“Is this Silicon Valley or Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?

They are part of a new wave of highly specialized technology — both software and hardware — built by and for Web titans like Facebook, Yahoo and Google to help them break data into bite-size chunks, and present their Web pages as quickly and cheaply as possible, even while grappling with increasing volumes of data. Facebook, for example, created Cassandra to store and search through all the messages in people’s in-boxes.” – Ashlee Vance, “Big Web Operations Turn to Tiny Chips”

If you study the French Revolution, the odds are good that at some point a professor or author will invoke the pendulum metaphor. The aptness is clear, as history adequately demonstrates a tendency for human events to swing back and forth from one extreme to another. Which is precisely what we’re seeing in technology today, as we swing from general purpose back towards specialization.

From the mainframe’s heyday to the Unix wars’ fragmentation to the ascension and dominance of Windows, technology has periodically vacillated between extremes of general purpose computing infrastructure to more specialized hardware and software combinations. As ever, what is old will be new again.

What’s new these days, then, is the old preference for specialization. Just a few years ago, application development was a simple proposition. You picked an operating system – general purpose, of course – a relational database (duh), a programming language, middleware to match and you got to work. It may yet be that we come to remember those with wistfulness, a nostalgic remembrance of simpler times.

Even the most basic of decisions today is fraught with the paradox of choice. Consider the long time standard LAMP stack. The explosion of options for persisting data has been well documented (coverage): the time when storing data meant choosing which relational database you wanted are, for all intents and purposes, over. Relational databases like MySQL remain a popular choice – and absolutely the most popular for the backing of existing applications – but it is no longer the only choice. General purpose operating systems like Linux remain the dominant deployment option, but that preeminence in increasingly threatened by cloud platforms which abstract the operating environment and appliances which make it irrelevant. Programming language fragmentation meanwhile, has been well underway for decades, so there’s nothing new there.

But what about Apache? Surely the venerable web server remains the most popular platform for deploying web applications? Well, yes, it is. Here are Netcraft’s numbers for overall web server share.

And yet there are signs that Apache’s dominance is challenged for what Netcraft terms “top sites.” See the following:

Some will undoubtedly argue that Netcraft’s numbers are imperfect, and they will be right. But the fact is that developers are increasingly weighing the merits of Apache versus new, built-for-purpose alternatives such as nginx, Node.js (coverage) or Tornado. Ryan Dahl’s presentation on Node examines some of the potential limitations of the Apache thread-per-connection model versus event-loop based alternatives, and some very bright developers are listening. The success of Node et al doesn’t mean that Apache isn’t still the most popular choice, of course: it simply means, in what is becoming a familiar refrain, it’s no longer the only choice.

Because there are an ever growing library of more specialized alternatives available.

Nor is the specialization bug merely infecting the software world. As Ashlee’s piece documents, there are more and more hardware startups popping up. Their raison d’etre, almost universally, is that current hardware models are not ideally suited to scale out workloads. Besides the SeaMicro’s and Schooner’s of the world, there is evidence that firms like Google are acquiring ARM expertise with the intent of leveraging it for specialized servers. Microsoft is reportedly exploring similar hardware, as is Dell.

Doubtless many of these efforts are better classified as experiments than actual commitments to specialized hardware. And the marginal benefits of the specialized hardware, in many cases, may not outweight the costs, whether those lie in design and production or lengthened development and deployment cycles. But as we see in software with projects like Facebook’s compiled PHP, HipHop (coverage), if the scale is sufficiently large even incremental gains in power, performance or both can be financially material.

Purveyors of specialized hardware are quick to point out that the benefits may extend beyond mere performance and power gains, however significantly differentiated it may be in either. Custom-fitting software to hardware can introduce benefits that are either impossible to achieve on general purpose infrastructure, or not economically feasible. Certainly this was one of the guiding principles behind the Sun Fishworks project (coverage), which stands for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware…works). Presumably new owner Oracle agrees, given the depth of their commitments to the appliance form factor in Exadata.

How all of this plays out in a market context is yet to be determined. Clearly, developers are actively embracing the shift back towards specialization, but the traction for specialized hardware either on a stand alone or appliance basis is still small relative to the current market size. As I told Schooner’s Dr. John Busch when we spoke a week or two ago, various players have tried to push appliances as a mainstream server option in the past: all have failed. Outside of categories like networking, security and storage – each quite large, to be sure – specialized hardware has been a difficult sell.

What might be different this time around is that on a macro basis, the market is showing an increased appetite for specialization at every level. Combine that with a driving need to maximize performance while minimizing the expense, both in power and datacenter floor space, and the opportunities may be there where they traditionally have not been.

As to when the pendulum will shift back towards general purpose, all I can tell you is that it will at some point. The inevitable result of an explosion of choice is a reactionary market shift away from it. All this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

I’m a bit late with these notices, and given the profile of the developers in question not to mention the respect that I have for both, the positions could well be filled already, but just in case I wanted to note that their respective firms are hiring.

