Mark Logic CEO Blog

Army's BCKS System Profiled in Government Computer News

2008-08-07T10:32:00.000-07:00

GCN today featured a story, Battlefield Knowledge Management, that profiled the US Army's use of MarkLogic in the Battle Command Knowledge System. Excerpt:

Now picture the frustration of executing such a search not over a broadband link in your home or office, but instead over a slow speed link as a solider deployed in a hostile forward area, under pressure and time constraints to gather critical information in preparation for battle.

The Army may have found a solution by implementing a Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS) to improve soldiers’ abilities to search the Army’s Warrior Knowledge Base (WKB). [...] The system enables soldiers to find the most up-to-date and cutting edge information that may assist them in the field.

The story continues:

The main feature of WKB is its ability to perform fast, specific searches. Rather than returning search results as a laundry list of links to large documents that would have to be downloaded and perused, BCKS returns very granular answers to queries generated by soldiers. The system is populated by Army content managers, who mine Army resources for applicable knowledge to add to the WKB repository. The content managers assign specific attributes (metadata) that characterizes the content and serves as keywords in the searches.

Read the full story here.

Norm Learns Rule 1

2008-08-05T00:22:00.000-07:00

One of the fun things about Mark Logic is that we unite people from different computing backgrounds: database people, search engine people, content management people, the odd computational linguistics person, and -- of course -- document/XML people.

Aside: one of my big theses of computing life is that individuals tend to stovepipe into a single computing camp early on, fail to cross-breed / cross-read, and thus the camps end up quite in-bred and incommunicado over time. That's one reason why I deliberately "jumped camps" in leaving Business Objects four years ago, hopping from BI into unstructured data / content / documents / XML.

But I digress.

We recently hired Norm Walsh, a pretty big guy in the document camp, which elicited comments such as the following from his fellow camp members:

I’m wondering how in the hell some obscure “XQuery Content” company stole Norm Walsh away from Sun. [...] Anyone care to provide some insight? Is Mark Logic really *that* good?

That was fun.

But what's been even more fun is helping someone who is clearly a distinguished individual in one camp and introducing him to another. Towards that end, I'm happy to report that Norm is now officially certified in what I call rule 1 of database performance: push constraints to data, don't move data to constraints.

Believe it or not, rule 1 appears quite counter-intuitive to document people who seem to innately want to materialize DOM trees and then process them in a middle tier.

Because I'm so wed to the database viewpoint, I have trouble expressing it in a document-person way. That's why I'm happy that Norm has recounted his journey here, in a post entitled Thinking Differently about XML.

The Never-Ending Fast Search Story

2008-08-04T23:59:00.000-07:00

I've already spent a lot of space covering the financial issues at Fast Search & Transfer. In part that was because, prior to the Microsoft acquisition, we competed fairly often with Fast, particularly in our publishing practice. Part was because the company reminded me of MicroStrategy, against whom we had to compete at Business Objects. Part was driven by my personal interest in international software companies and the issues that un-level the reporting playing field (e.g., GAAP vs. IFRS reporting).

Anyway, I took a crack at a post earlier today based on a story in a Norwegian business weekly, Dagens Næringsliv, that in turn has prompted posts from CMS Watch to TechCrunch to Stephen Arnold to Curt Monash.

I burned several hours, posted something, got in the car, drove home, and deleted the post just after I arrived. Somehow, despite considerable effort, I couldn't find what I thought was a satisfactory and appropriate way to editorialize.

Ergo, I decided simply to present the story. You can see it by pressing this link or looking at the Scribd iPaper below.

Disclaimers: I don't speak Norwegian and can't attest to the quality of the translation. I don't know either Norwegian culture nor Norwegian business publications so I can't vouch for either the legitimacy of the source publication itself or for any cultural slant present in the story.

Beneath the translated text are images of the original story with Norwegian body copy.

Fast's Stock Market Bluff - Upload a Document to Scribd

Thoughts on Category Creation and Information Access Platforms [Revised]

2008-08-02T12:05:00.000-07:00

[Revised 8/2/08; still working on cleaning up this consciousness stream.]

Back in the old days, it seemed easy to create a category in software. Look at the database market, for example:

IBM invents the relational DBMS (RDBMS) category
Oracle, Ingres, and Informix enter in a largely undifferentiated way, though Informix eventually drifts towards the low-end/cheap segment
Sybase creates the derivative category of high-performance OLTP RDBMS.
Arbor re-christens the failed multi-dimensional DBMS as the OLAP Server
Tandem creates the non-stop RDBMS with its superb fault tolerance
Illustra launches the universal DBMS and is quickly acquired by Informix
Sybase launches the bitmap-indexed DBMS with SybaseIQ
Teradata launches the data-warehouse DBMS category

And you can find just as many examples outside database-land.

ASK defines the manufacturing resource planning (MRP) category
SAP hijacks MRP, redefines it as ERP, and goes on to become the world's largest applications software company
PeopleSoft invents the HRMS category
Gartner Group's Howard Dresner invents the business intelligence (BI) category, re-christening and re-framing what was formally known as DSS or EIS.
Siebel pioneers the sales force automation (SFA) category
Scopus pioneers call center automation (CCA)
Companies like Rubric pioneer enterprise marketing automation (EMA)
Siebel, through acquisition, coalesces SFA, CCA, and EMA into a single category called customer relationship management (CRM)
Oracle and SAP work to coalesce CRM back into ERP. Such is the ebb and flow of categories.

