Our wait has ended. Not because they have actually done anything, but the opposite. It’s time to stop waiting.

Last week perhaps the biggest news out of Google IO, Google unveiled a new messaging platform centered around Google+. The name is Google Hangouts (version 2). The new expanded Hangouts is a separate application for Android, iOS, and a web interface that supports IM and video chat. It replaces Google Talk and G+ Messenger. Well at least that’s the plan. The feedback hasn’t been so great so Google now allows users to migrate back to the old Talk application in case they still want to communicate with others.

The basic problem is Hangouts is a step backward. It’s claim to fame is better synchronization among devices – also it supports 10-15 (different figures in different places) simultaneous video chat participants. Its list of problems is a bit longer. For one, the Google Voice integration is gone. Users that “upgrade” to Hangouts will lose ability to make calls to the PSTN, and won’t be able to send SMS messages. Hangouts supports video calling, but not voice (which do you use more?). Another point of contention is that Hangouts won’t support XMPP server relationships like Talk did – there goes enterprise integrations to platforms from Cisco, Microsoft, Avaya, and others.

Google positions the new Hangouts as its strategic future – something likely modeled after Skype and Facebook’s messaging solution. It is intended to be cross platform – unless you happen to use a Blackberry or Microsoft phone.

Google Voice has been bothering me for a while because I don’t see Google doing anything with it – and its service quality is degrading. It languishes in the GooglePlex as a cost center that hasn’t been monetized. Though costs are down with the two principals Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet gone. Not to mention any costs of development to integrate it into other Google products.

The fact that Hangouts was arguably one of the biggest announcements at the Google IO conference, and somehow forgot to include the highly visible features of Google Voice is quite the Freudian Slip.

After reviewing web comments over the weekend, Google+ updated its page stating “Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice, and making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning.” You can read that multiple ways, and I might recommend to start considering a replacement search to Google Voice users.

Google simply isn’t serious about voice. It hasn’t done much with Google Voice and it is an afterthought with the new Hangouts. There are ways to integrate business class voice services into the Google Apps cloud solution. From a premises perspective – check out Esna and AVST. Also, some UC vendors, such as Siemens Enterprise, support Apps integration. From the cloud perspective Verizon has integrated Google Apps into its hosted UC offer. Also, check out startup gUnify, which offers a clever integration between Google Apps and hosted UC from BroadSoft based providers.

Related articles

• New Hangouts App Conflicts With Google Voice Feature; Fix Coming (allthingsd.com)
• Hangouts is ‘the future of Google Voice,’ full calling functionality will return to desktop soon (theverge.com)
• Hangouts in Gmail dumps Google Voice integration (pcworld.com)
• Google Hangouts upgrade removes ability to host Google Voice calls on your computer (theverge.com)
• Reports: Google Voice incompatible with your iPhone 4? (reviews.cnet.com)
• Don’t Upgrade to Hangouts If You Use Google Voice on Your Computer (gizmodo.com)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

I have talked about this publicly a great deal – how I prefer “missionaries” over “mercenaries.”

But lately I’m more swayed by the wise words of Reid Hoffman.

“Founder is a state of mind, not a job description”

We all love the mythical stories of our great founder heroes who drove startups from scratch and led their businesses many years later: Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos and so on.

Very few founder CEOs go into the job ever expecting to give up their seat. It’s your baby. Your idea. You took the biggest leap of faith. It becomes an extension of self rather than a job.

So give up the CEO role?

Fuck no.

But it’s actually not that simple.

Jonathan Strauss took this issue head on in a blog post that I believe every startup founder should read on “Replacing Oneself as CEO.”

“After 3 and a half years of fusing my self-worth with the success of the company in the crucible of startup survival, it was impossible to tear them apart without pain.

But while my first reaction was disappointment and failure, it was almost immediately washed away by a wave of relief.

I knew change was inevitable, but I had no idea how stressful and exhausting maintaining my internal reality distortion field had been until they gave me permission to turn it off.”

I can’t imagine many founding CEO’s who don’t read Jonathan’s words and know exactly what he means.

I saw this first hand. The confidence, energy, passion and humor that are hallmarks of Jonathan became muted in the pressures of needing to show financial successes to match one’s enormous product vision and ambitions.

I told Jonathan (and believe) that this would be the best year of his professional life. He gets to return his focus and energy back to what got him so passionate in the first place – product – while now having a seasoned leader and enough capital to fulfill his vision.

I spoke with TechCrunch TV recently about the decision to give up the CEO seat, the stresses of the job and my perspective of the situation as an investor. You can watch it here.

I have never felt prouder of the team & product at awe.sm (please visit to check out our latest & be ready for our next big product announcement due out in next month or so) and yet we just brought in a new CEO to the company, Fred McIntyre.

How could these statements live in the same sentence?

*******

An Awe.Sm story

I first met Jonathan nearly 4 years ago. I know because I marked the occasion with a blog post on how to have a great VC meeting. I wrote about Jonathan’s visit (but never named him by name until now) because it was so memorable. His vision for social analytics and tracking the conversion funnel was better than any I had heard at the time (or since).

He talked about how we were going through a period of time in which people were measuring “likes” and “followers” but not the real value of social media conversion by tracking what actually converts into business and that few people understood the catalyst of what drove a successful campaign in the first place. It is what he set out to build and he had huge initial success in landing big clients like Disney, Zynga, Gilt and TopSpin.

I funded Jonathan’s first $500,000. For the entire first year after I funded the company he refused to take a salary and I had to admonish him to make sure he paid his expenses. He worked his ass off and delivered an amazing technical infrastructure to support a “big data meets social analytics” platform that could be used by any developer.

Yet our initial customer success didn’t translate into big revenue growth and we faced issues such as:

• Do we support developers, end-users or both?
• Do we price for volume of consumption or for enterprise integration with other platforms?
• Do we have a heavy-touch implementation and support or a lightweight one by integrating with products that white-label us?
• Do we optimize for “social sharing tools” or merely for back-end analytics?

The decisions were endless, the choices not obvious and the VC involved a pain in the ass. The financial pressures of running a startup started to hit Jonathan. I saw it first hand.

I have a very public seed stage investment policy  and awe.sm was definitely in the bucket of amazingly talented founders with a great product that hadn’t yet proved product/market fit.

So I wrote another check to extend our runway another year. The second check was $400,000 out of a $500,000 round. And I forced Jonathan to start paying himself.

Our product really started to show its strengths in attribution as we were able to prove publicly that Twitter was driving more traffic than people had acknowledged but it wasn’t showing up in referral logs due to what is known as the “last mile problem.”

We had inbound M&A requests from some of the biggest names in tech. We did a gut check and I asked Jonathan what he wanted to do. He knew that I didn’t want to give up on his journey but I would if that’s what he wanted.

He told me he couldn’t give up when there was so much more to prove. He remained as committed to the company vision as when we first met.

We had VCs show interest in funding awe.sm and settled on Foundry Group and raised $4 million ($1 million more from me).  It was great to get some new ideas around the table and to have some money to execute on our plans with more resources than before.

Yet with major advances in our product infrastructure we still hadn’t proven we could scale sales. It was really hard to look at the situation and know that the answer was that Jonathan needed help and that what he really needed was a boss. The board was unanimous in our opinion of this including outside director Ian Rogers who has served as Jonathan’s mentor and friend.

We knew what was right for the company and wanted to see the company succeed more than protect Jonathan’s short-term ego hit. Jonathan shared that experience in his blog post so I won’t repeat it.

But we did offer Jonathan his second gut check. We knew we had a valuable product that an acquiring company would gain greatly from and a world-class engineering and product team that would be valued by a buyer. If he wanted to sell we would enable it, but if given the choice I preferred to see the team fulfill their dream and I never lost confidence that our market was there. Nobody has stepped in with as complete of a vision as awe.sm has.

Jonathan went through a reflection period and chose to continue the journey. We have spend the last 6 months working on our next generation product and as one of the main beta testers I can tell you it’s the best stuff we’ve put out to date so I was very pleased with his decision to fight on.

We set out to find Jonathan’s “co-founder.” Somebody who had lived with the marketing consequences of trying to track online conversion from websites, google, mobile and social.

We found Fred McIntyre who had worked with Ian Rogers in the past and therefore we had a strong connection with his past skills, drive and determination. He has joined the team as CEO and shown an immediate desire to “live the company” in the way that founders did. To be a founder in state of mind.

*********

My Own Journey – And Replacing a CEO

I actually don’t talk about it publicly much but I am one of those people who gave up the CEO role in my first company so I know the emotional roller coaster it can be.

I had never even considered it, it wasn’t an option. But I was part of a networking group called YPO, which has a subsection called “forum” in which a small group of your peers meets monthly to discuss life. Topics range from aging parents, marital strife, infidelity, disease, stress, life’s true mission, giving back – you name it. I was staggered to hear people talking so openly.

I wish the tech community would found its own version of YPO Forum. It might help us better prepare for the enormous pressure & stress of being a founder, it might help us realize when there are people with serious depression in our midst (and try to spot people considering suicide), and frankly it might just be a great outlet for all of those insecurities you can’t tell your team, your co-founders and your VCs.

In my case it was the encouragement to hand off the role of CEO of BuildOnline before the company was eventually sold.

I had stayed for 6 years. I loved the entire journey – good and bad – and the employees and customers. But I was also in a rut where I felt I had lost the ability to be innovative and I had lost a bit of the passion & fun that came with the early days that were more existential and involved more intellectual challenges and less managerial ones.

The truth is I have never enjoyed running team meetings, managing processes & procedures and deciding HR policies, promotions and org structures.

There is no better article on the topic than Reid Hoffman’s post about giving up the role of CEO at LinkedIn.

“CEOs need to derive satisfaction from the nuts and bolts of building a company, not just building product and articulating the vision.  They need to be passionate about leadership, management, and organizational processes as the company scales.”

In this day and age many people will tell you that you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can simply hire a COO to do these things while retaining the CEO title but focusing mostly on product.

I have previously written why I don’t believe in the COO role at early-stage startups.

Reid weighed in eloquently on this topic.

“[to be CEO you need to] devote substantial time to time consuming things like running meetings and other business process. You can’t just do the exciting stuff like making the final call on product and speaking at conferences, while shuffling off everything else to the mythical COO who loves doing all the dirty work and doesn’t want any of the credit

… I had thought about the COO option, but I knew that the company needed someone who felt like they “owned the ball.””

