John Blossom Coverage of the SIIA Summit

I was planning to do a wrap-up post on the SIIA Summit I attended earlier this week, but thanks to John Blossom, president of Shore Communications and author of hot, new book Content Nation, I realized that I didn't have to because John already did it.

Excerpt

It is a hopeful sign that the SIIA Information Industry Summit this year has robust attendance and a great lineup of executives and experts who are wrestling with the changes impacting the information industry. These professionals are engaging many of the key "sink or swim" issues aggressively: resting on past assurances is a thing of the past.

Best of all, John has coverage of each of the sessions -- e.g., one of my favorites, Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider (which is soon to be renamed Business Insider).

While John's coverage is far superior to mine, I did do some intermittent tweeting during the conference which you can find here.

Whither the Business Objects website?

If box-bearing facilities guys are the harbinger of a executive's disappearance, then I suppose the corporate website is the harbinger of a company's.

A bit more than a year into Business Objects' acquisition by SAP, they seem to have done the "Business Objects, an SAP company" thing pretty well. That is, SAP seems to have let Business Objects operate as a relatively independent business unit thus far.

Well it seems all that is changing. I recently surfed over to www.businessobjects.com (to work on this post) and, much to my surprise given the positioning thus far, ended up redirected to this lovely URL:

http://www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects/index.epx

And saw this screen:


No more black. No more let there be light. No more Insight. No more Star Trek rainbow logo. No more executive team link. No more About Business Objects link.

Assimilation, it appears, has begun.

Addition
By the way, I'm not arguing that Business Objects shouldn't be assimilated. Typically the financial arguments behind these acquisitions require significant synergies which can only be achieved through integration. My belief is SAP has been prudent in taking a phased approach to integration (step 1: run as unit, step 2: integrate).

My beef is more about communication. Going from "Business Objects, an SAP company" to the above is very big shift to make without any explicit communication of a change in, or second phase of, the integration strategy.

The Big Cheese: Velveeta Network Marketing with House Party

I caught a Facebook status update from childhood friend and neighbor, Gene DeRose (who, among other things, founded Jupiter Communications), which linked to a Wall Street Journal article about his new company, HouseParty, and the big Velveeta House Party that they are running on Super Bowl Sunday.

Always interested in marketing, this got me asking: what's a House Party? The answer: a modern-day, high-tech interpretation of the old Tupperware party.

From their site:

Is a House Party like a Tupperware party?

Yes... and no. There are many appropriate analogies to be made to the successful phenomenon that is a Tupperware party, but a House Party is different in one key way: hosts of house parties are not paid representatives of any of the products that are showcased at the event.

Instead, a House Party host is typically a brand ambassador – a consumer that already has a positive association with the brand(s), and who is likely already out doing something we simply want them to do more of: telling their friends about the brand. House Party finds the most viral of these consumers, and gives them ways and reasons to do more of this advocacy while also allowing us to guide and sculpt some of it, peek in on how it's going, and track it.

I suspect there's some cool data mining technology involved, because they somehow identify the "most viral" of the House Party applicants. For example, for The Big Cheese, only 2,500 of the 15,000 applicants were selected.

Good luck with the concept Gene and Parker: it seems like a good one.

Why Google Employees Quit

As the bloom comes off the Google rose, you can now see the flip side of many of their once-sacred practices, such as their interviewing process and academic elitism.

While I'm not a Google fan -- for the record, I always hated "don't be evil" -- nor am I a detractor. My biggest problem with Google is the seeming lack of self-awareness of many of its employees. I'm not opposed to Google-isms; in fact, I agree violently with some of them (e.g., intelligence matters in software).

I'm sharing this post mostly to balance the mainstream press which worshiped all Google practices as best ones when times were good, and then forgets to update us when the tide goes out and, as Warren Buffet once said, you can see who's swimming naked.

I believe in strong culture and I know that Google has one. The trick, in my opinion, is looking out for the downside of a strong culture, because there always is one. The mails below help paint a picture of that downside.

