Thinkovation

Richard Holway posted this morning about Kashflow (a small but growing UK-based software company that offers accounting software via software as a service).

In Richard’s post he mentions that it seems that Michael Jackson (former Chairman of Sage) had made an offer for the Kashflow business of £1m, which was rejected by Kashflow’s founder Duane Jackson.

According to Richard, Jackson made the offer with a view to using the Kashflow product to act as the “heart” of a new SaaS venture he was planning.

Well done Duane for saying no to the £1m for 100%… If I were him I wouldn’t give the company up at this point in time, but I’d be very keen to find a way to sell Michael Jackson some kind of stake since he’d made a very city-friendly supporter and has a wealth of experience that money cannot buy.

I’m only posting this, because it reminded me of a conversation I’ve had several times with Holway - I’ve always been critical of what I perceive to be a deep lack of innovation at Sage, and have given Richard a hard time in the past over his positive opinion of the company. Richard only needs to point to the company’s long-term financial performance to justify his view of course, but I believe that Sage will be dead in 5 years unless it can develop a completely new platform around SaaS - which is something you don’t do by buying lots of companies and cobbling them together.

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So… having built a pretty dandy benchmarking engine, how do we make it easy for other people to consume it? Blathering away over a triple-grande-caramel-machiato-with-enough-extra-caramel-to-kill-a-dog, I happened to mention to Jonathan, that we could create a google gadget interface to the application… Naturally, this statement ended with “How hard could that be?”

Well, I’m in the process of finding out…

As it happens, I’m off to a great start - Thanks to this - an utterly superb intro to gadget writing.

If you’re at all gadget curious, I’d recommend the seoish tutorial… it rocks.

Katy Ring has joined us at Bathwick.

On a personal note, I can’t tell you how delighted and excited I am. Katy is an amazing person to work with - and I’m over the moon.

Here’s the press release:

Bathwick Group Press Release:

For Immediate Release

5.6.2008

Dr. Katy Ring joins The Bathwick Group

Dr. Katy Ring has joined the Bathwick Group as a Principal analyst in the IT Services field. Highly regarded internationally as an analyst with insightful and challenging views on the development of the IT services market, Dr Ring will be responsible primarily for developing Bathwick’s new Global IT Services research programme, due for launch in Q4 2008.
Jonathan Steel, CEO at The Bathwick Group, said “I am delighted to welcome someone of Katy’s calibre to Bathwick; her experience and ability adds a sharp edge to Bathwick’s IT Services research and consulting business.”
Latterly with NelsonHall, Dr. Ring spent 12 years at Ovum leading research into the opportunities for emerging software and services markets as well as developing the company’s Outsourcing Practice. Prior to her tenure as a Principal analyst and Practice Leader at Ovum, Katy was a journalist with publications such as Computer Weekly and Computergram, and was founding editor of Software Futures.
Commenting on her appointment at Bathwick, Dr Ring said, “It is refreshing to join a research organization committed to developing research that is both commercially relevant and intellectually engaging. The Bathwick Group has the operational agility, professionalism and cultural audacity to enable its researchers to think differently. I am very excited by the opportunity to build a Global IT Services programme here.”

Dr Ring holds two degrees: an Honours degree in politics, philosophy and history from the London School of Economics and a PhD in the popularisation of science from the University of Kent at Canterbury.

Last week, we ran a two day conference on Green IT, to take a look at the agenda look here

A great mix of attendees and speakers - including a number of analysts from other firms, Rakesh Kumar and Nino Moscardini from Gartner, Martin Hingley from IDC and Andy Lawrence from the 451. This has prompted a couple of questions from attendees - “Why allow other analysts to muscle in on your action?”. The simple answer to this is, because they’re smart, they’ve got something valuable and important to say, and the Bathwick group is absolutely committed to working and collaborating with other smart analysts. It doesn’t need to be “formal”, it doesn’t need to be an “alliance” - Let’s get on and do stuff.

And Reuters ran a piece on the event -> here

One of the many reasons I promote homeworking for certain types of job (it isn’t suited to “any job” by any means) is that it improves your carbon footprint.

I was challenged on this by a client recently, who asked “what about the additional heating of your home?”

So I did a bit of analysis (it being wot I do..) This is a superficial analysis - just looking at the commute and the additional home heating. I’ll do a more detailed model for all costs (electricity to run your home computer etc - although many of these are offset by the fact that you’d be running a computer if you were in the office anyway).

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IBM has today announced that it will establish the first Cloud Computing centre for software companies in China, at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China.

The initiative is the result of an agreement between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

“The announcement states;

IBM will work with Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited; the Wuxi municipal government; and its business partners to build the China Cloud Computing Center, which will be a shared facility providing each software company in the park with its own virtualized computing resource. For example, a company will be able to use the allocated resource for designing, developing and testing its software products. Such virtual environments can replace the traditional data center model, in which each company owns and manages its own hardware and software.

While this is one of many announcements that IBM has made with respect to its investment, and business interests, in China (And you can expect to see LOTS of announcements from IBM concerning projects that it is kicking off in the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries, as well as in other emerging economies like Vietnam, and continental Africa over the coming 12 months) - I think it’s important because it highlights a number of things that western companies, and indeed western governments, seem to completely misunderstand.
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As we’ve now had a little more time to mull.. there are a few more considered reactions to the Oracle / BEA and Sun/MySQL news.

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So, BEA and Oracle have come to a price both can agree on - I did blog this a while ago, and after destroying my wordpress install have managed to lose the original post.

So when I say “Well I reckoned that $20.00 a share was going to be the magic number, but hey I was pretty close given it went for $19.38!” It’s ok to say “You lying little scamp, you’re just saying that…”

But I did. Honest!

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Two major announcements to comment on today (Sun and MySQL, and Oracle and BEA)- but they both merit separate posts.

Sun has acquired MySQL AB the Swedish software company behind the eponymous (well without the “AB”) open source database. for what the press release describes as “approximately$1 billion”.

This move is of real interest to me since I’m currently writing a “MySQL and VB.NET” how to guide (see my development blog for the first installment).

I think that on balance this is good news. Of course there are caveats - Sun has a mixed record when it comes to acquisitions - but provided that they keep faith with the user base (and I think that they will) and can keep a few of the key MySQL engineers (and I think that they can) MySQL will continue to prosper.

There are couple of other “wrinkles” two key database vendors own bits of technology that are pretty “core” to MySQL; Oracle owns InnoDB (one of the core database engines that MySQL uses), and IBM owns Solid (another storage engine). But both Oracle and IBM should be smart enough to know “not to go there” when it comes to horsing with something as popular with the community as MySQL.

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