The Innovation Capitalist

YouTube should help schools.

Grammar and high schools frequently have videos that are produced for students, for example curriculum information, band concerts or plays.  With this in mind, folks like YouTube should consider creating private subsites that school officials can use to load up the videos so that students and parents can watch them at home on their computer and which are protected by security. The subsites should be protected with a login for the school along with students and parents. Doing so will provide a nice extension for YouTube and the school communities worldwide.

Weakness in economy will drive open source adoption

The 2007 economy is clearly not looking good. It is showing signs of experiencing the slowest growth in five years and the forecasters are predicting sluggishness  for next year at around a 2.8 percent growth. As our economy slows, many predict cut backs in the overall IT budgets for next year. Looking to lower its costs, I predict that IT will be taking a serious look at ramping the use of more and more open source software in order to help reduce costs. With many years of success using Linux and other core open source solutions, enterprises are becoming more and more comfortable with replacing expensive proprietary and closed solutions with their open source equivalents at a much lower costs and with higher reliability and quality. This should be good news for established open source companies in addition to  emerging open source based businesses such as EnterpriseDB, MuleSource, Talend, Pentaho, Cleversafe.

Although costs will be a driving force behind an accelerated adoption of open source, other factors including proven reliability, flexibility, openness, continuous innovation and excellent customer service and support will help overcome any previous hesitations with going down the open source road.

Business Intelligence Market Consolidation

The Business Intelligence market is clearly consolidating. Just recently, Congos picked up Applix, a nice compliment to the Cognos product line. Dave Mahoney, the CEO of Applix has done a terrific job getting Applix in shape since landing at Applix several years ago. All this hard work has now paid off and the Applix customer base should be feeling pretty good as long as Cognos takes good care of the Applix customers.

The market will continue to consolidate as the players attempt to leadfrog one another thru what I call the four pillars of acquisitions:  consolidation, gap filling, expansion and technical / disruptive innovation.  As an example, here are some of the candidates in the BI market that might fit these pillars:

1. Qliktech - a gap filling solution for BI players that have no "in memory" solution, similar in nature to Applix. A fast growing BI company that has a nice rapid application development front end that speeds the creation of business intelligence applications for their in memory data store, in turn producing rapid results.

2. Appfluent - a technical or disruptive innovation solution for BI companies. Appfluent  claims to be able to 'capture and correlate' user activity, data usage and query performance and provides detailed usage-analysis over time. This enables companies to better understand what data is most important to the organization, how rapidly they are able to achieve results from inquiries, and whether or not they are using data that is stored in the warehouse or mart. Auditing is a also another capability, giving insight on what data is being queried.

3. Oco-Inc or Seatab - an expansion play for BI companies. Both Oco and Seatab are SaaS BI vendors that offer alternatives to the heavy lifting sometimes associated with BI implementations. Both companies have made progress displacing existing BI players who have failed to achieve results in various enterprises. As the SaaS market matures and positive results are achieved from the use of BI SaaS solutions, the big BI players will wake up and understand that an expanison play will be necessary in this category.

4. Microstrategy - a potential consolidation play for BI companies. With a very strong customer base, double digit margins, a nice OEM business and a very loyal customer base, Microstrategy serves as an ideal candidate for a consolidation play by the larger scale BI players. With a high market cap, some may hesitate.

These are just a few examples to illustrate the four pillars of acquistions. As with any industry, as acquisitions take place, competitition for other players gets heated.

One of the hottest gifts for the holidays..

With electronics being the number one item on everyones gift list, it goes to reason that the next big trend this holiday will be innovative, modern, slick electronic gadget bags. The Kata Ergo-Tech camera bag collection is the one to consider. Very stylish, nice design and very practical. If you have a tech person in the family, this bag will get them to say "WOW".

iPod Touch and Startucks - Missing in Boston

Interesting feature of the new iPod Touch with support for music downloads in Starbucks, however seeing Boston absent from the rollout during the next 6-9 months is clearly troubling. Boston is considered one of the tech centers including a huge student population. Certainly more so than Chicago. So why leave Boston out from the initial rollout?

1. Maybe Steve Jobs is not a Redsox fan? I noticed that New York Yankee fans will have this feature before us. Ah, hes a Yankee Fan!! That's it.

2. Dunkin Donuts Rules In Boston and Jobs clearly prefers his cup of Starbucks.

3. Jobs is a graduate of Reed College, not Harvard or MIT, maybe he just didn't get accepted and ended up at Reed instead. Is he striking back?

4. It's a West Coast versus East Coast thing. We been dissed in the past, remember those early Apple shows here in Boston.

5. In Boston, we love to hack and the Touch iPod will be hacked by someone in Boston.

Clearly something is going on for him that is causing Boston to end up lower on the list, if Boston makes it at all.