Mythical COO who loves doing the dirty work with no credit. Kind of like a mythical Vice President of the United States who wants to be behind the scenes but doesn’t want the top job.

Therein lies the dilemma.

The best people almost always want the top job if they’re going to put in the real work effort. Of course there are exceptions – the most obvious one being Sheryl Sandberg.

Reid’s admission of his interests sounds like something I would have written myself verbatim

“I’d rather be solving intellectual challenges and figuring out key strategies, not debating which employees should get a promotion, or configuring project timelines.”

So Reid set out to hire a CEO. His first attempt was Dan Nye who had some success but apparently one key missing ingredient. Reid believes that you need a CEO who is also passionate about product and he later found that person in Jeff Weiner.

Jeff joined early enough to feel like a “founder” even though he wasn’t there at the “founding.” He was as passionate about the product as Reid and became the biggest eater of the LinkedIn dog food. He had founder mentality.

This seems to be the exact situation at Twitter. While Dick Costolo wasn’t there at the founding it seems clear that he has become the reasoned voice of the growth of Twitter. And while it was another team entirely that sparked the product adoption that is now Twitter, there is no doubt in my mind Twitter would not be its current success without Dick at the helm driving product, user engagement, capital raising and revenue growth.

Again, captured eloquently in the words of Reid Hoffman

“Being there at the start isn’t the only path to being a founder.  “Founder” is a state of mind, not a job description.”

So true.

So I look forward to watching the next awe.sm chapter unfold. To watching Fred lead our sales, marketing and implementation efforts and driving the recruiting & financing of the company. And watching Jonathan to continue to build on the product vision that started 4 years ago from his desire to fix a large part of the Internet’s inefficiencies.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Image credit: rambling anymouse

The always insightful Mark Suster recently tackled the subject of acquihires–the practice of large companies buying small startups simply to acquire their people.  Mark lays out an excellent argument for why the acquiring companies are actually losing out when they make acquihires:

“You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! for years. You have worked faithfully. Evenings. Weekends. Year in, year out. You have shipped to hard deadlines. You’ve done the death-march projects. In the trenches. You got the t-shirt. And maybe got called out for valor at a big company gathering. They gave you an extra 2 days of vacation for your hard work.

And that prick sitting in the desk next to you who joined only last week now has $1 million because he built some fancy newsreader that got a lot of press but is going to be shut down anyways.

What kind of message does that send to the party faithful who slave away loyally to hit targets for BigCo?

I’ll tell you what is says.

It says if you want to make “real” money  - quit.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Acquihires create incentives for a host of undesirable behavior.  It’s not just the fact that you’re encouraging people to quit–it’s also that you’re sending the message that the hard work of serving customers in a real business–what creates the actual value in the economy–is a job for unambitious suckers.  Far better to focus on building sexy demo products and collecting an acquihire bounty.

But there’s an even worse problem–acquihires contribute to the startup industry’s problems with truthiness.  Every time I see an acquisition announced on TechCrunch, it’s full of compliments and congratulations.  Yet the simple fact is that unless a price is announced, the acquisition is just an easy way for investors and entrepreneur to sweep failure under the rug.

Many people would be amazed to learn how many “successful” people are actually failures, at least in terms of the return to their investors.  But investors have no incentive to disrupt the game–investing in failures hurts your reputation and your fundraising.  Better to keep quiet and play along.

The result is that our entire culture is built on evading the truth.  We like to criticize the financial services industry for dishonesty, yet we’re guilty of much the same.

That being said, I’ve signed off on a number of acquihires of my portfolio companies–better to get something back, rather than lose all the money.  I guess my honesty has a price too!

(Cross-posted @ Adventures in Capitalism)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Cloud services are increasingly being used as a foundation to drive business, functional and IT transformation.  And while the concept of transformation isn’t new, there are though several factors that make cloud-enabled transformation in the enterprise uniquely challenging.   Here’s some specific issues I’ve seen with several recent enterprise cloud transformation efforts:

1. Executive sponsorship and risk – any successful business or IT transformation effort requires executive sponsorship.  What’s different about cloud is the profile and nature of execution risk.  Cloud transformation often requires executives to bet their careers on cloud service providers and their ability to deliver.   In conservative enterprises where cloud is still perceived by many to be risky, insecure and not “enterprise-ready”, it’s a rare breed of executive that will make that bet.
2. Frontline alignment – most enterprise transformation efforts historically have been top-down exercises driven by centralized strategic planning.  Cloud transformation efforts are unique in that they required both executive mandates as well as incentives for frontline employees.  Take for example application development transformation.  In the old world a standardized set of platforms, services and tools could be mandated by corporate IT, and developers would have little choice.  Today if the services incentives aren’t right, developers can still easily go rogue and take their apps to Amazon or Rackspace.  That’s why recent successful app dev transformation efforts like the one at JP Morgan Chase have relied on a combination of top-down mandate and bottom-up adoption.  This example can be extended to broader business and IT transformation efforts.  If incentives aren’t aligned with employees, they’ll often drive their own transformation efforts on their own terms.
3. Time and tempo – cloud-enabled business transformation typically involves using agility and time-to-market acceleration as sources of competitive differentiation.  This requires not just rethinking business processes and platforms, but also core skills and capabilities.  Cloud and big data dramatically compress the time required for enterprises to observe, orient, decide and act in response to the market (or in fighter pilot speak the “OODA loop”).  The wide scale use of time and tempo as competitive advantage is a relatively new one for many enterprises, one they’re not familiar or comfortable with yet.  The concept of being first to market certainly isn’t new, but the intensity and pace it currently takes to be first is.
4. Skills shortages – it’s a mundane topic that no one still really likes to discuss, but the lack of cloud skills is a real issue stopping organizations from doing more with cloud.  This is certainly becoming apparent to service providers, which is why you see things like Rackspace’s Open Cloud Academy and Amazon’s AWS Training and Certification.  This isn’t just an operational and support issue.  Without talent it also becomes difficult to evaluate opportunities and develop a roadmap, let alone determine how to drive a wide-scale transformation effort on cloud services.
5. Pace of innovation – the interplay between cloud and open source is driving a pace of innovation that is difficult for even the earliest of enterprise adopters to keep pace with.  This is certainly true at the IaaS and PaaS layers, and may eventually play out in SaaS as well.  While committing to cloud as a foundation for transformation is one thing, recognizing the ongoing investments in talent and skills required to leverage cloud platforms is another.  Taken together with the skills gap mentioned above, the pace of innovation poses a significant challenging for those deciding whether to drive a wide scale transformation effort.

While it may come as a surprise the some, the critical factors for success in driving cloud transformation have little, if anything to do with technology.  People, skills and incentives are becoming the name of the game in cloud transformation.

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

But the thing is, you get 5/6ths of your SaaS revenue from your customers AFTER you close the deal, AFTER the first contract … and that’s all customer / client success my friend …

If you haven’t “done” customer success before yourself … if you don’t know how to manage and engage customers over the long term … learn.  It’s an art and a science.  Don’t wing it.

There’s a lot of ways to learn Client Success … but I’ve got to say, this conference on May 30 in San Francisco has a killer list of speakers on client success, and I don’t know where else you’d connect with so many of them.  I’m up on stage (I think) with our VP of Client Success who’s speaking.

It’s not free, but I’d spend a few bucks if you want to learn about Client Success.  Where else you gonna get this horsepower?

Trust me, if you don’t know client success yourself — just learning from Bill Binch at Marketo (just IPO’d, up 67%); Kathy Lord at Intacct; and Eitan Saban from Adobe EchoSign alone is worth the $195-$295.  All three are geniuses here.  I don’t know everyone on the list, but man, it’s solid.  [There are some decent CEOs and VCs on the list, too, but you can see them anywhere ]

More here: http://customersuccess.eventbrite.com/ and http://www.customersuccess.org/

Go.  If I’m wrong and it’s not worth it, I’ll buy you lunch or a drink or three to make it up to you.

————————————–

Over 200 executives from industry leading organizations will share best practices on developing a customer-centric culture across the entire organization, and how their companies are organizing, planning, staffing, training, analyzing, cost justifying and automating Customer Success efforts.

Announced Speakers:

• Geoffrey Moore, Author of Crossing the Chasm
• Aaron Levie, CEO at Box
• Dan Steinman, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight
• Bernie Kassar, VP Customer Success at Xactly
• Kathy Lord, VP Sales and Customer Success at Intaact
• Tien Tzuo, CEO at Zuora
• Lori Wright, VP eCommerce Retention at Symantec
• Roger Lee, Partner at Battery Ventures
• Chris Cabrera, CEO at Xactly
• Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight
• Aaref Hilaly, Partner at Sequoia Capital
• Dr. Fred Van Bennekom, Customer Feedback Architect
• Byron Deeter, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners
• Kia Puhm, VP Customer Success at Oracle Eloqua
• Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, SVP Distribution Chief of Staff at Salesforce.com
• Bill Binch, SVP Sales at Marketo
• Abhay Rajaram, VP Customer Success at YouSendIt
• Amanda Schmidt, Senior Director of Customer Success at Marketo
• Jon Herstein, VP Customer Success at Box
• Eitan Saban, VP Head of Client Success at Adobe Echosign
• Mikael Blaisdell, Customer Relationship Architect
• Ping Li, General Partner at Accel Partners
• Greg Higham, CIO at Marketo
• Laura Lederman, Principal at William Blair
• Anjanette Hill-Mendoza, Director, Customer Engagement at YouSendIt
• Jeff Kaplan, Managing Director at THINKstrategies
• Lincoln Murphy, Principal at Sixteen Ventures
• Mike Rutz, VP of Sales at Angie’s List
• Bruce Felt, Former CFO at SuccessFactors
• Bryan Plaster, Director of Customer Success at Informatica Cloud
• Chad Horenfeld, Director of Customer Operations at Influitive
• Chris Stewart, AVP, Global Client Success Services at Cornerstone OnDemand
• Catherine Blackmore, VP Account Management at Badgeville

We hope that you’ll join us on Thursday, May 30th at the Four Seasons Hotel in San Francisco, California from 9:00 AM to 6:30 PM and help define the future of this developing industry.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Adam Baldwin is presenting…

Introducing NodeSecurity.io

Adam Baldwin

Adam Baldwin is a web app hacker, team lead at ^Lift Security and the CSO for &yet. Adam has presented at various security & dev conferences in the past including, DEFCON, Djangocon, Toorcamp and RealtimeConf.

