Tags: BearingPoint, John Gill, Information Management, BI, Performance Management, Analytics, IM, Business Intelligence, Performance Management

Featuring expert advice, helpful services, easy-to-use tools and resources for do-it-yourself fixes, and “real live” expert support, HP Total Care is designed to give SMB the best technology experience. The offerings include HP ProtectTools, Accidental Damage Protection with Computrace, HP Backup and Recovery Manager, Smart Desktop Management services, free online classes, white papers, and “How-to-IT guides” that help explain IT security options.

In this video podcast highlight, we speak with Worldwide HP Total Care Manager Greg Nika, and Tom Szaky, CEO and founder of TerraCycle, Bill Seidle, program manager, PSG Americas at HP, and John Dayan, VP for marketing and business development, PSG Americas at HP.

TerraCycle founder Szaky welcomes the freedom that Total Care gives him to focus on, well, garbage (TerraCycle repurposes garbage, packages its product in garbage, and has been distributed in the U.S. and Canada by leading retailers such as Home Depot, Wal*Mart, Whole Foods and hardware stores.

Also on hand for the announcement were the celebrity “achievers” who have made their “faceless” statements in television advertisements spotlighting the adaptability and versatility of HP’s personal computing technology, including Olympic Gold Medalist Snowboarder Shaun White, Tennis Pro and fashion designer Serena Williams, supermodel Petra Nemcova and The Orange County Choppers. Other mobility products and services were announced at the “Your Life is the Show” launch event.

Tags: HP Total Care, real live, SMB, ProtectTools, Accidental Damage Protection, Computrace, Backup and Recovery Manager, Smart Desktop Management, How-to-IT, Greg Nika, Tom Szaky, TerraCycle, Bill Seidle, John Dayan, Your Life is the Show

Tags: Seth Goldstein, Facebook, appvertising, Graphing Social Patterns

Tags: Slot machines, Terry Campara, Larry Magid

Adam Hepworth and Jared Richards determined their dream job would be to build and run a ski company. So the former college roomates designed the new skis and incorporated bamboo inside. This is is all by design since bamboo used in our cores not only gives extra pop but allows the skis to take on many of the same stiffness and durability qualities of carbon fiber at a fraction of the cost. Additionally, the bamboo was lighter weight and gives backcountry skiers a wide ski for extreme powder but shaves off a pound and a half off their load. Bluehouse Skis are ideal for the A/T skier, a park crew taking it to the backcountry, or a novice skier who is looking for an exclusive ski to flaunt on the mountain.

Marketing and sales are online through the Bluehouse Web site. The team is active with their blog and has already incorporated community feedback in their latest skis.

Tags: Bluehouse Skis, Adam Hepworth, Jared Richards

Gaming PC with quad core Intel processors. Wireless laptops with Intel Centrino Duo processor technonlogy. Wireless ultra mobile PC with Intel. A central HD-capable entertainment hub with Intel Viiv processor technology inside.

Related Stories: IntelDigtalHome, IntelGaming

Tags: Esquire, Esquire North, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad, Centrino Duo, Viiv processor, IntelDigtalHome, IntelGaming

The panel in this podcast includes Peter Kaminski, CTO of Socialtext, Jackie Medecki, attorney for social media and marketing at Intel, Jeff Moriarty, a social media/Web 2.0 design engineer at Intel, John Miner, an IT methodologist at Intel, and Eleanor Wynn, a social technology architect at Intel

It’s IT’s stereotypical response (”No”) to questions about setting up blogs and wikis, that prompts the debate. But as John Miner points out, most large companies inherently already have blogs and wikis — they just don’t realize it. This, he says, is because they tend to grow organically inside of large IT structures. But the fact is that the candor and conversation that make up the substance of blogs and wikis do tend to threaten some of the structures of the enterprise — especially when it comes to legal concerns.

How does Intel handle the challenges? Especially when it comes to the “gray areas?” This video podcast shows how one large corporation is navigating social media in the enterprise.

Check out the IT@Intel Community - Click here.

Tags: Tom Foremski, Silicon Valley Watcher, Intel Developer Forum, social media, IT, social networks, Peter Kaminski, Socialtext, Jackie Medecki, Jeff Moriarty, John Miner, Eleanor Wynn, social technology, blogs and wikis, IT@Intel

In September 2006, when HP acquired VoodooPC and brought VoodooPC Founder Rahul Sood on as chief technology officer for HP’s Global Gaming Business, the wheels were set in motion for HP to make bold statement in the gaming space. Sood explains what’s been going on behind the curtain for the last 12 months here, but the bottom line is that the “symbolic” partnership between Voodoo and HP has, by many accounts, not only marked HP’s entry into gaming with a splash, but raised the bar for the gaming PC industry, from the Blackbird 002’s high-performance engineering to the kind of design that has some comparing it with some stylish competitors.

On hand for the announcement were the celebrity “achievers” who have made their “faceless” statements in television advertisements spotlighting the adaptability and versatility of HP’s personal computing technology, including Olympic Gold Medalist Snowboarder Shaun White, Tennis Pro and fashion designer Serena Williams, supermodel Petra Nemcova and The Orange County Choppers, all of whom took a few moments to speak with PodTech’s Catherine Girardeau about HP and the role of personal media technology in their lives. Each of them, in their own way, embodies the event’s theme — “Your Life is the Show.”

The hopping party also provided a chance for press and enthusiasts to hear from several HP Personal Systems Group execs, including Satjiv Chahil, senior vice president of global marketing and Todd Bradley, executive vice president; Rahul Sood, CTO for HP Gaming (and founder of VoodooPC), and Phil McKinney, vice president and CTO for the Personal Systems Group and general manager of HP’s Gaming Business Unit.

Responses to the announcements have come from around the globe — in Britain, one blogger named Dave acknowledging, “This is not just any PC. This is the Blackbird 002,” while in Florida, Mark N. writes about the new PC with a simple, “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”

But the announcement wasn’t all about the gaming PC — it was also about building community around HP’s efforts in multimedia. Philip Churchill notes, on his blog, that in addition to the MediaSmart Server unveiled at the event, HP is supporting it with a “community for enthusiasts [of the server] to share information, offer support, and enjoy the product together.”

