Opinion | Enterprise Guys in a Social World

Posted on May 22, 2012 by Gordon Allott

So we are at TechCrunch Disrupt in NYC this week. K3 demo’d as a finalist in the Disrupt Battlefield Competition yesterday to an ocean of MacBooks. As far as we can tell we are only one of two enterprise applications here. Everything else? SOCIAL. Social Consumer, Social Media…social…social … social… (Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!)

Even among the social apps there is something of a dark specter lurking amongst the

Where's the Money?

Startup Alley tables. How much more can the “C” category actually consume??? And moreover, how can you MONETZE it???

We enterprise apps guys live and die by “value prop” and monetization strategy. K3 reduces maintenance costs of interfaces by 50% and virtually eliminates lost data problems associated with custom code interfaces. It’s a $300 Billion dollar market. That’s how we built it. That’s how we sell it. That’s how our clients come to love it.

So, let’s think about the social value prop. For most of these apps it is about harnessing a social community of trust. But, if you can’t monetize the community of trust it boils down to simple entertainment/advertising model. Pinterest…love it…its entertainment. Facebook…love it, but its entertainment. Unfortunately, the rabbit like propagation of social entertainment, based entirely on advertising revenue, has bit the hand that feeds it by turning advertising into total white noise.

Let’s look at Facebook. I’ve created a highly trusted community there. My buddy Daniel is a prolific reader. When he finishes a book on Kindle, I don’t even look at the title. I just buy it. But what’s FB getting out of this? Nada. But that’s the trusted interaction social apps HAVE to monetize.

If there is anything I believe in, it’s the creative power of the people at this conference. The next Google, the next Facebook is going to have to come up with a brand new revenue model that taps the trusted community.

News | BroadPeak is a Finalist at Tech Crunch Disrupt

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Vivek Pathak

The day has finally come. We’ve been under a news embargo for about a month, but K3 has been selected as a finalist at Tech Crunch Disrupt, a conference of new technology applications that are ‘disruptive’ to the current state. We have matured from a focus on Energy Trading to Trading as a whole to the technology mainstream. Bring on the world!

It’s interesting being one of the only enterprise applications in a room full of ‘apps’. In a day where our attention span is limited to 140 character and organized around hashtags (#), how do you convey the complex functional footprint of an enterprise application in 6 minutes? That was the challenge of the Startup Battlefield. Present to a room of 2000 venture capitalists, technologists and press and capture their imagination around how your application will transform an industry. Safe to say, our man Gordon Allott nailed it (click for full video and writeup).

As much as we have been demonstrating the functional power of K3, the organizational transformation it causes is the story that speaks to people. If you work in IT or Operations for a large trading firm or bank, you know how painful it is to keep your systems interfaces up to speed with your business. It’s a maintenance nightmare, and it reduces the job descriptions of smart people down to data cleanup activities. With K3, companies can efficiently build and manage systems interfaces, which is a functional and cost transformation; but the experiential transformation is for the people working at these institutions. No longer do IT and Operations need to clash around maintaining things like mappings and rules to move data between systems. IT gets open source components to build the interfaces and then Operations can use K3′s simple GUI to maintain them.

Sound easy? Good, because it is. Email us for details on how your Developers and Operations people can start loving their jobs again.

Opinion | Stop the Insanity!!!

Posted on May 20, 2012 by Gordon Allott

In the ’90s there was this crazy person on the TV. No Really. Some buzz cut, buff woman named Susan Powter (if that’s her real name). And she had these totally insane infomercials that forever changed the phrase “Stop the Insanity!!” Far be it for me to comment on stopping the insanity through more insanity, but I was thinking about that infomercial when thinking about integration problems.

Albert Einstein, reputed to be a very smart guy, said that insanity is, “doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. “ And that my friends is what we have been doing with systems integration. We throw out custom code to connect systems again and again and then wonder why we spend so much time mopping up the mess.

Around 2000 some pretty cool integration tools (read TIBCO et al) hit the market. We thought these were a Godsend. But they turned out to be these behemoth proprietary messes that took three times as long to integrate and failed miserably. Companies spend $300 Billion annually on systems integration. Of this only about $25 Billion is spent on integration tools. Why are 92% of integrations custom code? Simple, these tools take way too long to implement and cost too much. The business is not going to wait, and an IT manager is not going to bet his or her career on a project with a 70% failure rate. So we task a developer to bang out a custom interface. It gets done fast and cheaply to start.

But it also comes with the custom code problem. A friend of mine who also happens to be a CIO calls this the “bag of snakes” problem. When you do something like bang out

Enjoy!

custom code (conveniently without standards, documentation, management tools etc…) it is like the developer handing over a bag of snakes to the CIO with a wink and a smile saying, “enjoy!” If you want to make this integration work you are going to have to open this bag of snakes. And that’s the insanity we have to stop.

Ok, I’m going to get off my soapbox, but suffice to say that is exactly what we are trying to do with K3. There are seven components to every integration. We have all seven of them completely off the shelf in K3. And with that I will end…except that thanks to this post our marketing person is now going to be asking me for a white paper…

Dumb Things We Saw Today | Big Data vs. SAAS

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Vivek Pathak

Raj De Datta drops a really big buzz word in this TechCrunch article.

In a nutshell he’s calling out a supposed battle between “Software as a Service” (SAAS) vs “Big Data” (what he is calling BDAs or Big Data Apps). Maybe just trying to stir up controversy where there is none. So here is the truth.

SAAS: The distinguishing feature of a SAAS application is that it is accessed via a web services API. This is a mechanism of delivering software functionality. That’s it, nothing more.

noSQL: “Big Data Apps” or “BDAs,” as he calls them, already have a name: noSQL. This is a database structure and means of quickly processing/scaling large data. (see Big Table in Plain Language). That’s it.

So to suggest that noSQL will kill off SAAS means essentially that somehow noSQL will do away with the need for software delivered over the web? This makes no sense; they aren’t mutually exclusive. It’s like saying that digital cameras will end the need for special lenses. Instead, the future will be good noSQl using SAAS to empower business analytics like my 1 year old using his finger, using a tablet to learn the alphabet…and it will be awesome.

Raj, did you mean to say that noSQL will kill relational databases? This is at least debate-able material.

BroadPeak Think

Innovations in Interface Management, Trading Technology, Architecture and other tidbits

Monthly Archives: May 2012

News | BroadPeak is a Finalist at Tech Crunch Disrupt

Opinion | Stop the Insanity!!!

Dumb Things We Saw Today | Big Data vs. SAAS