My take on Google has always been

• One-trick pony
• Which has spent literally billions in experimental R&D -- in an organic model that I like
• But has nothing to show for it

I remember once watching a panel of thirty-something, first-100-in, ex-Googlers rather condescendingly lecture about innovation best practices and thinking simply: despite literally billions in investment, you've never come up with a successful business innovation since the first two (search keyword and contextual ads) and, what's worse, is you don't even seem to know it. Then again, when world's best business model is your first trick, it's pretty hard to come up with a second one, and if you were in early enough, heck, you don't need to.

But enough of my rambling. The purpose of this post was to link you to over to TechCrunch where you can see, in their own words, why Google employees quit.

A few excerpts:

As I was saying. Google actually celebrates its hiring process, as if its ruthless inefficiency and interminable duration were a sure proof of thoroughness, a badge of honor. Perhaps it is thorough. But I would be willing to wager that Microsoft’s hiring process, which takes a fraction of the time, does not result in a lower-skilled workforce or result in a higher rate of attrition. And let me say this: if Larry Page is still reviewing resumes, shareholders should organize a rebellion. That is a scandalous waste of time for someone at that level, and the fact that it’s “quirky” is no mitigation.

...

What was strange with me at Google was: while outside, I had all these big ideas I could do if I ever worked there. Once inside, you have 18,000 (at the time, Feb 2008) other googlers thinking the same things.

...

I wonder if post-Google bitterness is correlated to when you joined and/or how long you were at Google. It seems that it is. Maybe it’s the memories of Google in the first few years I was there that make it it seem magical, but I really do treasure the time I spent at Google. I left a few weeks ago, after almost 5 years at the company, because I wanted to pursue a markedly different career path. Sure, I had times when I was frustrated with the way Google was doing things, or when I felt that my particular project, or assignment was lacking, and I definitely had managers that I didn’t enjoy. But all in all — what a freakin’ amazing experience!

...

Google was my first job out of college. I was an English major at a prestigious college and was hired to work in HR. That is one of the problems I had with Google right there - is it really necessary to hire Ivy League graduates to process paperwork? I went from reading Derrida to processing “Status Change Request Forms” for X employees to go on paid leave. The term “Status Change Request Form” will forever haunt me.

...

Those of us who failed to thrive at Google are faced with some pretty serious questions about ourselves. Just seeing that other people ran into the same issues is a huge relief. Google is supposed to be some kind of Nirvana, so if you can’t be happy there how will you ever be happy? It’s supposed to be the ultimate font of technical resources, so if you can’t be productive there how will you ever be productive?

Business Objects Within SAP: €411M in License in 2008?

I was catching up on my weekend reading and noticed some research from JMP Securities on SAP which estimated that Business Objects (BOBJ) did €411M ($534M) in license revenues in 2008.

Gut-wise, the figure struck me as low. While I left BOBJ over 4 years ago, I have kept in touch with many BOBJ friends and stay attuned to the BI market since, like many others, I see some sort of "BI meets search" producing "new information infrastructure" trend emerging that unites the management and analysis of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Obviously, given what we do at Mark Logic, that possibility is something I want to stay close to.

To satisfy my quantitative curiousity, I grabbed BOBJ's last filed 10-Q and tried to figure it out how they've been doing.

Disclaimer: I did this at my kitchen table in my pajamas so (1) there are quite possibly mistakes and (2) it's also possible that they've been reporting real numbers that I'm overlooking because I don't track this very closely.

Anyway, the exercise was fun, and here's what it produced:

3Q07 and 1Q-3Q07 represent reported numbers from the 10-Q. The growth calculations are mine. The 2007 model represents what 2007 would have looked like assuming a constant license/service mix and a 30% backload factor (i.e., that the company does 30% of its annual performance in the last quarter). The 2008 model assumes growth over the 2007 model at a constant LOB-specific rate (i.e., 12% for license, and 27% for service). The JMP-derived model assumes the JMP figure of $534M in license and the same license/service mix as my 2008 model.

So, using what I consider a reasonable set of assumptions that just kept BOBJ "on track," I'd have guessed $607M in BOBJ license in 2007 and $679M in 2008. The JMP figure of $534M is 79% of my model for 2008 and only 88% of my model for 2007.

