas about the identity piece, and I actually think (yes, crazy, I know) that SXIP was partially headed in the right direction.

Troy is totally spot on about data flows, although it is logins (i.e identity + permissions) plus data flows that is important. “In the future”, one might imagine a composer like Yahoo Pipes where you can “pipe” data workflows between different apps. An email is an email is an email, whether in the billing system, the PM system, or the support system.

None of these are islands, they’re already leaking into each other. We just (for now) have this terrible tool of “synch” rather than connected flows.

First let me say that Boris has always been my  bellwether of what’s coming up next. He taught me about Drupal about 2 years before anybody else cared.  And he has done this repeatedly so I trust him when he says that real-time communication and XMPP based systems are coming.

In thinking about his comment above, I realized that I needed to start a meme in the Saas world:

Integration, Integration, Integration. It’s about the Integration. (Crikey, I sound like Ballmer.)

As a business, you DO want to move to the web, but in order to actually get more benefit than just the supposed (and sometimes difficult to realize) benefits of Saas vs. on premise, it’s important to minimize the number of platforms that you adopt because every extra platform you bring on gives you more identity headache and worse, more data flow headache so your ability to have your people use those systems and flow that data around in a meaningful business process are blocked.

You want MORE Saas on FEWER platforms where everything is PRE-INTEGRATED so you can have single-sign-on and flow the data in a simple way. Salesforce + Google Apps + Echosign = bliss. Google Sites + Dropbox? Nope. Can’t do it. They don’t connect. So to achieve what I wanted the other day, namely finding a simple cloud based file server that integrates with Salesforce and Google Apps in a clean way from an identity and data availability perspective – that sounds like a business opportunity for somebody because it’s not there (or I haven’t found it yet.)

KEEP IT INTEGRATED STUPID (KIIS) – pass on the meme.

And by the way, yes, I’m aware of the Cast Iron’s of the world who help companies with these issues but defaults are important. Something like 99.999999% use the defaults (yes, I made that number up) and so if it’s not built in, then it won’t get used by the broader market.

So what do you do if you’re a business running on Google Apps who wants to have internal distribution lists? Well, you could bolt something on. Or you can use Google Groups. But if you use Google groups and your people are already using Google personal for their non-work life, things can get pretty crazy.

First, we have to make sure that you’re clear on the basics:

• Google’s personal apps and Google’s business apps are not the same, so Gmail or Google Apps Gmail are different applications with different log ins.
• Google Groups does not exist in the Business apps, it is personal.
• Businesses need to have discussion groups.
• The work around is to have your people create a NEW, PERSONAL account using their WORK email address. (Yes, brain hurting).
• So they’ll have to have THREE accounts (2 personal and 1 corporate):
  • username@work.com (which you give them from the Google Apps admin control panel);
  • username@work.com (a PERSONAL Google account that they have to set up separately on their own!) What they’ll need to do is log out of everything and sign back in as a new personal Gmail user using their corporate email address (username@work.com)
  • username@gmail.com (their original personal account that they set up on their own).
• Why is this an issue? You can have tabs open in Firefox or Internet Explorer for both the Google personal apps as well as for the Google business apps. So your people can have their personal and their work data open in front of them at the same time. But if they try to have their personal, their work, AND the groups data (which is also personal), things break.
• Here are the answers:
  • Option 1: only ever log into work or personal or groups by itself (not very productive);
  • Option 2: 2 browser approach
    • Run the personal and work applications in multiple tabs in browser #1 (or a site specific browser)
    • Run the Groups application with the new userid ID in browser #2 (or a dedicated site specific browser)
  • Option 3: 3 Site specific browsers
    • Create a site specific browser for each of these and keep them completely siloed:
      • Personal Google apps
      • Personal/Corporate Groups
      • Corporate Apps only

Will any of this ever be resolved and will Groups ever be a full Google Apps for Business application? I don’t know. But until that time comes, this will let you and your company be productive. Enjoy!

In the relatively short era of online storage, there has been no shortage of sturm und drang . As with all nascent markets, venture capital flooded in, funding many look-a-like companies with little differentiation and many have struggled to truly understand their customer’s needs and differentiate their offerings to sustain themselves over time. The result has been entertaining to say the least. It has been a ghoulish tale of ghosts, zombies, rumors, theft, deceit, and opportunity.

