Second half 2010 a (Google) Wave for IT companies? »

2010 has been an interesting year so far. Recession can still be felt, although some companies - like my own - seem to thrive during this period. Traditional sectors seem to be caught by the distress much worse, which will cause them to cut back personnel and expenses. Next to that, they seem to increase spending on IT for more flexibility and efficiency.

The IT companies are on a wave right now, but is this good or not? Having to increase the amount of resources will cause investments to be made, while clients knocking at the door will take larger terms to pay the goods. This will bring a lot of IT companies to the ever growing risk of cashflow shortage. Unless you’ve seen the bad times before, chances are young entrepreneurs may not have the reserves and will be caught in a bad spot.

It will be interesting to see how smaller IT companies will cope with this. You can have a healthy company with loads of clients, but when you don’t have cashflow you’re at the mercy of the banks or the tax office. Cashflow shortage is one of the biggest threats of every enterprise. But what will happen to the companies expecting their software? They will suffer yet another loss when the IT company goes broke and will set back their efficiency some months or years. Still, most companies will opt for a slower payment.

Fact is, most clients see their IT companies as a supplies, which in most cases they are. But when their core business processes are automated by that company they will need those experience and skills to survive, whether they will like it or not. When your company is in the last category, better treat your IT company as a partner instead of a supplier. A body can’t move (easily) without its legs and cannot make new things without its arms. IT has become just in the last 10 years.

So what will it be for the second half of 2010? Will it be like riding on a wave, or will it be like Google Wave? I actually think IT companies can choose themselves. There is no shortage of work for the small to midsized ISV’s and when you’re not on the cowmarket (putting peope at the client’s office and expecting money for that, regardless of result) you should be good. It now comes down to the managerial skills of the often young(er) entrepreneurs.

It will be interesting to see who’s going to ride the wave… and who will be under it.

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Who am I? »

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Partner ships »

A partnership is easy to setup; just grab a phone, call the company which gives out the partnership, sign an agreement and off you go. Now that’s the easy part.

A good partnership sees both companies which are part of it investing time and effort into the product and partnership itself. Some people might see reselling as retail business, but the key to success lies in applying the product within your projects and benefit from it. Otherwise, you can just as easy give up the partnership right away.

Yesterday, we signed our 4th - and final - product partnership with Forward Search. Already being a partner with Umbraco, EPiServer and EPM Live this search tool can add something extra to all these products. Also, search will become more and more important in the coming years when data is ever expanding and the tools to find the information becoming more and more simplistic. At least, from an end-user’s perspective.

Having the right products in place - through partnerships - to provide our clients with a broad range of standard solutions gives us the flexibility to focus on the end solution. Each product has a basic setup, but each product also needs to be installed, configured and implemented before it can be used. We won’t focus on the basics anymore; somebody, somewhere has already done this for us and will continue to improve his product. Using shared benefits we make sure both companies focus on what they do best.

I have become a firm believer of partnerships and live them to the fullest when it comes to integrating them within our software solutions. It only works though, when the partner ships the product and starts his first sale. That is the only way to get things going, because until then, the partnership remains on paper only.

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Software Development 2.0 »

Being a software entrepreneur for over 10 years now, I have seen the development landscape change a lot. Ofcourse, the 10 years before that period have changed a lot as well, but we’re seeing a different change coming on. Where the previous era of software development focussed on getting to grips with the latest tools, frameworks and basically just keeping pace, the next decade will not only change development, but also developers.

My company Arlanet is in the Microsoft .NET business since the beginning of 2002. A major leap for software development - building on a framework instead of compiling on the lower layer - developers were finally getting some support in their building process. From then on, multiple versions of Visual Studio were developed and the 2010 version and .NET Framework 4.0 prove this way of developing software has stood the test of time. Until now.

With so much going on in the ‘social arena’, a good part of the developers now use an Apple. Heck, they’re using iPhones and iPods as well, but still love to develop on Microsoft. Mobile will become more and more integrated with business software that runs on Microsoft and more and more mobile is used on Apple. It will be interesting to see how these companies will integrate on each other, as Apple won’t take over the business software and Microsoft can’t get their mobile platform as dominant as their desktop variant.

Then there’s the developer’s community. Internet-minded techies go for the Mac, definitly. They try to keep their hands off the Microsoft crap (as they call it) and go for CSS, HTML5, jQuery or whatever is hot. They are hardcore developers as well, just not in the sense we know them - compiling code and reading the Daily WTF where poor pieces of code are being laughed about. However, these developers are both getting more and more depended upon each other.

The coming years will see expertises arise within the developers community that were subtasks before now. The internet - and developing for it - has become so damn complicated that professionals are needed at a much deeper level. Nerds will blend with former-creatives-turned-techies. No longer an application will belong to one developer, otherwise it won’t run on a certain version of Internet Explorer. The techie needs a developer to implement on his ideas. Software companies with new strategies and services will arise on the scene. Old ones get to become small IBM’s, converting on their own legacy.

And the entrepreneur? He will align his company, regardless of change, following innovation and his guts. My guts tell me to change now.

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"Excellence is the unlimited ability to improve the quality of what you have to offer."

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Converting products into solutions »

Having a great product is not enough anymore. All the products my company sells - umbraco, episerver and epm live - all have great features that most of the time fits to the requested business needs. Then why don’t we sell 100% since it’s that good?

Today’s businesses don’t expect to figure out working with a product anymore. They expect you to figure out how it works for them. Fair enough. This has become a result of personalization on the web and the increasing customer demands for flexibility. It also imposes an interesting question for the salespeople: do I sell the product old-school or should I become a business analyst?

I have always sold my products being a business analyst and love figuring out the right solutions. Most don’t call me sales, although I am responsible for bringing in most of the sales. Result is that most of our sales processes take up much longer, but in the end the client relationship is bound to go further for a long time. This long-term sales strategy takes up a lot of effort as well.

You know the biggest compliment I get from clients? Telling me I sold them nothing. I only got approved to invoice them on delivering the right solution.

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