BI
I spent an hour or so browsing the QlikTech S-1 and thought I’d share some observations. (See here for my prior post on the company.) * The company has achieved good scale (2009 revenues of $157M) but growth has been decelerating from 82% in 2007 to 47% in 2008
Open Source
The other day I noticed a taxonomy used on one of the NoSQL Database blogs that went like this: Types of NoSQL systems * Core NoSQL Systems * Wide column stores * Document stores * Key-value / tuple stores * Eventually consistent key-value stores * Graph databases * Soft NoSQL Systems (not the original intention ...) * Object
Strategy
As I sit here at Palantir's Govcon 5 conference at the lavish Ritz Carlton in Tyson's Corner (Virgina), I can't help but think about the recent "fit or fat" startup debate that hit the blogosphere a few weeks back. The debate started
Thanks to two major trends -- DBMS specialization and the NoSQL movement -- the database management systems space is generating more interest and more innovation than any time I can remember since the 1980s. Ever since around 1990, when the relational database management system (RDBMS) became firmly established, IT has played DBMSroulette:
Marketing
I've spent my career competing, for the most part successfully, against companies from 10 to 1,000 times bigger than my own. Thus, over the years, I've developed some rules that can help maximize your odds of success when competing against giants. * Concentrate force. The easiest
Management
The conventional Silicon Valley / venture capital (VC) wisdom is that startups should not bet on first-time managers in just about any position, but particularly at the executive team level. It's best captured by the statement: a high-growth startup is not the place to learn how to
Adam Smith's invisible hand never rests. Just five years ago, the database market looked like a static, three-player $10B/year oligopoly where the primary forces were inertia and profit-taking. Today, we have two major forces disrupting the comfortable stasis that has developed over the past 30
I'm happy to report that Kellblog was featured prominently in a story yesterday on Business Insider entitled How To Make An Awesome Corporate Blog. I provided the first tip: throw "corporate" out the window. That's because,definitionally, I don't think there are
As I have discussed a few times in the past, I want to rename the Mark Logic CEO Blog in order to accomplish a few goals: * Get a shorter, pithier name that will be easier for people to write and talk about * Get a more normal, blog-like name that
In creating my presentation for this past December's Mark Logic 2010 Digital Publishing Summit, I had a "creative moment" when I made a slide that made me think: wow, perhaps I'm onto something here. The slide was a list of six things that publishers
Marketing
On the face of it, Benihana is a pretty simple restaurant which ought to mean just one thing in the mind of its customers: teppanyaki, the form of tableside cooking/entertainment for which they are famous. I like the notion of businesses owning one word in the mind of the
Marketing
As previously covered, email archiving vendor ZL Technologies of San Jose, California sued leading IT market researcher Gartner for $132M earlier this year for its treatment in one of Gartner's vaunted magic quadrants. On November 4th, the case was dismissed, but have no worries. Armed with a seemingly