In addition to the PodTech video, photos from the event can be found here.

Director of Photography: San Key Sa

Tags: HP, Skylight Studios, iPAQ, handheld communications, MediaSmart PC, MediaSmart Server, multimedia, gaming enthusiast, Blackbird 002, VoodooPC, Rahul Sood, Shaun White, Serena Williams, Petra Nemcova, Orange County Choppers, Your Life is the Show, Satjiv Chahil, Todd Bradley, Rahul Sood, Phil McKinney

FutureBazaar.com recently got infused with a funding of $25 million and is bound to give established etailers in India many sleepless nights.

Led by Kishore Biyani, the group owns and operates huge retail chains including Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar, Central, E-Zone, Fashion Station, Depot and many others.

I caught up with Sankarson, CEO of FutureBazaar.com at the eTailing Conference in Chennai. Shanky, as he prefers to be called, has had impressive experience in the online retailing market having set up shopping sites for Rediff and Shoppers Stop.

In this podcast, Shanky gives his honest opinions about etailing in India and about FutureBazaar in particular.

Tags: India, FutureBazaar.com, Kishore Biyani, Pantaloons, Big Bazaar, E-Zone, Sankarson

Tags: Spock, Jay Bhatti, Jaideep Singh, search, Mercury News

Tags: fashion, open source, community collaboration, BurdaStyle, Nora Abousteit, Benedikta von Karaisl, Sewpedia

Here is a lighter look at government homeland security.

Tags: GOVSEC, homeland security

In other news, NextPage wins a 2007 CODIE Award finalist in the Best Document Management category for its document retention and compliance software.

Tags: ConnectCast, Cydni Tetro, Connect Magazine, Colin Kelly, Forbes 1000, Huntsman Chemical, vSpring, in2M, Mvelopes, Web 2.0, NextPage

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Tags: NETGEAR, Digital Entertainer HD, Jamison Ching

Related Stories: GoogleApps

(more…)

Tags: Google Apps, GoogleApps

(more…)

Tags: Venu Venugopal, CA, MPLS VPN

This is an Intel podcast.

Related Stories: IntelDigitalHealth

Transcript:

Guest: Ann Williamson - UCSF Nursing
Guest: Scott Eckert – Motion Computing
Guest: Paul Otellini – Intel Corporation
Guest: Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF Nursing

Ann Williamson - UCSF Nursing
We are actually technology hungry here, having not had a lot of technology at the point-of-care. We were one of the early leaders in information technology and healthcare and have fallen behind a little bit; so we are actually very excited and pleased to be in with this particular product.

Scott Eckert – Motion Computing
What I have here is the Motion C5. The clinicians gave us extensive feedback and Paul mentioned all the work that Intel had done on research into the usability for a device like this. You’ll notice there is no rubber strap on the back that is a great example. The clinicians actually told us five things, make it disinfectable, make it durable, include a barcode scanner, include RFID technology, and include a camera.

Announcer
The C5 mobile assistant could revolutionize how healthcare is delivered in hospitals. Intel began developing prototypes of this mobile PC in 2005. Motion Computing was the first to actually build a real mobile clinical assistant.

Dr. Michael Blum – UCSF Nursing
None of the barcode scanners are RFID readers, camera is certainly not new. What’s new is appreciating the ecosystem in which they need to work. A nurse wheeling around a COW with a barcode scanner on it and an RFID reader, a camera, none of which talk to anything else particularly well has proven to be a miserable disaster. The IT shops cannot get this stuff in place, cannot support it fast enough, the vendors do not make them connect well enough and you end up with exactly what we have, a digital device that records blood pressures, heart rates, and O2 status, sitting there, someone writes it down on a piece of paper and hours later it ends up in a system.

Someone uses a digital camera and then carries the picture around until tomorrow when they remember they have to download it in the system. This is the first time we looked at those problems. The technology vendors came to us and said how do we do this better and we said look, put this all into one, get it all talking to each other, and give the clinicians a device that they can use to take care of patients and not try to figure out which piece of technology I am supposed to grab off a shelf to take with me to do this task.

Paul Otellini – Intel Corporation
You just look at the target market as being 13 to 20 million nurses or that was on the video. I would agree that is a relatively small number in the grand scheme of what Intel builds every year, but it is a much bigger quest that we are after. I mean this is about taking the world’s largest industry, healthcare and the world’s least penetrated industries as a percent of IT purchases and bring it into a more productive state by the application of IT.

To do that, you need to work on every edge of the problem, you do work in the back end, in the health IT systems, you need to work around common languages, which is our efforts in dossier (ph); you need to work on electronic medical records, which is our efforts there; you need to work on the home and we will talk more about that in a future session; and you need to work more in the clinics, where the data has actually accumulated and then brought to a place where it can actually be dealt with. So, from that perspective, this is a very critical linchpin in filling out the entirely of that system and I think it is a giant opportunity that is why we created a business unit around it.

Announcer
The medical industry is high-tech intensive with advanced devices that diagnose and treat crippling diseases, but hospitals have not fully benefited from the Information Technology boom that began with personal computing in the 1980s. Nurses and doctors often use some surprisingly old-fashioned networked equipment to create, store, and work with patient records. This is what many hospitals currently use, a COW, known as a Computer on Wheels.

Ann Williamson - UCSF Nursing
This is the current device that has -– there is no ability at least on (Inaudible) right now, for a barcode scanner we have to -– it could be done and when we first put this into place the nurses said, if I had to wheel to my (Inaudible), I’ll show you in a minutes and Dinamap, which is our Automatic Vital Sign Retrieval device; it is like why can I just have the Dinamap sitting here and just have it all interacted and that is what we are doing with this Tablet.