So, what's my conclusion on how it's going?

• I'd bet SAP is quite happy with acquisition process overall. Remember that BOBJ was SAP's first $1B+ acquisition, so the deal had more than usual risk due to SAP's relative inexperience in the integration process.

• I'd bet SAP is quite happy with the deal at a strategic level. Adding market-leading BI to their suite was an important step, both offensively and defensively. (Imagine if Oracle or IBM had bought BOBJ instead.)

• Numbers wise, based on my models, I'm guessing they're not enthralled with the deal. If my math and assumptions are correct, they paid $6.8B for a $1.5B business growing at 20%. That's reasonable as long as it stays growing at 20%. But if my math and the JMP figure are right, then that business is now closer to shrinking at 10% than growing at 20%.
  

Lervik Resigns from Microsoft/Fast (Updated)

See this CMS Watch story which says that John Lervik has resigned from Microsoft/Fast. A Norwegian newspaper story on the resignation is here (with bad machine translation here). Stephen Arnold of Beyond Search covers the story here in a colorful post that delves into Norwegian folklore.

Since I've blogged extensively about the issues at Fast previously, I won't restate everything here, but instead provide a link to my previous posts.

While speculation abounds about why Lervik resigned (e.g., links to the accounting troubles and restatement of financials, or links to last October's police raid on Fast's headquarters), I believe that Occam's Razor suggests the following analysis:

• Microsoft clearly knew about the serious accounting issues prior to buying Fast
  
• Microsoft bought Fast anyway despite those issues (and at an inexplicable valuation when considering them)
  
• You would think that if Microsoft had issues with Lervik, they would have released him either at the time of the acquisition or the police raids (i.e., they had two good opportunities to do so and didn't).
• Lervik's resignation came almost one year to the day since the acquisition

While I don't claim to have any special information and have no idea what actually happened, this line of reasoning leads you to conclude that Lervik didn't like it at Microsoft and had to work through a one-year retention agreement before resigining.

Fast CTO Bjørn Olstad is said to be taking over Lervik's position, further suggesting that the action wasn't Microsoft trying to cut ties with Fast's previous management team.

Introducing MarkMail 2.0

I'm pleased to announce that we have rolled out a new version of MarkMail, our service for searching Internet email archives. MarkMail provides a real-life demonstration of the power of MarkLogic Server and the content applications you can build on top of it. It also provides a demonstration of how easy it is to convert email to XML and then how you can leverage the power of that XML in building slick applications. Lastly, it's a real convenient way to find information about open source development projects that's otherwise lost or buried in the 30M+ messages that we've loaded from scores of lists.

With MarkMail 2.0, the site transitions from being read-only to read/write. Now, users can login and see their own view of information, access their own private content, and create new artifacts on the site. New features include:

• Registration and login

• Personal display settings (i.e., date and time display)

• Creation of "named sets." Imagine there is a set of messages you'd like to refer to as a group, like "all messages relating to XQuery." Today they're scattered across a dozen random lists so it's hard to search them as a unit. A named set solves this by bringing them together under a user-defined name. Once defined, you can do intra-set searches. You can share your sets with others by marking them public.

• RSS feeds. You can now get an RSS feed for any query you write.

Check out the new MarkMail here. If you like what you see, let me know. If you're interested in having MarkMail, or something like it, for use within your organization, let us know by taking the MarkMail survey.

As mentioned previously, we are exploring commercialization of the system and would love to talk to organizations who would see real business value in MarkMail-style access to their own email lists.

Autonomy Buys Interwoven for $775M

Enterprise search vendor Autonomy today announced a definitive agreement to acquire content management systems vendor Interwoven for $775M or $16.20/share, a valuation equivalent to 2.8x trailing twelve month revenues -- not great, but not bad either for a company growing a bit less than 20% with a bit more than 10% return on sales (from the 3Q08 10-Q).

With a fairly incomprehensible subhead, the acquisition press release reads:

Combination of Autonomy and Interwoven Extends Meaning Based Computing to New Customer Base Enabling World's First Comprehensive Manage-In-Place Architecture

To be fair, Autonomy has long banged the "meaning-based computing" drum despite a lack of resonance for the phrase in the market. Compounding that problem is the (I believe) new "manage-in-place architecture" buzzphrase, which I find about as obscure as anything they've yet come up with.

