A little dose of SaaS reality

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I’m not even quite sure how I came across this post at this point, but thought it was worth highlighting.  This is from Going Private – a blog focused on the private equity business and an entry entitled Buried Cable.  The author provides some great perspective on the realities of Software as a Service (SaaS) from his perspective.  Whether you agree or not, it is a good read to keep those of us that advocate the new, new thing honest and humble.

Couple of my favorite points:

1.  On putting more infrastructure in place between the user and their data

  • "…the strength of a chain is only that of its weakest link"
  • "’Oh, but with the increasingly pervasiveness of fast internet because
    of wireless hot-spots and broadband internet…’  Hogwash."

2.  On real "use cases" and where to invest

"Still, every time I hear someone sing the praises of software as
service revenue I roll my eyes and
picture "Ralph," the union back-hoe
operator pulling up a fiber optic main, writing a blog post with my
e-mail client while sitting on an unconnected airplane, or imagine
myself working diligently on my laptop, finishing by candle light a
spreadsheet during one of the summer’s increasingly common blackouts
caused by increasing strain on decades old and barely adequate power
infrastructure.

Call me a Luddite, but I think I’ll invest in utilities with aggressive grid growth reinvestment policies instead."

How to get a meeting with a venture capitalist

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Venture capital is often discussed and often misunderstood.  I have learned some lessons and taken my lumps by being on the entrepreneur/management team side of the equation and there are some great VC blogs out there that I highly recommend (several I list on my blog).

That said, I am a huge advocate of this kind of risk capital and the role it plays is driving innovation and private enterprise in both the US and global economy.  I’ll save that for another post, but wanted to put the word out about a great way to chat with a venture capitalist…at his request.

Jason Caplain of Southern Capitol Ventures in Raleigh, NC writes a blog called Southeast VC.  He has put out an open meeting invitation to anyone who wants to get together on April 20 in Raleigh for a chat.  This is the kind of openness and proactive approach that I love to see.

I like and respect Jason and encourage anyone that can swing it to take him up on his offer.  I have family in the RTP area and he took my meeting request without knowing me as I passed through Raleigh a while ago.   

Interview with Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners – a personal view of the future

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I picked this up from AlarmClock who picked it up from Marketwatch and the now departed Bambi Francisco (of recent vator-gate fame).  It’s an interview with Roger McNamee about managing the mid-life crisis of mature media and content companies. Roger is part of Elevation Partners which is the vc firm formed by Bono of U2.

Anyway, a couple of good excerpts that are posted below.  Red highlights the points that I think are key.

Bambi:  You’re a product-cycle investor. Are there any product cycles of
major significance coming up in the tech world that investors could
ride (i.e. Microsoft 
    Vista, Apple’s iPhone/TV? Nintendo’s Wii for video games?)

Roger:  "It’s more of a thematic-cycle trend rather than a product-cycle trend.  That trend is helping people to make better use of their time. Research In Motion’s Blackberries and [Apple’s] iPods are excellent examples of integrated systems that helped people make better use of their time."

Bambi:  What’s the next disruptive technology?

Roger:  "…I also think mobility is incredibly disruptive. I have no idea how that’s going to look. Everything that matters will come on my person.  That’s the thing that disrupts the PC market. The one-sized-fits-all-PC
model is broken. Eventually, PCs will produce shrinkage of demand for
PCs in the developed world. Apple’s iPhone is part of the mobile
disruption, but a small part. The disruptive stuff isn’t one thrust.
It’ll come in small parts, like getting nibbled to death by ducks."

Generational view of electronic communications

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

We conduct a variety of research and roundtable forums every year and, in one of our most recent ones, a senior information security person provided the following perspective on the evolution of electronic communications:

Today’s younger generation uses email, IM, and text messaging as follows:

1.  You email your grandparents
2.  You IM your parents
3.  You text your friends

So unstructured communication will become even more unstructured as the next generation of workers populates the workplace AND company networks will not be the place where all communication occurs, is logged, and can be retained. 

Another participant pointed out that workers joining their companies in the future (and today) will already have a mobile phone and laptop and that they are putting the pieces in place to support personal devices (phones and PCs) vs. incurring the cost of supplying and supporting them.  Puts network security and management in a whole different light to manage non-standard/unknown devices hitting the network, accessing data, and communicating with each other.

Changing behaviors

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Ultimately behind all technology use are users and users make decisions about how to use technology to communicate, complete work tasks, and live their lives.

So, as companies struggle with how to increase awareness of the possible risks (security, legal, regulatory) from errant actions, how do you find the middle ground between mitigating risk and respecting the privacy of employees?