The node.js community is growing at an amazing rate. At the time of writing there was 27,757 modules publised on npm. Have you ever stopped to think just what you are putting into your project when you npm install somebody else’s module? Do you trust that code? This is an insane project to find out the answer to that question.

This talk will introduce the nodesecurity.io project, it’s goals, current results in hopes of inspiring involvement and receiving feedback directly from the node community!

James Halliday is presenting…

beep boop

James

Oh hello. I write too much code. I co-founded browserling. Here are some pretty pictures.

Unix philosopher and methodological reductionist etc.

Learn how to make computer sounds in node and the browser with the same api.

Using just a single function that takes a parameter t, time in seconds, and returns an amplitude between -1 and 1, inclusive, you can create music!

You can use this basic approach to write songs and synthesizers. In javascript. Yay!

Ryan Jarvinen is presenting…

Clustering Node.js on OpenShift

Ryan

Ryan Jarvinen is an Open Platform Advocate working with RedHat’s OpenShift team. He lives in Oakland, California and is passionate about open source, open standards, open government, and digital rights. You can reach him as ‘ryanj’ on twitter, github, and IRC.

Learn how to automate builds, deployment tasks, and application scaling as we use OpenShift’s platform architecture on-demand to build your own git-based release pipeline, including: development, testing, staging, and cloud-scaling production environments for node.js.

Slides:

• http://darkslides-rjdemo.rhcloud.com
• https://github.com/ryanj/darkslides/

Posts:

• https://www.openshift.com/blogs/secret-free-source-on-paas
• https://www.openshift.com/blogs/release-management-in-the-cloud

An adaptation of this talk was presented recently at HTML5DevConf in SF - http://html5devconf.com/sessions.html#r_jarvinen

Intro to Sails.js

Mike McNeil is presenting…

Mike

Mike autobiogrophies himself as, “I’m Mike, a developreneur based out of Austin, Texas and connoisseur of fine code. I’m also the creator of Sails.js, the open-source BaaS framework which allows front-end developers to build robust, scalable APIs using only JavaScript.

My first startup was in social television, where I saw the need for more efficient, easy-to-use solutions for realtime social features. Because of that, I got involved in Node.js early on, and after building a few early apps, recognized the need for an MVC solution to normalize patterns. Early last year, I founded Balderdash, a UX-focused mobile and web studio, which has given me an excellent opportunity to build out and utilize Sails.js in production.“

Sails.js makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is designed to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the more modern, data-oriented style of web app development. It’s especially good for building realtime features like chat.

Sails empowers UX and design teams to build hi-fi prototypes in no time without waiting for the back-end to be finished. This means focusing more resources on the user experience, which means better products. One Sails.js project at a time, companies move their legacy architecture over to a simpler, more efficient Node.js cloud. Each new client-side code base is more maintainable, since it’s built using the universal language of the internet: a RESTful JSON API.

Chris Dickinson is presenting…

Implementing Git in JavaScript & the Browser: A Case Study

Chris

Chris describes himself as “I make silly things with JavaScript: I particularly love bit-twiddling and WebGL-based projects. I live in Portland OR and work at Urban Airship as a JavaScript engineer.”

Git is one of my favorite things to hack on. It’s long been my goal to get a working (workable?) implementation of git running in pure JS, in the browser. My first attempt two years ago failed; and for a long time I’ve let the thought bounce around in the back of my head.

Spurred on by the recent interest in js-git, I recently restarted the journey towards an in-browser git, in order to help creationix deliver the best possible js-git. Newly armed with browserify and the small-module ethos, I’ve come much closer to a working git in browser and Node, and in the process have really put browserify and its shims through their paces.”

This talk will be comprised of:

A quick intro to the git object model and transport protocol
How browserify and the small module ethos have enabled great successes in the project.
Difficulties encountered in the process, both with Node.JS itself and with browserify, and how I’ve worked through them.
How I’ve diagnosed and worked through various performance issues.
Where is this project going?

Horse JS is presenting…

JavaScript, This is Confusing

….Horse JS Tweets, nuff’ said.  Horsing around…

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Some acquisitions thrive.  YouTube, PayPal, Android.  Others of course die.  GeoCities, Broadcast.com.  Perhaps most actually meander in the middle.  Flickr.

Take a look at this interesting chart on Google’s acquisitions from ArsTechnica:  in fact most acquired companies/products do survive and make it, at least for quite some time, if they pay for themselves, at least at Google:

But let’s put the products and companies aside.   Let’s talk about people.  What it will take for you, and those on your team, to make it post acquisition.

There’s one thing I’ve learned at the people level, why people don’t thrive after acquisitions (assuming they still want to succeed):  they can’t, or won’t, move from Persuasion as their way to drive decisions and change — to Alignment.

What do I mean?

Well, in most start-ups, even when you get pretty big … here’s how senior leaders Get Things Done:

• Identify a problem, an opportunity, or something that needs to change; then

• Get together the key players, physically, or by email, or whatever; then

• Explain their position, with data and experience.  Convince the rest.  then

• After convincing, new path is agreed upon.

And Then

• And this is the key part — once everyone is convinced — then everyone in a start-up just goes out and executes on that new path.  They just go do it.  (Yes, probably with prodding by the CEO and all that — but they go do it).  Both because that’s what you do in a start-up … and also because everyone is on the same team, with the same goals.

The thing is, in the BigCos, those last 2 points don’t really happen naturally the way they do in start-ups, at least if some of the stakeholders aren’t your direct reports, and especially if they are in different departments.  There’s too much risk to think through, in brand, in budget, in opportunity costs.  Also, people in BigCos just don’t go execute on the new path.  They don’t report to you, they are in different departments, and they have their own priorities.  So they wait until they are told to act.  Even if you’re right and everyone agrees you are right.  In fact, it doesn’t really matter if you are right, until you achieve Alignment.

So the senior start-up people that are most frustrated post-acquisition  … they make great arguments … pretty much convince everyone they’re right, or at least that action needs to be taken … and then beat their heads against a wall when nothing happens after that.

“Is everyone so stupid?” these frustrated, post-acquisition employees think?

No, they aren’t.  In fact, the senior folks in every tech BigCo are probably just as smart and most likely smarter than you (after all, they’ve gotten further than you in most cases).  Though of course, they aren’t as smart as you in your domain.

The problem, such as it is — is that you have to learn the skill of Alignment.  I know it’s an annoying concept if you haven’t had to live it.  Call it Politics, if you must.  It’s getting everyone at a reasonably senior level to go along with the New Path, or a different path than they are planning to go down.  It’s almost like guerrilla warfare, and you have to do it stakeholder-by-stakeholder, both 1-on-1 (to gain support) and then again in larger forums.  Probably, again and again.  And again.

This takes a lot of time.  You likely will even have to convince people who don’t care at all about your product or what you’re doing.  And you’ll have to find a way to get people to do things for you that don’t report to you.

It’s a hard skill to learn, especially when you’ve had success doing things your way (after all, this is why you got acquired).  Most start-up execs lack these skills unless they came from a BigCo at a reasonably senior level.

But you need to learn it, Alignment, if you get acquired.  Or at least, help your team learn it.

I’m proud of how we did after our acquisition.   I had some good, early success in Alignment, especially around maintaining our proven sales strategies.   You can see the results below:

But it is hard, learning Alignment — and practicing it.  Making that change is hard.  I wish I’d done a little better job at it.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Image © Mission Bay Conference Center

Last month, RightScale’s State of the Cloud report got me thinking about the rise of multi-cloud solutions. Next month, I’ll be moderating a Mapping Session at GigaOM’s Structure event to work out how, where, when, why and if this trend is going to prove significant.

Hybrid clouds, in which one public cloud and one private cloud are used together, are becoming increasingly common solutions to a range of business challenges. RightScale’s figures suggest growing interest in something more complex and, potentially, more interesting; multi-cloud. In a multi-cloud arrangement, customers build solutions combining one or more public clouds with one or more private clouds. This has the potential to significantly increase complexity, without necessarily delivering a comparable increase in value.

In my post last month, I suggested that many of these multi-cloud deployments were essentially accidental. A quick email exchange with RightScale shows that their survey respondents would appear to disagree; multi-cloud, for them, is a conscious business decision.

I’m intrigued, and so were GigaOM. So we’re putting on a Mapping Session at next month’s Structure conference to explore the issue further. I’ll be joined at the front of the room by fellow GigaOM Pro Analysts Ben Kepes and David Linthicum, as well as GigaOM Research Director Jo Maitland.

A GigaOM Mapping Session is more like a workshop than a regular panel. Although there are analysts at the front of the room, they’re really there to stimulate and guide a conversation with every single person in the room. We don’t have all the answers. We’re there to explore the topic, and to work out what — if anything — it might mean. The perspectives of customers, practitioners, suppliers and investors are an integral part of the process. When it works well, everyone comes away with a broader perspective than when they entered the room. Ideas are born, perceptions are sharpened, the germs of deals are done, and directions for future GigaOM research are painted. Mapping Sessions are free for registered Structure attendees, but separate registration is required. Numbers are capped, to ensure plenty of opportunity for discussion. If you’ve got perspectives to share, please do register to join us on 20 June in San Francisco.

Multi-cloud clearly throws up a host of intriguing issues for cloud vendors, their customers, and the ecosystem of cloud management-type providers (like survey author RightScale). What, if anything, do cloud vendors need to do in order to encourage, support, or hinder multi-cloud adoption? What’s the value proposition behind multi-cloud for customers, and what do the providers of cloud management services need to do in order to capitalise upon an emerging trend? Is this a long-term trend, or a short-lived opportunity?

Many of those stakeholders will be in the room, speaking, listening, and interacting. Do join us, and them.

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

From time to time, I write about Open Data. This has nothing to do with that. The Open Data Center Alliance is interested in data centres, not data. The Alliance was established back in 2010 with Intel driving things forward, and now claims over 300 member organisations, including the likes of BMW, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Deutsche Bank and Marriott Hotels.

According to the ODCA website,

we came together to deliver a unified voice for emerging data center and cloud computing requirements. Our mission is to speed the migration to cloud computing by enabling the solution and service ecosystem to address IT requirements with the highest level of interoperability and standards.

