Internship at Intalio

I am flying to Dallas today (actually writing this on the plane) to spend a week with my father. I have a significant amount of work to do, notably get the rPath server up and running again, build the infrastructure to allow the Designer to deploy on it without (much) user involvement.

I also have to call more than 400 leads that have provided us with a phone number to offer our services. This is more than interesting, as I’ll get a feel for Intalio’s current positioning, what projects they do, what problems they encounter. We can probably write a good telesales scenario, and get feedback on our current product offering.

Define what it is

The registration backend is the system the Designer talks to upon a registration or login attempt. We want the registration process to occur after the download, and after the install, not before. In doing so, we want to reduce usage friction. Ultimately, the user would agree to the license, download the Designer, install it, then register (or lose the ability to deploy processes on a remote EC2 server)

What I did

Hugues and I settled on the protocol to use, or rather the format of the request / response. We could have written a wsdl (web services description language), but I felt that was overshooting our needs.

The script I wrote is composed of two parts, one that creates a temporary account, with email information only, and sends a verification email with a link to the second part. This one allows the user to pick a password and provide us with information about himself.

It all interfaces with Salesforce: a lead gets created on temporary registration, and updated when the extra information is provided.

What still needs to be done

There are probably some security holes in there, but that is not our concern for now. Time is better spent on creating value, than preventing destruction of it, at this point in time. We need extensive QA to make sure it works on different platforms with corrupted/non-valid data; after that, we should go production.

The system is currently not isolated from Joomla: it is customized. This prevents us from upgrading as Joomla does, but that wasn’t a shared concern. Isolation can be done in a couple of hours.

I got up today (Sunday) at 8 in order to get ready to go on my first ever business trip - I’m going to Orlando, Florida to attend Gartner’s BPM Summit.

Gartner invited Intalio as a VIP in exchange for us sponsoring their Magic Quadrant. Ismael and Jacques-Alexandre suggested that I go this year, so Rosa got me a plane ticket and booked me a hotel.

I arrived at 10 at the San Jose airport, South of  Palo Alto. It’s small airport, like Love Field in Dallas.

First stop was at Houston, a horrible place where souvenir shops were full of Cow heads and cowboy t-shirts, and Fox “News” was the only place to buy a newspaper. As you would imagine, the TVs in there had red alerts with terrorist threats all over the place.

After meeting Jeff Bezos yesterday, I ran into Steve Jobs today!

Ismael came back to the office after having lunch, and was all excited: he had just crossed Steve Jobs, the CEO and Founder of Apple. Steve Jobs was sitting on the stairs to our office, on the phone (iPhone). I didn’t believe him at first: I knew he lived in the area, I just thought he was too busy to be in the area. Ismael insisted: ‘I kid you not’ he repeated. So I went out and saw someone sitting on the stairs, talking calmly. I went down the stairs, passed him, and turned around. Yes indeed, it was him. So I took my iPhone, and took a picture of him:

Apart from that episode, I started work on the Registration backend, and hopefully will have it completed by next week.

I talked to Ismael about the extended stay over lunch today (just after getting my hair cut). We discussed many things as usual, and we settled, after talking about telesales, on taking a gap year.

I also met billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com. I went to the Amazon Startup Project at the Faculty Club in Stanford with Walter, and attended the conference. (write-up available on awsome.ws).

There were only three questions available to ask Bezos, I got #2: “Why the absence of an SLA?”. The way he answered is a strong indication that they are working on one :-) Good news for many developers! I was emotionally stressed when I asked the question, maybe for fear of asking a dumb question, or get an laughed upon or whatever. I kept shaking for a few minutes.

I did not do much for Intalio past week, because of Office 2.0, so I caught up on a lot today. Caught up on sleep, on work, and on email.

I invited all the people I met for lunch to keep contact, a lot of them were interesting.

Today was the last day. We were all afraid all day long about the task before us: packing back up. We had to clean the iMacs for software, so that we could sell them at the end of the conference. We also had to dismount the arms and the Dell monitors, clean, and pack.

There was not much to do during the morning, so I attended Ismael’s presentation - and let me tell you, he is a good and entertaining speaker. I was surprised he had so much energy, since he had had little sleep in the past month.

I met a lot of sponsors, talked and socialized.

Then came 5:00 and the packing started. We got the process well, and it went very fast. We dressed a list with all the sponsors, the iMacs they used, and updated status so that May, who was selling them, could track progress real time on a different floor.

After that, we packed the Dell screens, arms, and leftover iMacs, and put them in a truck we rented. We drove down to Ismael’s house and put everything in the garage. After that, Ihab and I went to my place and slept.

We woke up very early this morning, Ihab and I, and drove in May’s car to San Francisco. We had to be there before 7 to finish preparing the pods, for the early sponsors to setup their presentations, between 7 and 10. It was very hectic, as there were many people, many sponsors, and yet many things to prepare.

Given the previous day’s success, Ismael officially put me in charge of the demo pod organization, and gave me the added responsibility of sponsor relations (kind of: I tried to fix discontent myself, but escalated to Ismael for delicate issues).

Things calmed down in the afternoon: I finally got something to eat, and sat down to rest a bit. Later the afternoon, I made sure all conference rooms had Internet connectivity, and forwarded all problems to the very, very competent folks at Swisscom. I then started networking and socializing with the sponsors, to get a feel for how they liked the Office 2.0 conference. A conversation I overheard in an elevator was that this was the “coolest conference I’ve been to. Just look at all the booths, with the iMacs”.

I have not had the occasion to attend any of the tracks, but I’ll try to tomorrow. I got back early today, at 9, and Ihab and I went for dinner together. We are getting along nicely.

I got up today at 7 - as I do most days - but was not to head for Emerson Street. Instead, I was going to San Francisco. Ihab, our new intern, joined me at the CalTrain station, and we chatted on the way North.

We arrived to find a very busy Ismael, and a very busy May. He instructed us to prepare the demo pods. The demo pods are for sponsors, they consist of a 24″ iMac for demoing products, and an attached 19″ dell monitor mounted on an arm to display the sponsor’s logo.

We had 53 demo pods to set up, 7 on the 4th floor of the St Regis Hotel, the rest on the 2nd floor. We started out Ihab and I, and were later joined by Eric, Theresa, and Lawrence. I spontaneously started coordinating the install effort, and as the day past and more manpower was given to us, I effectively became in charge. At the peak, 12 people were helping install and setup, and I made sure everything ran smoothly. We ran into numerous problems - too little space, wobbly support tables, lack of time - but we finished at 1:30 AM. We were 3 by then, all had gone to take some rest.

The experience was fun, and despite sore feet, a broken back, and strained muscles, I was thrilled. Installing and placing more than 50 computers is no small feat. This includes software installs, configuration, registration; power supplies, sand bags, and electrical cording; fastening and mounting an equal number of monitors; and numbering, packing, and storing all the boxes so that the iMacs can be repackaged and sold at a 20% discount.

Ihab and I got back at 2:30 AM, and had to wake up at 5:00 AM the following morning. To be continued…

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.