An extreme example of instant feedback to change behaviors was recently covered by the BBC- ‘Talking’ CCTV scolds offenders

Surveillance cameras that speak to you if you litter or commit "anti-social" behavior.  My favorite part of the story is using children’s voices to correct offending behavior

Competitions would also be held at schools in many of the areas for children to become the voice of the cameras, Mr Reid said.

Defining & measuring “non-business” email

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

Something we help our customers measure and address is the flood of non-business/commercial email that corporate email systems and the users receive every day.  This is the load of wanted email that people receive daily – everything from Google alerts to joke of the day emails. 

Maybe this stuff is wanted, but hardly business-related and not worthy of the significant costs to not only archive but wade through when trying to find an email during the course of a review, investigation, or legal discovery exercise.

So rather than this becoming a commercial for our intelligent classification product, I wanted to provide some actual data based on my own inbox.

I started this on 3/16 with both my inbox and incoming email from our former alliance manager’s address (I picked up his email when he left the company).

The results:

Number of days:  22 including weekends
Number of emails: 419
Total size:  12.5MB

Wow.  That’s a lot of "informational" email filling up my box, clogging our network, and being archived off.  Wouldn’t it make more sense to get (most) of this information via RSS feed?  At a minimum this stuff should be tagged, routed, and saved for what it is – non-business email.

Maybe this isn’t a huge number to you, but if you have thousands of employees and extrapolate these numbers over a year you quickly need to begin measuring in terabytes.

This is by far not the most sophisticated scenario our email classification product can handle, but demonstrates the importance of differentiating between high-value and low-value correspondence.  Especially when the cost per email of legal review can be over $2.

So, how does this work?  Artificial intelligence, Bayesian analysis, proprietary algorithms?  Truth be told, a very practical methodology:

1.  Identify known sending addresses that distribute this kind of stuff (examples include googlealerts-noreply@google.com) – 100% confidence on these and we have a master list of hundreds that can be immediately deployed or reviewed by the legal folks if need be
2.  Identify known words/phrases in the senders address that are indicative of this kind of stuff (examples include alert, news, etc) – still high confidence but needs to be validated with an activity profile
3.  Identify known words/phrases in the body text (an example is boilerplate unsubscribe language) – prone to false positives if the list of words/phrases is too broad – we recommend less is more for starters

Can you accomplish this without email classification software?  Yes, on an individual level if you want to experiment.  Just set up a mailbox rule in Outlook using the framework above and you can see this in action.  Email classification software deployed on a company-wide basis can do this automatically for all users.

Jigsaw & contact information as currency

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

I certainly don’t claim to be an early adopter of technology (the irony about my chosen career path is not lost on me, but more on that later) and come across many things long after they burst on the scene and turn into widely known and used products.

Jigsaw is one of those services/products that I have recently begun to understand.  Mostly because my inbox and voice mail box are filling up with messages from folks that seem to know exactly how to reach me (vs. finding me through our office phone switch).  This is not too surprising given my role as external spokesperson for MessageGate, but one particular inquiry and follow-up cell phone call made me ask the person how they found me.

The answer – Jigsaw.

I was certainly intrigued that somewhere out there my contact vitals are posted and once I got to understand how they build their contact base was left with a thought about how they have turned business cards and address books into currency that is freely traded.

In a way Jigsaw has created a dynamic marketplace of contact information where those who need to reach people they don’t know can trade on the value of the people they do know or know how to reach.

Which leads me to my next thought – who "owns" the value of my contact information? 

Does frequency of contact correlate with importance?

/ Robert Pease / Leave a comment

So here’s a question that comes up often in helping our customers interpret information about their messaging traffic and is something for us to think about on an individual level.

Does the frequency (how often) someone emails, calls, or otherwise "pings" you define their level of importance in your social network?

I see two sides to this:

1.  Those that have not contacted you before or have done so again after a long period of time are not part of your frequent contact universe. 

  • This includes unsolicited emails, telemarketing calls (which I both create thru programs and receive as a favorite target for vendors), spam, spim, etc.
  • These *should* be defined as low-value contacts

2.  Those that contact you often are part of your frequent contact universe

  • This could include spouse, children, co-workers, supervisors, etc.
  • This should be defined as a high-value contact

But how do you determine a high-value new contact event from a low-value new contact event?  Or even how do you differentiate between a common low-value contact (newsletter, system alert, relentless salesperson) and a common high-value contact (supervisor, co-worker).

Maybe through some sort of validation – be it a referral like LinkedIn or social intelligence tool like Visible Path

Or the addressing or structure of the message could shed some light.  Where you are a cc or one of many cc’s, this could indicate low-value correspondence.

As more and more instant communications tools are made available the number of inquiries demanding our attention will only increase  Having a way to intelligently or at least pro-actively segment this traffic regardless of source seems the next logical step.