Much of the Alliance’s work involves identifying customer requirements and capturing these in a series of usage models. In theory, prospective customers can modify these usage models in defining their own requirements, and suppliers can tap new business by aligning their offerings to the models. I’ve not seen much evidence that this is happening at scale yet, but the Alliance site does state that

we anticipate quick industry response to the requirements, initial POCs of solutions beginning in 2012. This could accelerate over $50 billion in cloud service investments and is expected to save $25 billion through IT operational efficiency due to cloud adoption.

One of those usage models is concerned with Virtual Machine Interoperability in a Hybrid Cloud Environment (pdf), and last month it was augmented by the release of a Proof of Concept document (pdf) which

outlines testing criteria and procedures for documenting how hypervisor and VM solutions from both ODCA members and non-members interoperated in real-world enterprise cloud scenarios.

Quoted in an April press release to mark publication of the PoC document, ODCA executive director Marvin Wheeler commented that

true interoperability of hypervisor and virtual machine solutions between clouds is critical to advancing enterprise ready cloud implementations. We encourage global IT managers and cloud solution and service providers to join us at the Forecast 2013 VM interoperability panel on June 17 to take part in the collaborative discussions that will help drive the next phase of VM interoperability in the enterprise cloud.

The basic premise is a simple one; a virtual machine started on one hypervisor or class of physical server should run equally well when moved to run on a different hypervisor or physical server. Further, there is a presumption that there is a credible business requirement for this capability. As enterprise users of cloud increasingly find themselves adopting a hybrid approach spanning their own data centre, co-location facilities, hosting sites and diverse public clouds, the likelihood of them needing to run their standard Windows or Linux virtual machines on top of more than one hypervisor certainly increases. It’s less clear, though, that an inability to reliably move a Linux VM from the KVM hypervisor in your own data centre to the Xen hypervisor at a cloud provider is causing significant business pain today; it’s often reasonably straightforward, for example, to simply select a different cloud provider able to support your chosen KVM hypervisor.

But even if a lack of VM interoperability isn’t presenting an insurmountable barrier to business right now, it’s still one more thing to think about when pulling a set of disparate services together. If we can cost-effectively and pragmatically remove or diminish its ability to complicate, then that’s presumably a good thing.

ODCA’s PoC work took the usage requirements the organisation had already defined, and applied them to a specific set of documented tests. As IDG’s Joab Jackson notes in his InfoWorld piece, the results were not great.

Running through all the different possible combinations of hypervisors and OSes, the researchers found that 13 test cases resulted in warnings, and 19 test cases failed entirely. Only in two cases did the VM work flawlessly across two different hypervisors. In both of these cases, a VM created with Xen worked without troubles on a Microsoft hyper-V environment — in one case running Ubuntu and in the other case running Windows Server.

The researchers do note that they set the bar for success pretty high, and that several of the ‘warning’ states would still result in a functional VM. It does appear clear, though, that customers with a real need for multi-VM interoperability face significant challenges in efficiently managing workloads across different virtualisation infrastructures.

And that brings us to the panel at Forecast, which can hopefully help quantify the true scale of the problem… and indicate some of the ways in which vendors are working to fix the broken bits. In terms of the panel discussion itself, I look forward to delving into at least the following:

• how big a problem is the current state of VM interoperability?
• do the ODCA VM Interoperability use cases prioritise the right things?
• what do customers really need, and are they getting it?
• how are vendors really responding to requirements such as those defined by ODCA?

If you have opinions to share, perspectives to offer, facts with which to illuminate, or questions to ask, I do hope you’ll join us.

ODCA has given me a couple of free passes to Forecast. If you want to come along and we know one another, then please do get in touch.

Note: ODCA is covering my flight to San Francisco, and accommodation during the event.

Image of event venue, San Francisco’s Westin St. Francis, by Flickr user ‘prayitno‘

Related articles

• Open Data Center Alliance Tackles Cloud Lock-In (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Virtual machines inching toward portability (infoworld.com)
• 5 Key Essentials of Cloud Workloads Migration (cloudave.com)

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

The one word the best entrepreneurs never accept.

I said it.

Now let me walk you through a broader story because avoidance of the word in and of itself will seem cliche. Stay with me.

When I was little I had a role model for entrepreneurship – my mom. She was a natural leader. She was president of the UJA in Sacramento. From this I saw civic involvement and leadership first hand.

She was a nurse but was never graduated from a 4-year college. Still – she can do the NY Times crossword puzzle better and faster than I. Even today.

She was a hustler. And a ball buster. And a natural sales person. She was never afraid of the word “no” even to the point of embarrassing me.

My youth was filled with her arguing with vendors if they tried to pull a fast one. As my wife will tell you – arguing is cultural – you grow up with it or you don’t. I did. It’s very Jewish. For better or worse. She’s learned to embrace it in me. If a maitre d’ tries to seat me at a table in huge traffic flow or a corner she knows not to bother sitting down.

My mom bought our family’s first computer and encouraged me to learn it at 13.

She opened 2 businesses – a bakery and then a restaurant. I worked in both before leaving to work in a software company at 17. I never knew a world in which you weren’t supposed to work and make money. Even though my dad was a doctor and in retrospect I probably didn’t need to earn my own money. My mom always taught me it was my responsibility to do so.

When I was younger my mom taught me something I never forgot

“You don’t ask, you don’t get.”

It’s simple. I know. But it amazes me how many people don’t really get it.

2 stories.

One.

When I lived and worked in London my wonderful assistant was Deborah Halliday, who was raised a very “proper” British young lady. Her brother played rugby for the English rugby team and went to Oxford. That’s kind of like having a brother in the NFL in the US.

If there was any society in which being a hustler was out of step with the norm is was England. Yet I was a foreigner so I got away with being different.

I used to ask Deborah to book my travel plans in France and Germany were I went 1-2 times / month. There were online tools to book this stuff but the Internet booking sites were early.

I would tell Deborah, “I found this hotel near the Champs Elysees for 170 Euros. But I don’t want to pay that much. Tell them I’ll stay if they’ll give it to me for 120 Euros.

“What? You want … what?”

“Mark. You can’t do that! You can’t just name your own price.”

Me. “Of course I can. Tell them you found a hotel down the street for 100 Euros but I prefer to stay at their hotel. Haggle. See what you can do.

Deborah. She was mortified. Bless her cotton socks. I put her outside of her comfort zone.

Me. “Deborah. You don’t ask, you don’t get! What’s the worst they can tell you? “No?” If so, we’ll call back an hour later and pay 170 Euros. It’s not like they’re going to tell you ‘no’ in an hour. You might as well try!”

Classic Mexican Road strategy.

Here’s the thing. They NEVER said ‘no.’ Such were the times. They weren’t fully occupied.

She began to love it. It was liberating. I taught her to make it a game. I would challenge her to see how cheap she could get rooms. I can still hear her giggle at how ridiculous it was in her mind’s eye. And yet how eye opening it was that you could have almost anything you wanted. If you just asked.

Story two.

Fast forward. My son Jacob. He’s now 10. When he was 7-8 my wife used to sit down with him to do homework and train him the importance of getting it done early and well. Luckily I have such a terrific and organized wife. Or Jacob would be screwed.

They sometimes did homework at Le Pain Quotidien. And if Jacob was good he could get a treat.

Tania once took him up to the couter to pick out a treat. He pointed at a chocolate cake and told Tania he wanted a piece.

“No, honey. That’s a whole cake. You can’t have a piece. It’s not cut. Why don’t you find something else?”

Jacob, “Of course I can have a piece. Just ask them!”

Jacob has IJ. He knows to ask for what he wants. He is respectful. But he has an inner compass that in stead of saying “ok” to adversity he says “why not?”

My wife thinks he’s an over negotiator but she secretly loves it. I always take it as a compliment.

Both stories have something in common. Not being ashamed to ASK. As I tell people almost weekly, “What’s the worst that could happen? That they would say, ‘no’?”

And I mean it. I promise you that 95% of the people I meet are afraid of people telling them no. They are personally embarrassed by it. Or insulted. Or view it as failure.

I’m told “no” all the time because I often ask for more than others do and therefore you need to be willing to hear “no.”

I was on a flight last year from DC to LAX. I had a business class seat due to status of flying a lot and my family was in economy. I felt bad and was planning on rotating.

But when I sat down I asked if my family could upgrade since there were 3 open seats. I assumed the answer would be “no” but I figured I had nothing to lose.

The flight attendant said “ok. but you’ll have to pay a small upgrade fee and I can’t move them until after take-off.” But move them she did. And she decided it wasn’t really important to make me pay since the seats were unoccupied.

Score!

We had also just been upgrade from London to Baltimore.

2 times in a row – unreal. My wife was a bit incredulous (but grateful). I simply pointed out that our kids learned a more important lesson than the downside consequence of their expecting to always sit in business class (which isn’t going to happen!).

They learned to ask, “who not?”

You don’t ask. You don’t get.

And here’s the thing about “no.”

I know first hand just how chicken people are about hearing it. I’ve sat through so many meetings where sales reps didn’t ask for the order. I’ve been pitched by hundreds of entrepreneurs who never actually asked me whether I would invest. Very few people do.

Here’s an experiment for you.

Hold interviews with tech people, marking people, ops people, finance people – whatever. They always finish the interview with a “thank you” and barely ask next steps.

Any great sales person will ask you at the end of the meeting, “So, how’d I do? Who else have you spoken with? How do I stack up? What do I need to convince you of to get an offer? What is the next step in the process?”

Great sales people are trained to “ask for the order.” If you interview a sales person and they don’t ask for the order, be worried.

I like to flip things on their heads. I like to ask in reverse in interviews, “If we did get aligned to offer you this role, do you plan on accepting? What other offers do you have? What do we need to do to win? What steps do you still need before you decide to go with us?”

I want to know. And I have nothing to fear in the answer.

My favorite (not) is dealing with lawyers (or VCs) who say, “as a firm, we never do a, b, c.” Let me tell you now that often this line is BS. But my standard response is, “I don’t care what you normally do. I think it’s right for our situation. So unless you explain to me logically why it doesn’t make sense at our company, my assumption is that it’s a good idea.”

In summary, I recommend some honesty with yourself. How comfortable do you feel with asking for the order? How confortable do you feel with asking awkward questions or asking for things that are out of the norm, “Could we have your room for 120 Euros so we don’t have to stay down the road?”

If you don’t find it within your confort zone – practice in small ways for asking for slightly unreasonable things just to get used to it. It’s a skill you’re going to need as an entrepreneur.