Here's my take on the deal:

• With its 12/05 acquisition of Verity, Autonomy first drank deeply from the M&A growth cup -- buying a company (stats from memory) that was more than twice its size at the time -- and evidently liking the experience. Sweetening the drink was Verity's tendency to sell term licenses, which put Autonomy in the enviable position of driving revenues in the subsequent years simply by re-selling existing Verity customers when their license terms ran out.
  

• The trouble with acquisition-driven growth is that it's addictive because the inorganic growth "fix" runs out after 12 months. That is, during the first twelve months after company A buys company B, they calculate growth using A+B/A. After twelve months, it's A+B/A+B, so what I call the "inorganic growth tailwind" disappears.
  

• So, it wasn't too surprising when Autonomy acquired Zantaz in 3/07. What did surprise me was the bottom-up strategy shift that followed. As I hear the story, simply by putting both enterprise search and e-discovery/compliance in their salesreps' bags, they started an emergent sales-driven strategic shift from enterprise search to compliance and e-discovery. Salespeople take the path of least resistance, selling what's easiest to sell, regardless of corporate missions about meaning-based computing.
  

• Interwoven, long a runner-up in the ECM space with its roots in WCM, had drifted towards compliance and e-discovery solutions which made them a nice target for Autonomy's new strategy. If Zantaz started the transformation of Autonomy from search to e-discovery/compliance, then Interwoven may seal it. The question is how far along were they in their own transition? Did Autonomy just solidfy its position in e-discovery and compliance, or did it accidentally just become a web content management vendor?
  

• Financially, Interwoven stacks another ~$70M per quarter on top of Autonomy's existing ~$150M, enabling another year of "minimum 45% growth" (i.e., even if the core business is flat, they'll grow 45% simply due to the acquired growth tailwind). In addition, acquisitions tend to cloud financials, making it hard to see what's happening for a year, and they enable a company to potentially flush some expenses as one-time acquisition charges that otherwise might have been considered normal operating expenses and thus impacted operating income.

• Autonomy expects $40M/year in (one of my favorite euphemisms) "synergies," including office closures, staff reductions, and even the royalty that otherwise would have been due to Autonomy for Interwoven's embedded search. Back of the envelope, it suggests about a 15% to 20% cut in Interwoven's quarterly expenses.
  

While Autonomy pitches the strategic rationale for the deal based on Interwoven's growing focus in legal, in reality, Interwoven was known first as an web content management vendor (i.e., software to help companies run their websites). From Interwoven's corporate overview:

Interwoven is acknowledged as a global leader in content management solutions.

We built our reputation by tackling content in its toughest form, pioneering solutions for Web and document collaboration that have since become the gold standards of the industry.

Today, Interwoven’s software and services enable your organization to effectively leverage content to drive business growth by improving the customer experience, increasing collaboration, and streamlining business processes in dynamic environments.

Our unique approach combines user-friendly simplicity with robust IT performance and scalability to unlock the value of content, for results you can count on immediately.

We are continually moving our offerings forward with new functionality to keep your business growing strong. And our offerings are enriched and extended by more than 20,000 developers and over 300 partners.

We are proud that the world’s leading companies, professional services firms, and governments use our solutions to reliably create and deliver time-sensitive materials, collaborate and communicate securely, and accelerate time to market for campaigns and promotions.

And while Interwoven may have been increasingly focused on corporate legal and e-discovery, those areas are but 2 of the 12 solutions featured on their website.

Other coverage of the deal:

• CMS Watch First Take
  
• Analyst Guy Creese's Post
• Nick Patience at 451
  

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Make Your Own Obamicon

Well, this one's a tad bit more historic than ElfYourself and, no, I didn't bother to analyze the terms of service, but go check out Obamicon.Me -- a site that very quickly lets you make your own image in a style inspired by Shepard Fairey's iconic poster.

Here's mine:

Have fun.

