•
Today, we got the chance to sit down with Aprimo, an on-demand marketing automation company that has built their software business around scaling their own cloud infrastructure with VMware vCenter . Aprimo has optimized its offerings to scale with customer growth and leverage best-in-class hardware to match innovation in the software layers it develops. In this discussion, we found less need for discussing private vs. public cloud. Instead, we found more focus on performance and speed-to-market as key drivers for moving a virtualization strategy into personal cloud infrastructure reality. Sponsor The story of Aprimo starts with virtualization - and has led to the company defining the boundaries of its cloud offering and product architecture around the benefits of scaling resources on demand. Aprimo uses a Microsoft .Net three-tier architecture with MSSQL in the back-end. All of the three tiers (front-end, business logic, database) run in virtual containers that are monitored with vCenter. Performance is the question that Aprimo studied when bringing vendors on board. The company has relationships with 3Com, Cisco, and HP for the three key parts of the technology stack. vCenter joins these offerings together and offers the company quick response to new customer requests. Like many business, marketing can come in waves and this architecture is designed to scale around the unknown and to be agile enough to support the marketing calendar. Here is a diagram showing the core services VMware vCenter is focused on: We had the chance to explore the customer experience of build-your-own-cloud with John Gilmartin, Director of Product Marketing at VMware. We asked him if VMware sells clouds, or if instead its tool build clouds. What we found is that it is a bit of both. Like a data center itself, or a complex application, building your own cloud can be a multi-faceted event. Customers are using vCenter as a building block to manage the resources and enabling automation around business processes. By thinking of automation as the line in the sand between virtualization and cloud, we can easily see how connecting business processes focuses on the best place in harnessing on-demand resources for business benefit. Some of the areas of focus we the Aprimo team took on as the company to optimize its virtual resources into its cloud. Design and optimization of resource pools Database tier optimization and support new dynamic customer scaling Designing for performance with vendor evaluations Leveraging best practices from VMware on tuning and finding bottlenecks Processes for spinning up new users automatically across all resources Out of these focus areas, we found database scaling the most interesting to consider. It seems clear that as build-your-own-clouds grow, database performance, concurrency, and process integration are ripe for further optimization. What we learned from Aprimo and VMware vCenter is that launching a cloud infrastructure is a combination of virtualizing computing resources and designing the automation of the right business and technical processes. Reaching the stage of an effective cloud depends on how the team thinks about connecting software, sales, and infrastructure together as a process. Making a commitment to your own cloud can bring a company together - from sales manager to developer. This join can position an organization to win customers and grow the business due to an increase in the end to end agility of the organization. Is your business ready to cook up a cloud recipe of your own? Discuss
Read the original post:
One Approach to Growth: Build Your Own Cloud with vCenter in the Middle
Tags:
Aprimo,
architecture,
case studies,
center-server,
customer,
marketing,
Microsoft,
organization,
technology
•
Every now and then we hear the story of the entrepreneur who left his or her steady job at a large company to follow their dreams and create a startup, but we aren't all as daring and brave to quit steady work, especially in a time of economic uncertainty. If you have the entrepreneurial itch but aren't in a situation that would allow you to sacrifice your day job, there are still ways you can scratch said itch and bring innovation to a "startup" within a larger company. Sponsor This morning I talked with Eric Ries , the driving force behind the " lean startup " movement, which encourages high efficiency and meticulous metrics tracking within entrepreneurial ventures. Ries, who is often asked to speak on the subject, says he noticed a trend among some of the people attending his talks. Many managers from large companies were coming to his sessions to learn what they could, because, as Ries discovered, the principals of lean startups can exist within larger corporations that are attempting to innovate. "A startup is a human institution designed to create something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty," Ries told ReadWriteWeb. "There is nothing in there about the size of the company, or what industry you're in, or whether you're the manager of a division or if you're two guys in a garage, its just about the conditions in which you operate." As he points out, there are times in larger corporations when divisions are created to work on a new project, and similar rules and guidelines for managing that project which come from startups can be used here as well. Ries says that managers, like entrepreneurs, are taking risks on new ideas, and when they create a new division, they are essentially investing the company's time and money as a VC would invest funds in a startup. "The more I started to work with those managers I started to notice that they were having very familiar sounding arguments," Ries says. "The arguments between a venture-backed entrepreneur and a venture capitalist are almost exactly the same word for word as between these 'intrepreneurs' and their CFOs because the same issues come up." One of the ways larger corporations can implement entrepreneurial innovation into their businesses is to allow for what Ries calls "innovation inside the box," or a fenced off sandbox for experimentation with new products. By creating a place where employees with ideas can test a tweak to a feature, or where new ideas can be built within certain constraints, companies can greatly increase their potential for innovation. "The real value is [this] starts to catalyze change because by changing the way you work you start to accelerate that feedback loop and that can become the basis for making other changes," Ries says. Unfortunately, most larger corporations aren't allowing for this open sandbox of innovation within their companies, and choose to buy up technology and talent from startups. Ries agrees that many entrepreneurs get frustrated working inside a larger company, but he says the combination of these entrepreneurs with a walled off innovation playground could provide for some amazing innovations. Companies could also benefit from the addition of a sandbox by inspiring their existing employees to be innovative, instead of wrangling up entrepreneurs from a startup, which would save them money in the end. "They have this idea that a certain alchemy will happen that 'if I bring these special people into my organization, they will teach my regular people how to be special,' and that's just a formula for breeding resentment," Ries told ReadWriteWeb. "If the people doing the acquiring had more of a theory about how entrepreneurship is supposed to work they could start to think of better ways to plug an acquired company into the larger organization, taking advantage of what they're good at without destroying it." If you're a budding entrepreneur or a manager at a large company, there is an excellent chance to hear from Ries and others on these concepts and others this Friday at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco. If you can't make it to the Bay Area, there are simulcasts occurring Friday in nearly 50 cities worldwide, many of which are free or very inexpensive, so RSVP and bask in the lean startup goodness. Photo by Flickr user longhorndave . Discuss