After all – you don’t ask, you don’t get.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

But the #2 most important thing you can do is retain your team.  And I don’t see enough talk about that.  Today, frictional unemployment for experienced tech engineers, salespeople, marketing stars, and other leads is … about -9.0%.  Negative, near as I can tell.  If you’re great in SaaS, just email me.  I can get you 3-4 job offers by the end of the month.

I did many things wrong as a CEO in both my start-ups.  But one thing at least quantitatively I did well was retain the team.  I tried to copy my old boss, whose motto was Zero Voluntary Attrition.  In my first start-up, not a single person left.  In my second, I only lost one person that I really wanted to keep.  A few of the early folks who were absolutely terrific, needed to do the next thing after we hit Traction, after several years of the very early-stage grind.  You will lose some pure start-up people once things scale up.  But after that, I lost no one that we needed to keep but one.

Now I’m not saying it was all roses.  Some of them could barely stand me at times.  Others needed to find a way to change or modify their roles.  And — importantly — a number of the best folks on the team almost left.  Really, really close.

So what are some tips and tricks here?  Let me add a few thoughts:

#1:  By The Time You Give Them a Raise, It’s Too Late.  They’re Already Out the Door.   You have to get comp right, as best you can, all the time.  These days, anyone good is going to get a 10-20% (or higher) raise to move — and maybe a bonus on top of that.

The thing is — you can’t counter.  It’s too late by that point.  Once they tell you they have another offer … they’re already out the door.  A raise won’t do it, at least not for the good ones.

#2.  Always Pay Market or Above As Soon As You Can Afford It.  At Least to the Great Ones.  The other night I was at an event with a number of other CEO founders.  One CEO told me the story of how he lost a top up-and-coming engineer, who was making a five figure salary … to a real boooooring company that doubled her salary.  That boring company had to.  How else can a boring company steal a star engineer from a hot start-up?  Lots of money.

My point here is this engineer should not have had a five-figure salary, even if it made sense in historical context (joined as a very junior person, consistent with prior salary).  Pay market, or above, as soon as you can.  It’s a sign of respect.  And most of the best ones won’t ask.  They’ll just eventually get frustrated and leave.

#3.  It’s Probably Not Too Late When They Interview.  So Be Paranoid.  And Intervene.  There are some very tell-tell signs of someone interviewing.  Out of the office at weird hours.  Talking on their mobile phone on the sidewalk – and moving away from you if you approach them to say Hi.   Signs of frustration in their posts on Facebook, in new connections on LinkedIn.

Now by the time they take another job, it’s too late.  Even if a raise would work then, which it won’t … the relationship is damaged at that point anyway.

But it isn’t necessarily too late when they start to interview.  It may be, in its own way, a plea of exasperation as much as anything else.  If you can fix that issue, you can keep him/her more times than not.

#4.  Find a Growth Path for Everyone, Especially the Great Ones.  You have to find a growth path for the great ones.  They join a start-up to grow, to learn, to do new things.  If they can’t grow, they die a little every day.  It’s your job to understand the career path for at least your first 50 employees.  Know it.  And do whatever you can, within the boundaries of reality, to help them achieve it.

#5.  Talk to People.  For Real.  Get Real Feedback.  At least Once a Quarter.  I know you probably hate annual reviews and the like.  I agree.  They are generally pretty wasteful in a start-up.  But you do need to do something different here.  You need to meet 1-on-1, in a unstructured way, with all your best people — at least once a quarter.  Quietly.  And ask them what’s frustrating them about their job.  What they want to be doing — but aren’t getting to do.  Be friendly — but blunt.  You need to learn.  Get it out of them.

You may think you know if you have drinks together, or go see movies together, or whatever, that you know.   But you don’t.  Even if people complain in that context, it will be general complaints.  You won’t learn, or know, what your top people need to find their growth path at your company.  Where they feel stalled out and frustrated.  You have to ask.

Just some ideas.

Because there’s absolutely, positively, nothing worse in the pre-Scale days than losing a rockstar employee that you could have kept.  It just kills you.  Later, when you have 100, 200+ employees, $20-$30m+ in ARR … well … you sort of can swap people out, at some level.   Including maybe even you.  Everyone should be redundant at that scale or you’ve failed as CEO.   But until then, every key player is critical.

If nothing else – address retaining your top troops at least as seriously as you do recruiting them.  And whatever you do, don’t ignore the ones that don’t complain.

—————–

And on that note, don’t just take it from me.  Take it from Don Draper.  Don’t let it happen to you.

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Zach Bobb is presenting…

Building a Computer In Your Browser

Zach the TriMet Ticket Man!

Zach is a mobile engineer with GlobeSherpa working hard to bring you the app that will let you buy TriMet tickets on your phone.

Want to learn how computers work under the hood while learning Web technologies? Come learn about the Von Neumann 51, a series of tutorials that will take you through building a computer from the ground up in JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS3.

The talk will start by laying out some of the motivation behind the project and then demonstrate some of the components people will build through the tutorials: logic gates, adder circuits, displays, etc. The end of the talk will demo a prototype of the vN51.

Some of the technologies in this talk are:  D3 | A JavaScript library for dynamic data-driven SVG graphics HTML5 Canvas | Pixel manipulation for display output

Paul Jungwirth is presenting…

Handling Errors with Cluster and Domains

Paul

Paul will jump into,

“Node’s callback pattern makes error handling difficult: throwing an exception kills the entire node process, terminating all current requests, and every callback initiates a new stack, so stacktraces are terse and don’t indicate how you got where you died. You can solve these problems using some newer features of Node called clusters and domains. This talk with explore using these tools for better error handling.“

Forrest Norvell is presenting…

Do as I say, not as I do: Node in the real world

Forrest

Forrest is a software engineer who has spent the better part of the last two years working with Node full-time, first working on bringing Singly’s Locker Project up to web scale, and then exploring the wilds of monitoring the performance of Node applications for New Relic. He has learned an unreasonable amount about JavaScript, V8, libuv, and making it all work well in the real world.

Forrest has spent the last year plumbing the depths of Node for New Relic, as he brings support for Node to New Relic. It’s a process that has required ingenuity, guile, and the willingness to break a lot of otherwise very sensible rules. He will take you on a tour of some of the more powerful but dangerous tools in the JavaScript toolbox: monkey patching, working with Node’s internals, and mixing synchronous and asynchronous code without setting your hair on fire.

Charlie Key is presenting…

Building a Multiplayer World for Pillow Pets

Charlie

Charlie is Co-founder of Modulus, a premier Node.js hosting solution. He has spent the last six-years working in the software, where he has created over a dozen production websites and applications for many global brands.

He is also a core contributor on Pulse game engine and one of members of the team who developed Pillow Pets World.

The talk will dive into the design goals, architecture and end result of creating this massive virtual world. Come see how Pulse (a HTML5 game engine) and Node.js were combined to create a fast, expandable, mobile ready world. Targeting a game at 10,000,000 people? Then come and find out how Pillow Pets World was built. Pillow Pets World is a virtual world built for millions of kids. Scalability and performance were aspects that were included from the start.

The technologies included in this talk are:

Pulse | HTML5 Game Engine Node.js | Scalable small servers Socket.io | Real-time communication using Web sockets Redis | Small in memory storage used for pub/sub communication between servers

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Q1: What is a cloud workload and cloud workload management?

A cloud workload is dependent on the cloud layer (i.e. infrastructure, compute unit, storage unit, etc.). In infrastructure the workload is the compute or storage units that are being utilized by the cloud consumer during a period of time. In PaaS, the workload refers to the software stack processing efforts while in SaaS it refers to the usage and demand habits of the end user or system. One method of measuring workload throughput is by analyzing the utilization efficiency. Cloud workload management requires an understanding of resource demand in order to ensure efficient capacity utilization at all times. Additionally, it means having the visibility and tools to utilize fixed capacity for steady demand as well as the ability to burst on-demand peaks while aiming for ideal throughput of IT and cloud resources.

Q2: What are the cloud consumer’s considerations for switching between clouds?

Having had this conversation multiple times, I’ve discovered that there are many considerations that need to be kept in mind when contemplating switching between clouds. Workload migration, whether it is between private and public clouds or between cloud vendors, should be driven by the business values gained by the cloud user – reduced costs, enhanced security, improved availability, or decreased vendor lock-in. Workload migration automation, or workload transportation rules, must be established based on full transparency of the dynamic cloud environment. Today, there is a rising debate on the feasibility of workload transportation between cloud vendors.

Q3: How does the perspective of the workload differ between the cloud vendor and its consumer?

From the vendor’s perspective, the cloud workload refers to the physical machine compute units that are utilized in a period of time (second, minute, hour). It is the vendor’s goal to eliminate idle physical capacity. Alternatively, the consumer’s workload refers to his/her utilization of the cloud compute utility in order to meet demand and terminate idle capacity. Essentially, both sides are aligned with the need to be efficient and to ensure that capacity meets demand while maintaining maximum throughput of resources at all times. A good example of this is Amazon Cloud spot instances that incentivize users to use lower priced resources at peak times and thus maximize the AWS underlying physical compute resources utilization.

“…the Open Data Center Alliance (ODCA), a global member-led organization, has brought together hundreds of end user enterprise IT organizations to work together in an attempt to drive broad scale requirements for the enterprise-ready cloud. The group recently announced the release of a new POC (Proof-of-Concept) paper developed to determine where the virtual machine (VM) industry currently stands in meeting interoperability requirements outlined in an ODCA VM interoperability usage model.” Resource: Forbes.com

Q5: What’s the degree of cloud vendor lock-in?

Cloud vendor lock-in is a significant consideration when adopting a specific cloud vendor or platform. Vendor lock-in is dependent on assumed costs of switching clouds. Taking that into consideration, the discussion should compare traditional data center “lock-in” with public or private cloud vendor “lock-in”. Based on this, it seems that public cloud consumers prefer not to be locked-in simply because there is no initial hardware investment. Heavy reliance on proprietary APIs, however, can create greater lock-in that drives costs up and undermines the savings that can be achieved through portability and technical efficiency.  Past experiences and the new cloud perception has led experienced IT leaders to better measure their vendor’s lock-in level. Vendors that don’t lock-in their customers may be perceived as a better option for organizations that are considering cross-cloud deployment.

Q4: What is Interoperability? Are there Cloud standards?

Cloud interoperability is the ability to use the same tools, process, and compute images on a variety of computing providers and platforms. For the ability to migrate cloud workloads between environments or between clouds there must be common concepts across the board, all the way to the actual API standards that enable and facilitate cloud integrations.