(And I could go on and on -- BPM, KM, CMS, WCM, ECM, LMS, DRM, SCM, PLM, ETL, DI, EII -- but I think I'll stop here with the initials list.)

People are still creating categories today, and sometimes it looks easy. Uber-categories have been quite popular in the past decade as people have focused on different ways of developing and delivering software:

SaaS as an uber-category has worked well, with a variety offerings in various SaaS sub-categories (e.g., Salesforce, NetSuite)
Appliances have done pretty much the same thing -- i.e., offering an appliance alternative for a wide variety of existing categories (e.g., a data warehouse appliance a la Netezza)
Open source has also done the same thing -- again serving as a different flavor/dimension for a wide variety of largely existing software categories.

Only a few genuinely new categories have emerged, virtualization being the most obvious example. (Though you could argue that virtualization is itself an uber-category covering storage virtualization, server virtualization, et cetera.)

Companies are still working to carve new categories, particularly in the database market:

XML servers: MarkLogic
Column-oriented databases: Vertica
Stream databases: Streambase, Skyler
Analytic databases: Aster Data

Sometimes vendors and/or the analysts who cover them try to impose either a straight name change (e.g., from MD-DBMS to OLAP) or a strategic shift (e.g., from BI to analytic applications) in category. Sometimes they're just bored. Sometimes a vendor's trying to redefine the market in line with its strengths. Sometimes an analyst is trying to make his/her mark on the industry and earn the coveted "father/mother of [category name]," much as Howard Dresner successfully did with BI.

BI got bored with its name several times during my tenure at Business Objects. At one point both the analysts and Informatica were trying to re-dub the category "analytic applications" in an attempt to get a fresh name and raise the abstraction level from tools to applications. Informatica nearly died on that hill.

Later, analysts tried to redefine the category, dubbing it corporate performance management (CPM), and arguing that business intelligence needed to link with financial planning systems. While knowing actuals is good, knowing actuals compared to the plan is better, and using actuals to drive the future plan better still. Cognos nearly tripped over itself repositioning around the CPM, ultimately acquiring Adaytum, which in turn lead to SRC's eventual acquisition by Business Objects.

In an art-imitates-life sort of way, one wonders if the analysts predicted a move in the market or provoked it? My chips are on the latter.

This stream-of-consciousness is a long way of winding up to a single question: are enterprise search vendors successfully repositioning themselves as "information access platforms" or not?

Background: the enterprise-search-related vendors (e.g., Fast/Microsoft, Endeca) and search/content analysts who cover them are in the midst of an attempted category repositioning:

The word "enterprise search" is now seemingly dead, having been contaminated by the Google Appliance. When a shark gets in the water, all the fish jump out.

The word "information" is increasingly being used as a unifying term to describe both data and content (aka, unstructured data)

Enterprise search vendors are increasingly calling themselves "information access platforms" (though not generally abbreviated as IAP, I will do so here for brevity).

For example, consider Endeca's corporate boilerplate:

Endeca's innovative information access software that helps people explore, analyze, and understand complex information, guiding them to unexpected insights and better decisions. The Endeca Information Access Platform, built around a new class of access-optimized database, powers applications that combine the ease of searching and browsing with the analytical power of business intelligence.

I have a number of concerns on and related to this attempted shift:

The important thing about categories is that they exist in the mind of the customer. Analysts and vendors can try to put them there -- but they have to stick. In my mind, IAP is not sticking. I have never heard a customer say: "I need to go out and get an IAP."

I do, however, believe that "information" might well stick as an overall term, meaning both data and content (aka, structured and unstructured data).

It is not clear to me why someone who desires a unified platform for "information" would turn to a search vendor. Search engines were designed as read-only indexes to help people find documents containing tokens; hardly ideal as an application development platform.

In my estimation, someone managing "special" data should turn to a database vendor. While databases have classically not handled "special" data well, databases were designed as application platforms, and there is a whole new class of specialized databases emerging for handling various "special" types of data.

While I think a unified platform is a dandy vision, I think no one is close to delivering a unified platform that handles all types of data equally well. Bolting Lucene and MySQL together isn't a platform. Relational databases still do a poor job with both content and many types of data (e.g., sparse, hierarchical, or semi-structured). XML servers (like MarkLogic) handle XML brilliantly, but need work before they can match RDBMSs at classical relational data.

I believe that someone who needs a crawl-and-index the intranet value proposition should use the Google Appliance; so I think the search vendors are correct in their desire to flee, I don't think that "information access platform" is a good refuge.

Overall, my chips remain on the don't come line for the attempted category repositioning from "enterprise search" to "information access platform." You can find my stack on the come line for the emerging "special-purpose database" category and "XML servers" as an instance of them.

Alfresco: A+ in Positioning as the SharePoint Alternative

2008-07-31T14:04:00.000-07:00

Frequent readers will know I'm a pretty tough grader, but I have to give Alfresco an A+ for the positioning and strategy around (if not the naming of) today's launch of Alfresco Labs Beta 3.

They're drowning in coverage -- press this link to see a list. And the positioning and strategy is simply superb. Why?

By positioning as the Microsoft SharePoint alternative they get to dismiss the entire existing enterprise content management (ECM) category, including their most direct and threatening competitors (e.g., EMC / Documentum, OpenText , Interwoven).

The SharePoint threat to the existing category is real enough, and the existing vendors wounded, confused, or over-engineered enough, to make that dismissal credible.

