100% Cotton

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…

Welcome to 100% Cotton

I’m Steve Cotton, CEO of FireScope Inc., and welcome to my blog – 100% Cotton. As some of you may know, FireScope celebrated its first anniversary just last month.  It’s been an incredible first year that started with a few napkin drawings, a concept and nine founding members. Twelve months later, we’re approaching 40 full time employees, have a mature product deployed world-wide and have generated lots of buzz within the media.

Whenever I mention the age of FireScope, I’m met with incredulous looks.  It’s virtually unheard of for startups to achieve full funding, bring a product to market and successfully sell – all within the first year.  I’m repeatedly asked how we accomplished it all.  Thus, the creation of 100% Cotton, where over the coming months I’ll discuss in detail how FireScope has brought a revolution both to the business service management market space and to how businesses embrace emerging technology to achieve better effectiveness.  I hope you enjoy the read!

BSM from the CEO Perspective

When you mention Business Service Management to someone, be prepared to hear lots of different versions of what it is.  Everyone seems to have their own definition, usually focused around specific feature sets and terms of technology.  In my opinion, this misses the core concept of what BSM is supposed to deliver – an end to the communication divide between information technology and the business it supports.

In my time, I’ve been a CFO, a COO and a CEO of several large multi-national businesses, and I realized early on that BSM is just as much about that side of the business as it is about Information Technology.  Since computers first entered the office, business leaders have largely seen IT as just another cost center: an essential part of the business, but not directly linked to the success of the business.  Unfortunately, many in IT leadership positions contribute to this perception by discussing technology in the terms of technology, a language the rest of the business simply doesn’t understand.  Additionally, while every other department within the business has their own unique set of metrics to measure success or failure – revenue generation figures, client retention metrics, employee turnover – IT tends to either not be set to any, or have so few as to raise questions as to the value of IT.

Business Service Management, in my opinion, represents the best approach to resolving these issues and making IT a full partner to the success of the business.  That’s because, as I see it, BSM is all about measuring and reporting IT in such a way that a VP of Sales, the CFO and CEO can all easily grasp what IT is doing for them and the business as a whole.  It’s about looking at technology from a completely different perspective that lifts the discussion above the technology and focuses on the end result. 

Now, this certainly leaves room for debate over the best approach to achieving BSM, what metrics are best measured or how to deliver this information to the user.  And while I’m a bit biased, I do think FireScope’s flexible framework offers the best approach by enabling the client to make many of these decisions themselves.  So far, every time we’ve demo’ed FireScope, this has been among the features clients are most impressed with.  You can read more about that in future posts.

I’m passionate when it comes to Business Service Management.  Of the multitudes of emerging technologies I’ve seen in the new millennia, I thoroughly believe that BSM and the best practices and processes surrounding it will have a lasting impact on technology and the perception of users and administrators.  The days of technology for technology’s sake are over, at least as far as the business world is concerned.  It’s time for IT to prove its value and align its focus on the business.