Startup Superstars

CTO Interview—Tu Nguyen, DOCCENTER

Startup Superstars — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 21:38:00 GMT

Tu Nguyen always believed in the promise of document management. After winning the Microsoft 2003 Imagine Cup programming competition, a lot changed for him. Inspired while working in his parents' Vietnamese restaurant in Omaha, Nebraska, Nguyen developed an application designed to bridge the language gap between English-speaking waiters and Vietnamese-speaking chefs. His solution ran on Pocket PC devices, enabling the restaurant's staff to communicate more effectively by translating food orders into each person's native language. Waiters entered orders into devices that transmitted data to a local server. The data was then translated from English into the chef's native language and sent to a printer in the restaurant's kitchen. By automating the ordering process, the application eliminated the dual-entry process and inconsistency of paper tickets, saving the staff time and the restaurant money. And while that experience may be a far cry from the company Nguyen is with today, DOCCENTER, it inspired Nguyen to want to start his own company—and to build it on the Microsoft platform. He started as an intern at DOCCENTER, and not long after winning the Microsoft award, he convinced the company to expand its vision, build a product on the Microsoft platform, and make him vice president of information technology.

DOCCENTER provides a complete solution for document management on demand. Its flagship product, EDDS Vault (Electronic Document and Digital Storage) is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that frees companies from the headaches of a paper-based storage solution and enables them to collaborate with trusted associates, manage compliance requirements, and know that their files are being backed up. Just recently, the company became a member of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program.

Here is our conversation with Tu Nguyen, Vice President of Information Technology at DOCCENTER.

Microsoft Startup Zone: So, having won the Imagine Cup, you had experience with Microsoft technology. Talk to us about the decision to build the company’s SaaS solution on the Microsoft platform?

Tu Nguyen: While at the University of Nebraska, and getting ready to apply for my internship, I realized that I needed something to really make me stand out from the rest. Getting A’s in math wasn’t enough. So I focused on this new Microsoft .NET technology that had just come out. My first application was for my parents’ restaurant—the application I designed won the Microsoft 2003 Imagine Cup. My version of the IPOD, for Intelligent Pocket Order Delivery System, was created with a simple UI that allowed waiters to take an order, and then once they got the order, it could be translated into Vietnamese in the kitchen. With that simple application, I was able to use the Microsoft .NET Framework, Compact Framework, SQL Server, Web Services, and then the whole .NET C# environment. After learning all about the technology, I realized the potential of what .NET could do versus other platforms—where I’d still be learning how to do things.

So, when I joined DOCCENTER, we were already using third party software, and some open source. I suggested to the president that we build our own product, and focus on the Microsoft platform because it was so well documented, and had a lot of community support around it as well.

We chose .NET for our current technology called EDDS Vault because it enables us to focus on what we want to do, and not worry about the whole plumbing of the technology itself. We’re also using SQL Server 2005, and the Internet Information Server (IIS) 6.0 environment. And we have a team that’s focused on Silverlight 2.0 technology. We used it to build our front-end capture so we could create one single platform that could be used for either the desktop or a Web environment—without worrying about browser-based support. We are really a big fan of Silverlight.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technology has been most critical to your success?

Nguyen: .NET is our primary critical technology that really helps our product in development. It really helped us to develop our product faster and get to market faster. But I can't say the same with the Silverlight yet, because it's very new. We still have a big learning curve. And I think, as the whole, we still have a lot of things that we wish were available in Silverlight—I hope that technology will get as good as the whole .NET and the Visual Studio environment.

MSUZ: Are there technologies that you're going to look at integrating or supporting in the future?

Nguyen: Yes, we are now investigating how we create a mash-up between SharePoint 2007 with our front-end capture. We did our research to find that there are a lot of companies solely embracing SharePoint as an Internet content management solution, but when they started looking at it in the form of document management solutions, SharePoint has limitations in terms of how an office will scan hundreds of thousands of documents into SharePoint effectively. So, we’re looking at how we're going to integrate our capture with SharePoint in a seamless solution.

Also with SharePoint when it comes to document management in terms of searching, record management, and retention, there are some limitations there as well. For instance, if I’ve already taken time entering indexes in the front-end—entering the indexes for each invoice or document—I need the ability to quickly find them. I want to use the indexes I have already created; I don’t want to go into a full text type of search, which is what SharePoint requires and is a limitation we see. We also have a team actually doing a proof-of-concept on how we can do integration with that, and why our product brings value-add to the SharePoint platform.

Second, with all the cloud-based services available on the Web today, and because our business is going to go more to online cloud storage with our document management capability, we want to leverage the Windows Live SkyDrive technology when they make it available—more like the Amazon S3, the API for storing and retrieving data on the Web.

And since Microsoft just released an SQL database service in the cloud, we realized that all of this really brings value to our system. We want to focus on our core, which is to deliver productivity and application and collaboration tools to the Web user, and don't want to bog down on infrastructure. The more we can outsource this with partners like Microsoft, trusted by the industry, the better. We have all this redundancy and infrastructure, and are now ready to grow to a million users, thousands of terabytes, but the reality is people are not going to trust us in terms of that since we’re just getting started. But if we have SkyDrive behind our name and Microsoft SQL data service, I think we can gain more acceptance in that area.

MSUZ: So where are you in terms of product launch?

Nguyen: We’re getting ready to launch our SaaS model sometime in mid September (2008). We have customers using our application from 1,600 users to small firms with just five to 10 users. And our customers span a range of industries from healthcare to financial services.

MSUZ: From a technical point of view is there anything that Microsoft could do that would really help you out more technically?

Nguyen: Yes, on the technology side, we know we’re able to use Visual Studio, but would like to see more on UI testing tools, some type of automation macro type of tool that our testers don’t have to know how to write script, they can just click the UI and have the automation.

MSUZ: The above Visual Studio issue was resolved and announced at TechEd last week.

Tu Nguyen’s Background

As Vice President of Information Technology at DOCCENTER, Tu Nguyen helps emerging to mid-market businesses efficiently manage and protect their digital assets. Since 2007, he has led the team in development of its SaaS Web 2.0 product, EDDS Vault (Electronic Document and Digital Storage). In 2006, he was recognized by the Midlands Business Journal as one of Omaha’s top 40 executives under 40 years of age. In 2003, he was the inaugural winner of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup for his Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) software application that took restaurant orders in English and converted them into Vietnamese for his family’s restaurant.

For more information, visit DOCCENTER online.

Where are They Now—Ravenflow Revisited

Startup Superstars — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 01:12:48 GMT

Ravenflow

EMERYVILLE, CA
http://www.ravenflow.com

Ravenflow Has 100+ Customers, 3x Revenue Growth and $10M in Funding

What’s the biggest risk in developing a new business application? If you guessed programming, you are wrong. It’s in the requirements. And according to Adam Frankl, Vice President of Marketing at Ravenflow, this is where most projects fall short. They fail to clearly define, communicate, and validate the complete business requirements from the beginning. Ravenflow set out to solve this problem.

Launched in 2004, and based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, the company enables enterprises to deliver applications faster. Ravenflow’s solution helps companies do requirement elicitation and definition quickly so they can build consensus on requirements, reducing the time required for stakeholders to approve specifications, reducing developer rework due to requirements errors, and seamlessly integrating requirements and testing. The company’s flagship offering, RAVEN, integrates requirements elicitation and definition with the application lifecycle management platforms from IBM Rational, Telelogic, HP Mercury, and Microsoft Visual Studio.

Privately funded by investors including Alloy Ventures, Palomar Ventures, and The Roda Group, Ravenflow has a long history of working with Microsoft.

The Microsoft Connection?

Ravenflow started working with the Emerging Business Team in 2005. EBT arranged a meeting with Rick LaPlante, then General Manager of Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS), and a couple weeks later, a two-day session was set up for all of the key product managers within TFS. Out of that meeting came a four-step plan for integrating the Ravenflow product with Visual Studio, a move that has turned out to be instrumental to the company achieving its business goals. At the same time, Ravenflow was pursuing its first round of venture financing and found that Microsoft’s commitment was crucial to its ability to secure a sizable $10 million round of funding from Alloy and Palomar Ventures in November 2005. Read what Phil Trapp, then Ravenflow’s Vice President, Business Development, had to say about the early Microsoft relationship.