Holy Cow! I'm on the BusinessWeek Home Page

One of my key rules for keeping this blog credible is to avoid the tendency to re-post stories without reading them or to write about new services without trying them. That means I'll output fewer stories per week, but hopefully you'll find the content richer and more meaningful.

Thus, when McGraw-Hill launched BusinessExchange a while back I was eager to blog about it, but I needed to get some real hands-on time first.

Why was I eager? I'm interested in BusinessExchange several reasons:

• I've always been a fan of BusinessWeek, which I started reading in business school and have read continuously since then. (Well over a decade for those who count such things.)

• BusinessExchange represents a big step (in fact, about as big a step as I can think of) by a major, traditional media player to re-invent itself in an Internet / Web 2.0 world.

• The site is MarkLogic-based, I know the head of the team who built it, and I know it was built using agile methodologies.
  

Here's what the New York Times had to say about BusinessExchange when it launched:

With advertising revenue sliding, publications try a lot of things online to get noticed, like — pardon the jargon — verticals, aggregation, user-generated content, popularity rankings and even something resembling social networks.

BusinessWeek magazine is about to introduce a site that combines some elements of all of the above in ways intended to capture new readers and funnel them into niches that will attract advertisers.

The site, called Business Exchange, is one approach to the fast-evolving digital world, where some news sites that experiment have rapidly expanded their audiences while those that do little more than post articles online have been left in the dust. After two years of quiet development, it will go public in late September, accessible through BusinessWeek’s own Web site (www.businessweek.com).

The core of Business Exchange is hundreds of topic pages, on subjects as broad as the housing market and as narrow as the Boeing 787. Plans call for the number of topic pages to grow quickly into the thousands.

I've been using BusinessExchange for a while now and was happy to learn last week that, based on my activity, they planned to make the "featured user" next Tuesday. What I didn't know was how prominently that would feature on the BusinessWeek homepage, and it hadn't also dawned on me "what else" was happening on that day.


As you can see, I'm most active in the topic of "venture capital" though I'm also pretty active in "information technology," "business blogging," and "public relations." Things I like about the site include:

• The ability to share stories from any source, BusinessWeek or not
• The automatic ability it has to parse some stories, with a title and summary
• The ability to save stories I find of interest
• The ability to connect with / network to some pretty influential people -- not the least of which include many of BusinessWeek's senior editors and correspondents, including Stephen Baker who I met a few times many years ago when I was at Business Objects in Paris
  
• The ability to find and read stories that have effectively been pre-selected by those in my network, essentially a form of collaborative filtering around news
• The business context

Aside: one of my theories is that social networks will fragment around interest areas and that people will seek to avoid "collisions" where (to use my favorite example) someone wants a 0% probability of their (LinkedIn, Spock, SlideShare) profiles intersecting with their (Facebook, MySpace, Classmates, Flickr) profiles interesecting with their (AdultFriendFinder, Match, Fling) profiles. Thus, collision avoidance will balance against the desire to minimize the number of social network profiles into some equilibrium where your number of active social networks = your number of deliberately unlinked social contexts.

So, if you've not tried BusinessExchange, I would give it try. My profile is here. The homepage is here. Come be an early user of in transition of mainstream business media.

How To Know When You Need an XML Server -- Thoughts from a Veteran DBA

I just heard that Mike Bowers will be giving a talk at AIIM entitled How to Know When You Need an XML Content Platform: Thoughts from a Veteran DBA (TEC03).

I've heard Mike speak before on this topic and would recommend attending his session:

• He knows more about storing XML documents in relational databases than about 99.9% of the people you're likely to meet.

• He uses some tremendously clever examples in his speech -- e.g., using Ted Codd's seminal paper that defined the relational database as the example of the structural and semantic richness of documents that is difficult to capture in a relational database.

• He is a database guy's database guy. I believe that virtually any self-identified "database person" who gives him a sniff test will properly identify Mike as a fellow database person -- just one who happens to know a heck of a lot about XML.
  

• He's a delightful and entertaining speaker.

His session is at the AIIM conference in Philadelphia on Tuesday, March 31 at 2:30 PM.