To learn more about managing cloud workloads, sign up for the live webinar, Managing Cloud Workloads: Back to Basics with Joe Weinman of Cloudonomics and Patrick Pushor of CloudChronicle.com on Thursday, May 16th at 12pm EST.

This article was cross posted on iamondemand.com

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Adam Ulvi is presenting…

Put a Sensor On It!

Adam Ulvi

Adam is a Portland native (straight out of the Simpsons) with a penchant for software and systems integration. 8-bit gamer, seasoned professional, perpertual noob. Specialization is for insects.

Learn how easy it is to create your own monitoring system! Hobbyist components and a rich ‘maker’ community puts advanced system designs well within the reach of your average software wonk. Stop planning and start building!

Our case study is ‘GroMon’, a solution for monitoring a tiny indoor lettuce garden. Our wireless sensor keeps track of temperature and humidity, if the plants get too hot or too cold then we are notified via text message.

We will discuss the design goals and architecture, as well as component selection, prototyping and debugging steps. With a little bit of programming skill and patience, anyone can build this network. Learn how to easily extend this solution for your own use.

Our stack is Node.js running on a Raspberry Pi. We connect over Bluetooth to an Arduino hosting a single sensor. All components can be purchased off-the-shelf, no soldering is required and the total cost is around $80. Code and bill of materials is available on GitHub, let’s hack!

Aron Racho is presenting…

Jive Purposeful Places SDK – A NodeJS Bromance

Aron

Aron Racho is a Senior Software Developer at Jive Software. Aron’s background has primarily been in Java, about 10 years in. He is a relatively recent convert to Javascript, and server-side Javascript in particular. Though relatively new to NodeJS, he has been smitten by its fluency, flexibility, and superb design. One might even say a Bromance has been started.

Ok, get ready, this description for this sessions is HUGE!

Jive Software’s latest cloud release enables 3rd party developers to easily push data marshalled from external systems of record such as Salesforce into Jive. Our aim is to publish a developer framework and API which makes it drop-dead simple — and fun — to get up-and-going from scratch, or easily integrate into an existing framework. We chose NodeJS precisely for those reasons:

• High developer adoption
• High velocity development — javascript! no compilation required
• Best-in-class IDE support (IntelliJ for example)
• Native support for REST and HTTP
• Excellent package management system (NPM == maven the Good Parts)
• Tons of great libraries
• Amazing documentation, well organized, very easy to get started instantly

Our framework is built on Express, and is designed to be programmed by “convention: fill in the blanks with logic specific to your application, and as long as you’ve satisfied the contract, the framework automatically:

• Wires up routes required for configuring your integration
• Notifies your listeners for integration life cycle events (integration created; destroyed; updated, etc.)
• Executes recurrent tasks you’ve scheduled
• Handles persistence of required objects. We have support for 3 types of persistence out of the box — in-memory, file, and MondoDB.

The framework is designed for developers who want to as quickly as possible start integrating a 3rd party service with Jive, with minimum setup.

For those interested in integrating Jive into an existing NodeJS Express app, we are going to make the underlying API available to developers, allowing them finer grained control over the setup of their integration. This API will be the same one underlying the mechanics of the aforementioned framework.

For my presentation, I will be describe how we used NodeJS as the basis for this framework and API. Please note at the time of this proposal, we’ve created the framework, and are now in the process of refining the API so that it can be used independently of the framework.

Christopher Meiklejohn is presenting…

An Introduction to Functional Reactive Programming

Chris Meiklejohn

Christopher Meiklejohn is a Software Engineer with Basho Technologies, Inc. where he focuses on building rich web applications for Riak using Erlang and JavaScript. Before joining Basho, he worked at Swipely, a loyalty program startup based in Providence where he maintained critical infrastructure components written in Ruby. Christopher currently serves as one of the maintainers of Rubygems.org.

Chris also knows a thing or three about this show… called The Wire… he could probably speak entirely in quotes solely from The Wire and still make complete sense. So throw a quote out, I bet he’ll catch it.

There is no doubt that todays web applications continue to grow in adoption, replacing their desktop counterparts in all areas of computation. Essential to their growth is their ability to provide near-native performance and rich user experiences. As these applications grow in essential complexity, they also grow in accidental complexity due to the imperative callback processing style found in most web applications. The asynchronous nature of most of these applications also further compounds the issues due to guarantees around message ordering, and a level of indirection required in callbacks handling events.

Functional reactive programming is one approach for mitigating accidental complexity, using a declarative and composable data-flow model. During this talk, we’ll look at the history of functional reactive programming, some JavaScript implementations of FRP, and finally some ClojureScript implementations of FRP and examples on how to get started with using functional reactive programming.

Max Ogden is presenting…

Minecraft.js

Max Ogden – Penciled and colored!

Max used to live here in Portland, and at some point defected to work on noble causes with Code for America. Since then he’s been an Oaktown Coder (Oakland, the other city near San Francisco).

In January of 2013 he started the Voxel.js Project. Since he and contributors have generatored nearly 100 node modules related to 3D game development and distribution. Examples including voxel rendering and first person controls and physics. On the main voxel-engine the project has received over 50 pull requests from 20 contributors. All of this since January. Max is going to dive into this effort and what inspiration people have taken to dive into game development with JavaScript.

Brock Whitten is presenting…

Mighty Messaging Patterns

Brock Whitten

Best know for having co-created PhoneGap, Brock went on to work at Joyent where he created the Public API for the beloved (and now sunset) No.de Platform. He’s now working on the Harp Platform where he’s worked with a team to have created a dead simple publishing platform that uses Dropbox as its deployment mechanism. Much has been learned, he’s read to share.

He describes his course as, “Messaging is the lifeblood of distributed systems yet it is often treated as an afterthought when applications are architected. Few get passed the point of tacking on a message queue to fire and forget tasks with no visibility into what is happening on the system. I’m here to tell you we can do better. That Messaging can do more for us than just put tasks in the background. By combining basic messaging paradigms we can build powerful distributed systems with full awareness of what is happening around the network. And we can do it all in pure JavaScript.

In this talk, I will start with a crash course on the basic messaging patterns push/pull, pub/sub, and request/reply and then show a real example of how we have combined these patterns to build a custom message broker that we have used to build a fully distributed and modular architecture for the Harp Platform. I will share details about what we have learned and common pitfalls to avoid when building a messaging system for your needs.

Basic outline for the talk:

• how messaging can be useful
• crash course on the basic message patterns
• how to get started with zeromq/axon
• common pitfalls when in production
• proven trade secrets we have learned

By the end of the talk, my hope is that everyone will have a new appreciation for what can be achieved with massaging and will know where to begin when attempting to integrate messaging into their next project. I feel this aspect of building modern web applications is often overlooked and viable techniques need to be shared and discussed.“

Are you signed up?  BUY YOUR TICKET FOR NODE PDX HERE

Want to learn more? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know the dates? http://nodepdx.org/

Want to know who else is speaking? Stay tuned here or go check out http://nodepdx.org/!

Have a last minute request, idea, comment or a speaking proposal? http://nodepdx.org/

(Cross-posted @ Composite Code)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

And who cares, right?

A couple of tech giants throw millions around in either cash (for which they have hoards) or part with some publicly traded stock. And a few teams of super talented, educated and bright entrepreneurs make a few mill. in their 20′s. What could be more capitalist than that?

It has even gone so far that we now have evocative headlines in the tech press such as “Buy or Die,” which is what got me thinking about this post.

We’ve been here before – trust me. Every era has its own amnesia for M&A gone wild.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not some big tragedy on a grand scale. But the press (and I suspect many of the senior execs of these companies) don’t really explore the corrosive downside of these acquisition.

So I thought I would.

Buy. Or Die.

Really?

If I don’t commit to millions of dollars of acquisitions I will … die? I’m supposed to believe that my best innovation can only come from scores of startup founders who just made millions and have now become CVOs at my company? (Chief Vesting Officers)?

Meh.

The Aqui-hire Business

Many buying companies price these deals on the basis of $1 million per engineer on the team for an early-stage deal. And they might give a premium if the team has been around a longer period of time, has built some hard-to-build proprietary technology or has some customer traction.

Usually the location of the engineers matters great so having offshore engineering makes acquihires unlikely.

Let’s assume an early-stage company around for 2 years with limited traction. It is probably purchased in the $5 – 15 million range even if you see higher numbers in the press.

Almost certainly the startup would have raised some capital. Let’s assume $2 million in seed money.

If the money comes from professional investors it usually has a “liquidation preference” meaning that their money comes out before the founders or common stock. (If you don’t know venture economics – there is an overview here.)

While at initial glance this sounds unfair, when you think about it – it doesn’t. If you give $2 million for 20% of a company ($8 million pre + $2 million investment = $10 million post-money valuation) that has no product and no customers and it turns around 3 months later and sells for $5 million it would hardly be fair for investor to get $1 million back (20% of the proceeds). That’s why liquidation preferences exist – downside protection.

After the liquidation preference the founders (probably 1-3 people) are likely to get 90% of the remaining proceeds and the staff – those engineers that the acquiring company so desperately wants – would ordinarily receive a very small proportion.

I talked about the math of this in this post, “Is it Time to Learn or to Earn.”

Mark – doesn’t the acquiring company mostly care about the super innovative founders? Those 1-3 you’re talking about?

If they do then they’re naive. And most buyers aren’t. Most founders stick around for their lock-up period (1-2 years) before going on to found their next company.

Think about it – they were the ones most willing and most able to take risk in the first place. They founded their last company with no money in their pocket. Now they get to go out and try again with $2 million in their pockets plus the credibility of having just gotten a big W.

Most founders stay the least amount of time they can.

I know the buyers try the best to believe that [insert well known founder name here ... David Sacks, Max Levchin, Dennis Crowley, Keith Rabois] will stay and help lead their company in a totally new direction. But evidence suggests otherwise.

So the buying company usually wants to pay $0 for the company. And wants to structure a huge payout for the employees that will remain. That way investors (dead money for the buyer) and founders (flight risk) don’t get all the spoils while the faithful staff who will stick around get nothing.

And precisely because buyers usually prefer to have limited money go to investors – investors almost always have the ability to say “no” to transactions in the terms of their funding documents (aka “blocking rights”).

And that is the tension in the acquihire – what is the purchase price for the company, what is the “earn out” if the acquired company hits some performance targets and what is the amount of money set aside for staff retention? And will investors allow a deal to happen in the first place.