In April 2006, Ravenflow announced integration with the Visual Studio Team System, and in May, had their first customer in production with RAVEN Visual Studio Team System. Once EBT learned that Ravenflow was talking with Bowne & Co. (NYSE: BNE), the group connected Ravenflow with the Microsoft sales team in New York City.

Adds Frankl, “The Microsoft relationship was key to us in a couple of ways, notably that they made introductions for us that hooked us up with the Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server group. Since quite a few of our customers are using it, being able to integrate our products seamlessly with Visual Studio is a big advantage for us. And making introductions and recommendations to the VCs gave us a lot of credibility in the VC community and enabled us to raise money from several top-tier firms. We’ve now raised more than $15 million — another $5 million was raised in January 2008.”

Where are they now?

With more than 100 customers worldwide using its software, Ravenflow tripled its sales in 2007 over 2006. Key customers include Boeing, New York Life, Charles Schwab, Citco, Accenture, Halliburton, HP, World Savings Bank, and state and local government and federal agencies. Ravenflow was included in the list of "Cool Vendors" in the "Cool Vendors in Application Development, 2007" report by Gartner, Inc. in 2007, and just this year, market analyst firm IDC named Ravenflow the fastest growing vendor in its first assessment of the Requirements Definition and Management software market.

In July 2008, the company announced general availability of RAVEN Express, a new Microsoft Word add-in for requirements definition module.

Explains Frankl, “Besides integration with Microsoft Visual Studio, we also integrate with Microsoft Office, Word and Excel, and our collaboration system is based on Microsoft SharePoint Services so we’re integrated with Microsoft products across the board.”

Since Microsoft is the leading producer of development software, it’s in keeping with our strategic vision to support startups such as Ravenflow that add real value to Visual Studio.

For more information, visit Ravenflow online.

CTO Interview—Paul Irvine, Earth Class Mail

Startup Superstars — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:24:29 GMT

You’ve got mail. From anywhere, at any time. And not just email—we’re talking about postal mail. It’s all going online, if Earth Class Mail has anything to do with it. Founded in 2004, the company wants to change how postal mail is delivered, for the betterment of individuals, businesses, national post offices, and, most importantly, the planet. Instead of making physical postal deliveries that are so dependent on fuel for planes and trucks, this company delivers postal mail online—where people can deal with it instantly, anywhere in the world.

Since launching its product in April 2006, the company has accelerated sales in the business-to-consumer space, is in the process of providing its service to all employees of a Fortune 50 customer, is deploying with other enterprises and is in talks with several national posts. In October 2007, Earth Class Mail teamed up with Microsoft at Post-Expo 2007 in Barcelona, Spain. According to Maxim Lesur, Worldwide Postal Industry Managing Director at Microsoft, “The company’s technologies facilitate Microsoft’s vision of the secure digital delivery of postal mail. The savings in time, money, and to our environment are significant and allow the business model to evolve to a receiver-pays model.”

In 2008, the company’s goal is to recycle more than 200 tons of paper—and it says this is just the beginning. It has developed the first online postal-mail delivery system scalable to handle an entire country’s postal mail.

Here is our conversation with Paul Irvine, Vice President of Customer Engineering and IT at Earth Class Mail.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Give us a 30,000-foot overview on Earth Class Mail.

Paul Irvine: In a nutshell we've put postal mail online. We allow you to receive and manage your mail, no matter where you are in the world. It's stunningly simple in concept, and amazingly huge and vast in areas it can touch, and how it can grow. We have major marketplaces. Our customer base is everything from direct B2C sales, road warriors, snowbirds, and then we scale up through small and mid-sized businesses, enterprises, and government organizations. They all take a slightly different approach to managing and deploying. Right at the very top of this is managing digital mail for national post offices. We think it is a digital mail revolution.

MSUZ: What’s your business model?

Irvine: We offer a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model for a monthly plan. Your plans are priced according to the amount of mail that you need to have managed. An individual can go with one of the entry-level plans for just a few dollars a month, and larger operations can buy a bigger bulk package that gets them a better per-piece price rate.

MSUZ: Why and when did you first choose the Microsoft platform?

Irvine: I joined Earth Class Mail as VP of Engineering the end of November 2006. The prototype had already been up in running in PHP and MySQL. It really was a prototype in that it worked clearly, but wasn't built to scale. It was designed to get sales traction and funding. With PHP and MySQL, like many open-source technologies, you can build systems that scale, no question; I wouldn't argue otherwise. But our particular prototype was not able to scale. It had some architectural deficiencies that just meant that the best route was to really throw it away, use lessons learned, and build a completely new one right.

Having got there, it was just so clear to me that the .NET 3.5 platform gave us so much of the plumbing code right out of the box, and that it would accelerate our time to market. We were already seeing massive growth in increased sales for the business-to-consumer retail marketplace, and we were clearly nervous at the time that we had to have a solution that would scale to support these people, and that the existing platform was starting to creak around the edges. With having to rewrite an entire application with all its attendant business rules and unwritten assumptions, it was nontrivial. So, anything that saved us time was a huge factor in our success.

MSUZ: So it sounds like the .NET platform was the most critical to your success—can you elaborate on that?

Irvine: Yes, the key technology for us was .NET 3.5. There are so many components, not just the framework. LINQ (a set of extensions to the .NET Framework) made a significant impact on making it simpler for our development team to work almost entirely in the service layer, and we didn’t need a raft of serious SQL developers on the team to make this all fly. But the big difference was clearly the .NET Framework Class Library, the out-of-the-box capability that .NET brought to the table. We could then focus on the business services and the contracts and, not the nuts and bolts and plumbing.

MSUZ: Can you quantify the benefits in terms of what it helped you achieve?

Irvine: It took us about five months to completely rewrite the system with a relatively small group of engineers. Scalability and the ability to maintain high performance were key imperatives in our rewrite. You have to remember that our business model isn't linear growth, as most other company’s experience, and this was a key thing. For our retail service, direct customer sales for small and medium business, and the local plans, our growth is accelerating on a fairly predictable curve. But each new Fortune 100 enterprise or government mail facility that we bring on pushes our mail-handling and delivery services up in a single big jump—it’s like a huge stair step. So for a large organization of, say, 20,000 employees, we’re handling roughly in the region of 300,000 pieces of mail a month. When we bring on an enterprise, it may suddenly jump up to 300,000 pieces in one day, figuratively, and that's the sort of scaling and performance management that we had to architect into the solution. We had to make sure we could scale up for massive jumps in operational performance, not just in the usual predictable growth curves.

As a result, we went from a couple of Linux boxes with PHP and MySQL to a multiple redundant Microsoft Windows Server architecture, which addresses all of our current needs. We have Windows Server 2003 for our Web tier and for our application services tier, and those are in a redundant configuration. Each of those tiers can be transparently expanded basically without any application changes.

We use Windows DFS for our image storage tier, which is also architected out separately. So, again imagine storing all of those images of the envelopes and their contents. We really do need something that's robust and scalable, and Windows Distributed File System (DFS) and Windows Server 2003 give us that.

We're also using some secret sauce in there to ensure that the imaging server is fast, and that we can scale the image services independently over the Web for all of the other tiers that we're working with. We're also going to be engaging with Microsoft through the Startup Accelerator Program, which is a fabulous opportunity for us, so that we can really learn more and take advantage of DFS in our expansion strategy.

A key part of this architecture was to take advantage of SQL Server 2005 64-bit and running in mirrored mode for redundancy. Another key technology with fabulous results has been using SQL Server 2005 for our Business Intelligence strategy as well. That's been so wonderfully successful. It enables us to have the ability to create reporting portals quickly, and to deploy self-serve OLAP cubes for our operations and our finance teams. In a nutshell, I mean, you can't fly an airplane without a good instrument panel, and SQL Server 2005 and the business intelligence suite on that is fabulous.

