Pimpin’ ain’t easy

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about viral applications like del.icio.us vs. the enterprise application market. Which direction does one take when confronted with some basic dilemmas of a startup? I would argue that the cost of creating and releasing an application focused on the enterprise market carries more risk though it may also have a commensurate reward. Even though the unprecedented access to skilled world labor markets presents a compelling opportunity to absorb less risk, the time required to come to market with an enterprise application is far greater than that of its big city cousin. Couple today’s requirements for seamless interoperability with broad platform support and you’ve got a QA nightmare on your hands when trying to develop applications that run in the data center. The Web 2.0 world of social networking and search can’t be bothered with such development and release roadblocks.

Enterprise apps can’t be in “beta forever” like the Web 2.0 applications of today. Technorati seems like they should be in beta though they are not. How long was Gmail in beta? Google is known for keeping something pre-GA for a long as they need. But, the engineering effort alone to get to beta phase for enterprise applications can be very expensive, especially for a cash strapped start-up. Then that leads me to think about the blokes from Skylook. These guys from Australia develop a plug-in to Outlook that integrates with the Skype API. These full-featured client plug-in applications relate far more to their Web 2.0 cousins than do those applications meant for utility and enterprise computing. Plug-ins require less engineering effort since they’re typically focused on being able to plug-into a limited set of applications and technologies. With Skylook, they only have one application to be worried about — Outlook. Their business is based upon Skype so they only have one API on that end to keep up with. But I don’t see plug-in developers making a huge impact on the world at large.

Pimpin’ ain’t easy. Especially when you’ve set your sights high and you’re making an attempt at big pimpin’. Alright, I’ve whined long enough about how much more effort and risk are required to sassify big businesses. I’m not really considering putting something out geared for the Web 2.0 world for a simple reason — I’m not in love with it. It doesn’t keep me up at night and consume my thoughts whilst sitting idle at a stop light. But data storage and information lifecycle management gets me randy. (That might be the geekiest thing I’ve thought all day.) I’m consumed by the thought of data having a beginning, middle, and an end.

But it’s not as simple as that. I’m further intrigued by the macro relationship of the lifecyle of information to the physical storage infrastructure on which it resides. It’s data storage existentialism. Humans have a variable lifecycle compared to other humans, but in the bigger picture, just accept for the moment that you can only discretely affect the course of this lifecycle. A human’s habitat and environment take into consideration the stage of the lifecycle and often times will evolve appropriately. That doesn’t really happen in today’s disconnected data center. The environment for data rarely evolves just because the information is no longer beneficial. Why? Because it’s not overly clear to anyone, especially those responsible for the environment, that the habitat can and should change accordingly.

There are quite a few companies out there trying to solve this problem, but their attempt is in such a monolithic fashion that it ends up competing with other better-suited remedies. It’s as if they’ve found what they consider to be the miracle drug that is the end-all-be-all, but you can’t compete with Tylenol on certain levels.

Or then on the other hand, you’ll find the companies that are under the mistaken notion that the entire problem of information lifecycle management falls squarely in their ballpark. (I hate sports analogies, so I’ll stop right there. You get the picture.) Mark-a-tecture in practice requires that companies focus their spin relative to what they do. I don’t blame them necessarily, but I don’t want to present myself as the end-all-be-all. I just want to be the necessary cog that’s required to make the information lifecyle wheel turn more efficiently.

It’s not just about efficiency today though. I want to build a better mouse trap that also keeps you from getting into trouble with the various government regulations that dictate how you manage your mice. More on the mice later…