The numbers you see announced in the press for deals are hardly ever right.

OK, Mark. We get the mechanics. But what is so corrosive about this?

Why Acquihires Hurt the Acquiring Company

How about if we look at it from the “rest of company” perspective.

You have been at Google, Salesforce.com, Yahoo! for years. You have worked faithfully. Evenings. Weekends. Year in, year out. You have shipped to hard deadlines. You’ve done the death-march projects. In the trenches. You got the t-shirt. And maybe got called out for valor at a big company gathering. They gave you an extra 2 days of vacation for your hard work.

And that prick sitting in the desk next to you who joined only last week now has $1 million because he built some fancy newsreader that got a lot of press but is going to be shut down anyways.

What kind of message does that send to the party faithful who slave away loyally to hit targets for BigCo?

I’ll tell you what is says.

It says if you want to make “real” money  - quit.

Go do a startup. Get some famous angel or seed money. Get yourself in a big demo day competition. Woo the press. Hire legions of young, impressionable graduates from the top engineering universities. And then come back and sell me your company.

I know many rank-and-file employees. I’ve had the chats with them. You rarely meet people who don’t resent the scores of entitled acquihirees of their company.

Does Yahoo! et al really have to keep up with the Jones’s to build its future?

For the 200 new employees they’ll get through acquihires do they unleash 2,000 unhappy existing employees? Sure, most won’t quit. Because they know that it’s not a slam dunk to start a business and get acquired. But the most talented of those 2,000 will.

What if the $100 million you’re going to spend trying to win this alleged “war for talent” in stead went into big retention plans to keep your most talented employees.

You can’t “Roll Out the Red Carpet When Your Best Employees are on the Way Out the Door” as I wrote in this post. So why not announce big, hairy audacious goals on recruiting the best mobile talent with sign-on bonuses and retention plans? And reward your existing top 10% of employees handsomely.

I’ll bet the ROI would be higher than acquihires.

Acquihires and Venture Capital

I’m a VC. I know I’m supposed believe in acquihires to bury my investments that aren’t working.

I would never discourage any teams of people I’m working with against early acquisition if they felt it was in the company’s best interests.

But that’s not how you make money in the venture capital business. You make money by backing winners that build real businesses.

I look for entrepreneurs who set out on their journeys to do exactly that – build big businesses. Change industries. Not looking for quick flips.

And on many occasions I have passed on deals where it was clear that the founding team was over-optimizing the deal structure to focus on a quick exit.

When I have great teams with products that are taking longer to show traction than they or I would like I usually spend time trying to figure out how we can build a better business versus selling early.

I don’t blame entrepreneurs who go for an early exit when it comes up. To the contrary. On many occasions where I’ve met with teams of people in whom I’ve never invested I’ve encouraged exactly that – an early exit at a “small” price. Because if you’re business isn’t working or isn’t likely to work it’s obviously better than running into a brick wall or over-capitalizing yourself.

And of course many small acquisitions work for the buyers when there is a clear strategy for owning the asset or a clear alignment with the team you’re acquiring.

But as a repeatable strategy for large companies to try and compete with each other it still strikes me as a wasteful strategy. And few in the press are willing to call this out.

Sarah Lacy did. It’s why I love reading her writings – she’s one of the few remaining journalists in the tech sector (along with Kara Swisher and a few others) who have been around long enough to have earned their critical eyes or cynicism.

She wrote this excellent piece last year called, “The Acqui-hire Scourge: Whatever Happened to Failure in Silicon Valley”

And I thought I’d finish on a quote from Sarah,

“Allowing entrepreneurs — and their investors — to save face by saying they were “acquired” instead of failing is nice, but it’s a bit like the pre-schools where everyone wins a trophy for showing up.”

Note: image from PandoDaily, clicking it will take you to the article in which I found it.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

During the latest episode of CxO Talk, my weekly video talk show with co-host Vala Afshar, social business expert Dion Hinchcliffe made provocative assertions about IT. Dion is chief strategy officer of consulting firm, Dachis Group, an experienced enterprise architect, book author, and fellow ZDNet columnist so we should examine his comments carefully.

In our discussion, Dion proclaims the era of IT essentially over, with line of business functions inevitably absorbing technology and leaving the CIO to reign as steward over nothing more than low-value technical plumbing. Think phone systems. Dion’s perspective appears fatalistic, implying highly devalued IT departments that merely provide basic infrastructure while other groups in the enterprise absorb strategic aspects of technology.

Dion explains that, ”our existing model for IT is broken in a highly proliferated universe,” because organizations increasingly demand rapid access to solutions with a relatively short lifespan. Therefore, he calls the traditional IT model a “choke point” for technology innovation in the enterprise.

Following the CxO Talk show, I asked Dion to elaborate his views regarding the state of IT in its present form:

It’s pretty clear to most technology leaders that traditional IT, as we know it, is undergoing the biggest challenge in its history. The advent of intense competition and tech innovation from outside the organization has reached an unprecedented and — more importantly, an unsustainable level.

Internal business customers can now far more easily obtain IT service from the cloud, SaaS products, app stores on mobile devices, and outsourcing partners. And they can do it far more cheaply, faster, and with less hassle this way. IT departments are now the hardest way to get things done (albeit there are many risks for shadow IT as well, though widespread problems due to it are not emerging as fast as many would have thought.)

BYOD is just another proof-point and canary in the coal mine as cheap, agile, disposable consumer tech remakes today’s IT landscape. This means the infrastructure of IT in most organizations will recede into the cloud while digital strategy moves into other areas of the organization, including the much-discussed new role of Chief Digital Officer.

The global CIOs I talk to in general see this writing on the wall: The overly-centralized IT department as the provider of all technology is just as outdated a concept as sourcing all your IT from one vendor, like we did with Microsoft in years past and IBM before then.

It’s a very challenging time to be in IT, yet also perhaps the time of greatest opportunity. IT seems to be splitting into 1) tactical infrastructure and 2) strategic tech innovation as applied to the business. The former is heading largely to the cloud, while the latter is going to move across the C-Suite in a variety of interesting ways.

These arguments are hardly new. For example, in 2008 I wrote a piece called, “Is IT becoming extinct?,” which summarized a variety of reasons explaining why IT has lost influence in the enterprise. I followed that a post titled, “5 tips to prevent IT extinction,” that offered advice to a scared IT crowd. In 2012, I also wrote about a devalued future for IT. However, since 2008 more data has emerged to strengthen Dion’s argument.

For example, Dion calls out data that shows flat IT budgets while lines of business increase their spend on technology. Gartner presents this graph, showing flat IT budgets:

Source: Gartner

Meanwhile, this next chart, from Retail Information Systems, shows the growth of technology budgets in retail marketing between 2012 and 2015. The chart demonstrates that marketing will have significant increases in technology spending over the next few years. Although focused on retail, similar shifts are happening in many industries:

Source: Retail Information Systems

Dion’s comments are also consistent with recent survey data described in a Harvard Business Review blog, showing a high level of CEO dissatisfaction with the current state of IT:

57% of the executives expect their IT function to change significantly over the next three years, and 12% predict a “complete overhaul” of IT

With project failures remaining at high rates and IT continually blamed for lack of responsiveness, it’s no wonder that the existing model seems to have broken down. But, this problem will not be solved by simply waving a magic wand that transfers technology to marketing or other groups inside an organization. The problem and solution are more nuanced than that.

Simple technology transfer arguments fail to recognize that when IT becomes less involved delivering specialized technology to lines of business, those groups must learn to become deep technology experts. When lines of business transform into IT departments, they will face similar challenges as IT itself. Unless, of course, we give the easy and fun stuff to lines of business and leave IT with the harder problems.

(This discussion does not even address core computing functions that must remain centralized — security, data integration, bandwidth, and network infrastructure, for example, should remain basic IT activities.]

The ability for lines of business to absorb massive change relating to technology will be an ongoing challenge in this new world. Therefore, the real solution is a new kind of collaboration between IT and lines of business.

‘The most innovative CIOs I talk with recognize the essential importance of partnerships to address these issues. For example, during another episode of CxO Talk Kim Stevenson, Intel’s CIO, said:

The next decade is about business transformation and business efficiency; how does IT help the business grow? You can’t do it alone, it’s always in partnership with the business, but IT can be a catalyst to that business growth. There are no IT projects; they are all business projects today.

During yet another CxO Talk conversation, Gartner group vice president, Mark P. McDonald, also elaborated on partnership between IT and the business:

Turning sparks into flame and growing that flame requires a scalable, very capable platform. That’s what the CIO brings to the table. The most powerful combinations we’ve seen are the CIO and CMO working together with a shared goal to grow the business. When my goal is to grow the business, everybody has the potential to win.

On a different episode of CxO Talk, the CMO of LexisNexis, Steve Mann, said that marketing tasks such as campaign deployment and management, for example, require “intricate knowledge” that IT cannot fulfill unless they provide dedicated resources to marketing. Steve’s comment further implies the kind of partnership that both Kim and Mark advocate.

Yes, the relationship between IT and lines of business are ambiguous and fraught with difficulty. However, the bottom line is this: partnership based on deep collaboration is the only solution that will work. Both IT and the business need each other; both sides must adapt and bend to the winds of change.

If you are a CIO, the message is clear: gain a more sophisticated awareness of business needs, actively forge cooperative partnerships with your business counterparts, and learn to say “yes” when the business seeks assistance. Your survival depends on taking these steps.

===============

CxO Talk is a weekly talk show that explores the tension between technology and lines of business in the enterprise. Our guests include senior level executives, analysts, and other top thought leaders who can offer a valuable perspective on the issues.

Here is a video of the entire conversation with Dion Hinchcliffe:

(Cross-posted @ ZDNet | Beyond IT Failure Blog)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

But, as we all become increasingly dependent upon data sourced from third parties, aspects of this rather esoteric pastime are beginning to matter to a far broader audience. Products, recommendations, decisions and entire businesses are being constructed on top of data sourced from trusted partners, from new data brokers, from crowdsourced communities, or simply plucked from across the open web. Without an understanding of where that data came from, and how it was collected, interpreted or maintained, all of those products, recommendations, decisions and businesses stand upon very shaky foundations indeed.

Data attribution is increasingly important, but it will be essential to make sure that the rules, tools and norms which emerge are both lightweight and pragmatic. Now is not the time to get heavy-handed and pedantic about where the comma goes.