MSUZ: Are there Microsoft technologies you’ll be looking at using and/or integrating in the future?

Irvine: SharePoint is up and coming on the integration path, because so many enterprises already use SharePoint for content management and workflow capabilities. We believe having the mail drive directly into workflow at the enterprise level is huge. People have had visions of paperless offices since I was a programmer back in the—well, let's just say way back. But the timing now is so right. I mean, the sheer amount of paper being delivered into enterprises and moving around government organizations is staggering. Changing to digital delivery is resonating so loudly in many of the companies we're working with.

Outlook integration is also key to our future, too, but I can't divulge too many details of that strategy at the moment.

MSUZ: If you had to do it all over again, would you still select the Microsoft platform?

Irvine: Absolutely. We embarked on a Microsoft strategy as a chosen path at the end of 2006. About six months after that we had started down our migration planning, and the engineering team building, and just by chance we met with Microsoft's Executive Director for Worldwide Postal Solutions. It was like two halves coming together; it was unbelievable. We had no idea when we made our platform decision that Microsoft was already very committed to the postal arena as a strategic market. This just strengthened our commitment to working with Microsoft at all levels.

I want to add, we couldn't ask for a better partner in the technology space who could share a big enough vision to make this happen. It's this combination of Microsoft platform technology, scalability, reliability, and high performance—this is what will enable us to bring our vision and implementation to the national post-office level and globally around the world. And most importantly, it gives us the confidence that it will simply work when we're scaling to process millions and millions of letters a day.

Paul Irvine’s Background

Paul Irvine brings 28 years software product development, consulting services, and management experience to Earth Class Mail. He began his career as a software programmer in mainframe technology in 1979. After gaining experience in data architecture, business rules analysis, and document imaging technologies in the early ’80s, Paul formed his first consulting and software development company. Key clients in London, UK, were British Airways, Marsh McLennan, and British Nuclear Corporation, among others.

After the demise of the mini-computer marketplace in 1993, Paul moved to the U.S. and joined forces with Voyager Systems, a leader in imaging systems and database solutions. As Director of Consulting, Paul led development and sales of automated migration services, serving key clients as diverse as Deutsche Bank, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several large Justice agencies. In 1999, Paul joined Emerald Solutions as a senior manager, leading teams on Internet-based consulting, strategy, and software development engagements focused on IBM and enterprise document management solutions. In 2002, Paul signed on as VP Engineering at Via Training, a high-growth startup in the field of online Internet Sales Training, with major clients such as HP, Microsoft, and Intel.

Postscript

Rajeev Dujari, Senior VP of Products at Earth Class Mail, is now further building on the .NET foundation laid down by Paul Irvine. Rajeev previously had a 15-year career at Microsoft, culminating in a Product Unit Manager role on Visual 2008. As Paul has recently transitioned to another company, inquiries about Earth Class Mail’s product roadmap and technology strategy may be addressed to Rajeev.

For more information, visit Earth Class Mail online.

Where Are They Now—Skinkers Revisited

Startup Superstars — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:23:27 GMT

Skinkers

NEW YORK, NY
http://www.skinkers.com

Company Pilots Interactive Live TV on Your PC, Enterprise Product Used on World’s Leading Brands, and Wins UK Technology Innovation and Growth 2008 Awards

For communication you can’t miss, Skinkers is it. Founded in 2001, the London-based firm is a leader in information broadcast technology. Already, many of the world’s leading brands use Skinkers technology. It claims to be the world’s first enterprise class, multi-channel message and content delivery technology. Through its Live Notification Platform, it delivers ShouldKnow information (breaking news, corporate communications, service outages, share prices, etc.) directly to the most appropriate device (computer, handheld, mobile phone) via the most appropriate channel.

The Microsoft Connection?

Back in 2005, CEO David Long says Skinkers was handling desktop notifications for a number of leading brands including the BBC and had several million people using its information broadcast technology and needed to make the delivery of news updates more cost effective. The company started looking at peer-to-peer technologies as a way to reduce scalability costs, and through a venture capitalist met with the Microsoft division of IP Ventures. Interestingly enough, IP Ventures was looking to marry technologies that were coming out of Microsoft Research Labs to potential businesses.

Recalls Long, “We identified this Microsoft technology called ‘Pastry’ — we saw it as the best peer-to-peer technology on the market for our purposes. Says Long, “When we mentioned this to IP Ventures, they said it was something they were looking to bring out of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge to have developed by a third-party. So a marriage was made in heaven for us there — we stated our interest, finished our funding run, and then didn’t hear anything for a while. Then in June 2006, the deal came through where we acquired the intellectual property rights to three core applications that leverage the Pastry foundation.”

Skinkers agreed to an ‘equity for technology’ deal with Microsoft. As part of the agreement, Microsoft took a minority stake in Skinkers – the first time the company had done this with a European business — with a view to co-develop software with Microsoft that will benefit both companies and result in products that Skinkers could take to market. In addition Andrew Herbert, Managing Director of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, became an observer on Skinkers’ board. The technology Skinkers has acquired has allowed Skinkers to develop its current offerings and create new solutions for real-time event notification and more importantly, the delivery of live TV to broadband connected computers.

According to Jean-Philippe Courtois, President, Microsoft International, at the time of the technology transfer in June 2006, “This agreement is more than a transfer of technology, it is the beginning of new business relationship with Skinkers that will yield new innovations for the European and global market.”

Explained David Long, CEO of Skinkers, “Since that investment was made in Skinkers, a business within Skinkers has emerged called Livestation. Skinkers main business is the provision of an enterprise software solution for large-scale communications applications within the enterprise. The nascent Livestation business, based on the first implementation of the original Microsoft Research work, is what we’re focusing on for live television on the PC. And our relationship with Microsoft spans both businesses, because one was spawned from the other.”

Explains Long, “The relationship with Microsoft, and obviously IP Ventures, has been critical. We have huge support from both IP Ventures and from the Cambridge Lab, particularly in the form of introductions.” In addition, Skinkers was a Vista launch and Silverlight partner, and says it is working with Microsoft product and sales teams on joint bids in various accounts within the financial sector in Europe.

For its new Livestation business, Long says the Emerging Business Team has made introductions to the Microsoft Media division. “We’ve managed to get into a number of the product groups and really get to meet the right people.”

Where are they now?

At the Microsoft EU Innovation Day in Brussels in December 2007, Skinkers showcased its Livestation, the first broadcast platform to exploit the Internet for the delivery of live interactive TV to computers. Built on peer-to-peer technology, Livestation allows broadcasters to distribute live audio and video to a potential audience of hundreds of millions of broadband-connected people at a dramatically reduced cost. It is currently in technical trials with leading international broadcasters (including the BBC and France 24).

According to Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of Livestation, “This ground breaking technology will allow broadcasters to reach a virtually unlimited number of people while at their computers. Livestation is going to change the way people access linear television thanks to its ease of use and quality of the experience.”

For the Skinkers enterprise business, Long says they are working in conjunction with Microsoft to pitch to some big-name banks in the UK. And already, its technology is used with Virgin Atlantic, London Stock Exchange, American Airlines, JC Penney, and many more.

Explains Long, “With Livestation, we’re trying to create a compelling offering for the global news citizen, with a world-beating technology that is hard to replicate. On the Skinkers side of the business, we’re innovating within the communications marketplace. I don’t think anyone has come up with a solution on how an enterprise connects people with information in a multi-channel world. With email overload now being a huge problem, how do you connect people and systems with what we call ShouldKnow information. How do you ensure that no matter what device you are on, or where you are, you will receive important information with acknowledgement for audit trails, compliance, corporate governance, etc.”

In March 2008, Livestation won the MediaGuardian Innovation Award for Media Technology, and Skinkers and Microsoft were awarded the prestigious Partnering for Innovation Award at the UK Technology Innovation and Growth 2008 Awards.

For more information, visit Skinkers online.