Alfresco then gets to have an elevator pitch that boils down to: everyone knows SharePoint is going to eat the ECM category, and most people like neither SharePoint nor Microsoft, so wouldn't you like to have an alternative?

It's beautiful in it simplicity, logic, and credible dismissal of what I'd guess is their top short-term enemy. Most vendors try to dismiss the current competition in their pitches, but it's not credible. They either say "we have no competition" (yawn) or "we welcome competition from the 87-foot giant because it's going to validate our space" (in which you may likely end up roadkill).

I'm not sure I've ever seen a startup so elegantly, effectively, and credibly dismiss a $1B+ competitor. What's better is that the strategy backs the messaging. By effectively offering an alternative SharePoint backend, they are able to swap out the plumbing and eliminate the need for underlying Microsoft infrastructure, such as SQL Server and Windows itself.

Great strategy. Great messaging. Great execution.

Well done John, John, and Ian!

Cuil vs. SearchMe, Plus A Rant On Powerset

2008-07-30T18:55:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week a new Internet search engine with an oh-so-hip name, Cuil (pronounced "cool"), launched to great hype about ex-Googlers taking on their former employer with a 121,617,892,992 page index (that's 121B if you're not good at counting digits), supposedly making Cuil "the world's biggest search engine." Excerpt from their info page:

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.

PageRank a "superficial popularity metric"? There's a clear roundhouse thrown at Google if I've ever seen one. I'm sorry, but didn't PageRank crush keyword frequency in Internet search because the latter was too easily gamed by spammers? At first blush they sound like they going back to the past (which I doubt), but they're not clearly backing their arguments, either. I'm fine with throwing punches at Google, but the punches better connect. This explanation in their FAQ doesn't connect either:

So we started from scratch—with a fresh approach, an entirely new architecture and breakthrough algorithms [...] our approach is to focus on the content of a page and then present a set of results that has both depth and breadth [...]

So Cuil searches the Web for pages with your keywords and then we analyze the rest of the text on those pages. This tells us that the same word has several different meanings in different contexts. Are you looking for jaguar the cat, the car or the operating system?

We sort out all those different contexts so that you don’t have to waste time rephrasing your query when you get the wrong result.

The early PR seems to suggest that Cuil has been busted for over-reaching in their claims. See this Wall Street Journal blog as just one example. For more fun, read the comments which take no prisoners. Edited excerpts:

I think the press got bamboozled in reporting Cuil’s numbers and should have checked them first.
While I really wanted Cuil to be Cool, it isn’t. I did [a vanity search] and didn't get a single hit on Cuil.com. When I did it on Google, the first result was a photo club I belong to.

I have tried this search disaster and determined that they have one thing in mind. Building it to sell. It has no accurate results that compared to Google, Live, or Yahoo.

I searched for “Cuil” on Cuil. [There is] no mention of Cuil.com on the first page of the results -- they have a long way to go.
Cuil was a waste of $33 Million. This thing is slow and the results are so outdated they are worthless.

The real story here is how a site so useless and amateurish managed to generate so much press.

The people who founded the company are obviously very intelligent, but most searches result in crap that does not really pertain to the search phrase.

The last one reminded me of a comment I heard from a disgruntled Autonomy user the other day that went something like: "I guess I'm not smart enough to understand why the Bayesian relevancy algorithms failed to get the right result; all I know is they didn't."

When will search vendors stop peddling PhDs and algorithms, seemingly all the while ignoring results? Particularly in the world of Internet search where any clown (e.g., me) can go to a site, enter a few queries (almost always including a vanity search) and get an opinion of whether "it works" in seconds?

This whole episode reminds me of the Powerset launch (where I was also critical) arguing that calling yourself the next Google was almost a guarantee that you wouldn't be. I nailed that prediction, but never had time to rant about it, so I'll do so here.

After all the next-Google hype, when Powerset finally launched they could not search the entire Internet (as one might have reasonably expected) or even the entire English language Internet (as one could have very reasonably conceded given all the natural language processing) but instead a rather small content set called Wikipedia.

You raise $20M in total capital, you call yourself the next Google, you generate more press than Miley Cyrus, and when you launch you can only search Wikipedia? Are you kidding me? By the way, have you *ever* met anyone who's complained that they can't find information on Wikipedia!?

Fortunately (for them) Microsoft bought the company a few months later for an estimated $100M, certainly yielding a nice return on the $12.5M in VC invested and a nice windfall for the founders. Not a bad outcome, mind you. But, the next Google? Pluh-ease. See here for WebGuild's take.

Anyway, I tried Cuil today and, like many others, was disappointed. I liked the Spartan search screen. I was mildly disappointed with the results of my vanity search; I prefer Google's result because, among other reasons, I beat the realtor in Colorado. I liked Cuil's multi-column presentation. I also liked the categories to refine searches, though I found them hard to find. At first blush, I liked the eye-candy, too, which reminded me of a toned-down version of SearchMe.

In fact, the whole thing reminded me of a weak version of SearchMe. Now I can't remember if SearchMe has its own index or whether it's adding value above an underlying Google search, but frankly, I don't care. As a user of the site, all I care about is the user experience and the results. Results-wise, I like SearchMe better. User experience-wise, I like SearchMe much, much better.

In fact, my single biggest complaint on Cuil is the eye-candy. While SearchMe renders a very cool iTunes-like rolodex of each returned webpage, Cuil renders a bit of seemingly random eye candy, presumably using a whizzy algorithm to find the "best" image that, not to put too fine a point on it -- doesn't work.