Speaker
This is the machine that we use for our patient assessment, all the information we need are in here and then we just add in more information to it with the Dinamap for the blood pressure reading. So, here I am going to push this to get that information, this will give the blood pressure, this will give the pulse, and this will give the oxygen saturation and this information we get from the little device on his finger and the blood pressure we get from the blood pressure cuff on his right arm. Okay, so we do have his readings, 155/67, his heart rate is 53, and his pulsoxymeter is 97%.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: C5, IntelDigitalHealth

In this podcast, Farid Moussavi, managing director of BearingPoint Financial Services Technical Solutions Practice will help you to better understand a service delivery framework to address the prevalent issues in providing market data to your internal clients. He will also explore what it would take to treat market data like a service.

Transcript:

Host: Paul Lancour - PodTech
Guest: Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint

Paul Lancour - PodTech
I’m Paul Lancour with PodTech.net.

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
People are expecting in a very short-term and I mean the next 12-18 months, the volume of market data to quadruple.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
That’s Farid Moussavi, Managing Director of Financial Services Technical Solutions Practice at BearingPoint. Not only is the sheer volume of data a problem, but traditional practices of considering data in individual silos will no longer suffice. I started by asking Farid to give us his view of the landscape today.

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
I think the best way to give a good background to set things going here is to state it in the form of a problem, and then discuss about how to identify the solution or solutions around the problem. Market data in its original form dating back to its early days really was historically pretty nothing more than a ticker tape if you will, of information coming on a piece of paper, out of a box on to a user’s desk or office or an organization, and over the course of time, Financial Services history especially in the last decade or so, it’s really exponentially grown to be much more than that. It’s no longer just a push of information to individual or organization. It really needs to be treated like a technology service, just like other technology services in an IT organization is used to pushing out to whether it’s email service or network service or desktop services and the like. And in this context, what we’re advocating here is to really put together a service delivery framework as an IT organization and the financial services firm is looking to treat market data for service.

Now, there’re some challenges obviously, especially in the days of algorithmic trading and program trading, this really represents the secret sauce if you will, of some other financial services firms, and breaking down the barriers to the silos of what it takes to deliver Market Data Services to a User Community, it is really the daunting task that’s in front of most IT organizations as well as the business divisions that they represent and support. There are fundamentally, currently two models providing market data, one is the classic outsource model, Bloomberg is a primary example of a subscription based turn-key solution, and then the other model is one which is more of a cookie cutter, grow your own type model. Companies like Reuters and Thomson are usual suppliers in this domain that leverage on market data distribution platform.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So, that’s a good outline of the problem as it exists right now that there’s a lot of market data out there, and there’s a lot of technology that is changing the way, people expect to have that data presented to them. What’s the trend going on right now with financial services firms using Market Data?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Well, the most daunting trend is just a sheer volume of market data coming out from the exchanges into various sources. The content is just exploding and the ability of the financial service firms to absorb this volume, and deal with it and basically make very quick financial decisions from the moment of making the decision to the execution of that decision is now being measured in microseconds whereas it used to be measured in minutes if not hours. So, with this explosion of data and just a sheer volume and the type of data what we’re looking at here is a problem statement whereby the technologists who have to consume this data or challenge with rising costs, being forced primarily in a reactionary mode, and it’s really a costing issue and most firms on Wall Street are now challenged with this trend.

Market Data, let’s not forget, is this annual spend in a large Wall Street firm is usually measured not in the millions or tens of millions, It’s measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year as their annual spend and this number is increasing.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Given what you’ve said then what would it take to take to go from the old models to a newer model that would treat market data more like a service?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Well, we’re advocating a tiered service delivery approach whereby you’re really treating users based on their need for market data. So, if you take the analogy of a bronze, silver, gold typed User Community where the bronze user would be basically looking at just screen-based display of data, the silver and gold as now platinum user would be looking at data coming out in a much faster pace to address for example automated trading, algorithmic training, doing some of the really exotic cross-asset class trading applications, that is a totally different type of user and therefore must be treated as such.

In order to treat the User Community in such a structured fashion, you’re really looking at addressing three fundamental areas. One is Instrumentation and that’s simply the monitoring and reporting of connectivity with the market data service providers. Your internal market data feed handlers and cache, and looking at of course your data quality itself. Another area where it’s definitely needed to some assistance on is the area of Processes. If you’ll take a look at the service delivery framework then too it’s of course several processes that together form that framework. The most important one that applies here is one of Capacity Management, and we should not be a surprised because of course the sheer volumes are forcing capacity limitations to be violated. Looking at Capacity Management which involves enhanced collaboration with the exchange data providers, the application developers, production support, regulators as well as the end users themselves who will help the market data service organization stay ahead of the curve.