CTO Interview—ATG Srinivas, DiVitas

Startup Superstars — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 23:09:00 GMT

Founded in 2005, DiVitas Networks has rapidly become a leader in Mobile Unified Communications. DiVitas offers the first solution to mobilize corporate voice and messaging (desk phone, contacts, IM, presence and push-to-talk) applications for business by unifying them onto a smartphone. DiVitas “seamless roaming’” enables its solution to operate transparently over any mobile network—WiFi, cellular, or both. DiVitas does all of this while allowing company IT to retain complete control over its mobile solution. DiVitas provides IT the ability to customize features and implement policies while selecting the PBX, network, handsets and service plans that best meet their needs.

Here is our conversation with ATG Srinivas, Vice President of Engineering.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and when did you first choose the Microsoft platform?

ATG Srinivas: We were founded in 2005. Right from the start, we realized that dual-mode phones are key to the success of our solution. Microsoft was the first platform to come out with dual-mode phone support, and the penetration that Microsoft now has in North America and in Asia-Pacific is significant. As a pioneer in the converged mobile market, we chose to support Microsoft technologies because of the ubiquity of the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform for dual-mode pocket PCs. In addition, solutions from Microsoft offer key development tools and are supported by the leading handset manufacturers around the world.

MSUZ: We understand that you were using a number of key Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Visual Studio, Live Communications Server 2005, and providing support for Microsoft XP Professional and Windows Mobile, can you elaborate on this?

Srinivas: When we start development on a mobile platform, the most critical things to consider are the underlying platform development tools and the platform itself. It is a little different from development projects where people are much more focused on a particular technology like .NET or Windows Media or Silverlight. For us, what Microsoft brings to the table is an extremely well documented platform layer, which supports telephony, socket layer, and connection manager. The speed of the development is a key aspect of this platform for us. Tools such as Visual Studio are extremely important.

We are trying to mobilize enterprise applications (deskphone, IM, Contacts and presence) on smartphones. For that to happen, there are two things that are important. First, the penetration of the platform into business accounts; and second, how well does the platform integrate with the rest of the business applications. The beauty of Microsoft is that a lot of people are already familiar with Calendar, Outlook, and all that comes integrated into the platform itself. For us, having access to things like contacts, calendars and email is extremely important. So to summarize, the key advantages of using Microsoft technologies are speed to market and the wealth of information that is available for development.

MSUZ: What other Microsoft technologies have you looked at?

Srinivas: One of the latest things that we plan to use is the Mobile Device Manager. This gives us the capability of remote management of devices. For a mobile platform, which is business controlled, this is a key aspect. In the future, we are also looking at .NET and we have something in the plan for Office Communications Server.

MSUZ: Anything that Microsoft could do to help you more with technology solution?

Srinivas: Yes, definitely. Since we are a phone application on top of a mobile device, we would like much closer integration with the lower layers, as well as the telephony stack and WiFi stack. It would be extremely useful for us to get access into those layers from the API perspective, and also technical support in terms of issues that we face. We are a mobile application and because of that there is a lot of emotion attached to it by the end user, and the closer and more seamlessly that we work with the native platform, the better the user experience is.

ATG Srinivas' Background

Prior to DiVitas, Srinivas spent 12 years working for startups in networking and telecommunications including Sycamore Networks and Cascade Communications. At Sycamore, he was part of the core team that developed Sycamore’s first optical switch. Srinivas also led Sycamore’s Network Management Systems group. Previously, he was a consultant with Infosys where he led several projects for Cascade Communications. He graduated from IIT Kanpur, India with a Bachelors of Technology.

For more information, visit Divitas online, or the success story "DiVitas ‘Unwires’ the Enterprise."

Where Are They Now—IP Commerce Revisited

Startup Superstars — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:20:00 GMT

IP Commerce

DENVER, COLORADO
http://www.ipcommerce.com/

IP Commerce Has Raised More Than $34 Million in Funding, and Secured Key Financial Institutions and Software Companies As Customers

IP Commerce is the creator of the world’s first open commerce network delivering on-demand access to the next-generation of commerce services. Referred to as a “services grid for the payments industry,” its technology was built on the Microsoft .NET Framework and a service-oriented software architecture (SOA) that enable financial institutions, merchants, and consumers to radically improve the way payments are made. Founded in 2005, the company has created a fresh approach to payment systems, one that will benefit both businesses and consumers.

The Microsoft Connection?

According to Chip Kahn, Founder and CEO, the Emerging Business Team provided a lot of directional guidance early on. “We were able to cultivate some relationships on our own building off the contacts I had from working with the Dynamics group for several months, plus we actually have a person based in Seattle who focuses on the Microsoft relationship.”

In 2006, the company was selected as a strategic launch partner for the Windows Vista operating system release. Since then, as a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, the company has focused on the channel and marketing side of its relationship with Microsoft. Explains Kahn, “That has proven really valuable. It has helped us drive credibility in the marketplace with software ISVs.”

Explains Kahn, “We’re not a consumer, Web 2.0-based play, we’re an Internet infrastructure play. And our success will be largely invisible to consumers, but visible by the success of our partner companies. Our big vision is to create the first open payment network over the Internet that has all of the major payment players and software connected and collaborating.”

Where are they now?

Kahn says they are reaching a ‘critical mass’ in the U.S. market with its payment service relationships and software companies. Says Kahn, “We don’t sell to a merchant, we sell to software companies, banks, big payment processors, and big channels such as Best Buy.”

IP Commerce maintains partnerships with some of the world’s most respected financial institutions and softwrare companies, including Microsoft, PayPal, Chase Paymentech, CIT Group, TransFirst, Dialect (now part of TNS), Internet Commerce Corporation, BankServ, and AmbironTrustWave. In addition, it implemented with two of the 10 largest acquiring banks in 2006. Acquiring banks (also known as merchant banks) facilitate a credit card transaction between the merchant and the card issuer. Chase Paymentech is the largest acquiring bank in the U.S.

In January 2008, the company introduced its IP Commerce Platform—an open commerce network and backend technology that connects financial institutions, service providers, software development companies and established distribution channels to create and distribute new commerce solutions.

"The IP Commerce Platform takes the pain out of the development and delivery of payment solutions for small businesses," explains Kahn. "By making the process of payment application development more intuitive, everyone involved in the process—from the software company to the distribution channel—can cut costs, increase speed to market, and grow their channel. It gives our partners unprecedented flexibility that's never been seen before in the payments industry."

In early June 2008, the company raised $17.5 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Venrock, the venture capital firm founded by the Rockefeller family. To date, IP Commerce has raised more than $34 million in venture funding, and plans to use the funds to accelerate adoption of its IP Commerce Network, particularly in the software development community and the financial services industry. It also has funding from two Colorado-based VC firms, Meritage Funds and Appian Ventures.

In the coming months, IP Commerce plans to offer commerce-enabled versions of additional Microsoft products. Says Kahn, “We’re working through some of the native capabilities in Office Accounting 2008, and want to have private-label versions so a bank could extend their brand to the desktop and enable the same authentication.”

CTO Interview—Bob Kruger, Mimosa Systems

Startup Superstars — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Email has rapidly become the mission-critical application for today’s businesses. And Mimosa Systems says it is revolutionizing email archiving with the industry’s most scalable grid architecture for Microsoft Exchange environments, scaling across hundreds of thousands of mailboxes. The company’s solution unifies content archiving, eDiscovery, disaster recovery, and business continuity in a single offering to meet the demands of today’s information-driven enterprise.

Here is our conversation with Bob Kruger, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Mimosa Systems.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Building the Mimosa solution on the Microsoft platform was clearly a critical part of your business and technical strategy, can you elaborate?

Bob Kruger: It was an integral part of the company and product foundation, and it was done for both technical and pragmatic reasons. We’re in business to make money, right? So if you look at the marketplace, you look at the number of Exchange deployments, you look at the problems that people are having with storage costs, the need to do compliance work or discovery work, etc., it’s easy to see where the money is. And having something that's closely aligned with Microsoft technologies just made it that much easier and faster to implement — plus made it more reliable. And done properly, it also enables us to co-market with Microsoft, a good partnering opportunity.