For example, when you run the query "Mark Logic" on Cuil, the eye-candy includes:

Two reversed company logos
Four regular company logos
An image from a documentation newsletter
A Wipro logo (one of our partners)
An image from one of our smaller marketing programs (asking if you're missing the DITA bus?)
A photo of Stephen Buxton, our director of product management
A photo of Jason Hunter, principal technologist and creator of MarkMail

So the collection of eye-candy is both rather boring (i.e., repetitive) and random. Simply put, if you ran the query and did a quick skim of the results, you'd think that Stephen or Jason ran Mark Logic.

More interestingly, it's not at all obvious how they're assembling the eye-candy. When you visit the pages associated with the displayed images, the images aren't there. Hence, my speculation that they have a whizzy algorithm that finds eye-candy on or near the referenced page, but that nevertheless, uh, doesn't work.

Hence the four reasons I like SearchMe better:

The SearchMe UI is unquestionably cooler than Cuil
I find the SearchMe results better than Cuil's
Both SearchMe and Cuil have categories for search refinement
And SearchMe doesn't use "magic" in assembling the eye candy so it just works better

Note that I'm generally distrustful of magic (see Uh Oh, It's Magic) and greatly prefer SearchMe's straightforward approach of just rendering the referenced page as opposed to trying to whiz-up some potentially relevant JPEG.

(Disclaimer: SearchMe is a sister Sequoia-backed company. While I think that doesn't change my opinion of them, you might think otherwise.)

The Yahoo DIY Resignation Letter Generator

2008-07-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

This is fun, but pointed. A do-it-yourself resignation letter generator for Yahoo employees. Ouch. Check it out, here (profanity warning).

Valleywag blogs on it here.

Highlights from the 2Q08 Software Equity Report

2008-07-18T10:45:00.000-07:00

Here are some highlights from the 2Q08 Software Industry Equity Report published (for free) by the folks at the Software Equity Group, LLC who also host the Software Business 2008 conference on October 30-31, 2008 at the Marriott San Francisco.

Aggregate US software spending increased 2.6% from 1Q08 over 4Q07 and 9.5% over 1Q07, according to the Bureau for Economic Analysis.

Server virtualization, server consolidation, and cost-cutting topped IT's spending priorities list according to a Goldman Sachs survey. Open source (which seems oxymoronic in this context), content/knowledge management (which should be two separate items) and on-demand computing were at the bottom. This demonstrates the need for Mark Logic to remain focused on verticals where content matters as it's not yet a general IT priority.

The SEG software index of 210 public software companies closed 1H08 down 13.5% The SEG SaaS index closed down over 25%

Median EV/revenue was 1.8x. A major arbitrage opportunity continues to exist for large companies buying smaller ones, as the median was 2.8x for $1B+ companies and 1.2x for <$100M companies. For example, this means that a previously independent Business Objects could have bought a $50M company for $60M and then, in effect, sold that revenue to SAP for $140M.

Growth still drives a large premium in valuation. Companies growing at 10%- (i.e., less than 10%) had a median revenue multiple of 1.2x, while those growing at 50%+ had a multiple of 2.6x

But EBITDA margin drives an even bigger valuation premium. Companies with 10%- EBITDA margin also had a median revenue multiple of 1.2x, but those with rich 30 to 50% margins had a multiple of 5.9x

Median EV/EBITDA was 13.2x

Median EBITDA margin was 12.5%. Profit was unsurprisingly concentrated with the rich; the median was 23.9% for $1B+ companies and 5.4% for $100M- companies.

Median TTM revenue was $154.1M with median TTM revenue growth of 15.5%

Database companies continue to be worth about 2x content/document companies. Database and file management firms had a median revenue multiple of 2.8x while content/document management companies had a multiple of 1.5x.

The IPO window remains, in effect, closed. Only 2 (ArcSight and RiskMetrics) of the 12 companies in SEG's 12/07 IPO pipeline went public, and both IPOs were in 1Q08.

SEG counts 17 companies in the 2008 software IPO pipeline, with average revenues of $59M, net income of $0.4M, and average TTM revenue growth of 46%.

SEG predicts only 8-10 software IPOs in 2008, thus predicting a 66% decline from 2007's total of 26.

Software M&A deal volume was roughly flat at 380 deals in both 1Q and 2Q08. However, the value of those deals dropped from $25.5B in 1Q to $21.9B in 2Q08.

Database and file management companies topped the M&A exit valuation category with a median valuation of 11.4x TTM revenues.

Should My CEO Have a Ghost-Written Blog?

2008-07-17T08:49:00.000-07:00

I received this question the other day from an old friend:

Clearly, having [our CEO] write his own real blog would be ideal, but do you think it's possible that a ghost-written blog is better than nothing at all, or is the downside not worth it? If you're against it, [do you have] any ideas on how to explain it to him (and the marketing team pushing for it) ... ? And if you think it's doable, [do you have] any advice to him/the writers?

My short answer is a vehement no. If your CEO is going to have a blog then it should be his or her own. Why? Because, in a word, to do otherwise would be misleading.

The promise of a blog is connection and interaction with the author on topics of shared interest.

Readers expect blogs to actually be written by their stated authors.

If the marketing / PR team writes the blog, it will -- with all due respect -- probably end up easily identified as marketing-produced pabulum, rephrasing and reinforcing company press releases. Odds are you can't bluff this, so you shouldn't try.