Save the Date and Submit a Talk for the Mark Logic 2009 User Conference

Please save the date for the 2009 annual Mark Logic user conference on May 11-14, 2009 in San Francisco. We will return to the wonderful, new Intercontinental Hotel.

In addition, we issued the call for speakers today. Speaking at the user conference is not only a great way to highlight your work and share information with the Mark Logic user community, it's also a great way to earn yourself a free pass to the conference, which otherwise costs $695.

So, submit an abstract -- it's easy! Just go here and fill in a simple web form.

I look forward to seeing you.

RSuite CMS Wins Information Today People's Choice Award

Congratulations to long-term Mark Logic partner Really Strategies for their product, RSuite CMS, winning the Information Today People's Choice award for top content management system. Since RSuite is based on Mark Logic, I'll take a moment to let us bask in a bit of reflective glow.

Other winners include:

• Top new innovator: Adobe
• Top content creation: Facebook
• Top new technology: ThomasNet
• Top social networking tool: Twitter
  

Balderton Raises $430M Fund

Congrats to my old boss, Bernard Liautaud, and his partners at the UK-based Balderton Capital for raising a $430M fund in only two months, during chilling times indeed.

Balderton's past hits have included MySQL and Bebo. Recent investments include: Big Fish Games (gaming), Metaversum (virtual worlds), 7digital (music downloads), and betNOW (gambling).

See TechCrunch's story on the fund, here. Excerpt:

Barry Maloney told the Financial Times: "We are about to enter a very interesting time for new investments, if not for exits. Part of the reason for raising this fund now is to take advantage of the opportunities that this stage of the cycle throws up."

Balderton’s thinking is evidenced by the fact that it invested in Lovefilm which will benefit from film fans avoiding high prices at cinemas. Balterton’s Barrry Maloney also told the FT there would be “some casualities” in its portfolio and made the totally safe prediction that there would be VC-backed IPOs in the next 18 to 24 months.

See Balderton's press release here.

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Correlations between Grateful Dead Fan Concert and Online Behavior

First Monday, a peer-reviewed Internet journal run by the University of Illinois at Chicago recently published an article entitled A Grateful Dead Analysis: The Relationship Between Concert and Listening Behavior which I found interesting.

Frequent readers will know that I've always believed the Grateful Dead provided a roadmap -- twenty years in advance -- for how the music industry should respond to the digitization of media, by changing business model emphasis from album sales to road touring, community building, and branded concessions. In fact, you could easily argue that the roadmap goes beyond music into publishing and information industries in general.

You might remember this post (Krugman on the Grateful Dead as a Business Model) where I reported with delight that Princeton's Paul Krugman thought the same thing.

The First Monday article, however, isn't about business models. Instead, it's more of a study in community, comparing live concert vs. online listening behavior. Specifically, they took data from 1,590 live set lets across as 23 year period and compared it to 2.6M listening events from 2005 to 2007 on last.fm.

Excerpt:

The extreme upper right of this plot is important as “Trucking” and “Sugar Magnolia” represent not only the most popular songs in terms of times played in concert, but in terms of times listened to on last.fm. “Trucking” is on 25 of the 90 released Grateful Dead albums and “Sugar Magnolia” is on 32 of those albums. Both “Trucking” and “Sugar Magnolia” were also well received publicly. “Trucking” reached position 64 in 1971 and “Sugar Magnolia” reached position 91 in 1973 on the Billboard pop singles charts. Also in this area is “Touch of Grey”. “Touch of Grey” was the only Grateful Dead song with an accompanying music video and in 1987, reached the top 10 Billboard single’s chart.

A fun excerpt from the middle:

It is interesting to note the songs “Saint of Circumstance”, “Victim or the Crime”, “Lost Sailor”, and “Greatest Story” in the bottom left of polygon B. All of these songs were created by the song writing duo of Barlow and Weir and sung in concert often by Bob Weir. While these songs were played extensively in concert, they received relatively little attention from last.fm users.

This is no surprise to Dead fans. I think many of Bobby's songs -- particularly the testosterone-filled ones -- were viewed as a chance to give Jerry's voice a break. I like when the data draws easily supported empirical conclusions.