From a technology standpoint, the great thing about Microsoft Windows environment is that it's well defined and very consistent, and we know that it's broadly deployed. From customer to customer, when we look at it — we know what it is. If somebody says we have a Windows Server 2003, and we're running Exchange 2007, and we're running SQL Server whichever version, then it's known to us, and we can immediately tell them how we perform in that environment. From the standpoint of implementing products, of course, if you know all that upfront, it's a lot easier.

This is a big difference from a Linux environment. If you're running Red Hat — you have to know which distribution, and which kernel are underneath. You start going through all the other open source pieces, or custom components, that people might have put into the product, and it's not as finished and/or polished. And then there's the messaging system itself, and what is it, and how does that integrate? That makes things very challenging.

MSUZ: So Microsoft Exchange was the most critical technology? What about other Microsoft technologies you used?

Kruger: Exchange is the foundation for sure. And the Windows Server platform to begin with, including Active Directory was important too. It provided us with a robust platform and the directory services we actively use.

MSUZ: What have been some of the quantifiable benefits?

Kruger: I’d say ease of use around deployment and manageability of the infrastructure come into play when I think about the directory services, for example. Just about everything is in one place. So between the user accounts, the server resources and machines, everything is there, so we don’t have to go to other places to get necessary information. If we didn’t have that, there would be a lot of work to do by hand and that takes longer and is fraught with errors.

MSUZ: What other technologies are you looking at for the future?

Kruger: We’re like a poster child for Microsoft technologies. We continue to keep pace with the Microsoft Management Console that makes life easier in terms of the creation of console snap-ins. We also use the Windows Presentation Foundation and the Windows Communications Foundation—those save us time as well in terms of providing remote capabilities for general presentation services. Having all of that is a big timesaver for us.

MSUZ: And we understand you are doing something different with your NearPoint solution — in terms of scalability and flexibility, can you elaborate?

Kruger: NearPoint is not just a product or a solution in and of itself. It's also a platform, a foundation for other solutions. We’re building our e-discovery and content monitoring, and other products, as solutions that leverage that foundation. That foundation itself is grid-based, meaning that multiple servers not only can be deployed but they can have different personalities. They can perform different tasks and distribute those tasks throughout the entire grid. If one fails, then another server would pick up its task. If the master that coordinates everything fails, then a peer would be promoted to master and take care of it. So in that way, we’re able to scale in a variety of directions. We can scale up or scale out — however the customer sees fit. And that's how we were able to tackle, by the way, a recent large customer win comprising the archiving of 150,000 mailboxes. A leading analyst group told us that there's only one other deployment out there in the industry that's larger than ours. We’re going to quickly — because of the grid architecture — reach unlimited scalability.

Bob Kruger's Background

Bob Kruger has over 30 years of experience in the high tech industry mainly in senior roles comprising software engineering and product management. Prior to Mimosa, he was senior vice president of engineering at Mendocino Software, a startup in the "continuous data protection" market. Before that, Kruger held CTO and SVP of Engineering roles at NDCHealth, Citrix Systems, and BMC Software. Prior to this, he worked at Microsoft for more than a decade. His last position with Microsoft was as the general manager of systems management products. Among other duties, he drove the creation of the Web-Based Enterprise Management and Common Information Model standards.

Earlier parts of Bob's high tech history began with Northern Telecom and the Commission on Professional and Hospital Activities. Bob was a major contributor and technical reviewer for Bill Gates' second book, Business @ the Speed of Thought, and a contributing author to Aspatore's book, Inside the Minds: Making Critical Technology Decisions. He is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), with a degree in International Relations.

For more information, visit Mimosa Systems online, or read their Alum Interview "Where are They Now - Mimosa Revisited" or the success story "Mimosa Systems: Next-Gen Information Management."

Where Are They Now—Loyalty Lab Revisited

Startup Superstars — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:06:00 GMT

Loyalty Lab

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
http://www.loyaltylab.com

Loyalty Lab Doubles Sales, Wins 75+ Clients, Signs Strategic Alliance with HSBC

Ready, aim, engage. At least, that’s the motto of Loyalty Lab, a San Francisco-based on-demand ‘best’ customer management solution provider for leading brands. It gets you ‘ready’ to build brand loyalty by putting programs in place, and then helps you collect the data and learn what customers are really up to. It takes ‘aim’ by segmenting your customer markets and building strategies that connect you with each customer segment on their own terms. And it enables you to ‘engage’ with your customers wherever they are — online, in person, via email, phone or even through social networks.

The company makes multi-channel engagement a reality by combining web-based software with world-class services, delivering an integrated, multifaceted CRM solution that allows leading brands to maximize their customer relationships. Loyalty Lab’s flagship Customer Relationship Manager Suite provides retailers and service companies with integrated and on-demand loyalty program management, email, incentives, and campaign management. Clients include New York and Company, 1-800-Flowers.com, Bally Total Fitness, and a number of other prominent retail and service companies.

Loyalty Lab chose the Microsoft platform — including Microsoft® Windows Server, SQL Server, the .NET Framework, and Visual Studio developer tools — because it provided a comprehensive and integrated set of technologies that met the company’s requirements for reliability, scalability, affordability, and ease of use.

According to Mark H. Goldstein, CEO, the company has scaled and grown its business based on the original Microsoft-based platform it started with in 2004.

Explains Goldstein, “We have a loyalty and retention platform. And the way it works is that our clients upload their customer data to us, and we watch everything that goes on their web sites or online communities and in their stores, anywhere that the customers might be touching the client brand. Our software automatically detects opportunities to trigger offers, messages, and reminders that keep that customer engaged, and then tracks whatever the customer might do as well as records and rewards points, or discounts or some type of bonus or recognition for the customer.”

What makes Loyalty Lab different is that it focuses on helping clients grow by using their existing customer bases. Says Goldstein, “And the economics around that are pretty good because it’s generally a lot less expensive to get an existing customer to buy from you than to go out and try to reach someone who hasn’t bought from you in the past.”

The Microsoft Connection?

Goldstein says they made the decision to go with the Microsoft. NET Framework because retailers they were talking with were comfortable with it, and, in fact, were more comfortable working with an organization that had a .NET Framework than one based on Java or an open source platform. Early on, the company benefited from its relationship with the Emerging Business Team, gaining access to tools, technologies, and product teams. Goldstein says they forged a strong relationship with EBT Director Mark Barry, who has since left Microsoft to join OpenView Venture Partners.

Explains Goldstein, “Mark ended up being a significant reference for us because he was familiar with our approach and technology. In fact, I think the whole Microsoft involvement actually led to our latest round of capital. Mark left Microsoft to join OpenView Venture Partners, which invested $7 million in us last year.”

Goldstein says they leveraged another Microsoft EBT company as well, ExactTarget. Says Goldstein, “We spent quite a bit of time with their CFO and CIO, talking to them about how they scaled their stack and technology platforms, recognizing that we were both built on .NET.”

And just recently, the company sent its technical team to a Microsoft Architecture Review session where it had direct access to product teams. Says Goldstein, “They help us think through our business and determine how we’ll leverage the next generation of Microsoft reporting services.”

Where are they now?

Today, Loyalty Lab has 75 clients, most of them consumer name brands ranging from traditional retailers (Bon-Ton, Smart & Final) to airlines (Virgin Atlantic), and consumer product companies (Miller, Clorox). The company claims to be “the fastest growing loyalty company out there,” and Goldstein says they have built a critical mass of customers, have scaled the business, and are processing millions and millions of transactions every day — doubling its sales every year.

Just recently, in April 2008, Loyalty Lab scored a large customer win by signing an alliance with HSBC Finance Corporation’s card and retail services business to extend advanced loyalty and customer retention marketing (CRM) capabilities to retailers that offer private label and co-branded credit cards through HSBC. The new alliance means HSBC’s more than 70 merchant partners have the option to employ Loyalty Lab’s rewards engine to power their private label, co-branded and CRM solutions. Merchants will be able to internally collect and analyze select information that will help merchants improve customer retention.