The last and definitely not the least, it’s not the most extensive is looking at addressing this tier to user community from an organizational support perspective. This is where you have development support for new API to support low latency infrastructures that the new volumes are dictating, as well as the integration with existing service delivery components to address the problem. What do I mean by that? IT organizations for these firms are all providing perfectly viable email service, network service, desktop services, and they all have what you would expect and to help desk, trouble ticketing, problem change inside of management, that’s all embedded into the way they do things everyday. There’s absolutely no reason why market data cannot be treated just like any of these other service families, leveraging the exact same service management concepts that are dictated by a service delivery framework. Hopefully, that shed some light on how one would go about embarking on a tiered user community.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
I think it does, but also I would wonder what are some additional challenges? You’ve already outlined some in terms of expected speed by the client, the sheer amount of data. What are some of the challenges in breaking down these silos?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
A couple of things, one comes to mind is primarily is — market data falls in that classic business and technology divide. On one hand, you’ll have as I have mentioned earlier in the introduction, the secret sauce, the applications which consume market data information are really in many ways swinging the profitability of the firm could very easily go from the positive to negative and vice versa. An outage of market data during the business day even measured in a matter of few minutes can translate into tens of millions of dollars of lost revenue. So, letting go or opening up access to these applications and see where some of the skeletons are, where some of the errors of optimization could be opening up some other proprietary protocols. These are the types of things that are much higher hurdles in the context of market data than in other technology solutions. It’s an (Inaudible) of email which is basically a utility type application whereas market data applications or anything, but you also have sheer lack of knowledge unfortunately in the technology community as well as in the business community about what market data is from a life-cycle perspective. There’re so many disciplines that are involved in pushing this out as a service. Market data is the industry is somewhat of an incestuous industry. Very few people in the industry are aware about the issues. A lot of people can speak to them, but actually addressing them, you can really — it’s hard to find their talent that can speak to it and work at it the same time.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Well, given all the difficulties you’ve outlined what is the reasoning behind doing this in the first place?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Well, as I mentioned it represents hundreds of millions dollars of annual spend that usually is one of the largest, it’s not The largest line item and IT organizations budge in the financial services firm. And by definition there’s opportunity to save but not only capital cost but operational cost. So, cost optimization, cost efficiency is definitely one aspect of it. Secondly, everybody is expecting not just the slope to continue going up linearly but exponentially with the advent of some of the regulations that are coming on board, people are expecting in a very short-term and I mean in the next 12-18 months the volume of market data to quadruple. So, this is if they don’t spend money on it now to address the issues that they’re facing, but now they’re only going to be spending that much more money later. So cost avoidance, optimization and frankly, user satisfaction getting that very precious piece of information to that trading desk in the right to point of time is going to be the difference between profit or loss at the end of the trading day.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
So, what is the vendor community doing to address this problem?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Well, depending on which sub-section of the community you’re talking about. At the end of day you’re talking about CPUs, you’re talking about servers, you’re talking about networks. If you’re a CPU vendor you want to sell more servers, you want to be able to ultimately ideally, horizontally scale but that’s not going to solve the problem that’s actually going to — it’s anything add to the problem, you want to ultimately, vertically scale and looking at some of the latest technologies when it comes to, for example, Dual-Core technology or testing Quad-Core technologies, exploring server fabrics, these are the types of things that the hardware vendors are addressing and most of these firms are maxed out on their data centers. There is no space left, there is no power left to add more servers, so something more innovative has to be done to address the hardware on footprint.

On the network side, of course the usual suspects in the networking community are providing the monitoring tools or just beginning, I should say, you would think that they would be well on their way given the size of dollars that are being spent but they’re providing monitoring tools to be able to measure latency which is a very big issue at the moment in a the market data space, and the service providers themselves, the market data service providers, the Bloombergs, the Reuters, the Thomsons, they are recognizing that this is becoming a barrier that’s too high for even them to address on their own. So, they’re developing various user groups to work along with their clients to address some of the service delivery aspects of market data.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Who do you see out there in the market place who is at the cutting edge addressing this?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Well, without necessarily plugging any one vendor, I think as I mentioned depending on which angle you’re addressing this problem, you have your service management vendors which were obviously very keen on because that’s the foundation of what we are talking about here, providing more open sourced solution based approaches to service delivery whether it’s a reporting tool, whether it’s a trouble ticketing tool, whether it’s a monitoring tool, they are all beginning to wake up and pretty much trying to address this problem, of course admitting that there is a talent shortage in the space. In the network space the hardware vendors the likes of Cisco, for example, but definitely not just them are also being able to put in some monitoring capabilities to their underlying switches and routers to be able to accommodate at this very specialized type of traffic in the monitoring and in reporting.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Is there anything else, Farid, you would like to share with our audience?

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Well, to those in the audience who’re involved in providing market data to an end user community, I would like to say is help is on the way because the vendors are be a little bit late to the scene are beginning to wake up, I think there really is no real silver bullet, there is no automated solution that’s out there that you can just buy off-the-shelf I think. People are going to have to continue rolling up their sleeves for those of the audience who have experienced a shrinking of their budget when it comes to this particular technology domain, they will see a reversal of that, they will have to see a reversal that is their firm is going to continue being a player in the capital market space.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Well, with that I want to thank you very much for taking the time out to speak with us today, Farid.

Farid Moussavi – BearingPoint
Oh, you’re quite welcome.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Farid Moussavi is the Managing Director of Financial Services Technical Solutions Practice at BearingPoint.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: Farid Moussavi, BearingPoint

Transcript:
Host: Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Guest: Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Welcome to this edition of Thought Leaders, where we bring you candid conversations with the people whose research and writing are guiding both the buyers and suppliers of IT Solution. I’m Jim Leach. Today we are joined by Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder of Tier 1 Research. Andy is unique in market research field in that he is part Wall Street analyst and part IT Industry analyst. He applies his experience on Wall Street through his research and how IT companies are turning customer solution into shareholder value. Thanks for joining us on Thought Leaders Andy.

Andrew Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Hey, happy to be here, thanks for having me.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Can you put on your Wall Street Analyst hat first and give our listeners your view on the hosting industry? How big is it? How do you segment it? Where are the growth areas?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Sure. Well, from the Wall Street perspective, there were a ton of people that got burned back in the Internet bubble that looked at Exodus as the be-all-end-all company in the hosting sector and then there was Acomi and all these other companies that had monstrous billion dollar valuations, and obviously those all came down in fact, to zero to something probably above zero.

So, in a couple of years that ensued since then, it was tough for people to really understand why would I go back to that industry, it was part of the bubble. And fortunately now, we’ve had a five year - half a decade separation to where people can come back and revisit these.

So, that’s because of the Web 2.0 movement that gives a lot of prospects. BusinessWeek article from a couple of weeks ago; we have a $12 billion industry in hosting that people still don’t necessarily know how to look at. There is two ways to look at it. One is the old way which is the — there is data centers, and that’s a co-location business. There’s people with dedicated hosting that actually own the gear and it’s actually a single device or multiple single devices for specific a client. Then there is shared infrastructure; shared infrastructure used to just be defined as shared hosting, but now as you look, it includes utility computing and virtualized hosting. That’s the old way to look at it.

