For the past several years, we’ve had an annual refresh of our vendor service offerings, always unveiled in the fall. This year has seen more change than usual, and so I’d like to share some of the highlights with you here. A revampimg of our services for users is in the works as well, and I’ll share that too with you when it is finalized.

Aspects that haven’t changed much include:

• We ask all vendor clients to join a program called the Monash Advantage.
• Monash Advantage members get effectively unmetered quick-inquiry consulting, and more in-depth advice sessions as well.
• Our speaking and writing services, which vendors like to use for lead generation and general image-buffing, are generally restricted to Monash Advantage members
• The entry-level Monash Advantage price is $10,000/year

The biggest change from prior years is that there are now three tiers of the Monash Advantage, up from one.

• The Monash Advantage Lite is for small, tightly-focused companies with severe budget constraints. We offer suggestions and help them think through their most pressing issues, a few times each year.
• The Monash Advantage Basic is for more typical technology companies. We help them with anything and everything.
• The Monash Advantage Custom is for companies that want us to serve as core strategic advisors.

The early response to this tiering has been very positive, and we have had multiple sign-ups for 2010 at each of the three levels.

Another change is that we no longer require companies to join the Monash Advantage on a strict calendar-year basis. Now, it’s calendar quarters, and for Custom members we’re completely flexible.

Finally, we’re open to doing stock deals with seed-stage companies, at least ones that don’t compete closely with our other clients. For example, I’ve just started advising one stealth start-up in a hardware area that complements analytic DBMS, and I’m having a blast.  I’ll disclose the names of any companies I have private stock in, as well as offering at least a capsule of what is publicly known about what they’re pursuing.

]]> http://www.monashreport.com/2009/12/14/our-services-for-technology-vendors/feed/ 1 http://www.monashreport.com/2009/04/20/im-holding-forth-on-public-policy-again/ http://www.monashreport.com/2009/04/20/im-holding-forth-on-public-policy-again/#respond Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:35:28 +0000 http://www.monashreport.com/?p=206 I was interviewed by Federal News Radio again, and will edit in a link to an audio file if/when they give me one.  (Here it is.) The subject was the completion of the Aneesh Chopra/Vivek Kundra team for United States CTO and CIO, something I find alarming due to their lack of focus on the tough project management/data integration and privacy issues at the heart of government IT.

Overall, the interview went a lot better than my last one with the same station.

I work from my house, as does my wife Linda Barlow. That makes it an interesting place right there, as Linda has published 15 novels, served two terms as a director of the Author’s Guild, testified as an expert witness on HTML technology in Federal court and, for variety, taught neurobiology at a local college. She is also a much better MMO player than I am.

Monday night, however, things got interesting in another way. On the whole, I’m not apt to be particularly celebrity-struck. I grew up in Beverly Hills; worked with bunches of politicians, Nobel Laureates and Fields Medalists at Harvard; talk for hours with some of the tech industry’s biggest names; and have met some extremely popular authors through Linda. Still, I thought it was cool to be Twittering back and forth with LeVar Burton, of Roots and Star Trek fame, especially when he sent a direct message that read, in its entirety, “Exactly!!! Well said.” But unfortunately, that wasn’t the most interesting part either.

The flare-up

While I was tweeting away in the middle of the night, I heard a shout from Linda. It turned out that we had a fire on our 49-year-old electric stove. (A burner had failed to turn off, a plastic cutting board had fallen onto it, and flames had started.)

Some lessons from that should be obvious.

We fumbled ineffectively with the fire extinguishers.

Lessons learned:

Make sure you know how to USE your safety equipment. Also, at least try for workarounds on the fly. I should have carried the fire extinguisher outdoors to safety and then worked hard on figuring it out; the fire was small enough I could have still gone back in and extinguished it. Indeed, it was eventually extinguished by a policeman using a similar device, before the fire department ever arrived.

Not doing anything useful with the fire extinguishers, I tried throwing a small amount of water on the fire, just in case what we’d heard about water not helping w/ kitchen fires was wrong. But it turned out to be correct. Perhaps if I’d wetted the cabinets in the line of fire — as it were — the flames’ climb would have been slowed, but I didn’t try that.

Ultimately, all that was destroyed by the flames was the stove itself, some adjacent cabinets, and some contents of same. The real damage from fire turns out to be caused by smoke. Disgusting fire extinguisher powder added greatly to the perceived mess, but probably didn’t actually wreck very many incremental items.

The clean-up

The fire left a small part of our house destroyed, a large part uninhabitable, and the rest uncomfortable. The insurance company happily feels obligated to set things to rights.