Explains Goldstein, “HSBC is the premier private label credit card issuer and we’re thrilled to be working together to put sophisticated loyalty and retention programs in the hands of their merchants. Linking loyalty programs directly to the payment mechanism makes the most sense for consumers and the merchant. By working together, merchants will get faster integration and gain broader program capabilities.”

For more information, visit Loyalty Lab online.

CTO Interview—Jerry Barber, Verdiem

Startup Superstars — Mon, 19 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Getting a little green into your PC network is a good thing. And Verdiem can get you there. This Microsoft .NET Framework-based company develops power management software for PC networks. Its SURVEYOR software provides measurable energy and cost savings, simplified and automated management of PC power options, and painless implementation that comes with minimal maintenance and a rapid payback. The development of SURVEYOR was funded in part by the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, and the software is approved as a conservation measure by utilities and power producers throughout North America. Verdiem is a recognized partner in the EPA’s EnergyStar program and was recently awarded Premier Partner status in the U.S. Department of Energy's Rebuild America program. And in April 2008, it was recognized as a "Hot Company to Watch in 2008" by Forrester Research.

Here is our conversation with Jerry Barber, CTO at Verdiem.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Give me the quick 30,000-foot overview on Verdiem. We get the green concept, but how did this company evolve?

Jerry Barber: It goes back to 2001 when the wife of one of our founders was working for a school system, and they were getting very worried about the power consumption that all the PCs in the district were consuming since they were left on all the time. They had made some efforts to try to turn them off, but that didn't work. Our founder knew there had to be a way to solve this, and Verdiem was born. Our initial target market focused on managing costs at school systems, state and local governments, that sort of thing.

But about a year and a half ago, enterprises got very interested in not only managing their costs but also managing their carbon footprint, and doing something green. We found that the Global 2000 and Fortune 500 companies really started showing up on the radar as customers of ours or future customers wanting to deploy our technology. And we’ve grown quickly since then.

MSUZ: So what is the Microsoft angle here, and why and when did you first choose the Microsoft platform?

Barber: Clearly, Microsoft was the largest PC platform. And they were a very large consumer of energy as well. We were going after the low-hanging fruit in terms of being able to reduce power consumption. If you look at the actual statistics of where the power goes in an IT organization, 40 percent goes to desktop machines. Everybody thinks most power consumption is from the datacenter, but the datacenter is only responsible for 22 to 23 percent. So the biggest opportunity we saw was on the desktop. And that’s where the Microsoft infrastructure and tools are in place to centrally manage PCs. We knew it was here that we could bring the most value to IT organizations, and do it fast.

MSUZ: You built your solution based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and other technologies?

Barber: We used a combination of .NET and specifically Visual C# and C++.

MSUZ: Any one technology that has been most critical to your success and business model?

Barber: Not in terms of technology. Obviously, a critical part of the model was within the Windows operating system and being able to expose the APIs for managing power schemes. That allows us to control how long the monitor should be on before it switches off, and how long the computer should be on before it goes into sleep—and ultimately that enables us to put in the infrastructure to control that remotely. Some of the other technologies that we've used are the object technologies in the Office environment. These give us the ability to programmatically manipulate Office applications. As an example, we can go in when it’s time to shut the computer down, and check to see if there are any documents that haven't been saved, and if there are, we can actually save them before we shut down the computer.

MSUZ: What have been the overall key quantifiable benefits of using Microsoft technologies?

Barber: It obviously offers a full suite of development tools that allows us to integrate and work with the operating system at fairly low levels. One of the things that we do is try to determine how much power in watts the machine is actually consuming. One of the ways we do that is by using the WMI interface and looking at the actual components that make up the machine. And then based on the usage patterns that we see on the machine, such as the users typing of the keyboard, the CPU running at this speed, we see disk I/O bandwidth like this or network I/O bandwidth, we can then calculate how much power the machine is actually using. So, I think the fact that the whole environment exposes a lot of its components in ways that allow us to put together a lot of information to determine the power usage in the machine is a big advantage for us.

MSUZ: Tell us a little about your business model?

Barber: With our current business model, we sell software, both a client and a server, that is installed behind the firewall in global 2000 corporations. We are working on a SaaS model as well.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support/want to integrate/use in the future, and why?

Barber: We're doing a lot of C# work, and we're doing work with Web services as well. One of the things we use fairly extensively is SQL Server—it’s at the core of our product, as is SQL Server Express in some cases. The reporting services have given us a quick way to enable customers to generate reports. And with SQL Server, we collect a lot of data, and SQL Server is really an enterprise class and very fast database system. It provides us with the scalability we’ll need as we grow.

MSUZ: If you had to do it over again now, would you still pick Microsoft as a platform for your solution?

Barber: Yes, absolutely.

One last point to mention. Microsoft has been a tremendous supporter of our efforts, and their whole tool suite has been very useful and very popular with our customers. We’ve integrated our administration tools for Surveyor with SCCM, formally known as SMS, and that's the Microsoft administration console, and that's been extremely popular with our customers, and it makes the task of administering a very large Surveyor installation very easy.

Jerry Barber's Background

Jerry Barber is an expert in Web services architectures. He began his technology career at the University of Idaho, earning a BSEE and a BA in Math, and an MSEE degree. Following graduation, he wrote one of the first Basic interpreters for the Intel 8008 chip while working at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Barber has also earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and completed the Stanford Executive Program.

After completing his post-doctoral work at INRIA (France's national institute for research in computer sciences) he returned to MIT as a research scientist where he co-founded Gold Hill Computers, which adapted artificial intelligence applications to the then-new IBM PC. He was also a co-founder of the Object Management Group that defined the CORBA specification for interoperable enterprise applications. Barber later became a founding member of a second standards-setting consortium, the Digital Imaging Group.

Following his work at MIT, he joined Aldus Corporation as director of advanced products and then became CTO. When Aldus merged with Adobe, Jerry became director of technology integration and later became Adobe's senior director of core technologies. He also co-founded PhotoAccess Technologies, which evolved into an Internet-base. digital image-processing firm that was then acquired by PhotoWorks. There he served as vice president of engineering and IT.

Most recently, before joining Verdiem, Barber worked with DocuSign, developing the company's technology, infrastructure, and engineering capabilities to efficiently manage growth.

For more information on Verdiem, read Yi-Jian Ngo’s blog post, “Green Power Management."

Where Are They Now—Robosoft Revisited

Startup Superstars — Mon, 12 May 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Robosoft

BIDARD, FRANCE
http://www.interse.com

Developing Service Robots—For Transport, Cleaning, Healthcare Markets

A robot in every home—or a ‘robuter,’ as Robosoft calls them. Someday soon, this may become reality if Robosoft’s President and Founder Vincent Dupourqué gets his way. Since 1985, Robosoft has been providing advanced robotics solutions for transport, cleaning, security, healthcare, and research markets. The company is considered a European leader in service robotics, and is one of the first spin-offs of INRIA, the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control. ‘Robuters’ have applications in such areas as entertainment, education, culture, healthcare, assistance to the elderly and handicapped people, and more. And to bring these applications to life, Robosoft already integrates 80 percent of the software complexity in its robuBOX, a software module developed with Microsoft Robotics Studio.

By using Visual Studio .NET and the Microsoft Robotics Studio, Robosoft was able to create robuBOX in less than a year. RobuBOX is a complete set of hardware, software, and sensors that enable a range of robot controllers from performing simple, low-level functions to a sophisticated fleet of service robots. This is a hardware level abstraction allowing software applications to run on different platforms, just like the BIOS in early PCs.

According to Vincent Dupourqué, in the 1960s, robotics technology became a mainstay of manufacturing floors, and now it is coming of age in the services area. “Imagine robots cleaning floors in malls, transporting people in theme parks, or washing skyscraper windows and more. Our big challenge is to put our robotic engine inside every robot—and to sell our engines to the people making the robots."

And by robotic engine, the company means software—that is the main value, which is what led the company to Microsoft.

The Microsoft Connection?