The form factor — way to look at it is not how we believe investors would want anyone to look at it. The new way should be, who is the buyer of the services that are being sold in this $12 billion hosting industry; it’s the consumer which buys blog services, media publishing, and sharing tools; it’s the small business that buys different software, the service applications, or host their own version of an appliance as an application. Then there’s large enterprises that have big needs for disaster recovery, big needs for facilities, for lots of their analyst applications.

So, the right way to look at it is by customer type that’s buying; and that’s how we are starting to segment our industry at least, in our revenue view of this $12 billion sector. But now that’s the right way to look at it, as people are starting to understand that and understand how these business models are working. The investors have started to come back, and most of the stocks in this sector that are public, and what we’ve seen are doubling over the last year, or at least they are more formalization in how their capital structures worked. So, I think investors have more of a reason to come back to this sector as well as a healthier sector to come back to.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Very interesting; so let’s dig into those buyer segments a little bit, the consumers, small business and large enterprises. Where are the growth areas in those segments, are they all growing at about the same rate or are some of the areas hotter than others?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
The consumer sector interestingly, is actually being driven by free services, which are advertising based. So, it’s actually a different revenue model than people buying actually for the services whether it’s a blog service, whether it’s a shared hosting account, whether it’s an email account.

So that business model is completely different and there’s tremendous growth in online advertising because of the benefits that you can have from better targeting who you are trying to reach with your ad. As you get into the small business, those companies are finally understanding that they can take advantage of the applications that larger enterprises have used because they can buy them in a ‘software as a service’ delivery model, which gives it a per user, per seat, per month, pricing structure, and lets it be approachable by both the user as well as the buyer from the small business.

So that’s the biggest growth area as it relates to hosting. The large enterprise has already decided whether they’re going to do something in-house or whether they are going to do it on an outsourced basis. That usually has a five year cyclical nature and I think we are coming back to the marketplace — we are coming back to the part in that cycle, where the enterprises want to be outsourcing more. And interestingly the dynamic that’s hitting at the same time now is the availability of so many enterprise applications through this ‘software as a service’ model, which is causing enterprises to need less data center space in some cases, or if their delivery model is to be a ‘software as a service’ company, a lot of these companies are taking on more infrastructure.

So there’s as many companies growing huge in a large enterprise as it relates to their hosting needs, as there are companies who have a significantly less need. So a good large enterprise is probably the slowest growth sector but it’s more about who you’re targeting that large enterprise group.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
So the buyers of Web hosting services are starting to segment themselves into these different categories of consumer and small business, large enterprises. Are you also seeing a similar type of segmentation in the Web hosting providers? Are they trying to deliver different types of services and to meet the needs of these different segments?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yes, that’s a great question. It’s been the changeover from the seller having the power to the buyer having the power; and there’s equally as many companies that get this change, to the companies that don’t. So, the companies that get this change are offering so many services on a needed basis, or on a pre-user basis; that’s how the buyers are interested in buying right now. As you go down across those different segments from large enterprise down to consumer, the consumer is becoming so used to having free services, and they are happy to understand that advertisements are what’s allowing them to get that service for free.

You no longer have people interested in buying a software package at ‘Best Buy’ or ‘Circuit City’ or having them download software from the Web, you’re wanting them to just be able to drive right in and use the service and pay for it; then again, as you go up into the small business and large enterprise to be able to use that and pay for that on a pre-user basis, and above and beyond that the ones who really get this change that’s happened, understand that you are personalizing and verticalizing their offerings; so, not just offering a utility computing platform but tailoring it towards a particular vertical market such as financial services or retail or healthcare.

Whatever the application is that’s going to reside on top of an infrastructure, it’s going to have a better growth story behind it and a better traction and adoption if it’s tailored towards this specific vertical market. Those are the companies who really get what’s going on right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Or in a sense that the consumer segment is driving the business segment; and from an IT supplier perspective, a number of the biggest hosting companies, firms like IBM, EDS, big telcos like AT&T and Verizon, they grew up in the business sector. Are firms like those big traditional outsourcers going to have trouble surviving in this new market? Do they have to regroup?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
They definitely need to regroup. I wouldn’t go as far as to say they have a problem surviving. I hope a lot of these mega-companies lay off a lot of people that hopefully go and start a lot of new interesting entrepreneurial companies. The entire reason that the consumer is driving the innovations in the enterprise services world is that it’s easier to adopt something that’s free. I mean you can get mass adoption of something that’s free, and you get a lot of people that battle-test different applications that are online.

So is Microsoft ready to offer their entire Office suite in an online format yet? Sure they’re probably ready, but will they? They won’t until they have to. Unfortunately, there’s companies from Google all the way on down to the companies like Zoho that are launching spreadsheets and word processing documents online, and making that something that Microsoft will have to react to; same thing can be said for the outsourcers on your question. If these services are geared towards being tuned with expensive consultants and expensive engagements, it’s not necessary that that’s wrong, there’s the need for that personalization.

They’re using the tools that have been battle-tested in the consumer world. You are able to more quickly and easily adopt, customize, personalize, and verticalize all these applications and the enterprises outside do think that IBM is at a disadvantage as a company, but hopefully the IBMs, EDSs, the CSEs will use to their advantage the divisions that are focused on looking at those technologies to their advantage for their enterprise accounts. So again, I wouldn’t go as far as to say they’re in trouble; I would go as far as to say they are disadvantaged relative to companies that do get to work closer to both the cutting edge consumer side as well as the small business side.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Let’s talk a little about the startups that you alluded to, that it might start emerging over time. I know you keep an eye on that part of the marketplace. Have you seen anything interesting with the startups that you think could have a big impact on the broader Web hosting industry?

Andy Schroepfer - Tier 1 Research
Yeah, I think social networking is essentially the heart of what the Web 2.0 movement stands for; it’s the ability for anyone to interact with any content and share it with anyone that they want to, in any format that they want to. Whatever website you might go to, whatever application you might interact with, it should afford you the opportunity to use that in a community fashion whether it’s reading a news article online, whether it’s buying a product online, whether it’s writing a blog entry online; everything that you might do is something that should be something that can exist in a social network.