Even if you have a highly talented and knowledgeable person write the blog it will fail to capture the CEO's voice. When people meet me, they feel like they know me (and in a sense they actually do) because of the blog.

If the CEO simply wishes to air a few corporate thoughts every once in a while, you could accomplish that goal with a "CEO corner" in a corporate newsletter or on the company's website.

If, on the other hand, the company wants to use a blog to comment on industry topics of interest that aren't necessarily appropriate for its own corporate website, then why not create a corporate blog -- i.e., the company X corporate blog. With this solution, you're not misleading the audience: they know they're reading a corporate blog, and you can make it a multi-contributor blog where, perhaps every once in a while, the CEO weighs in.

If, despite these arguments, you are hell-bent on a ghost-written CEO blog, then I do have this advice.

Only write posts that are the direct result of live interviews with the CEO on topics that he or she chooses.

Instruct the writer to suppress his/her own voice and instead work very hard to capture the voice of the CEO -- in tone, in diction, and in style.

Here's a slightly old article on the topic written by corporate and CEO blogging expert, Debbie Weil. Debbie's author of The Corporate Blogging Book and runs a blog of her own on corporate blogging.

Pelz-Sharpe on Analyst Relations

2008-07-16T08:56:00.000-07:00

A few months back, Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch posted an interesting write-up entitled Advice for Vendors Dealing with Independent Analysts. I thought I'd highlight it here for two reasons:

It provides a rare, reverse-look at vendors through the lens of analysts, a bit like a doctor writing up how to be a good patient.

After two decades of dealing with industry analysts from the vendor side, I -- perhaps surprisingly -- generally agree with the advice and I have some commentary I'd like to share on it.

Here are Pelz-Sharpe's 12 rules, along with some Kellogg color.

1. Don't assume the analyst is out to get you. Color: too many people assume analysts take sides and, in general, I believe they actually try not to. So while you may notice analysts not taking your side, you probably won't notice that (good ones, at least) aren't taking your competitors' side either.

2. Your reputation precedes you. Color: the software world is small, the software marketing world smaller, and the analyst world smaller still. Your company's reputation and your own precede you in walking into the room. Ignore this at your peril. Instead, try to build credibility over time through honest, credible communications and responsive turnaround.

3. The technology customer is king. Color: analysts love to talk to customers. So you should not only respond quickly to reference requests, but ideally work at a company that actually has happy customers, so it's both easier to find references and you can do things that analysts will find unusual -- like giving them un-chaperoned access to customers at your user conference. Almost any vendor can find/manufacture 5 happy customers out of 1000 and chaperone an analyst safely through the minefield of the other 995. Very few say: "go into that room full of customers and talk to anyone you want; yes, you'll hear a few grumbles, but overall I think you're find them very happy." I'm pleased to say at Mark Logic that we do the latter.

4. Don't threaten analysts. Color: this is probably the one way to get an analyst to take sides. Remember years ago when CA declared war on Gartner? Take notice of Alan's comment that nasty emails are "the coward's way" of dealing with conflict. Those who know me may laugh, but I'll say it anyway: never send a nasty email. (OK, outside the company at least; I'm still working on the inside-the-company part.)

5. Don't quote your own press releases or other analyst reports as evidence. Color: this is just plain moronic and I'm amazed by how often I see it either attempted or done. Also, remember that while it's a bit non-intuitive, most analysts deliberately do NOT read each other's work as a way of both insuring independence and avoiding plagiarism claims. So it's bad idea for even more reasons than you might think.

6. Never say "we provided an X% ROI to our client in less than six months, etc. Color: this is the one point I'd quibble with, but in general I'd agree -- not for the reason Alan states -- but because most vendor ROI claims lack credibility because the analyses are simply not well done. They lack rigor, ignore opportunity costs, tend to count only incremental costs, and make a dozen other basic errors such that I -- as a buyer -- wouldn't give them the time of day. To agree with Pelz-Sharpe, I do think that the lower level the technology, the more the ROI argument is in fact **for the category** and not for the vendor. In short, while I believe it's possible and often desirable for marketers to invest in high-quality ROI analyses, I think it's equally important not to overmarket them (i.e., your mileage may vary) and not to attempt to differentiate unless the analysis is specifically focused on competitive differentiation. (In which case, I'd argue that should be more of a total cost of ownership analysis that assumes roughly equal benefits as the competition, so the differential ROI is actually coming from a lower TCO.)

7. Don't kiss my ass. Color: while I agree with his point overall, I've known many an analyst who appreciated a fun dinner and a nice Bordeaux. Much as in dating, I'd argue, the issue is what you expect. I expect to have a good time, to enjoy at least some of the Claret, and hopefully to make a new business friend -- but nothing else. So I say offer the fine meal -- or the simple one as your guest prefers -- and spend some time getting to know one other. But don't expect 5 mm of magic quadrant improvement per Robert Parker point above 95. That's not the way it works; expecting such is offensive.

8. Don't ask me for advice. Color: I just love this point. While there are times when it's important to get analyst input and buy-in up front, most people seem to get it quite wrong. Were I an analyst, nothing would scare me more than a vendor who says: we don't know what it is and we don't know how to position it -- but what do you think? To which my response would be: "Hey buddy, it's your full-time job and if you mean to tell me that you can't figure out your strategy in six months why do you expect me to do it in ten minutes?" Put differently: "Do you have a strategy or not? While I will most certainly have an opinion about your strategy (if you have one), frankly, nothing scares me more than its complete absence."