Follow this link:
Thinking Inside the Box: Eric Ries On Creating Startups Within Large Organizations
Tags:
Business,
companies,
entrepreneurial,
flickr,
friday,
manager,
organization,
startup-lessons
•
The Internet of Things is the idea of a web of data provided by things like real-world devices and sensors. It's something we've covered in great detail here at ReadWriteWeb because where there is data, there is a platform for services and mashups. When that data is intimately tied to our real lives off-line, that's exciting. The Internet of Things offers a whole new world of opportunities for improved decision making, innovative services and (unfortunately) social surveillance. It's loaded with implications to consider. Whether you've got 5 or 30 minutes to spare, check out the two following videos (one short, one long) that both do a great job of explaining where the Internet of Things is at and why it's so exciting. Sponsor Last week industry thought leader Tim O'Reilly, the man widely credited with popularizing the term Web 2.0, gave an opening keynote talk about the Internet of Things at his organization's MYSQL conference . Some readers here might assume that a MYSQL talk is too technical for them, but this was a speech that anyone could appreciate. We've embedded below two videos. The first is a great 5 minute explanation of the Internet of Things from IBM. The next is O'Reilly's 36 minute keynote. We highly recommend you check both out for a great picture of where the future is headed. Above, from IBM's Smarter Planet . Below, Tim O'Reilly at the O'Reilly MYSQL conference . Of course it's not all peachy keen. As O'Reilly explains at the 18 minute mark, there is a battle over control of all this data the web is being flooded with. "You see increasingly the giants of the internet are trading for their own account, they are building a platform in which all roads lead back to themselves. Now there is a contervailing force for openess, but we have to wary, we have to be aware of that, we have to work for openess in that web." What do you think about the Internet of Things? Caption image from the Internet of Things 2010 Conference coming up in Tokyo this November. Discuss
Read this article:
Tim O'Reilly Explains the Internet of Things
Tags:
data,
internet of things,
MySQL,
opening-keynote,
organization,
reilly-explains,
smarter-planet,
things,
Tokyo,
widely-credited
•
Wikipedia , the online user-created encyclopedia and the number six website on the Internet today, is about to get a makeover. And it's a big one. According to a blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation User Experience team detailing the changes, the upcoming Wikipedia redesign, due to launch April 5, aims to make the site easier to navigate, easier to search and, perhaps most importantly, easier to edit. Sponsor Easier is Better The upcoming design, code-named "Vector," has been in use over the past six months by a group of 500,000 beta testers. Included in the update are changes like simplified navigation, a relocated search box, clutter reduction and even an updated Wikipedia logo. Also, all English Wikipedia users will soon be able to create PDFs and printed books from Wikipedia articles, a service previously available only to logged-in users. However, the most interesting change is how Wikipedia is making the page edit functions easier. A new toolbar will be provided which lets editors more easily insert links and tables, and an included cheatsheet will help users access the most commonly used functions. These editing changes launching next month are only the beginning, notes Naoko Komura on the Wikimedia blog . Later this year, the site will see even more radical revamps to the editing process. This includes the following: Reducing the amount of wiki code users see in the edit system and making it possible to change data in tables and information boxes through simple forms. Cleaning up the edit page itself, to use more understandable language and get rid of confusing clutter. Providing a new outline tool to navigate a long article while you're editing it. Wikipedia Needs More Editors Now the question is whether or not these changes will encourage more people to actually edit the online encyclopedia because, surprisingly, few users actually do. Wikipedia is often heralded as a shining example of how there's power in the "wisdom of the crowds," a phrase that implies how a diverse collection of individuals can be more accurate than individuals or even experts. However, the dirty little secret about the supposedly "crowd-edited" online encyclopedia is that, even though anyone and everyone can edit it, few do so. In fact, only 1% of Wikipedia users are responsible for half of the site's edits . Wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, has even been quoted as saying that the site is really written by a community, "a dedicated group of a few hundred volunteers." Given these statistics, it's no surprise that Wikipedia wants to make some changes. Recent reports point to slowed growth , a downward trend that may be partly to blame on the increasingly complex editing process, according to some experts. Dr. Ed H Chi, a scientist at the Palo Alto Research Center in California, told the Telegraph that the site had become a "more exclusive place", where only a handful of the most experienced editors were responsible for editing and maintaining the site. In other words, Wikipedia became a site that wasn't representing the "wisdom of the crowds" anymore, but the "wisdom of an elite group." That in, turn, may have caused the slowdown. Over the past several years, the number of new articles per day has dropped from 2,200 in July of 2007 to 1,300 today. Is It Too Late? Or Just in Time? By simplifying the editing process, Wikipedia could potentially reverse this trend -
Tags:
crowds,
crowdsourcing,
editing,
internet,
online,
organization,
over-the-past,
research,
research-center,
wikimedia,
Wikipedia,
wikipedia-needs,
words
•
TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release . The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding. TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability. Sponsor Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as "other" (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means. The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie , which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator . Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or "other" (e.g. merger or private investment). The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party). TechStars attributes this success rate to its "mentorship driven approach." The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity. TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, "I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It's powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program." I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it's a city with plenty of vitality and smarts. If you're a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon. Discuss
See the original post:
First Look at TechStars Historical Results Data
Tags:
awesome-zombie,
Boulder,
colorado-read,
companies,
elyssa-pallai,
mentorship,
nyt,
organization,
program