So, whether it’s the social network software makers themselves that actually pioneer this into all of the enterprise applications is yet to be seen - kind of like business analytics, that’s the sector that still exists today with business objects and a lot of mega companies still – essentially analytics need to be applied to every application. We think social networking is the latest thing out of the startup movement and needs to be applied to almost every website, every application that exists.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
It’s always a pleasure to get a chance to spend some time and talk with you Andy, I really appreciate you being a part of Thought Leaders. Let me asked you one last question.

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
Sure.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
There has been a lot of press coverage recently about an impending battle between Microsoft and Google. Are the battle lines really being drawn between these two companies, and if they are, who’s going to win and what will it mean for the IT industry?

Andy Schroepfer – Tier 1 Research
When the company is afforded evaluation like Google has, and is simultaneously able to spend increasingly mega amounts of money and be rewarded for that, that’s a hard monster for anyone to compete with. Fortunately, there are a couple players in the world like Microsoft that have dollars that they can go and compete.

So, Microsoft committed a couple billion extra dollars in this current year to go build the platform to compete. But what’s really happening is, who can build up a complete platform that anyone in the world can plug an application into and be able to like Google, help monetize that in return for access to this monster platform. Microsoft, I think is going to do the same thing; so, I guess, I do believe they are at battle completely and wholly. Do I think Microsoft has the ability to win? They have the chance to win, but this is Google’s game to lose at this point. The longer the market continues to afford Google, evaluation, to the extent that they have it for putting together this monstrosity of the computing platform, it will become almost untouchable.

So, everyone in the world that wants to have an application — and again, this comes back to the hosting sector and say, if I wanted — do I want to go build my own complete resource, or do I want to potentially tap that into a Microsoft platform or a Google platform or a Yahoo platform or an Amazon - eBay could, on down the line. Fortunately, the hosting companies that get this, again are offering utility computing, so you can hopefully tap into an unlimited amount of resource, so you can serve all of the people that want to come visit your site. But specific to Google and Microsoft if I had to pick a winner, I’m still picking Google at this point, but if you had to compete against anybody - if I’m Google, I don’t want to compete against Microsoft, if I’m Microsoft I don’t want to compete against Google; its going to be an interesting battle. Google’s my pick for the winner right now.

Jim Leach – SAVVIS Thought Leaders
Thanks again to Andy Schroepfer, President and Founder, Tier 1 Research, and thanks to you, our listeners for joining us on this edition of Thought Leaders.

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Tags: Thought Leaders, SAVVIS, Andy Schroepfer, Tier 1 Research

Transcript:
Host: Paul Lancour - PodTech
Guest: Tim Chou – Author and Entrepreneur

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
The idea that they are software companies! You could argue, if we were sitting here 10-20 years from now, we maybe looking around going, you had what?

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Welcome to Connecting with Revolutionary Minds. Conversations with IT and business leaders from WebEx. In this series of Podcast you’ll hear from IT and business pioneers working on the leading edge of the On Demand Business. I’m Paul Lancour and for this Podcast, Tim Chou, author of the book ‘The End of Software’ stopped by the PodTech studios for a wide ranging discussion about On Demand software and the future of computing among other things. I started by asking Tim to give us a little of his background.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
I’ve been in the software business for over 20 years. I’ve worked at companies like Tandem and little ventures called Reasoning and most recently, I was President of Oracle’s On Demand Business for the past five or six years.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
And now you’ve written a book about ‘The End of Software’ having spent your entire career working with the software industry, what are you talking about?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Yeah, why would you do that, right? You know I think the title is probably appropriate because I think for the first time there has been an economic shift in the software business. I think that has clearly been a transformative effect in the hardware business, the example I always use is that, well, Intel once upon a time was a little baby hardware company, no one cared much about. Today, right now, since every market process — every processor in every server is an Intel processor, how did that happen, right? Well, that revolution was a revolution of economics, simply, right? They were able to take cost and take it down, down, down; function up, up, up and by virtue of staying on that relentless path in essence re-evolve the entire industry.

This movement to quote software as a service or software On Demand is no different, it’s fundamentally an economic shift, right. We are changing the fundamental economics of the software business, which is why the old traditional software world will end, has ended, and a new one will emerge.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
But in the same way that the chip evolution was market-driven, this is not necessarily anybody’s grand-design, this is a market-driven change. This is as technology advances and as users change what they ask for from technology, the market is following that. Is that a fair parallel with the chip industry?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
I think it’s a fair parallel to refer to the fact or the idea, that in essence by giving people more technology and lower and lower price point, more and more people can take advantage of it. That certainly has happened with hardware technology. But I think in the software world — here is a simple example, I think most people will grasp, I always say, well a lot of people know what eBay does, right? eBay, let’s put it back now 15 years ago, prior to the Internet, could you have found a couple of programmers to write auctioning software? I said, well yeah, I mean it wasn’t that hard, they would have written C++ or something. Okay cool. Next step, how are we going to get our auctioning software to everybody? Oh, I have a really great idea, let’s put it in the Sunday paper, right.

Okay, we’ll put it in the Sunday paper. What happens on Monday morning? My bet is, the phone is going to start ringing, and the questions going to be asked, well shoot! You know my Windows 95 machine used to work and I downloaded your software and you know still it doesn’t work and my Shockwave dll is broken or blah…blah…blah… right? Oh, hey no problem, we’re software guys, we know how to deal with this, we’ll hire a support organization, they’ll answer the phones, they’ll sort this all out, right? Okay cool. Let’s keep going forward. It’s a year later, my great product manager shows up, Lisa, and she says, I guess, really cool idea, the Buy-It-Now function, let’s get it out to everybody.

Figure out how do we do that? No, well, Sunday paper! Right, all right we are back in the Sunday paper. Monday morning, my bet is, the phones ring again, it’s my Windows 2000 XP configuration with my Linux Box doesn’t work anymore and — no problem we’ll hire more support guys, we’ll move some of them to India, no big deal.