Back in 2007, you had Google’s GDrive still being rumoured but also being 18 months late , feisty startup Mozy winning a large scale contract from GE , ElephantDrive launched and Box.net partnered with Zoho. Fabrik raised another $24.9M, Microsoft released Windows Live SkyDrive and presenter Egnyte was telling the world that they were KM2.0 providers (remember KM 2.0?), and TechCrunch started to wonder where GDrive was (for the first but not the last time.) Nirvanix also made some waves as they released their beta , Iron Mountain – one of the largest document repository companies weighed into the market with a hybrid offering and the Wall Street Journal again warned us of the imminent arrival of GDrive. But it was not to be.

2008 had enough drama for a Michael Lewis novel. Omnidrive staggered around the edge of the deadpool like a zombie with his head still attached by a strand, and then failed again . Five months later, the CEO was still proclaiming “We’re not dead yet.” It was like the scene from Monty Python of the body collectors (see 1:02 to hear Omnidrive’s CEO say: “I think I’ll go for a walk.”)

Troubles also plagued DivShare which flew close to the deadpool before landing on the auction block back in 2007, then managed to have a security breach where user data was divulged from a “malicious user” attack (why on earth was that data available to a malicious user??), but which would go on to quietly acquire “over a million registered users” and become profitable before selling to a new set of owners over at 3Sixty in early ’09.

Still back in 2008, The big guys jumped into the fray with EMC picking up the 1990s darling Iomega (remember the 128MB iomega zip disks?) for $213M,  and Symantec buying SwapDrive for $123M, while AOL was busy shuttering a number of services including their XDrive . There were some incredible successes as well with Carbonite’s CEO taunting the market gods by bragging about their “26 consecutive months of double digit month-over-month revenue growth” and Box.net winning the online storage vendor slot for Dell’s netbook strategy.

With the economic storm in full swing and the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States past, the comedic relief ensued. The now annual rumors of GDrive’s “very near release” made the rounds for the fourth year in a row although few people are falling for that old saw anymore. Yahoo tripped, fell, and lost its Briefcase on the way to work. And perhaps as a statement on the industry’s silliness as a whole, even Dilbert jumped into the market with Dilbertfiles.com. I mean, you almost couldn’t even write that if you tried.

In the births and deaths section of the news this year, Backblaze launched what seems to be the world’s simplest backup service while HP’s Upline went offline for good, going out in a blaze of glory by refunding its users all payments that had been made to the short-lived service. In the wedding announcements, Lacie merged with Caleido AG , creators of Wuala’s online storage system.

I need a simple but powerful online file-server for a small workgroup. I have tested out JungleDisk and found it infuriatingly awful and can’t recommend it at all (to the point that I refuse to link to them). Next up are Dropbox, Egnyte, Box.net and Mozy Pro. I’ll let you know what I find. Or if you have experience with any of them, drop me a note at troy at troyangrignon dot com or leave a comment here.

There was an even more important piece of news buried in the story though. As the old journalists used to say, “Don’t bury the lead!” Google finally adapted and released a critical piece of technology from their acquisition of Positin that allows corporations to use their existing Active Directory systems (their lists of users and groups and permissions) for Google Apps. Before this Google Apps Directory Sync tool was released, the adoption barrier was so huge that there was no real way for a company to adopt Google Apps. The downstream permissioning nightmares that come with having Google Apps disconnected from your Directory Service are horrendous.

The long and short of this is that with that AD Sync tool now in place, Google has removed one more MAJOR barrier to adoption to large enterprises. Nice work Google Enterprise & Postini Team!

Frank Gillett and his team over at Forrester have released “The State Of Emerging Enterprise/SMB Hardware Trends: 2008 To 2009″ reports. You can find them here (Enterprise / SMB). The summary is below with my thoughts added at the bottom:

• x86 server virtualization adoption. Fifty-four percent of enterprises have implemented x86 server virtualization or are doing so within the next 12 months. Fifty-three percent of SMBs have already implemented x86 server virtualization or are doing so within the next 12 months.
• Virtualization of OS. Enterprises report virtualizing 31 percent of their operating system (OS) instances today, and SMBs have virtualized about 36 percent of their OS instances. In two years, enterprise respondents expect to virtualize an average of 54 percent of all OS instances, while SMB respondents expect to virtualize 61 percent of all OS instances.
• Cloud computing. Firms surveyed showed growing interest in pay-per-use-hosting of virtual servers, one of many types of cloud service offerings in the market. Five percent of enterprises have already implemented pay-per-use-hosting of virtual servers, and three percent more enterprises will be implementing within the next 12 months. Two percent of SMBs have already implemented pay-per-use-hosting of virtual servers, and two percent more SMBs plan to do so within the next 12 months.
• Power and cooling. Eighty-one percent of enterprises indicated some level of interest in increasing the electrical efficiency of the data center, although only 18 percent said they are very interested in doing so.
• Alternatives to traditional PC technologies. Firms are feeling real pain over the costs of maintaining PCs. Seventy percent of enterprises and 74 percent of SMBs said they hope to lower PC costs with alternative technologies such as various forms of desktop or client virtualization.
• Information sources and influence in purchasing. Despite the hype about Web 2.0, IT buyers really just want to know what their closest associates think. Hardware decision-makers at enterprises and SMBs reported that their peers and colleagues are the most valued traditional source of information for purchase decisions.