9. A demo should actually demonstrate something. Color: totally agree, and hard to add much here.

10. Make sure you understand how your product works. Color: this is another point I just love. It's scary how many product marketers want to brief people on products about which they understand relatively little. Remember the Dale Carnegie-ism: if you want to speak about something you should know 10x more than you're audience. You should not be presenting at the limit of your knowledge; your knowledge should be much deeper.

11. Understand the difference between a fact and an opinion. Color: I'd agree and offer the analyst community a friendly reminder that this cuts both ways. An opinion isn't a fact just because it's mine -- or, for that matter, yours. I'd also add that vendor commitment to a strategy is a fact (provided you can validate it's true since many vendors claim commitment to N different strategies and ergo none). But, once verified, commitment to a strategy is fact; whether a given strategy will work is opinion.

12. Understand that customers implementing your systems have a very different perspective to share. Color: while I understand his point, I think that great companies to go great lengths to understand their customers and partners experiences and opinions about the product. So, to me, this point goes without saying, but I'd add that I am more than ready to discuss what we are hearing our customers and partners telling us and we should be allowed to do so (if only to show the degree of gap or non-gap in our knowledge).

He closes with an "extra credit" rule -- don't believe your own hype -- where he adds the following sage advice on not living in a vacuum.

We know it's your job to be passionate about your company, about its product, and its services. We understand it's your job to help sell this vision and to educate us all. But make the effort to really understand your competitive landscape too. Don't live in a vacuum. Analysts don't. I applaud your enthusiasm, and I wish you and your colleagues the best of luck, but I wish all your competitors the same too.

Thanks to Alan for a great post. I hope vendors everywhere read it.

Greene Bounced from VMware: A Bad Valley Pattern

2008-07-15T16:10:00.000-07:00

Here we go again, with one of the age-old questions of Silicon Valley: when, and under what circumstances, should the board / executive management bounce an executive who was an integral part of building a company in order to replace him/her with a "professional" who can presumably do things better than the home-grown leader whose credentials include only, simply, uh, well, building the company in the first place.

This post was prompted by this article about Diane Greene, co-founder and until recently CEO of VMware, who was recently fairly visibly bounced from her job. I met Diane a few times in 2002 and I was very impressed with both her and the company. I think she did great things for VMware -- not the least of which was taking it from a raw startup to a company with over 6,000 people.

But what "credentials" does she have to run a company of 6,000 people? It's such an easy question that I view it as a kind of a sucker punch. Few people start companies and take them to 6,000 people twice. So, almost by definition, a founder-CEO (which I'm not, by the way) is going to lack those credentials.

See this InfoWorld story where the standard reason/ story / cover-story for this kind of situation is presented articulately:

David M. Lynch, vice president of marketing at Embotics, said Diane Greene was a strong and charismatic leader who focused on the technology -- which is ideal for a technology startup. But Lynch said, "VMware is now entering a new (and highly competitive) market phase, and the skills and focus that served the company well during the initial phases are not the skills needed to deal with the market challenges that are now occurring. It is very rare that a founder of a startup will see that company through to its maturity."

What credentials does Larry Ellison have to run Oracle? Or Steve Jobs to run Apple and Pixar? The answer isn't about credentials. It's about leadership, skill, and brains -- of which Greene seems to possess plenty. Frankly, I was surprised and impressed that EMC managed to keep her as long as they did with their Boston-centric, rather blue-collar corporate culture (compared to VMware's Berkeley/Stanford-centric PhD rocket-scientist culture.)

Losing her, to me, seems a bad thing for VMware, though I don't claim to be informed on the details, because I'm a database, CMS, and search watcher, and not an EMC watcher.

But I'm also a Silicon Valley watcher, and my gut reaction is "bad idea" when I hear that a company has cut loose an entrepreneur and visionary who built a $1B+ software company. Sometimes it's true that person who took you to stage N can't get you to stage N+1 or N+2. Sometimes they don't want to.

But oftentimes -- and especially when it's a sudden ouster -- it's a PR smokescreen, corporate politics in disguise, or simply corporate conservatism and distrust. My guess in this situation -- given that her replacement was an internal transfer -- is #2.

In the end I think the old expression about dances should serve as the default guiding rule: dance with the person who took you.

Global Service Branding: Let the Seller Beware

2008-07-15T15:38:00.000-07:00

It's only fitting that my first post since heading off to Europe 3 weeks ago should discuss international branding. Bear in mind I'm a career marketing and business professional who has lived in Paris for 5 years so these aren't just the idle rantings of a frustrated American tourist. Well, actually they are. But at least they're the idle rantings of a moderately well informed and business-savvy American tourist.

Today's question is why do American service-industry firms use the same branding in Europe as they do in the US when the consumer experience they deliver is not at all the same? Do they think they're leveraging their global brand? Do they think they merit kudos for global consistency? I think all they're doing is under-cutting their brands, irritating most customers, and potentially badly alienating their best customers.

For product companies, I think things are bit different. A BMW's a BMW no matter where you put it. So is a QuickSilver t-shirt, or a Nike soccer ball.

But when the product is service, well, if you're going to call it McDonald's, the coffee better be lawsuit hot, the quarter pounder (or metric equivalent) better taste like a quarter pounder, and there better be a moderately clean bathroom in the vicinity.

Similarly, if you're going to call it Starbucks, then I better be able to order my half-caff, extra-hot, no foam, no whip, peppermint, skim mocha.