Okay that’s a software business we’ve all been good at this, right. My conjecture is that, that business eBay could never have existed because the cost of an auction would have been thousands of dollars to compensate for the cost structure of what I just described. So, the ability for eBay to be delivered as a service to auction software in the story to deliver as a service is fundamentally, I’ll say, at least ten times cheaper than it would have been done in the old fashion way. In the technology business, anytime you change the economics by an order of magnitude, you change the industry and we’re already seeing that.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So, this evolution has been going on for a while and I know it’s a kitschy title to talk about the end of software, but is it in fact that strong of a shift to something — this is an evolution that’s been going on, but it is something happening right now that — I mean software is still involved in this and there are plenty of programmers, you’re going to still have work to do, but it’s — I guess the question I’m asking is, is there a tipping point that we’ve reached rather than just the gradual evolution? Is there a — as they say, a paradigm shift it’s going on right now?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Well, I think the paradigm shift is going on, has been going on, you could make a conjecture that every major software company that has gone public in the past ten years, whether that’s WebEx or eBay or Amazon etcetera, which I all count as software companies have all been software as a service. We’re already shifted out of the world of the old fashion traditional software. I think what you’re saying right now is that the traditional world in essence has moved into a model of consolidation and in essence atrophy, it’s just sitting there, most people will say, well enterprise software, business software is dead, and it is in so many different ways: it’s atrophy, it’s over. What we’re sitting in the middle of is a transition that’s already happened on the consumer side by the way, we just used eBay, Google, Amazon, any of these guys, it’s already happened on the consumer side.

What the real shift is now is it’s happening on the business side and new companies are being created whether it’s like Concur and Enviance etcetera all building up in this model. I think that shift has happened. We actually — in my opinion, we have shifted into phase one of this already, meaning we have an operationally more efficient model. It is manufacturing wise more efficient. That’s not the end of the story. When you look at and let’s just use Salesforce as an example; that is really operationally more efficient than Seibel. It is cheaper to deploy, to manage etcetera, etcetera absolutely, right. Intellium right now etcetera.

The next step of this evolution is really when I’ll say; you begin to integrate data and software together. So, let me paint you a spectrum here. You got Siebel in the traditional world, Salesforce in version one, phase one of this new world of software as a service and Amazon in phase two, because most people, when I look — well, is Amazon a software company? They all look you like, ‘No’ well, wait a minute. If you go to Amazon right now, okay I know they have some loading docks with some books in it and what not, but you look at the core of what it is, it’s a software company.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
But from a user’s point of view they don’t think about it in terms of software it’s a bookstore.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Amen! and I think that’s because what happened is these two worlds have connected, meaning the world of data, meaning when you look at Amazon, you’re not like going oh let me enter in the user ID, the VIN number etcetera, etcetera, you look there was the book, right and I want to go by the book or I want to read about the book. The software in essence has disappeared, this is where I think we’re now transitioning to the world where in the hardware world, silicon is a very important constituent or part of building hardware, very important, but who the hell cares about it? I think that’s where we are headed to. I mean software is a very important, but who the hell cares about it? It will completely disappear. The idea that there are software companies, you could argue, if we were sitting here 10-20 years from now, we maybe looking around going, you had what? It’s like, oh I know there are silicon companies but who the hell are they?

Paul Lancour - PodTech
Well, is this — I think this happens with a lot of technology and in the early stages, the early adopters or people who are more technically adept, but ultimately as computers become more and more flexible and more and more ubiquitous, the average person doesn’t care about computers anymore than they care about how the television signal gets into their house. So, I know what they want to watch and so it becomes user–driven, I think that’s what we’re just talking about anyway but it becomes a user-driven rather than a technology-driven medium.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
I think user-driven in a very importantly different way, let me give you an example, I was helping a company out about a year-and-a-half ago who was in the — it’s called the Incentive Management business. So, it’s like managing what Salesforce compensations are like, it’s traditional software company, right.

So, the CEOs like, what should I do and I’m going to just move to software as a service, get out of the traditional world, move to software as a service. Okay great, six months ago I’m talking to him and he said, “Hey you know, we made the transition, you know we’re now software as a service,” I said, “That’s cool.” He said, “What’s next?” and I said, “Well, what’s next is that as I said the data and the applications come together, these are indistinguishable from each other” and he goes, “Well, that’s really weird, because you know what question I get asked now the most is what Salesforce compensation plan works the best? What Salesforce compensation plans work the best?” He is not — as a traditional software company, he would never been ask that question.

All you’ve been asked for is, I need this feature to be able to give my sales guys a 10% kicker in the last quarter of the month or some such thing. He is not being asked a very important question. You think about the value of the answer of that question; it’s gargantuan, but it’s only possible because the software and the information have now become one and I think that is exactly — we have been building capability to store information for years.

Now, it’s really the defragmentation of information and of people that is a huge step forward and we only need to look at Google as a simple example of this. That is what it is. It in essence is saying, I’m wanting to defragment information and give you knowledge, there is a shit load of software — once again most people don’t think that Google is a software company. Go down to Mountain View and walk around; I’ll tell you most of those guys are programmers.

Paul Lancour - PodTech
So, are we running into a problem here where you’re going to go to somebody who’s designing software and say to them what’s the best compensation plan for my Salesforce? Are you asking the right question to the wrong person or do these companies need to evolve in such a way that they can think differently?

Tim Chou – Author and Entrepreneur
Companies are going to have to evolve. I think new generations of companies are being created as we speak, where it’s about knowledge and information much more than it is about a hunk of software, much more than it has to do with processing of financial transaction. The history of computing is, it came from basically being a large calculator to basically being a giant spreadsheet that keeps a nice record of how many dollars I spent. We’re way, way beyond that, and the world we’re headed into is not a world of spreadsheets and what not; it’s a world of information, knowledge and whole new ways to work.

