Who’s On Phirst

I spent most of last week in hotter-than-the-sun Las Vegas at the HP Software Universe trade show. Here are some quick observations:
 

1. Hewlett Packard Software is all about the data center. Really. All they talk about is making data centers run more efficiently – from test to deployment to performance metrics. Up and down the stack. It was nice to see such a big company have such a singular focus. There is no confusion in the HP ranks as to what their goal is.
2. As for web application servers that attendees used, WebLogic, WebSphere and Jboss were all about equally represented. Only one attendee we talked to was on Oracle OAS. Also, very few of the WebLogic prospects we talked to were on release 9.2 or 10. Most of them were on 8.1. I would have thought more companies would have migrated up by now.
3. The HP staff was pretty awesome. Lots of engineers from HP roaming around and looking at what new technology their partners had to offer. We must have talked to 8 different engineers from the Opsware group alone that wanted to learn more about what we do – and they were just as forthcoming in helping us with the questions we had about OpsWare. (Disclosure: Phurnace is coming out with an integration to Server Automation soon – that’s one of the reasons that we were at the show).
4. Finally, the Palazzo and Venetian are pretty swank.

In Server Automation, Opsware, HP
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Working at a small software company like Phurnace is kind of like surfing. Well, actually, - since I have never surfed - it’s kind of like what I imagine surfing to be like. You are either on top of the world or at the bottom of the ocean, and you spend very little time in between. When Robert and I first started full time with Phurnace, I was only as good as my last meeting. If the meeting had gone well, then I was convinced that our success was all but inevitable. If the meeting went poorly, then I was crushed. Sometimes I would feel both ways in the same day - or the same hour. The ups and downs were extremely hard to deal with – and if I were to be honest, they still are.

Now, before everyone starts in on how much of an emotional weakling I am (which may indeed be the case), keep in mind that it’s not just me who has had these feelings. I have talked to a lot of people who have done similar things and feel that same way. So, either this is a common experience, or I hang out with a bunch of wimps. Take your pick.

Over the years I have found a few ways to deal with this. One is just to become numb to it and be cynical about everything. Another is to go all Mr. Spock and just try to deal with it as everything as analytically as you can. Both of those can work at times, and I’ve used them to good effect.

But you know, I think that kind of misses the point about working at a small company (and especially a software company). And that point is that it is suppose to be fun. It’s supposed to be exciting. And, while the downward plummet to the abyss can be quite terrifying, ultimately it will be those times that destruction looked the most certain but was somehow avoided that will be the most poignant, and the best remembered. The trick is to be able to enjoy the downslides as much as the upswings; to be able to laugh at both of them - whether gleefully or manically.

In Untagged 
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About a month ago I had a conversation with the President of a professional services firm about what was more important to succeed in the market: a good product or a good sales team. Since his background was sales, and mine was in building products, you can probably guess which sides we fell on. The conversation turned into one of those Star Wars vs. Star Trek debates where neither of us could move the other, and we just agreed to disagree.

Which is all well and good, but I have found myself thinking about that conversation on and off since then, and I am now ready to change my mind. Not that I suddenly agree that a good sales force is more important than a good product. But I think both sides miss the point.

The most important thing for success in the market is the customer pain. It won’t matter if you have a great product and a great sales force if the problem you are targeting isn’t really painful to your customer.

A good sales force can sell a mediocre product to a customer if the customer’s pain is big enough, and the reverse of that is true as well. The pain is the key.

So, how do you go about finding that out? Well, two things. First, start with an industry that you know and have worked in for awhile. That will be your divining rod that will point you in the general direction of what is painful enough to develop a product around.

Second, you have to get out there and ask. When Robert and I started Phurnace we talked to more than 100 individual Java professionals (devs, sys admins, architects, etc.). All that we asked them was what was painful about their jobs day to day. And what they told us was that deploying and configuring their applications was really, really painful. That’s when we decided to build some software to help them out.

We didn’t stop asking about the pain, though. We kept following it as we were building the product, going back to those people we had talked to as well as our early customers and ask them what features they wanted and how they wanted them to look and act. We still do that. Every feature we add has to have a customer story behind it which makes it a lot easier to figure out what to put into each iteration.

If you are planning on starting your own company or looking for an idea for a product, there is a great book by a former software exec, VC, and now professor named Rob Adams that I recommend. (Full disclosure: Rob is a friend and on the Board of Directors of Phurnace). The book is called A Good Hard Kick in the Ass. It’s got some great advice on just the kind of market validation I’m talking about.

