Latest News from Roman Stanek

COSS BI: Open Source, Open Core or Openly Naked?

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:45:00 EST

Peter Yared wrote recently a BusinessWeek guest blog post called “Failure of Commercial Open Source Software.” Not surprisingly his post caused a lot of angry replies from people who work for COSS companies. “The emperor is not naked” they argued. I believe that the COSS emperor is openly naked. And the discussion shouldn’t be whether COSS [...]

TDWI: Independence vs. Cash

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:14:00 EST

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that “independent industry analyst” was an oxymoron. But the willingness to sell independence for cash reached a new low with TDWI’s New SaaS Business Intelligence Portal. Please visit the link and see if there is any trace of independence left…

Will Moore’s Law Find It’s Way to the Cloud?

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:30:00 EDT

Moore's Law states that computer system performance/price ratio will double every two years. And that was very much my expectation when Good Data started using Amazon Web Services almost 2 years ago. But I had to wait until today to see Moore’s Law at work: Amazon announced 15% drop of EC2 prices. The price of [...]

Please Don’t Let the Cloud Ruin SaaS

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 21:30:00 EDT

Back in the old good days of enterprise software, we did not need to worry about our customers. We delivered bits on DVDs – it was up to the customers to struggle with installation, integration, management, customization and other aspects of software operations. We collected all the cash upfront, took another 25% in annual maintenance. [...]

Bad economics are difficult to shake off

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 14:12:56 EDT

Terry Pratchett once wrote that “Gravity is a habit that is hard to shake off”. We could make a similar comment about the financials of SaaS BI companies. As much as startups in this field would like to shake off their bad economics, reality always catches up. We’re seeing one after another SaaS BI startup [...]

LucidEra: the People Express of On-Demand BI?

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 18:30:00 EDT

I am not happy to see LucidEra disappearing. It is not a good sign for the SaaS BI market in general and the startups in our space specifically. And I still believe Rob Ashe (IBM/Cognos) was wrong when he said that “BI doesn’t lend itself to SaaS”. There are some fundamental differences between first generation SaaS [...]

Small Pieces Tightly Joined: Open Source in the Cloud

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:45:00 EDT

The rise of open source is clearly linked to the rise of the web. Buy a commodity piece of hardware, download source code of any of the thousands of open source projects and start to “scratch your own itch”. My Linux box will communicate with your Linux box as long as we stick to some minimal set of protocols. The web is loosely coupled and software can be developed independently in a bazaar style.

Cloud Expo Europe Keynote: Building Great Companies on the Cloud

Tue, 19 May 2009 15:38:00 EDT

Yesterday I spoke at the first Cloud Computing Expo Europe and I enjoyed the conference very much. Here is my presentation: PS. This presentation was featured today as one of the Top Presentations of the Day by Slideshare… Tagged: Cloud Computing Expo keynote, Europe

Friends Don’t Let Friends Overpay for BI

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Business Intelligence projects are famous for low success rates, high costs and time overruns. The economics of BI are visibly broken, and have been for years. Yet BI remains the #1 technology priority according to Gartner. We could paraphrase Lee Iacocca and say: People want economical Business Intelligence solutions and they will pay ANY price to get it.

Only Google…

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 12:45:00 EDT

No other major SaaS company in the world could get away with this approach to paying customers. Not only Google offers no user-friendly tools to add shared contact to the paid version of Google Apps. They offer no tools. Period. Here is the only information available to email administrators: Administrative management of non-employee contacts now available Premier Edition [...]

Can Cloud IP Address Be Damaged Goods?

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Elasticity of the cloud computing is a wonderful idea. You can get an instance of networked computer exactly when you need it and you only pay for the time when you actually use it. But while the virtual memory and hard disk is a “clean slate” created specifically for you, the IP address assigned to [...]

Looking for SOA in All the Wrong Places?

Sat, 25 Apr 2009 10:30:00 EDT

Systinet’s founding CTO and my friend Anne Thomas Manes pronounced the demise of SOA a few weeks ago. Honestly, SOA lost its meaning for me on the day when good, old Solaris became the “SOA operating system”. But is SOA dead or not? I don’t believe so but I think that Anne and others are looking for SOA in the wrong places. Here is why:

You will not see us in your accounts

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:41:28 EST

The analyst firm The 451 Group asks technology companies “Who else do you see in your accounts?” Being “seen in the account” is perceived as a sign of market presence and ability to execute. And the opposite is true as well. Not being seen in accounts is sign of weakness and lack of market penetration. [...]

Entrepreneur Country - Land of Opportunity

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 08:04:53 EST

I spoke at the Entrepreneur Country forum at Institute Of Directors in London earlier today. The event was organized by Ariadne Capital (Disclosure: I am one of Ariadne investors). Here is the feedback from the audience via Twitter and below is my keynote: Tagged: GoodData, lessons, NetBeans, startups, Systinet [...]

End of the Retooling Decade?

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:24:32 EST

Tim O’Reilly wrote a great post about the collapse of demand for consumer electronics and there he quotes the term “peak waste” - in an analogy to peak oil maybe we’ve reached the pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture. I absolutely agree that the “creative destruction” - the process of transformation that accompanies [...]

“Business-IT Chasm”: The Business Perspective

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 05:03:02 EST

My plan for today was to write more about the “Business-IT chasm” but I came across a great blog post written by Jorge Camoes that reveals the business perspective of this divide. There is nothing better than the first hand experience: IT will try to change your project, naturally. Try to avoid the “security bomb” (their [...]

The New Chasm

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 17:12:27 EST

I believe that readers of my blog are familiar with the chart below. It is the classical “Crossing the chasm” diagram from Geoffrey A. Moore’s book Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers. This book was published back in 1991 and it is still number two on “Twelve Business Books in [...]

Derivatives and Transparency

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 08:42:29 EST

Every time I think about the current financial crisis I come to the conclusion that the lack of transparency is the biggest reason why things got so bad. There is an obvious implication for business intelligence but even when I simply look up “derivatives and transparency” on Google Trends I am surprised by the level [...]