So, my simpler interpretation of the same data shows:

• 80% – say they’re interested in green power (but aren’t really acting on it). Much like humanity in general. I believe this number.
• ~74% have real pain with PC or client maintenance and management and hope to mitigate that with desktop and client side virtualization. This makes a lot of sense.
• 53-54% are about to or have already implemented server virtualization. This fits with what we’re hearing as we speak with people in the industry.
• 30-60% have already virtualized or are about to virtualize the operating systems.
• Only 18% of them are “very, very interested” in green power – that still doesn’t say that they have implemented any green measures.
• 2-5% of SMBs and Enterprises have implemented cloud computing and will increase that to  4-8% respectively within 12 months. This is still really early in the cloud computing cycle. What I think may be missed here though is the fact that many rogue departments are purchasing cloud computing and expensing it without ever involving the IT department. This is exactly how PCs crept into businesses and how Saas Applications also entered through the basement. My bet is that the numbers here are higher if we talk to people outside of IT.

Startups we’ve selected to present at Under the Radar are aiming squarely at the major pains and opportunities in this survey. Check out the newest companies on the horizon who are addressing: end-point virtualization, management tools, virtualization optimization, and of course, all aspects of cloud computing here.

If you are an IT professional working on any of these issues for your organization, you will want to come and attend the upcoming Under the Radar: Clarity in the Cloud on April 24, 2009. You can register here. Early bird pricing ends next week.

Under the Radar Round 2 Calls!

As many of you know, I am extremely fortunate to be assisting the Dealmaker Media team as co-chair of the upcoming Under the Radar event on April 24, 2009 in San Francisco. This is round 2 of our call for companies in the cloud computing, virtualization, software as a service, and web services categories. This is an excellent opportunity for early stage startups to present their businesses and ideas to CIOs, CTOs, and Technology VPs at companies like AT&T, Getty Images, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc, as well as VCs, prospective partners, and industry press. Of the 400 companies that have presented on this stage in the past seven years, over 50% of them have been funded (more than $1.3B in funding so far) and nearly 20% of them went on to be acquired by companies such as Google, Salesforce, Cisco, and Microsoft. This event has practically become a rite of passage for early stage startups. Previous Under the Radar Alumni include: Ribbit (which was acquired by British Telecom), Zoho (do they EVER stop building cool applications??), Box.net, Animoto, Elastra, Jive Software, 3tera, Zimbra (acquired by Yahoo), Nirvanix, LinkedIn, SupportSpace, SlideRocket and Q-Layer (acquired by Sun Microsystems.)

The deadline for applications is March 20, 2009. You can apply here.

Some of the companies who are already invited include Boomi, Ctera, Eucalyptus, Heroku, Marketo, New Relic, Qwaq, Sauce Labs, Spigit, Symplified, Tap In Systems, Twilio, uTest, Virsto, Zephyr, Zimory, and Zuora and we have more exciting companies waiting in the wings for final confirmation.

Want to learn all about cloud computing? Sign up now for early bird tickets.

For anyone looking to understand the cloud space and see who’s innovating AND who’s buying -  this is a one-day deep dive into what’s happening. Tickets are still available at the early bird discount rate. To register for that rate, please click here.

Judges, Moderators, and Sponsors

Here are some of the judges who are committed so far (with more to come):

• Bipin Sahni, VP Technology Manager , Wells Fargo
• Steve Phillpott, Chief Information Officer, Amylin Pharmaceuticals
• Steve Heck, Chief Technology Officer, Getty Images
• Doug Harr, CIO, Ingres
• Gary Little, Partner, Morgenthaler
• James Urquhart, Market Manager: Cloud Computing & Virtualization, Cisco
• Joe Weinman, Strategy and Emerging Services Vice President, Corporate Bus.
• Development – AT&T
• John Foley, Editor, Information Week
• Larry Dignan, Editor, ZDNet
• Maha Ibrahim, Partner, Canaan Partners
• Matthew Glotzbach, Director of Product Management, Google Enterprise
• Mike Maggs, Director of Business Development, Azure group (Microsoft)
• Mitchell Kertzman, Managing Director, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners
• Rob Hayes, Partner, First Round Capital
• Robin Vasan, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund
• Sunil Dhaliwal, Partner, Battery Ventures