In customer
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Just got back from IBM IMPACT 2008 show

3 things I learned about WebSphere customers:

Last week Jessica (our Marketing Manager) and I spent about 4 days doing booth duty at a conference, IMPACT 2008. I thought I would share 3 quick impressions that I got from the show, the people there, and what companies where showing off. Two quick caveats: first, since I was only talking to people who went to IMPACT, my impressions should probably not be fully extrapolated to a state of the general market; second, I was talking primarily to people who either stopped at the Phurnace booth or were hanging out at the same bars as me – so there may be some selection bias.

1. WebSphere is SO main-stream. It’s everywhere. No one industry dominates. Everyone is using WAS, and its add-on products. I knew that there were lots of folks using Portal, but what surprised me was the number of people I talked to who were currently using Process Server or were planning to. Personally, I thought adoption would be slower than that. But lots of companies seem to be embracing it.
2. There were tons of consultants. Everyone from GBS, to Perficient, Accenture, CSC, CapGemini, etc., etc., etc. Sure, they were prospecting for customers just like I was, and I get that, but doesn’t that say something about the industry that the thing we are there to see/learn/discuss is so complex that about a third of the people I talked to where consultants?
3. There were some small companies doing some pretty cool things (and not just Phurnace). For example, the people right next to us was Clear App (a competitor of CA’s Wiley) who had some interesting stuff on performance monitoring of Portal apps. And I met Michael Dag, a solo owner of a company called MQSystems. He has an interesting tool for the modeling of MQ configs and object relationships. Start-ups and early stage companies are alive and well. And they are driven by some interesting innovation.

So that’s my quick three: WebSphere -- it’s everywhere, lots of people want you to pay them to help you with it, and there is some real innovation happening in start-up land. Oh, and next year I am not staying at the Tropicana Hotel. But that’s a whole different topic.

In WebSphere
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If you have never been in the datacenter in the wee hours of the morning, trying to figure out what's wrong with a server, stop reading this.  If you have never been in an all-hands-on-deck meeting where everyone is trying to figure out what went wrong with a deployment, then stop right now and go do something more useful with your time.  Because if you haven't lived through that, then the rest of this post won't mean much to you.

I've been through plenty of those times.  And the truth is no matter what company I worked at - big, small, or something in between - we always had those times.  They are just a fact of life for people whose job it is to keep the server up and running.

Which brings me to the point of this entry (which is naughty blogging of me - you are supposed to make your point in the first paragraph, but oh well.  It's my blog, so I get to do what I want).  Anyhoo - the point is that so much is wrong with how we think about the "Software Development Lifecycle."  In all the flow charts and diagrams I've seen they all seem to be ignoring the very basic point that things go wrong.  And they don't have a lot of built-in mechanisms to help you through that phase of the life-cycle.  It's a black box in the flow chart that says "insert troubleshooting here."

Let me back up a bit.  If nothing changes about a server environment, chances are you aren't going to have a lot of problems.  Maybe a power supply goes out.  Maybe the network drops.  But for the most part you are only going to have problems when things change.  And that's the catch 22.  Things are supposed to change.  New code is supposed to go out to the servers.  New features are supposed to make it into the hands of eager customers.  And those changes are supposed to happen more often rather than less frequently.  That's how our companies compete with each other - it's called time to market.

And that's the fundamental disconnect between the two goals of keeping things up and running, and getting new code out faster.  As diplomat Henry Kissinger used to say, "real tragedy doesn't happen when right faces wrong, but rather when two rights face each other".  Keeping the servers up is a good thing.  Getting code out faster is a good thing.  How do you balance the two?

To me, any real Software Development Life-cycle has to fully embrace the fundamental belief that things are going to go wrong during any process.  Phurnace Software sells a product that helps do things better, but I can't claim, and I wouldn't claim, that if you use Phurnace to do your deployments that you will never have a problem again.  That's ludicrous, and simply not credible to people who have done this as long as I have.

But one thing that is very different about Phurnace, and the way we do things, is that what we have built is functionality that is designed to specifically help you out when things do go wrong.  We know it's going to happen at some point, and we work hard to try to make it as infrequent as humanly possible.  But it will happen.  And when it does, we have the built-in the features you will need to figure that part out.  Heck, we even have a product named Troubleshoot. 

So, when you are looking at how to balance that "time to market" with "keep the servers up", keep in mind that you have to have robust tools and process in place to fix the problem.   A black box just doesn't cut it.

In troubleshoot, Tips, java
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