100% Cotton

Great Article on SOA

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/mgmt/66465FFD087DA621CC2573800011B1F0

 

"You're not going to throw the baby out with the bath water. You are going to continue to leverage your previous investments," Gardner says. In fact, Bloomberg adds, "[SOA] is not really that disruptive on the technology side. SOA helps leverage existing technologies. It has a heterogeneity story that says, 'Well, you don't have to replace. You can leave and abstract as needed."

 

This is a good article around how organizations will be challenged to break down silos and leverage prior IT investments across the organizations. SOA or BSM is not about reinventing the wheel its about getting more out of prior investments and aligning those investments around the business.

 

Steve

 

I’m Back

I have not posted for a few days, while building a great company is a lot of fun, sometimes other priorities take precedence. This last week I lost a member of my family unexpectedly and as you could imagine it gave me pause in my daily life. I paused to be with my family and reflect on what's really important in life – our loved ones, family and friends. One thing I do feel good about; I know the company we are building will help folks simplify their lives and hopefully give them more time with their loved ones. I hope you take time out to let the ones you care about know how you feel!!

 

Steve

Moving

One of the purposes of my Blog was to share the Journey of building a technology company (FireScope) that is focused on BSM and specifically how Web 2.0 technologies can be leveraged to simplify IT Operations. As most of you know FireScope is a Enterprise Mash Up that helps company's streamline their IT operations and reduce costs. We have been enjoying wide acceptance and success since we launched our company. With success comes the need for more room, so this last weekend we moved our headquarters for the third time – we doubled our space. This is cool; however, what I forgot was how much I hate moving – when you're a start-up CEO there is no facilities department to move you. I talked my buddy into waiting with me at 6:00am for the carpet guys to show up. We wanted everything carpeted prior to the team moving boxes, desks, phones etc – you get the point. There were many challenges during our move over the weekend; however, we got FireScope's third move in 12 months done. I hope this space lasts a little longer than the previous one – at least for now!

One of the points I try to stress to our team is to be frugal about what we spend, I stress that the capital we spend should be focused on our product and getting the message out – not on fancy offices (personally, I'm not a big fan of individual offices). Every company that I have been associated with that has done really well had an abundance of collaborative space and less emphasis on traditional office space. The ones that had office space to match a founders or a manager's ego struggled. So with this move we were able to keep our emphasis on collaborative space to allow our folks to stay focused on our product through collaborative teamwork. I'll keep you posted on how we like our new digs…

A Cool Blog

Doing my research this morning on how to reduce costs or drive your business model – I came across a very informative blog on Web 2.0 written by Dion Hinchcliffe, check it out and see what you think….

 

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/?p=135

Reduce Operating Costs Leveraging Mash-ups – Part 1 the Challenge

I was flying yesterday to visit our development team in Dallas and I was thinking about how to reduce IT and operating costs using these new mash-up web 2.0 technologies. For those who don't know me – I tend to think a lot about reducing costs and business models, so I approach technologies from a cost reduction or simplifying a business model perspective. Cool technologies are great, but if they do not help reduce costs, improve the quality of our daily lives or improve our business model – what's the point. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to try to answer the question "How to reduce operating costs leveraging Web 2.0 technologies?" . If you have thoughts or articles that you think would help answer this question – join in. The goal is to take a real life data center example look at their costs and see how those costs could be reduced leveraging Web 2.0 Mash-ups…..Stay tuned.

More on Good to Great

Found this on Symantec's blog - 5 steps to go from good to great in IT.  I found step 4 interesting - but I'm a little bias :>)

http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2007/10/it_risk_management_five_steps.html

Wanted: Great Visionaries with Passion

Just woke up its 5:30am – last week was another incredible week for FireScope, I spent the majority of my week interviewing candidates to join our revolutionary company.  A few months back I had read a book called Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by Jim Collins – great read about why companies succeed and fail.  My take away was it was all about great people, not good, but truly great people.  So my mission last week was to find some great people for FireScope – not an easy task.

The candidates I interviewed are really talented and have had a great track record developing, selling or marketing for other software companies.  FireScope’s challenge, find the right candidates with great experience and passion, candidates willing to re-think about how IT operations and BSM tools have historically been delivered to the customer – proprietary framework vs. an open framework leveraging Web 2.0, Mash-Up’s, AJAX etc.  Technologies that enable the customer to easily implement a BSM solution that aligns to their business without complicated licensing that historically has been a big compliant of customers.  FireScope has grown fast due to our great people who are passionate about technology, and how technology can be used by our customers to simplify their businesses.  To fuel our future growth we need more great passionate people….. 

I spent half of my time last week, interviewing this candidate and that candidate, listening to them talk about their past accomplishments, what they are passionate about in work and in life, why they will make a difference at FireScope.  With ever approaching interview, I would get excited that this is going to be the one, the one candidate that stands out above the rest.  Well after a dozen 1 ½ hour plus interviews, I have a single candidate that I think will be a good fit.  So why is this candidate different than the rest of the talented individuals that I interviewed?  Well this individual possessed qualities we were looking for and three other qualities that are essential in fueling FireScope’s future growth:

1.      Passion for life and work.  They really believe they can make a difference for customers and they genuinely care about people.

2.      Curious not just about FireScope, but in general.  You could tell by the questions they asked – curiosity to me means they will seek to understand our customers in helping them with their IT and business challenges.

3.      Opinion – they have an opinion.  I mean they get engaged and tell you what they think or believe.  Revolutions are started by free thinking and people who speak-up about a different path or a way of doing things – Our customers expect us to look for ways to make IT operations simpler.  We need people who express fresh ideas about what that means.

Next week this candidate will visit with the rest of the team – I hope they will be as excited as I ‘am about this talented individual.  More to come….. 

Mash Ups

Grabbing a cup of coffee a buddy of mine asked what is a web 2.0 Mash – Up.   I explained to him what I thought it was which was essentially creating a new application by putting together other applications – he looked puzzled and I think even I was a little puzzled as to how to best explain this to him – so I went in search of a better definition and example of a Web 2.0 Mash-Up – I learned a lot so I decided to share with you what I learned…..

A Mash Up is a web application that uses data sources for different applications to create a new application.  An example of that would be Google Maps integrating real estate information, thus creating a new application that was not originally architected by Google or the real estate company.  Ok there has to be other examples, let me dig some more:

So here is a cool link of Mash – ups.  http://www.mashups.com/software.htm 

I looked through this and while the mash-ups are cool and fun, my CFO experience said there has to be some more practical examples of mash-ups that help solve real world problems.   So my search continues ….

Ok back, after searching further I came across a pretty good article on practical mash-up business models  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mashup_business.php .  Let me know what you think.   Talk to you later…