Excerpt from the conclusion:

This article presented an analysis comparing the popularity of Grateful Dead songs as identified by both how many times they were played in concert and how many times they were listened to by members of the last.fm online music service. The results presented here indicate a strong, but not perfect, correlation between concert plays and fan listens. These results suggest that the music choices of its online community of listeners reflect very well the live concert tradition of the Grateful Dead phenomenon, even after their dissolution.

The complete article is here.

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Quiz: How Many People Work at Oracle and SAP?

While we all carry intuitive notions of size, one of my favorite things to do is quantify things. Simple example: what does it mean to say a kid is "very good" at soccer? Is he/she:

• Better than 99 out of 100 kids
  
• 999 out of 1,000
  
• or 9,999 out of 10,000?
  

There is a huge difference among the three answers and I'd argue in all cases one might say, "very good," while perhaps in the last case one might say "exceptional" or "outstanding."

Today's example is corporate. While we all know that Oracle and SAP are "big" -- exactly how big are they in terms of headcount? Quick, make a guess.




[Blank space inserted to somewhat hide the answer]





And the answer is:

• 86,657 people work at Oracle
• 51,863 people work at SAP

Per recent research from JMP Securities.

By the way, the same report also says that Oracle is in the midst of laying off about 1,500 staff and that SAP is laying off about 7-8% worldwide (i.e., ~3800), with a particular focus on the Americas where cuts may be up to 20%.

Kelly Stirman to Speak at Intelligent Content 2009

Mark Logic business development director, general Renaissance individual, and low-carbon emitter, Kelly Stirman, will be speaking at the Intelligent Content 2009 conference 1/29 - 1/30/09 in lovely Palm Springs, California at the Parker Meridian Palm Springs Hotel.

Kelly will appear on Ann Rockley's keynote panel on Intelligent Publishing from 4:30 to 5:30 on 1/29/09. It looks to be a great conference; other presenters include the always entertaining Scott Abel (The Content Wrangler), author Bob Boiko (The Content Bible) and the always colorful Stephen Arnold (Beyond Search).

More information on the conference is available here.

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Commercializing MarkMail

If you've not seen our mailing list archive search service, MarkMail, go check it out.

The brainchild of Jason Hunter, the project has evolved over the past year, largely through his work with Ryan Grimm, into a popular destination for searching the email archives associated with open source development projects like Tomcat, Struts, MySQL, or Ruby. And when I say popular, I mean millions of visitors per month and with millions of pageviews.

This year, we're going to investigate commercializing MarkMail. We think that enterprises can benefit from using MarkMail against internal mailing lists in the same way the open source developers benefit from using MarkMail against their archives.

In reality, email is the corporate knowledge base. Better yet, email is the knowledge base you don't have to build. You have it already. You just need to make it accessible.

At Mark Logic, we use MarkMail internally and -- without any pushing from me to use it -- it's one of our most successful internal systems.

If you're interested in using MarkMail against your organization's email or message archives, you have real budget to put behind that desire, and you're willing to be a pioneer in the commercialization of a new product/service, then you should contact us. Mail me at this blog or contact Bill Veiga (bill-dot-veiga-at-marklogic-dot-com), the VP in charge of this initiative.

Goldman Sachs Smacks Software Stocks

See this story on SeekingAlpha (which might consider renaming itself SeekingShelter), entitled Goldman Slaps Most Software Stocks.

Excerpt on aggregate spending:

The worst of the IT-spending slowdown likely remains in front of us, as we start the clock on slashed 2009 budgets. We forecast 0 percent revenue growth for our group, below consensus at 5 percent, and 1 percent earnings growth, below Street at 2 percent.

The most interesting point addressed is whether the downturn will drive consumers to open source (i.e., nominally "free") software:

There has been much discussion in the blogosphere about open source software and how it will see a surge of adoption do to its lower cost. Goldman quite rightly says this will not be the case. I have written that CIOs will hunker down and stick with the tried and true (which is not open source in most large-sized enterprises) and Goldman is in agreement, seeing a consolidation of functionality with big, established vendors and a moving away from the concept of seeking best-of-breed point solutions regardless of vendor.