Now, I'd say that McDonald's and Starbucks actually deliver quite well on the global experience consistency promise. (Except that I'd rather not pay the same nominal amount in pounds-sterling as I do in dollars when I order my latte, but that's a different problem.)

My wrath today is aimed at two global brands who don't deliver consistency: Hertz and Hyatt.

Two summers ago when we visited France, Hertz kept us three hours at the airport waiting for a minivan that I'd reserved months in advance. "We don't have any cars. Sorry. It's not my fault. It's not possible to do anything. I don't care if you ever rent from Hertz again for the rest of your life. It's not my fault. You and your kids can just wait 3 hours for a minivan in 90 degree heat after getting off a twelve-hour flight."

It was legendary French indifference, non-empowerment, and incompetence. Is that endemic in France? Sadly, in most service industries, I'd say yes. But that's not the question. I knew that already. The question is why would Hertz want their brand slapped on that customer service experience? The answer is they shouldn't.

This year's nightmare was a repeat of one two years ago at the Hyatt Charles de Gaulle. We typically stay there the night before returning to the US, because the flights leave early and you can (theoretically) reduce stress by staying overnight at the airport. We typically arrive around 7pm, after a long day's drive, want a quick dinner, and then want to retire early before heading off the next day. Nothing special or surprising, I'd imagine, for an airport hotel.

This year, as was almost exactly the case two years ago, the dinner part of the equation was a disaster. (So much for giving service providers second chances.) Skipping the myriad details, it took over 2.5 hours and numerous requests in various languages with various intensity to be served green salads (whose dressing was seemingly forgotten) and some plates of penne pesto.

"It's not my fault. We only have two cooks. There are several big tables here. It's not my fault." Overall it was a total mess -- many other American customers cancelled their orders and left -- and a mess on which Hyatt absolutely should not want its brand.

Some people at the Hyatt Charles de Gaulle were nice; some people were competent. Some were both nice and competent. But that's the trick in service industries: you're not a good as your best person; you're as bad as your worst.

In branding, so much is about expectations. If the sign on the door said Sofitel or Mercure, I'd have thought "heck, we're in France, it's normal that things take forever." But the sign didn't say Mercure. It said Hyatt. And when I'm in a Hyatt, I expect a Hyatt experience. And if you can't deliver that, well, then don't call it a Hyatt.

Delivering consistent global servce can be done -- it just takes a work. A good ex-pat friend in France once quipped that he loved Disneyland Paris because it was the one place you could see French employees smile.

The moral: either do the work to ensure service consistency (e.g., Starbucks, McDonald's, Disney) or put another brand on the experience. But don't, don't, don't promise one brand experience and then deliver another.

WebMama Puts Mark Logic CEO Blog in Top Ten

2008-06-24T08:01:00.000-07:00

SEO and SEM consultant Barbara Coll, author of WebMama's Look at the Web blog, and CEO of the Palo Alto consultancy WebMama.com, Inc., did a blog post today entitled 45 Online Resources for CEOs which named this blog to a list of top ten management blogs to which readers should subscribe.

WebMama's top management blog (of which I count only 7 -- I guess she's saving 3) list is:

David Kellogg, CEO
Mark Logic, Inc.

Joel Spolsky, CEO
Fog Creek Software

John Mackey, CEO
Whole Foods

Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director
Garage Technology Ventures, founder of Truemors and Alltop

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President
Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Mark Cuban, Owner
Dallas Mavericks

Craig Newmark, CEO
Craigslist

Thanks WebMama, that's quite some company. Next thing you know I'll be on Dancing with the Stars. :-)

Mark Logic and the US Army's Warrior Knowledge Base

2008-06-23T17:34:00.000-07:00

Check out this story, published today, entitled Mark Logic Technology Key to Success of Army's Warrior Knowledge Base.

Here are a few excerpts:

“Connecting our 90,000-plus members with relevant documents in the ... repository within seconds, and then sharing that content with other forum members, is our goal,” said Mark Uhart, Warrior Knowledge Base integrator and knowledge management consultant. “The [Warrior Knowledge Base] shows promising capabilities that have already demonstrated great utility ...

The metadata assigned to these types of documents, and the fact that content can be discovered and viewed page-by-page without having to download the file, allows discovery and use of only the relevant content. [The Battle Command Knowledge System] has the capability to store and manage content in 37 different languages.” ...

We knew we had to provide content discovery and access at the page level to be of any value to forward-deployed soldiers and the DOD/DA contractors and civilians who support them,” Uhart said. “They have neither the bandwidth nor the time to download a large file only to discover it’s not what they wanted."

Basically some great arguments in favor of fine-grained search and retrieval, multi-channel content delivery (to handhelds) and web 2.0-style participation / user-generated content.

Happiness as a Business Model

2008-06-23T09:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to highlight an exceptional PowerPoint deck (that I suspect is making the viral rounds) on happiness as the first-principle from which you can create a successful business model. It's by Tara Hunt, founder of Internet consultancy Citizen Agency, and author of a blog called HorsePigCow.

I like the deck not only because of the psychological first principles from which its drawn, but also because it is an A+ demo of what I'd call "the new PowerPoint" style.

People are so burned out on old-school PowerPoint that I see many people make one of two mistakes: (1) throwing out the baby with the bathwater, dispensing with slides altogether or (2) forgetting that slides are a useful medium for creating "written presentations" -- i.e., decks that stand alone, intending to be read / clicked-through and not necessarily as materials to support a live presentation.