I think one of the things that people have not spent much time on at the enterprise world is relationship of what is going on in multiplayer gaming. Multiplayer gaming is another fascinating example, what the hell is that, it’s software, it’s a software company. Nobody would call World of Warcraft a software company by conventional standards. But what is it there, but an immense amount of software wrapped with an immense amount of content and information. But the paradigms that are being established within those worlds to allow — one of the ways I describe – oh no, your listeners may not know much about World of Warcraft but for those who do, my abstraction of World of Warcraft is quite simple. It’s an environment in which a group of people from around the world who do not know each other, come together to achieve something and go away.

I’ll tell you if you ask every manager of every — in anything, software or hardware, trucks, I don’t care and ask them what their number one challenge is in the modern world; it is precisely that how do I get group of people together from around the world, to cooperate and achieve something and go away, and it is happening inside these virtual worlds.

If we start to learn there’re so many aspects of what is happening in the — what I would call the Consumer Internet that can be brought into morphed, extracted from, that world I’ve moved into the world of business that have game changing so over years but have huge shifts and we are at the very, very, very, very, very beginning of this, and software as a service phase one, which is the one that we are in right now, I think is going to give way to the next step where information and data come together where verticality is important, right. Where if I can defragment information and people, I change the way business is done.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Can you be more specific about this? I can understand what a bunch of kids in their basement playing endless hours of World of Warcraft is like, how will that apply to the business worlds directly?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Let me talk about the problem or the challenge or the opportunity of the idea of defragmentation of information and people. Let me put in the context of venture that’s been worked on out right now called Open Water. In Open Water one of the things that working on is, really the problem today. Let’s start where problem is, how much it costs service software on the planet? A servicing and managing software and I’ll put PCs, servers, big IBM mainframes in the background. The number is about $80,000 a second, spent by corporations around the world, managing existing systems in about — at this point in time in the world-wide economy is $2 trillion. Now, $2 trillion is being spent fundamentally on one thing — this is going to sound really stupid but it is really on one thing and it’s really on the ability to find a piece of information or a person and that is it.

I’ll give you some simple statistics. This is actually a study that was done at Oracle about two years ago on the number of service and support transactions coming into the systems. There was about a 100 million transactions that came in one year. Now, most people think that out of those 100 million transactions, that a lot of have to do with bug fixes or software. The truth of the matter is, the number was less than 1/10 of 1%.

Now, think about what I actually said, that’s out of 100 million request for information coming into Oracle. Now, there is tons of questions and request for information coming in inside Citibank or inside a Unocal or whatever. Probably in order of magnitude beyond that. So, we’re talking about a billion of these. If you did that statistic, it is less than 1/100th to 1/1000th of a percent. So, what the hell is all this stuff? It’s basically trying to figure out how to attach an optical cable to my iPod, try to figure out how to make my WebEx session run faster. So, they’re trying to figure out information, but it’s hugely-fragmented, it lives in 100s of different places. It’s not that the information is not known; it’s that it lives in 100s of places in 100s of people’s brains.

So, at the end of the day, we already know the power of defragmentation and I’ll make it even simpler than World of Warcraft. Look at Google, all that Google has done has fundamentally made it so that I can defragment an interesting amount of public information, in some useful way in a very wide context and we see the power of that. If I can begin to defragment information in a more specific domain and if I can defragment people — we all know, I mean what ends up happening, people joke about this, but most kids my age serve as their parents’ IT department.

We’re the ones that get called up, hey what’s up? Well, are we really the best people? The answer is no, but how would I know, how would I know who these people are and how would I begin to bring them to collect together in a collaborative environment? I think that’s where when you start to look at the guys like — the technology that WebEx brings to the fore, which is really to say, “Hey look, if I can defragment the people and their interaction models,” so we’ve all learned that — we’ve all come from the age where the old people, where we used to write letters — we don’t write letters anymore, well so we write email but our kids don’t write email, they do IM, and they do chat, and now we’re doing Skype and we’re doing Skype conference calls and etcetera, etcetera. Can I bring together, a collaborative environment which allows people in a multichannel way and where that’s occurring in a virtual world such as Second Life, or whether that’s occurring in a Web World, whether that’s occurring by me sharing applications.

If I can begin to defragment information and people in a collaborative environment, I can fundamentally, in this one little small problem I talked about, which is $2.7 trillion of spend every year, make a huge dent in that, because if you think about what’s going on in the modern world, the modern world is moving all to a service based economy, manufacturing is not the game anymore, it’s all a service based economy, if it’s a service based economy it’s all about information and people. If I can defragment information and people in useful and productive ways and segments etcetera, that’s the backbone of the entire future economy frankly.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
What can our listeners take away from this in terms of taking action? Is there something I should be doing right now with this as the future, in order to position myself to take advantage, full advantage of the future of computing and of networking?

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
Well, I think probably that statement goes to different people as different things. To the technology community, particularly those in the enterprise side, my counsel is get smart. Start learning what’s going on here because it is game changing, whether that’s becoming smarter about what’s going on in multiplayer gaming or what does it mean to defragment information in an unstructured world, get smart, because this is going to change fundamentally everything it’s going on in business software that we see.

To the consumer of the stuff I think you’re already seeing it. There is not a one of us who’s not already a consumer of Google and eBay. We already experience what I’m talking about. I think it’s up to them and to new generations of workgroups there to begin to redefine how they do work, I mean whether I’m a Ford Motor Company or I’m a 35% startup sitting in Palo Alto. How I redefine, how I do work in this new world, how I defragment information and people in a different way? I challenge all those people to rethink that in a networked environment.

And to the investors, a lot of people say to me, why enterprise software is dead and I well, yeah, I guess by the old definitions of this absolutely, but the software business is not dead, it’s just changing and it’s changing in dramatic ways and I think those that are starting to understand how it’s changing can stand to benefit an enormous amount.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Tim Chou, thanks a lot for taking your time out to talk.

Tim Chou - Author and Entrepreneur
You’re welcome.

Paul Lancour – PodTech
Join us next time right here for our next Podcast in the series Connecting with Revolutionary Minds from WebEx. Thanks for listening.

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Tags: Timothy Chou, entrepreneur, WebEx, Oracle, The End of Software

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