On sectors:

So in terms of non-defense technology companies we are batting two for two: Neither hardware not software will be spared over the next several quarters as the outlook remains dim for both.

Happily for Mark Logic we have a large defense / intelligence business, which I believe will offer shelter from the storm. And, as I've argued before, for non-advertising-driven media companies, I believe that GDP growth (or lack thereof) is a second-order effect relative to seismic changes driven by the Internet and Google to which MarkLogic helps them respond.

Mark Logic at Enterprise Search Forum Tokyo 2009

Mark Logic will participate in Basis Technology's Enterprise Search Forum Tokyo 2009 on February 4, 2009 at the Grand Hill Ichigaya in Tokyo.

Presenters announced thus far include:

• Carl Hoffman and Steve Cohen of Basis Technology: The Power Under the Crawlspace of Major Search Engines
  
• Ron Avnur and Dave Ponzini of Mark Logic: Unlocking the Value of Content
  
• Sid Probstein and Andrew McKay of Attivio: Beyond the Search Bar -- From Discovery to Active Intelligence

The event will also feature a keynote address, a panel discussion, and a networking reception. For more information on the program go here. While the event is free of charge, pre-registration is required by January 30, 2009.

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New York Times on Risk Mismanagement

Those:

• Interested in the financial meltdown,
• Who are fans of Nassim Nicolas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan),
• Who enjoyed When Genius Failed, the story of the ironically named Long Term Capital Management,
• Who enjoyed Against the Gods by Peter Bernstein,
  
• Who are generally quants interested in finance,

Should very much enjoy a story in today's New York Times magazine entitled Risk Mismanagement by Joe Nocera.

The story discusses risk management and introduces the concept of value at risk (VaR), an easy-to-understand measure of the risk of a portfolio of assets, pioneered by JP Morgan. The story touches on two key questions:

• Did sophisticated risk models help avoid or rather help enable the financial meltdown?
• To what extent should people worry about the probable 99% or the improbable 1% in assessing risk?

A few quick thoughts:

• I found the backward-looking nature of historical standard deviation to measure the risk of a portfolio of stocks so counter-intuitive that I didn't actually understand it in b-school until about the 3rd time it was explained to me. That is, innately, I've always understood that risk is about the future and standard deviation is about the past (and, in particular, the past period you are using to calculate it.) So the ideas in the story easily resonate with me.

• The question is not whether "the math works." The math always works. It's about whether people understand that 1% of the time ... happens, well ... about 1% of the time. To me, the issue is never whether the math works, it's about what probabilities are built into the models and what boundary conditions cause the models to become invalid. In my (semi-educated) opinion, these are always the sources of the "math problems" in finance.

• Finally, I've always believed that people problems dominate the math problems. For example, in the failure of Long Term Capital Management, the root problem was that other traders started copying the arbitrage strategies they were using, effectively picking the low-hanging fruit from the risk tree. That, plus increasing hubris on the part of the firm's principals, caused them to take bigger and bigger risks, increasingly deviating from their original strategy, and eventually leading to the collapse of the firm.

Excerpt:

Which brings me back to David Viniar and Goldman Sachs. “VaR is a useful tool,” he said as our interview was nearing its end. “The more liquid the asset, the better the tool. The more history, the better the tool. The less of both, the worse it is. It helps you understand what you should expect to happen on a daily basis in an environment that is roughly the same. We had a trade last week in the mortgage universe where the VaR was $1 million. The same trade a week later had a VaR of $6 million. If you tell me my risk hasn’t changed — I say yes it has!” Two years ago, VaR worked for Goldman Sachs the way it once worked for Dennis Weatherstone — it gave the firm a signal that allowed it to make a judgment about risk. It wasn’t the only signal, but it helped. It wasn’t just the math that helped Goldman sidestep the early decline of mortgage-backed instruments. But it wasn’t just judgment either. It was both. The problem on Wall Street at the end of the housing bubble is that all judgment was cast aside. The math alone was never going to be enough.

The full 7500-word story is here. Enjoy!

[Addendum: a critique of the article is here on the naked capitalism blog.]

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