The most interesting aspect, I think, is the business process. There is a master contractor called Belfor for restoration, aka remediation, with dozens of offices nationwide. Its employees — who arrived the first afternoon after the fire — do the actual multi-week demolition and clean-up. They subcontract as needed, e.g. for a quick visit by an electrician. Another firm handles all clothes cleaning. A third handles rugs, carpets, and upholstery. All had paid us their first visit by the day after the fire. The insurance adjuster himself arrived the morning of the second day.

There’s a bit of a trend in the auto insurance industry too to move to in-kind services. Auto glass is, I think, commonly handled that way, on a no-fault basis. And some auto insurers, such as Plymouth Rock, handle all repairs themselves.

The benefit to our insurer, Liberty Mutual, is obvious — repeated purchases from specialized suppliers it knows and trusts. Meanwhile, we’re being served by a large and knowledgeable firm, Belfor, that is accountable to another large firm, Liberty Mutual. Not everything is perfect, but the competence/accountability/BS frontier is in a whole different place than I’ve commonly experienced in home contracting scenarios. This is much more of a B2B relationship than it is classical consumer schmooze-and-abuse.

A little bit of cool (or hot) technology

A lot of what’s being done involves saws, sponges, and trash bags. But occasionally an interesting big of electronics pokes through. The most important one was right up front. The fire department has infrared cameras or detectors they use after a fire is apparently out, to confirm that nothing more is smoldering in the walls. This is a huge improvement over the prior technology, which is an ax they used to smash the walls and see for themselves.

I am told that a more advanced version of this is used on water damage sites. How do you detect the source of a leak, which almost always is in a wall, under a floor, or underground? Well, what you’re really trying to detect is an abundance of water. So if there’s any reason for the water to be hotter or cooler than the surrounding structure, an infrared temperature detector may uncover the leak.

Infrared gets mentioned once again in tape-measure-replacement tech. Supposedly, the device is accurate to 1/16th of an inch. My first search engine hit looking for something similar turned up a combo infrared and sonic tool, for $149, advertised at 1/4″ accuracy. Hmm. Cool toy, but I think I have other gadget priorities first.

We also have some heavy-duty air cleaners going, with charcoal adsorption as the core technology. This has already gotten a nod of approval from Linda’s ex-husband, who happens to be an international expert on indoor air pollution.

And yet more

For once, I’m using Twitter the “official” way — briefly updating followers on the state of my life, good and bad alike. I imagine I’ll scale that back soon, for my followers’ sake as well as my own. But for now, I’m giving a bit of a fire-survival play-by-play.

We’ll zap this interview to the entire Maryland/VA/DC tri-state area. We’ll also stream it live at federalnewsradio.com. And afterwards, we’ll archive it online in its entirety (MP3 format).

Hopefully I’ll get a more precise link to the archive once it’s up, in which case I plan to edit it into this post.

The subject is what Obama should look for in a CTO, and what the Obama Administration’s technology priorities should be. This interview was surely triggered by my post arguing the new United States CTO needs to be more of a CIO, and the Slashdotting of same.

Related links

• MP3 of the interview
• My rant rebutting the attitudes represented by the interviewers
• Freedom even without data privacy

The subject is Positioning Choices in the Analytic DBMS Market. (Aka data warehouse DBMS, data warehouse appliance, analytic appliance, or whatever.) I proposed eight ideas that I think work, but they overlap a lot – four are variants on “great price/performance” and three are variants on “the safe choice.” I also called out a few that I don’t think work, including at least one that one of my clients is pretty much betting the company on.

Obviously, there’s a huge amount of research backing up this analysis over on DBMS2. (Just one example – my recent Teradata product line overview.) But I also invoked some underlying marketing theory. Part of that has been posted on Strategic Messaging. Other exists only in very crude draft form. (Sadly, that’s what my whole company website used to look like, until Melissa Bradshaw rescued it.)

Other than the highlights feed itself, we have four pieces of news to share today:

• A new white paper
• A new Network World blog called A World of Bytes
• A new Intelligent Enterprise blog that may or may not wind up being named Data Frontiers
• Translation of some of my analytics-oriented posts into Russian
  

Let me explain.

The white paper, sponsored by EnterpriseDB, is called The Explosion in DBMS Choice: Database alternatives for a cost-conscious world. I’ve blogged two excerpts, namely the introduction and conclusion. I urge you strongly to read it, whether in whole or just in part. Connoisseurs of our blog design may notice this new white paper referenced (even if under the fold) in the right-hand column of every blog page, on all five of the blogs we own.