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Moderating Gilbane Panel: Digital Publishing Platforms

2008-06-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

If you're attending the Gilbane Conference this week at the Westin in San Francisco, then please don't miss the session I'm moderating on digital publishing platforms.

The session title is Digital Publishing Platforms: Magazines, Newspapers, and eBooks. It's on Friday morning June 20th at 10:15 AM. Joining me are:

Andrew Savikas, director of publishing technology at O'Reilly Media, general manager of the TOC conference (tools of change for publishing), and regular contributor to the O'Reilly Radar blog.

Cimarron Buser, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Texterity and author of a blog called Digital Publishing Insights.

If you're attending, I'd suggest as prep the two posts I blogged about the other day from Scott Karp

LinkedIn Raises $53M and Posts Video on Valuation

2008-06-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Today, the business social-networking site LinkedIn announced that it raised $53M at just over a $1B valuation. In addition, they posted a YouTube video with Jeffrey Glass from Bain Capital, David Sze from Greylock, David Cowan from Bessemer, and (Mark Logic board member) Mark Kvamme from Sequoia. Per TechCrunch this round brings the total funding up to $80.5M.

Mark Logic Innovation Awards Photo

2008-06-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

Here's a photograph from last week's user conference with representatives from organizations recognized in the first annual Mark Logic Innovation Awards.

From left to right we have:

Telly Stroumbis, The Boeing Company, for work within the US government
Dave Kellogg, Mark Logic Corporation
Ryan Shevchik, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., for work within the US government
Hank Hoffman, Congressional Quarterly Inc.
Etienne Taylor, Clinical Trials Semantics Inc., for work with the American Cancer Society
Darin McBeath, Elsevier, B.V.
John Walker, John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Carl Hixson, The McGraw-Hill Companies
Alex Moulas, OpenConnect Systems Inc.
Charles Greer, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Alex Humphreys, Oxford University Press
Lisa Bos, Really Strategies, Inc.
George Florentine, Flatirons Solutions Corp., for work with United Airlines
David Sewell, University of Virginia Press
Max Schireson, Mark Logic Corporation

Also recognized was the US Army for its work on the the Battle Command Knowledge System (BCKS).

What Publishers Still Don't Get About the Web

2008-06-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

Just a quick post to highlight two great posts by Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 on what traditional newspaper and magazine publishers still get don't get about the web.

The posts -- and the comments -- should be required reading for traditional publishers.

The Entrepreneur Age Myth

2008-06-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

The romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle popularized a faux statistic about age and the single woman, saying "a single woman over the age of 40 has a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of getting married." Another equally invalid urban myth relates to age and the entrepreneur.

Reading Valleywag you'd think that the only entrepreneurs are Digg-style party animal 20-something year olds. Or, if you really want to feel over-the-hill, consider the 12-year-old Jason O'Neil, profiled here by Forbes.

While I have no problem with young entrepreneurs, I think the media -- in its disproportionate coverage of them -- creates the mis-impression that if you over age 30 then you have a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than of starting a company. So I was happy to find this post on Infectious Greed that brought some data to the problem.

Excerpt:

Perhaps surprisingly, the report shows that U.S. tech entrepreneurs are, if anything, older than expected. People founding tech companies over the last ten years had an average and median age of 39-years, nowhere near the age that makes for good stories about dorm room entrepreneurs -- and older than many of us might have thought.

Elsevier's Article 2.0 Contest

2008-06-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

Darin McBeath of Elsevier recently told me about their upcoming Article 2.0 contest which puts entrants in the driver's seat of defining the next generation of scholarly articles.

The idea is both simple and clever. Elsevier will expose, via a REST interface, the full content (in a rich XML format) of 7,500 articles and challenge entrants to build applications that leverage and present that content. Excerpt:

Each contestant will have complete freedom for how they would like to present the scientific research articles contained in the Article 2.0 dataset. We will encourage the use of XQuery, but this will not be a mandate. By leveraging these APIs, the contestant becomes the publisher and can render scientific articles to meet their needs including integrating the article into existing applications or combining it with other web service APIs.

I suspect that some of the people who read this blog (and many who read Matt Turner's Discovering XQuery) may wish to enter. First prize is $2500, second prize is $1000, and third prize is $500.

The contest starts on 9/1/08 and ends on 12/31/08. Awards will be announced on 1/31/09.

I've been invited as a potential judge and, provided they aren't too many moonlighting Mark Logicians entered, I'll be able to do so without recusing myself.

The Hippest MarkLogic App Ever -- Pop Culture Universe

2008-06-16T18:27:00.000-07:00

You might wonder if I'm testing the new co-occurrence feature in MarkLogic 4.0 by uttering "MarkLogic" and "hip" in the same sentence, but OMG, the folks over at Greenwood Publishing are taking pop culture srsly with their upcoming new product Pop Culture Universe.

Greenwood describes Pop Culture Universe as "an authoritative, yet irresistible, digital library of information on American and world popular culture, past and present—in a package as dynamic as the topic it covers." The product integrates over 350 different titles/sources into a single online resource that covers the "icons, idols, and ideas" of popular culture.

The folks at Greenwood suggest a number of ways to use the product including studying:

What makes a person or thing iconic?
Film and society
Music as history and literature
Sports and society
Diversity in American culture
Art and architecture in American and World culture
Science in pop culture
Advertising and consumer culture
Politics and the Presidency in popular culture
Television and American society

Library Journal has a glowing pre-review of the new offering, slated for launch this summer, available here. Greenwood are also the creators of Cooking with the Bible which I blogged about here.

C u l8r!