More on Moore’s Law

I orchestrated the Gartner briefing today, and it went all well. It was comprised of a 90 min presentation Ismael gave, and a 30 min demo Jacques-Alexandre gave.

The presentation was lengthy by request; at least I had the opportunity to hear Ismael present our BPMS suite. The demo, a Company Purchase process, used Amazon’s E-Commerce web service. We will hopefully reuse that process as it is impressive, simple to relate to, and gives a fair overview of our product’s capabilities. It covers Intalio’s Real Run technology, business activity monitoring, and optimization.

We were happy when it was over. It was fairly stressful: Jacques-Alexandre finished the demo while Ismael was speaking, and we were waiting for some rule sets from Open Lexicon too.

Friday evening I was invited to eat at Jacques-Alexandre, our VP of business development who went to engineering school with Ismael, and had a nice time. Antoine was invited as well, with Cecile, his wife. I got to meet Raphaelle, Jacques-A’s wife, and their two 2 and 4 year old daughters.

Saturday, Jennifer and Steve, who’s house I rent a room from, celebrated Steve’s birthday. Many people were invited, and I got to meet the next-door neighbours, Mona and Don. Mona works for Warren Buffet, and flies celebrities all over the world. Don is an investor of sorts – I hear he made $600.000 closing a deal over the weekend. I am now second degree from Sir Anthony Hopkins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Tiger Woods!

Sunday I rested

Over the past two weeks, I have been working with two established Analyst firms, Forrester and Gartner. Forrester published its Wave report on the human-centric business process management landscape. Gartner finished gathering information for an update.

Well, let me tell you the industry is corrupt. Very corrupt. Analysts are not required to disclose their revenue from the companies they “analyse”. As Jonathan Schwartz put it,  “it’d probably help their credibility if they, like the financial analyst community, started disclosing revenues they receive from the vendors they cover”.

But nope. No way. Things are good for them as it is. Why change when you have over a billion dollars in revenue?

At Intalio, we don’t pay Forrester a Dime. Not a Penny. So guess what happened when Forrester published its Wave? We got an email.

From Greg DeGregorio, Forrester Account Executive, to Ismael Ghalimi, Intalio CEO

Hi Ismael, 

I just got word that the wave Intalio was included in just went live
to our web site. Is this a good time to discuss having Intalio become
a Forrester client?  As a non client you cannot use this wave
externally meaning you can’t put it to your website or even put a
press release out about it. Please let me know if you want to set up a
call to discuss our services as well as learning about how you can
leverage the wave externally and use it to your advantage in your
sales cycle.

Pay us! They say. Pay us or you can’t use our research! Makes me feel sick.

If they had an honest business model, they would get their revenue from the people they advise; instead they act like a petty advertising agency. “Quotes for the clueless” should be their tagline. Because with a business model like that, you know they’ve got to be biased. You can’t be fired for choosing Gartner? I think you should. Politicians have more integrity than these guys (well, maybe not in the US).

Enough said. I’m off to write a press release.

I woke up at Hugues’s loft today, and we went off to work together. I got a call from Walter, a smart entrepreneur whose room in house I applied to, saying that Krystal, one of his roommates, a recent Stanford grad and Facebook employee, was moving out and that there will be room for me later this month.

I got a call from Jennifer as well, confirming the credit check and reference, so I’ll be able to move in at 7:00.

I looked into OpenID today; it is definitely cool. We could use this at a later point in time. I signed up at myopenid.com, and created a few personas (complete, intalio, minimal). Personas are sets of information on yourself, permissions really. When I signed up on Buxfer, I gave minimal persona when signing up, so they did not have my email address. Had I given Complete, they would have had access to my name, email, birth date, and much more.

At the end of the day I moved in; Pascal dropped my luggage off, and I went to Safeway to restock. The house is very nice, and so is the neighborhood.

Today was fairly rough. Yesterday I moved all my stuff to the office, first on my bike, then on a supermarket caddy I found. I went to bed around 1:00 AM. I got up at 6, so to open the office to the Glass wall workers at 6:30, and vacate the premises so that Mike, the landlord, can start remodeling the apartment. At 8 I got a call from Jennifer, saying I could drop by at 6:15 PM to visit. When I did, she gave me paperwork and we agreed that I move in tomorrow after a credit check.

Hugues offered his guest room for the night, so that is where I slept. His wife, Leti, made us good dinner, and I fell asleep within minutes of getting into bed.

In regards to work; I am working on the Eclipse registration popup. This requires that a form posts registration information to our Joomla Content Management System, that then interfaces with Salesforce. The problem is that there is data validation somewhere, so I’ll have to duplicate the registration class in Joomla and make my own modifications there.

I got a brand new Wii this weekend, my colleague Hugues lent me a few games. I played a lot; so far all of the games require you to stand up, and have a lot of open space around you, so I had to take pauses to catch my breath. The golf game isn’t so tiresome, but the boxing one is horribly physical: I ended up sweating. It is all very original.

Hugues pointed out something I had not thought about. The Wii being the least powerful console prevents game developers from using graphics as a differentiator; they must focus on originality, plot, and storytelling – all the good stuff.

I am trying to stay aware of all things UI with the iPhone and the Wii, but have so far not found anything that could help Intalio.

Last Friday Ismael confirmed that the iPhone deal still held, and that he would get an iPhone for me.

Well, today’s Monday, and I have been sitting next to a brand new 8GB iPhone box all day, agonizing while waiting. I won’t open it until tomorrow morning

The I’ll have to decide how to hack it / what plan to get, etc. Ismael suggested I take a pay as you go option.

Work-wise, today Rick and I settled for a step approach to the evaluation process, a road trip analogy to BPM, and I finished two press releases.

I was invited this Saturday to Ismael and May’s newly bought house, for a barbeque. I met many interesting people, among which a software engineer for a processor company that do burn in design, the founder of everytrail.com – a location based startup, and the Chief of hardware at Apple. Very pleasant day.

This week end I had nothing planned so I decided to go biking around. I went to Mountain View and Los Altos, and swung around East to highway 101.

I got a bit scared later on as Rightscale had a bug in which you got a notification that 20 instances had been fired up when you migrated to an Amazon account (rather than use theirs).

This Wednesday and Thursday two guys from rPath came over and gave me a great bit of help in getting the server to work. Thursday evening we even had our first instance running.