We have also pleased to have some excellent moderators for the event:

• Rafe Needleman, Editor at Large, Cnet
• Jeremy Toeman, Stage Two Consulting
• Charlene Li, Co-Author – Groundswell
• Ellen McGirt, Sr. Writer, FastCompany

Of course, an event of this size is only possible with great sponsors and we have the best possible sponsors for this event:

• Gunderson Dettmer
• Microsoft
• Mosso – The Rackspace Cloud
• Salesforce.com

“Are companies getting funded?” The answer still appears to be yes. As long as the market opportunity is solid, the company has an “A” team (or is close to achieving that), and they’re solving real pains for known, addressable customers, the funding still seems to be flowing. Here are a handful of companies in the space that have received funding in 2008 and already in 2009.

So while you are ramping up early customers, keeping your burn rate low, and learning as much as possible from your early customers, (and if it makes sense to take venture capital which is a whole separate post), then you probably want to keep pitching to prospective investors. It might take a little while longer but if you have the right ingredients there is funding out there.

We will be able to announce more financing events soon from some new and exciting companies so stay tuned! Also, if you know of other companies getting funded, leave us a comment below or email us at <utr at dealmakermedia dot com>.

This April 24, 2009, I’m fortunate to be working with Dealmaker Media who will be hosting the 13th Under the Radar conference. In one day we will present a full roster of innovative startups, tech thought leaders, and REAL enterprise & big media customers who are buying cloud services to let you see for yourself what the cloud REALLY MEANS…

What is Cloud Computing?

We have a very simple but broad definition of cloud computing:

Applications, services, platforms, or infrastructure that are highly abstracted or virtualized, web service enabled, able to be automatically provisioned, and generally charged on a pay-as-you-go model.

As the market evolves, we predict that there will be a number of clouds from a variety of vendors with a range of performance characteristics. They will vary by location, security, pricing models, supported “stacks”, degree of regulatory compliance, location, service level agreements, and many other dimensions.

Benefits of cloud computing

The key benefits of cloud computing are that it allows organizations to:

• shift up-front capital expenditures to ongoing operational costs which can allow businesses to provision more quickly or scale faster than if they had to deploy capital;
• provision infrastructure more quickly than by their traditional infrastructure purchasing and provisioning model;
• dynamically match computing capacity to demand more accurately, which means less wasted resources in low-traffic times, and less downtime during high-traffic times;
• test ideas with a lower threshold by deploying test environments in the cloud and then shutting them down when not in use;
• scale up to computing capacities that would have been impossible to achieve in any other way cost-effectively;
• decrease the time-to-value of new IT projects because of the faster provisioning and lower costs.

In short, it allows organizations to do more, faster, with less resources. In some cases, it allows organizations to do things they could never have dreamed of doing before. 

Current Issues with Cloud Computing

It is still early days for this next generation of computing. There are many issues to work through including: security; performance; vendor lock-in; cloud interoperability;  stack selectivity (only certain clouds will support certain technology stacks); cross-cloud portability, administration, and management; regulatory compliance (current clouds do not comply with many regulatory frameworks such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, PCI, data protection regulation or others), and even common metering and billing models.

We believe that this is an opportunity for entrepreneurs to identify and fill those gaps by picking components of the stack and bringing them forward into this new era and we’re hand-picking the best ones to tell their story on April 24!

Early Bird Tickets are going fast. Register to be the first to meet and do deals with these innovators.

Anybody else have better insight yet?

It’s also nice to see that Google continues to march inexorably forward and continue to solve the non-trivial tasks of making their online apps work offline. First came Google Docs Offline in March 2008. Now they have released Gmail Offline and Google Calendar Offline. The offline Gmail at least lets you send new messages. The offline calendar is limited and read-only which seems hardly worth the bother. Why not just subscribe your iCal or Outlook to your GCal and be done with it? But I’m guessing that these are just incremental steps towards greater functionality that will be released over time. One of the most interesting things for me is that they are releasing this functionality to paying “Google Apps” clients first. Nice to see that paying for a web app gets you to the front of the line. I actually LIKE that. I wish the Google apps team continued success. Having lived in Google Apps for the better part of the past  year and half, I find the tools to be an incredible value.

[UPDATE June 15, 2009: According to TechPulse360, Google's Dave Girouard stated that the five year old Google Apps program "has attracted 1.75 million businesses – with dozens of them with more than 1000 employees – and totaling more than 15 million active users." Which means that they may be ahead of the trajectory noted above. Great progress Google Apps team.]