Last May, Network World approached me to write a blog for them. I have longstanding relationships with John Gallant, Adam Gaffin, and the publication itself — indeed, before this blog I’d been a columnist for them twice, an adviser once, a video guest, and of course frequently quoted. They offered me visibility to their strong end-user audience, and demonstrated their general seriousness about the whole venture by ponying up regular monthly cash money.

The result is A World of Bytes, a name I’d picked even before I realized it was lifted from Nicholas Negroponte. We’re still feeling our way; for example, I just found out yesterday that the hideous and obsolete user interface — I can say that now! — is going to be imminently replaced. But basically, what I’m doing there is summarizing views on enterprise software I present in more depth elsewhere, and also posting the primary versions of some of my thoughts on the online world.

New just this month is my Intelligent Enterprise blog. Editor Doug Henschen asked me if he could syndicate some of my posts, publicize them on the front page of Intelligent Enterprise, and pay me cash for the privilege. I thought at great length — thousands of milliseconds! — and said Yes. So far it looks great. Basically, that’s Doug’s baby. While I have the ability to edit the posts, I plan to exercise it as rarely as possible.

Finally, Konstantin Lissianski pinged me on AIM and asked whether he could translate and republish some of my posts about BI or data warehousing for his Russian audience, on the site infology.ru. That’s a business relationship too, albeit looser than with the more established American publishers; i.e., we’ve outlined how to “skin the unkilled bear.”

That’s it for now. I’m off for a short trip to the Bay Area. When I return, I plan to get the Monash Letters back on track, for the ever-growing membership of the Monash Advantage. Stay tuned for further highlights!

But please pay no attention to the listed description. Any topic goes — from Attensity to Zilliant — and the write-up is just one editor’s idea of what would be a good hook to attract participants. (And please, definitely, pay NO attention to my antiquated and scrunched up picture, to the missing text, or to any other aspect of networkworld.com’s user interface.)

• Help visitors find information that may be of interest to them
• Keep the blogs easy to read and pleasant to look at

I hope you will agree that we’ve met those goals with — as it were — flying colors.

Most aspects of the redesign are pretty obvious, but here’s a biggie you might at first overlook. On most category pages on DBMS2, Text Technologies, and Software Memories, there are now brief category descriptions and, crucially, suggested links. Hopefully, these will help you find research that is interesting to you, but which you may have missed the first time around. If you want to check out some examples, you could start with:

• (in DBMS2) Business intelligence
• (in DBMS2) SAP
• (in Text Technologies) Google

Also — if you’re wondering why we added that super-prominent sign-up box for our complete feed, the reason is simple: Only about a third of our feed subscribers take the integrated feed. (The others typically take just Text Technologies or just DBMS2.) Given how my interests and subjects connect to each other, I think my readers are much better off if they get at least the headlines to everything.

• The title of “my biggest customer” has no clear winner these days. Most of the contenders are small DBMS vendors such as Netezza, DATAllegro, and EnterpriseDB. Generally, I’m closer to small companies these days than to big ones.
• That wasn’t always the case. For example, In other years my biggest customers have been Oracle (several times), SAP, Computer Associates, Microsoft (I think — if not so, then close to it), and AOL.
• I’ve had a falling-out with SAP, who flat-out cheated me in some business dealings. Multiple execs from the VP level on up seem to have been OK with that. If you think that SAP is more ethical than, say, Oracle or Microsoft, I strongly beg to differ.
• Every white paper and webcast I do is “sponsored”; i.e., money changes hands. (There may be occasional exceptions to that rule in the future, but it’s usually the case.) Sponsorship is clearly disclosed.
• I cannot commit to promptly or completely disclosing who my consulting clients are. Sometimes they want to be served in confidence. However, I always have disclosed — and in the future always will disclose — any kind of relationship in which I am paid to promote companies in any way.
• I do spot consulting for both public-equity and private-equity/venture capital investors. In other years I’ve also had a small number of retainer relationships with public-equity investors, but there don’t happen to be any at the moment.

The reason you should care about these is in both cases the same: Our research is actually spread across multiple sites and feeds. I write about Google both in the Monash Report and on Text Technologies. I write about enterprise text management both on Text Technologies and on DBMS2. I write about computing appliances both on DBMS2 and in the Monash Report. I write about data mining in all three places. And now that there’s an integrated, industry history relevant to any of the other subject areas may find its way onto Software Memories. Your view of my views simply isn’t complete unless you have access to all of those sites.