In 2005, the company decided to use Microsoft tools—with the original idea to make roboticized PCs. Says Dupourqué, “We decided to switch from purely robotic tools to PC software tools and we chose Microsoft technology to do that.” To investigate Microsoft’s technology in this area, Dupourqué did a Google search on Microsoft Robotics, and a speech by Tandy Trower, now the General Manager of the Microsoft Robotics Group came up. He immediately emailed him to tell him what Robosoft was working on—that original email spawned a flurry of other emails and meetings with people in the UK and France. Once the Microsoft France IDEES program met with Dupourqué, they suggested that Robosoft become a beta tester on the first release of the Microsoft Robotics Studio.

Explains Dupourqué, “Before I had this tool, I had to spend too much time and money on software development kits. Now that I have this product available, I can focus on robotic software and develop the robots very quickly.”

At the RoboBusiness Conference in June 2006, Robosoft showed off its six-wheeled robuROC6 robot, capable of autonomous navigation across difficult terrain, which highlighted how a distributed architecture, built from its robuBOX robotics core, could be easily controlled via the Microsoft Robotics Studio runtime.

During the last two years Robosoft and Microsoft have focused primarily on technical exchanges—since the market for robotics is still small and in its infancy. Says Dupourqué, “We are building relationships for the future, and have been working with the development team in Redmond, using their software, giving them feedback, asking for improvements on the software development kits.”

Where are they now?

The company’s big achievement is its ability to make robots much faster, and less expensively, than ever before. Just last week, the firm delivered three huge robots (weighing in at more than five tons) for transporting people in a theme park in France, and it has also developed a robot that is now cleaning the glass Pyramid at the Louvre Museum. As another example, Orange, a major global network operator, is using Robosoft technology (the robuLAB equipped with a video camera) to give its subscribers a novel experience—remote visits to museums. The creation of this unique robotic experience was realized in one month using Microsoft Robotics Studio, which provided a high-end development environment that allows fast, reusable software development. Unlike virtual visits, this is a real visit to a museum over the Internet, from a simple web browser and remotely achieved via a robot acting as an individual’s personal guide.

At Microsoft’s Innovation Day in Brussels in late 2007, the company showed how its service robots could help elderly and handicapped people staying at home. In March 2008, it delivered the first units of a set of 16 robotized machines to the “City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution (ESPCI).”

To date, the company has developed nearly 500 robots for different applications. Its ultimate goal is to get its robot engine into every robot—and to commercially develop a ‘universal robot engine’ with Microsoft. Dupourqué is convinced that the Microsoft Robotics Studio will become a major product, and critical enabler technology.

For more information, visit Robosoft online.

CTO Interview—Rob Barbour, Skoots

Startup Superstars — Tue, 06 May 2008 06:15:00 GMT

Founded in 2005 by automotive and IT industry veterans, Skoots provides a unique, web-based service for auto dealers and their customers—all based on the Microsoft .NET Framework and other technologies, including Silverlight. Consumers can find the new or used vehicle they want, eNegotiate with a dealer in real time, and lock in a deal without having to ever leave their home or office.

Here is our conversation with Rob Barbour, CTO at Skoots.

Microsoft Startup Zone: Why and when did you first choose the Microsoft Platform?

Rob Barbour: That was actually one of the easiest decisions. With any startup, with any company of this nature, you have to choose technologies that are basically going to get you to market fast enough to capture your existing audience or an audience that you hope to capture. We chose everything Microsoft. It was .NET, SQL, IIS from the start. The real reason is basically bringing our product to market faster than we could have done with other technologies.

MSUZ: Can you quantify what advantage that decision gave you?

Barbour: We didn't do any development work on other technologies, so it's tough to quantify. However, I can tell you my personal experience over the years, it's 50 to 100 percent faster [using Microsoft] than doing it in with other technologies. What can be done, for example, in .NET would take you two or three times longer using other technologies. Without question—it’s much, much faster.

Just to give you an example, I’ve been working with Microsoft technologies since the 1980s. I started on Visual Basic when it was launched and with .NET at launch. Today, it’s a quantum leap how fast you can bring things to the consumer, to the desktop, to the web. It’s just amazing. So if you were to compare .NET up against something like PHP or Ruby—there’s no comparison. I can literally develop an application, a complete application that could run on any desktop in minutes.

MSUZ: So for the Skoots Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering, your LIVEoffer and Accelerator product, you used the .NET Framework, Microsoft Visual Studio, Windows Enterprise Server, SQL Server 2005, and Internet Information Server 6.0. Any one technology that was most critical to your business model?

Barbour: .NET was key—our product is based on it. But more importantly, is the scalability and the speed at which SQL 2005 has really enabled our company to do some amazing things on the back-end. It’s been an amazing tool to use. I mean, I’ve been through all the versions of SQL, and SQL 2005 is really a great platform to work on and develop on. It’s really enabled us to deliver the data faster and actually do anything we need to do on the back-end. SQL is far faster than using other databases.

As an example, if we want to display data (our application uses grids and things like that overall), we have a lot of flexibility with .NET. We can drop a grid in, populate it, display data, and have those done in minutes. It takes longer to really develop a rich user friendly interface, but being able to literally create something that displays data in a grid format, for example, within minutes, where else can you do that?

MSUZ: Can you explain how this is critical to your data model?

Barbour: It’s a combination of the front-end and the back-end. On the front end, we’re using ASP.NET and some grid components to display the data that is being brought in from the SQL back-end. On the back-end, there were hundreds of stored procedures that were written to actually generate the displays. This is the data that is then used by the grids in other technologies on the front end, which is part of the reason we are going to be using Silverlight. When Silverlight 2.0 is released we’ll have the ability to display the database information within the Silverlight application with ease, and with a rich user experience.

MSUZ: Can you elaborate on your use of Silverlight and how you think it will change the user experience?

Barbour: Since Silverlight 2.0 was just announced at the MIX conference, we’re going to gear everything toward that version. We think it’s an amazing interactive technology, and believe it will allow us to create some very unique ways for consumers, to not only view the data that we’ve already got on the back-end, but to a certain degree, to enable them to have some fun with the data we’re providing them. Silverlight will change how people interact with our Web site and what they’re able to do with it. Having already worked with Silverlight 1.0 in testing the waters, we’re just getting started with Silverlight 2.0, the beta release. In fact, we’re going to completely revamp the details page for a car—and that will really highlight Silverlight’s capabilities. Due to the fact that Silverlight is cross-platform, it will enable our application to work on a variety of desktops regardless of browser type. Eventually, we’ll revamp all areas of the consumer site so consumers have such a rich experience that they won’t want to go anywhere else to look for cars.

Other technologies we will use will include Server 2008, SQL 2008 and we’re already using Visual Studio 2008.

The bottom line with using these Microsoft technologies (.Net, SQL, Server 2003, etc.)—we wouldn’t have been able to bring the application to market as quickly if we chose to use other technologies. We’re truly looking forward to Silverlight 2.0 and to building an amazing and feature rich consumer experience for car buying.

Rob Barbour's Background

Rob Barbour has more than a decade of experience in the technology field—and has worked in a variety of environments, and in more than 52 countries worldwide. As CTO of Skoots, he oversees all current and future technology development work. Prior to joining Skoots, he worked for a variety of start-ups in executive roles, honing his entrepreneurial and creative skills. In 2002, he formed his first company and still runs it today. Before that, he leveraged his knowledge of Banyan and Microsoft, and began consulting independently, and within various organizations. He began his career in the networking industry, with an interest in Banyan, which at the time was one of the largest server systems. He worked in that environment for several years and eventually led several of the teams he was part of. His focus shifted to Microsoft technologies as the use of Banyan technologies began to subside. He also began to focus on programming and acquiring domain names. Many years ago, he had the vision to see the value in domains and currently owns an extremely large portfolio of domain names and associated Web sites.

For more information on Skoots, read the success story, “Skoots Drives Sales to Online Auto Dealers."