Former colleague Leigh Dodds recently offered a useful discussion of the rationale behind data attribution. Early on, he describes the related (and, often, sloppily interchangeable) notions of attribution and citation;

It might also be useful to distinguish between:

• Attribution — highlighting the creator/publisher of some data to acknowledge their efforts, conferring reputation
• Citation — providing a link or reference to the data itself, in order to communicate provenance or drive discovery

This distinction is important in some circumstances, but it can also be useful to consider a simpler, more selfish, but ultimately more scalable justification. Attribution (and citation) of data quite simply provides an audit trail, enabling you, your bosses, your investors, or your customers, to know more about the data upon which actions are based.

Creators want credit, consumers want to trust

Much of the serious consideration of attribution comes from a relatively small cadre of data owners or creators, who (understandably, perhaps) want credit for their hard work. Perhaps they want to prove use in order to secure future funding or advancement, or perhaps they simply want to track where their data ends up. Through a series of licenses, contracts and Terms & Conditions statements, these creators have done much in codifying the ways that data should be referred to. Leigh discusses some of the licensing terms in his post, but it’s probably fair to say that none of them have really caught on outside a few rather narrowly scoped groups of co-dependent developers and data providers.

Data owners’ requirements for credit run the gamut, from loosely phrased requests for a link back to their website all the way past this rather excessive example quoted by Leigh to end up as lengthy tomes of draconian legalese;

The attribution must be no smaller than 70% of the size of the largest bit of information used, or 7px, whichever is larger. If you are making the information available via your own API you need to make sure your users comply with all these conditions.

All too often, that sort of self-defeating prescription is enough to send prospective users back to Google, in search of a less demanding alternative.

For consumers of data, or for those wondering where the data behind a product or decision came from, things are rather simpler. On the whole, those on this side of the divide are simply looking for a pointer which enables them to learn more. Is my company’s multi-million dollar change of direction based upon detailed data from stable Governments, credible banks and respected analysts, or did the person responsible use some numbers the found on their friend’s blog?

Carefully crafted rules regarding attribution’s wording, placement, colour, size and typeface are an irrelevance, probably deserving to be ignored or ridiculed.

Far better, and far more likely of success, to simply encourage users and re-users of data to sensibly point back (however they like) to their principal sources.

Remembering all the ancestors is a bit daft

Data set A is modified and added to in order to create data set A1. Data set A1 is modified and added to in order to create data set A2. Data set B is modified and added to in order to create data set B1. Data set B1 is modified and added to in order to create data set B2. Data Set C modifies and extends data sets A2 and B2. It seems reasonable to acknowledge the contribution made to C by A2 and B2, but some would argue (loudly) that A, B, A1 and B1 also need to be acknowledged in C. This is one aspect of ‘attribution stacking’, and attribution stacking is, quite simply, stupid.

If I am the creator of data set C, I am selecting A2 and B2 because they are the right data sets for my purpose. That selection will be based upon a range of criteria, including the scope and coverage of the data. The selection will also be based upon my impression of the brands responsible for A2 and B2, and that impression (implicitly or explicitly) will include some awareness of the processes they use to select, validate and manage the data they use. It’s for them to carefully select, validate and provide attribution for A1 and B1, not for me. And it’s A1 and B1′s job to do the same for A and B, not me.

Things get even worse in some open source data projects, where all the individual contributors expect to be acknowledged. Inside the project (and on its website, etc), that’s fine and sensible. Outside, though? It’s ridiculous. So if data set A were created by individuals Aa, Ab, Ac, Ad and all their friends right up to Az, under some licenses there would be an expectation that every single one of those individuals be acknowledged by name in any mention of data sets A, A1, A2 or C. A massive administrative burden for any downstream users of the data set, and of no real benefit to anyone whatsoever. This desire for glory really does need to be challenged, if it is not to stifle free and fair downstream use and reuse of the data. Within the project building A, it may be vital to know that user Aa is a bit sloppy, or that user Ad has a nasty habit of making the data say what she thinks it should rather than what it actually does. But it is the responsibility of the project behind A to put processes and procedures in place to address these issues, and to ensure that all of its participants receive appropriate credit within the project for their contribution. By the time we reach A1 or A2, though, those internal details no longer matter. A1 chose to use A because those processes exist. After an initial evaluation of those processes and their implementation, A1 can — and should — simply trust them, rather than endlessly second-guessing them.

Tracking and Trust are different

Ultimately, the motivations of data creators and data re-users are very different. The processes and procedures put in place by creators and owners in search of kudos or statistics may actively obstruct the use and reuse that they profess to want. Complex forms of attribution, aligned to heavy-handed enforcement of infringements, do nothing to encourage a far broader community of use to emerge.

By attempting to count — and manage — the small number of uses today, data creators are stifling growth that otherwise is ready to explode. A perfect example of the saying (which may not translate beyond Britain’s shores!) of ‘biting off your nose to spite your face.’ Think about it…

Leigh ends his post with

Attribution should be a social norm that we encourage, strongly, in order to acknowledge the sources of our Open Data.

Other than broadening it from ‘Open Data’ to just ‘data,’ I couldn’t agree more. But let’s keep it lightweight, simple, and pragmatic.

Note: or perhaps this post should have been called “When you stand on a giant’s shoulders, it’s a good idea to say thank you.”

Image of Eduardo Paolozzi‘s sculpture of Sir Isaac Newton by Flickr user ‘monkeywing‘

Related articles

• How Do We Attribute Data? (ldodds.com)

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

He did a great job, so if you have time, click through here or below to see more: Jason Lemkin, Echosign, Adobe, SaaS King {Video Leader Series}

We’ve got a super treat for all the software sales executives in our community. This week’s video is sure to open your mind. I was honored to sit down with Jason Lemkin, one of my role models in the SaaS game. Jason was the founder and CEO of super-popular sales product, Echosign. He sold the company to Adobe and it’s now a $64 million recurring business unit.

Jason’s knowledge is a step above the rest when it comes to building SaaS revenues for scale and success. Watch as we ask him questions about hiring for a VP of sales, generating leads, the future of sales teams, and where you should focus as a SaaS exec.

As always catch the individual clips easily. If you’ve got 20 minutes on the treadmill or during your commute, we highly recommend checking out the full video at the bottom of this post. Here is Jason Lemkin:

• BEST SAAS METRIC?
• WHERE DID THE LEADS COME FROM?
• YOUR STORY?
• HOW TO HIRE VP SALES?
• OUTSIDE VS. INSIDE SALES?
• HUNT DEER OR ELEPHANTS?
• YOUR INFLUENCERS?

(Cross-posted @ saastr)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

Albert Einstein, you may have heard, was a clever man. He scribbled equations on blackboards, thought big thoughts, and all of that. But, allegedly, he also said

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

These words have resonated with me recently, as I’ve heard pitches from one company after another, all of which are trying to cut through the complexity of data to make it accessible. Their goals appear laudable, but all too often I find myself wondering how simple this stuff can be? If we make it too simple, do we run the risk of unleashing a flood of half-baked ‘analysis,’ undertaken by people who really shouldn’t be allowed near a calculator, let alone a Hadoop cluster? On the other hand there’s a persuasive argument to be made for democratising access to data and tools, freeing organisations from over-reliance upon their new High Priests of Data.

Every data question should not require a data scientist, but maybe we really shouldn’t be making it too easy for people to tackle the hard questions without support from someone who knows what they’re doing.

How simple, then, is too simple? And can we use data in a different way; in order to offer enough simplicity, smartly?

One company which has tried to do that in an interesting way is Datahero, and I spoke with co-founder Chris Neumann this week to learn some more.

There’s been some good coverage of the company over the past few weeks, and if you’ve not come across them before then it’s worth taking a skim through the Related articles at the end of this piece. I won’t bother repeating those pieces here.

The thing that interested me — other than Chris’ obvious passion and enthusiasm for his subject — was the way in which Datahero plans to use a mix of data analysis, user experience design and machine learning in order to guide the user toward analyses and visualisations that are likely to be of use to them. Chris is quick to stress that the company isn’t looking too closely at the data values its customers upload. Instead, the system studies the structure of the data (this column contains dates, this column contains place names, etc) and any associated metadata in order to make recommendations for logical ways to visualise the dataset.

As the number of users grows, the roadmap also includes Amazon-style recommendations. If a lot of other people uploading their quarterly sales forecast graph it in a certain way, then it makes sense to recommend that type of graph to a new user who uploads data with a similar structure. The recommendation won’t always be right, but it should go a long way toward minimising the fear of staring at columns and columns of data without a good idea about where to turn first.

Smart recommendations, clever algorithms, and an engaging UI will not — on their own — turn everyone into a data scientist. But nor, really, should they. What they can do, though, is what Neumann described as “enabling the 99%;” those people who have a dump of data from Mailchimp or Google Analytics or Salesforce or Excel, and who don’t really know how to begin sensibly visualising the multitude of columns and rows of numbers.

It’s an intriguing idea, and it will be interesting to see how successfully the system can deliver value to a potentially huge pool of individuals who find themselves data-rich, but skills-poor.

Even if technically successful, of course, the challenge will be persuading those same users to continue paying for the service. If they think they’ll use it often enough to pay for, won’t they end up acquiring enough of the skills to work with their own data anyway? Unless, of course, Datahero manages to grow and add complexity along with its users…

Image of Albert Einstein, ©1947. Image sourced from the Library of Congress’ Prints and Photographs division with identifier cph.3b46036. Shared on Wikipedia, and deemed to be in the Public Domain.

Related articles

• Datahero Turns Data Into Rich Visuals Without The Need For A Data Analyst (techcrunch.com)
• ‘Data vis for the 99 percent’: DataHero launches its free service (venturebeat.com)
• Datahero launches to the public, making genius-level data science simple, automated and free (thenextweb.com)
• Visualization startup Datahero opens its doors and delivers data analysis for the masses [GigaOM] (gigaom.com)

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud of Data)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

There is no perfect approach and as I mentioned I’ve seen all of these methods attempted.  The reality today is these deployments are not perfect and organizations do need to make some tough choices around how they want to approach these technology deployments.  This goes hand in hand with understanding the four types of enterprise collaboration deployments.  The best solution for your organization depends on where you see this initiative going in the long run and the kind of support you are willing to give it.

Hopefully this will provide some guidance or at least start some discussions around what your organization should be doing.

(Cross-posted @ Social Business Advisor: Enterprise Collaboration Strategy)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.