For the purpose of the anonymity, I came up with pseudo-names for the company, the project and some of the execs. Not sure myself why this anonymity is needed.
Windsail is a maker of enterprise applications and it also purchased a number of competitor application vendors. A goal was to set to rebuild these applications from scratch, and the new name of the application suite would be Garbanzo Applications.
The year was 2005. Five goals were announced by the then VP of products Jamie Woltman. Garbanzo Applications would have:
- Best features from Windsail's applications and its acquired companies' applications
- Built on "standard technologies", viz., Java and J2EE
- SOA/BPEL enabled from ground up to help with integrations
- Business intelligence with live transaction data, enabled via single database instance
- Superior ownership experience: easy to upgrade, maintain, etc.
It was a huge undertaking. 100-200 applications, 10000 business processes, many1000s of engineers, architects, development managers and product managers, billions of USDs in investment. After long delays, general availability was announced in 2011, so six years in the making. Whether general availability means anyone can use it is another question, and I will address that later in the post.
One more thing before I start. Windsail Company had had many internal re-orgs, VPs would let go, and their teams merged with another team. One major re-org happened in 2007 when the applications VP Jamie Woltman was let go, and technology VP Tyrone Ketterman was given both applications and technologies.
Okay lets start the rants.
One more thing before I start. Windsail Company had had many internal re-orgs, VPs would let go, and their teams merged with another team. One major re-org happened in 2007 when the applications VP Jamie Woltman was let go, and technology VP Tyrone Ketterman was given both applications and technologies.
Okay lets start the rants.
Strategy Mistakes
Not built as SaaS ground up
It is not that the executives at Windsail Company did not know that SaaS was the wave of the future. President Clayton Philbeck said he knew SaaS would be important, but it was still few years away. CEO Lonnie Earles is known to be an industry visionary, and he talked about utility computing back in the 90s. It really beats me why they did not do SaaS form the beginning.
As spinmasters, they now tout that Garbanzo Applications run on the cloud. They have their own definition of the cloud, which is basically applications run on some data center and managed by their employees. Others would call it hosting.
They also tout that multi-tenancy is past, and the new paradigm is virtualization. Many companies are doing virtualization these days, but boss, those companies are infrastructure providers, not application providers.
As spinmasters, they now tout that Garbanzo Applications run on the cloud. They have their own definition of the cloud, which is basically applications run on some data center and managed by their employees. Others would call it hosting.
They also tout that multi-tenancy is past, and the new paradigm is virtualization. Many companies are doing virtualization these days, but boss, those companies are infrastructure providers, not application providers.
Not built on an Application Platform
An application platform is basically where third parties can come and build applications. The platform provides certain amount of "common" functionality, and application developers build domain specific functionality.
Definition will differ based on who you ask. It is best to describe with examples. Salesforce.com's force.com, Google's App Engine are application development platforms. They provide certain common functionality, often via APIs and sometimes via UI. Developers within or outside the company can build the rest.
Project Garbanzo has technologies, frameworks, IDEs - but nothing that resembles a platform. They should have built a strong platform, or acquired one, to develop the applications on.
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