Roman Stanek

Archive for February, 2009

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You will not see us in your accounts

In Work on February 18, 2009 at 1:41 pm

The analyst firm The 451 Group asks technology companies “Who else do you see in your accounts?” Being “seen in the account” is perceived as a sign of market presence and ability to execute. And the opposite is true as well. Not being seen in accounts is sign of weakness and lack of market penetration. It’s also a proxy for the longevity question: “Will they even survive if they are not on anybody’s radar screen.”

My perspective is completely different. I believe that being seen in the accounts of large competitors is a sign of confusion and a complete waste of time and money. Startups are best when they disrupt existing markets, not attack them head on. Any sufficiently disruptive technology should be first deployed in a market segment that is seen as secondary or completely irrelevant by the big guys.

Established companies often compete on feature/functionality depth — delivering more features at an ever diminishing rate of value to customers to extract more money from them. Clearly not an interesting place to be for a young company.

I would like to promise here to our large competitors: You will not see Good Data in your accounts if:

  • your customers believe in a single version of truth
  • you deal with BI and data warehousing “experts” who attend TDWI seminars
  • Inmon Vs. Kimball matters to you
  • your projects are measured in months or six figure dollar numbers
  • you engage in star-versus-snowflake schema debates
  • your product offers 30 ways to format a decimal number
  • producing 1,000 different reports a day is one of your product claims

I could go on and on. Simply put – every time we read that competitor XYZ doesn’t see us in their accounts, we consider it a small victory. We don’t want to be seen in your accounts. At least not until we are ready…

Looking for SOA in All the Wrong Places?

In SOA, cloud on February 5, 2009 at 4:02 pm

Systinet’s founding CTO and my friend Anne Thomas Manes pronounced the demise of SOA a few weeks ago. Honestly, SOA lost its meaning for me on the day when good, old Solaris became the “SOA operating system”. But is SOA dead or not? I don’t believe so but I think that Anne and others are looking for SOA in the wrong places. Here is why:

Part of our Systinet SOA pitch was this truism: “SOA is not something you can buy”. We believed that SOA didn’t come in a box and companies have to invest time and money to build it. And maybe this is the crux of the problem. What if the act of building internal service blueprint is beyond the capabilities and budgets of the individual customers? Go to the SOA mailing list and try to understand how to build your own SOA and you can spend the rest of your life reading the discussions and related blogs and comments.

Systinet SOA

My point is that IT departments will always spend most of their budgets keeping the lights on and there is not enough money left for a complete architectural redesign. And even if they decide to throw more money at it they will still not get it right because of lack of internal expertise, lack of vision and simply because it is too hard to rebuild systems that somehow “work”. Every company seems to have a set of requirements that none of the commercial products can ever satisfy and as a result the existing internal architectures are usually completely proprietary. And sediments of bad architectural decisions are nearly impossible to peel off…

Maybe it’s time to forget about this SOA delusion and look someplace else. For companies like Google, Amazon, Workday and others (including my company – Good Data) SOA is not only “yet another IT initiative” but the key differentiator that allows them to deliver a flexible and extensible set of services. And the only way IT departments will be able to “buy SOA” is to use services from the companies in the cloud. The role of proprietary internal architectures will diminish over time as companies move to an increasing number of on-demand services – and that is probably what Anne wanted to say when she declared SOA dead…