Where Are They Now—K2 Revisited

Startup Superstars — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:00:00 GMT

REDMOND, WASHINGTON
www.k2.com

K2 Snags 1,500 Customers in 42 Countries—20 percent of the Fortune 100

K2 (a division of SourceCode Technology Holdings, Inc.) says it is changing the way people use software. In 1997, it set out to build a better workflow product, and make it applicable to just about any type of industry. Today, it is doing that and more by offering a platform for building process-driven applications that improve business efficiency for all kinds of organizations. It can be set up to automate and manage business processes—such as document approval or inventory tracking—or pull together business processes, people, services, information and systems into a single application that helps drive business. You can even use it like building blocks to assemble new applications. In this way, K2 eliminates the complexity of traditional software development. It’s easy to use, visual tools enable business people and technical people to collaborate and assemble process-driven applications. The company’s flagship product is K2 [blackpearl]—a business process management tool for the enterprise.

The Microsoft Connection?

According to Adriaan Van Wyk, CEO of K2, “We set out more than seven years ago to build software on the Microsoft platform that would help people be more productive working in process automated environments. As we saw Microsoft innovate with the introduction of Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server and Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) as a platform, and saw the enhancements in Office and the Office system, it created so many more opportunities for us as an organization, and allowed us to expand our vision of what we could do with customers. It extended beyond the Office System to include the Microsoft BizTalk Server to address the system-to-system and EAI space. If I look at the core platform itself, the .NET platform, Visual Studio, and new technologies like Silverlight, it certainly has changed the way we look at our own software and capabilities and the problems that we solve for our customers.”

Having worked with the Emerging Business Team since 2004, Van Wyk says, “We’ve had a great working relationship with just about all aspects of Microsoft—from the field organization, to technical assistance to early engagements with product teams.”

Specifically, the company has worked with the Connected System Division, Developer Evangelism, and the Office team. Explains Van Wyk, “This has given us the insight, and empowered us to innovate with them, and enabled us to attach to their innovation cycles. That has probably been one of the key success factors of the relationship and of our making the decision to back our entire business on the Microsoft platform—Microsoft has allowed us to work with them, and be successful with them.”

The original Microsoft connection came when K2 was working with another Microsoft customer—it had only a handful of customers at that time. Once Microsoft saw the technology, Van Wyk says they were quick to help them achieve success. Recalls Van Wyk, “They wrote up our story and published it to their internal knowledge base where other divisions within Microsoft became aware of our solution, and invited us to engage with their customers as well.”

“If you look at where we were just five years ago, it is a phenomenal success story of how Microsoft empowered a company like ours to be part of their ecosystem and achieve success,” says Van Wyk.

Where are they now?

The company has grown from three customers and a few employees back in 2000 to 300 employees and 1,500 customers in 42 countries worldwide. Today, the company has about 20 percent of the Fortune 100 as customers including big-name companies such as BMW, Pfizer, Wells Fargo, Allianz, Accenture, and Microsoft. K2 is also profitable and growing about 50 percent year-over-year by revenue. As a Global ISV and Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, K2 has won a number of Microsoft awards including the Information Worker Solutions Technology Partner of the Year in 2006. As it looks to the future, it continues to leverage Microsoft technologies, such as SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, together with the next-generation of server technologies such as Oslo. On its front office, it will be making investments in the Office System and in Silverlight, as well as the Unified Communications products. Says Van Wyk, “We plan to broaden our reach with customers and take most of our products and our offerings and offer them in a service-oriented way to allow a new generation of customers to get the benefits as well. There’s a lot of work happening between us and Microsoft to enable that. The whole software plus services (S+S) model is very key for us, and we’re going commercial with it in the next 12 months.”

For more information, visit K2 online.

CTO Interview – Jim Cooley, Co-Founder and CTO, Zumobi

Startup Superstars — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:08:45 GMT

Zoom zoom—on your Windows Mobile phone of course. That’s what you can now do with the Zumobi application. Founded in 2006, Zumobi has developed an entirely new way to experience the web-based content on your phone. Its patented Zooming User Interface was initially developed by the Microsoft Research lab, incubated as part of Microsoft IP Ventures, and then spun out as a startup company focused on mobile device content. In mid-December, the company launched the beta version of its award-winning Zooming User Interface and mobile widget platform. It also debuted content from more than 75 mobile widgets or Tiles, including many from Zumobi Beta partners such as Amazon.com, MTV Networks, The Associated Press, AccuWeather.com, Traffic.com, FlightStats.com and OTOlabs, who developed Tiles for Vail Resorts and Fox Television’s “Family Guy."

Here’s our conversation with Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer Jim Cooley.

Microsoft Startup Zone: We understand that your company was the result of more than three years of development by experts in human-computer interaction and data visualization, but why did you first choose the Microsoft platform?

Jim Cooley: In our case, we already had some technology we licensed from Microsoft that was on the Microsoft platform. So I was looking at it from the start, definitely in devices. The Microsoft platform has a lot of advantages—such as the tools, and the authoring and debugging process over J2ME and other platforms. Years ago, I used to work in the developer tools division at Microsoft so had experience and familiarity with Microsoft.

MSUZ: What one MSFT technology is most critical to your business model/success, and why?

Cooley: I’d say the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework. One of the key advantages for us was that the compact framework was so close to the .NET Framework for the desktop that we could run our same code on both the device and the desktop. This allowed us to solve probably 80 to 90 percent of the problems in the desktop environment with richer debugging tools and faster processors. And that experience translated very well to devices.

For us, definitely .NET is huge. The developer tools themselves, such as Visual Studio were fantastic too. It’s much better than Eclipse or any of the other debugging environments.

MSUZ: In what way was Visual Studio better, can you elaborate?

Cooley: It was easier to use and set up, and more reliable. A lot of other solutions, especially the open source ones, are really good at one or two things, and then for other things they are just average. But Visual Studio products seem to be really good ALL across the board.

MSUZ: What have been the key benefits of using Microsoft technologies?

Cooley: It definitely helped us get to market faster. I mean, I didn’t do both approaches, so I can’t say how much faster, but my gut feel is that we probably saved at least three months on the development cycle.

MSUZ: What Microsoft technologies will you support/want to integrate/use in the future, and why?

Cooley: We plan to look at Silverlight. Rendering is really core to our user interface and our experience, so we’re always looking at high-performance rendering. Of course, Direct X and Direct Show, both of those are really interesting technologies to us as well. But Silverlight is interesting because of its high-end rendering engine and scripting platform that is similar to Flash.

MSUZ: If you had to do it over again now, would you still pick Microsoft as a platform for you solution?

Cooley: That’s a tough question. I would definitely include it in the family. Unfortunately, in the mobile marketplace J2ME has broader reach. And so we probably would have started first on J2ME, but we’d definitely do Windows Mobile. We’ve found also with Windows Mobile that it’s more consistent across operating system versions and handsets. With J2ME, there are probably seven or eight primary variants based on OEMs. From that, each phone model is different and has to go through a different debugging cycle.

With Windows Mobile, we wrote for Compact Framework 1.1, that works on Compact Framework 2.0, it works on Windows Mobile 5.0 and it works on Windows Mobile 6.0. So that was just really amazing. Of course there are some minor differences, but it’s nowhere near the same issue.

MSUZ: Anything you’d like to see Microsoft do that we are not doing?

Cooley: We understand that Microsoft is stopping support for Visual J#. We think that’s unfortunate since it is so close to Java, that it would be theoretically possible to write in J# for Windows Mobile and J2ME and use the same code base. That would help porting immensely.

Jim Cooley's Background

Prior to joining Zumobi, Cooley was a member of the Microsoft Intellectual Property Ventures team, where he evaluated Microsoft technologies and helped start-up companies deploy them. He spent more than 11 years in a variety of senior technical roles at Microsoft, most recently as Product Unit Manager in the Windows New Business and Products Group. He held technical leadership roles in many embedded and media projects including Windows CE 1.0, the Digital Memory Project and Services for Smart Personal Object (SPOT) devices. Prior to joining Microsoft, Cooley held senior technical positions at Aldus, Microrim and the Walt Disney Internet Group.

For more information, read the success story: "Zumobi ‘Zooms’ In On Mobile Experiences."