Phurnace Blog for Daniel Nelson

Thoughts on HP Software Universe 2008

Daniel Nelson — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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:

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. As for [...]

Start-up Surfing

Daniel Nelson — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 poo [...]

Follow the Pain

Daniel Nelson — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 [...]

IBM IMPACT 2008

Daniel Nelson — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 th [...]

SDLC's Dirty Little Secret

Daniel Nelson — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0100

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 thos [...]