Adrian Holovaty (EveryBlock) Position: Python Screen Scraper (Chicago)

If you’re not familiar with EveryBlock, and you live in one of the supported cities (Chicago, New York or San Francisco) I suggest giving it a look. It’s a natural extension of the work original done at Chicagocrime.org, and thus guaranteed to be interesting work. Consuming data of all kinds – be they restaurant reviews, crime statistics, even liquor license requests – EveryBlock that repurposes this through a form og geospatial normalization, thus making it usable. Cool stuff.

Anyway, Adrian’s looking for someone with the following skillset:

• Mastery of screen-scraping
• Experience programming in Python
• Experience with geographic data

If you feel like you fit that bill, jump over here and throw your name into the ring. Given my massively failed efforts with Adrian’s templatemaker framework this past summer – not knowing Python didn’t help much – I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified, but you might be

Havoc Pennington (LiTL) Position: Multiple (Boston)

You may know Havoc from his time at Red Hat, or from his contributions to the GNOME community, but I’m most interested in his vision of the Online Desktop. Probably because it’s one that I strongly agree with.

Whether or not it’s related to his current work at LiTL is undetermined at this point because the firm is mostly stealth, but there are some parallels in the little that is public about the firm:

LiTL is a well funded startup developing a consumer product that involves hardware, software, and online services. We’re looking for talented folks to help us create our iconic first product (and many products to come).

Anyway, irrespective of whether it’s related to the Online Desktop idea, it sounds like cool work. And hell, it’s in Back Bay, which is within an easy walk of one of the finer places on this planet.

If you’re game, the LiTL folks are looking for a Lead Server Dev, a Senior UI Dev, Release and Quality Engineer, and a Software Interaction Designer. Details are available here.

When my parents were first married, my mother was not quite the accomplished chef that she is these days. Living in a trailer near Fort Benning, where my father was preparing to be shipped overseas, my mother had a simple ambition: prepare a nice Thanksgiving meal for the two of them. Inexperienced as she was at the time, she sought assistance the traditional way – by asking her own mother for her turkey and stuffing recipe. Recipe acquired, she was off to the races and gamely set to work.

Unfortunately, one important and salient detail had somehow been lost in the translation. Unbeknownst to my mother, the recipe was for a turkey twice as large as the one she’d bought for herself and my father. Cramming the stuffing for an 8 pound bird into a 4 pound bird could not have been easy, but she managed it. Somehow. Unfortunately, the tragically overstuffed bird then proceeded to explode while in the oven, at once making the Thanksgiving meal somewhat problematic and providing future generations of O’Grady’s – i.e. my brother and I – with an amusing anecdote to mitigate our own culinary failures (ask me about the cilantro pesto sometime).

Why bring this up now? Well, I’ll confess that it’s in part an effort to nudge my Dad into relating a more detailed version of said story to his own audience. If they’re going to tell stories about me, I figure Mom’s fair game. But it’s also because the analogy is quite appropriate. When it comes to analyst conferences, we’re the turkey.

Like just about every other vendor analyst conference I’ve been to, Sun’s recent event featured a schedule that began at the unholy hour of 7:30 AM and continued through dinner. Not a second was spared in the drive to pack our brains full of everything we could possibly want to know about Sun’s various businesses, limited mental capacity be damned; even lunch was a working affair. Given the breadth of material that Sun or any other vendor has to – or perhaps more accurately, wants to – cover in what may be their only face to face interaction with some of the folks in the room in a given calendar year, I can’t really blame them for the forced march aspect to the scheduling. But I know how the turkey feels.

That grumbling preamble aside, because my scheduling issues probably aren’t your number one concern in life, what was important or interesting from Sun’s event? Many things, some of which I’ve written about previously and some of which will be written about in future. For now, I’d just like to talk about the underlying – and potentially interesting – theme to the show and the conversations I had there.

That theme was actually well in evidence before the show began, as evidenced by posts such as this one. Or maybe even earlier than that, with programs like this one. Or maybe even earlier than…actually, it’s not important. The point is made in any case; Sun’s interested enough in the market represented by Automattic that its CEO felt compelled to issue a public apology and mea culpa. That’s interesting. What’s more interesting is how pervasive the interest in serving new markets is; it’s not limited to just software or just x64 servers – it’s everybody. Even the services and storage folks were busy contemplating just how they might be relevant to the Automattics of the world.

That, in my experience working with some of the largest technology vendors on the planet, is rare. I’m not convinced that IBM, Oracle, and SAP would pick up the phone if Don or Matt called them. Sun’s got its own problems picking up the phone, but it clearly cares about those problems. The big folks? Not so much.

Does that matter? Well, if you were to judge solely by the financials, you probably conclude that it does not. Sun, after all, was just in the black. IBM and Oracle, on the other hand, were comfortably profitable. But you’re smarter than that, and you appreciate the lag on business model returns, so you’re aware that that’s obviously a superficial way of looking at the issue.

So what about economic opportunity? Well, setting aside the fact that most businesses in the world are in fact small businesses, the answer is clearly yes. Regardless of whether you personally agreed with the valuation – and I’m beginning to think it wasn’t a bad idea, the $1.6B Google shelled out for YouTube was in fact real money. Or stock. There is, then, wealth creation and accumulation, as Google itself proves every time it reports its absurd earnings. Yes, there are ten, one hundred, maybe even a thousand flameouts for every YouTube, but it’s not reasonable – I think – to argue that the startup market is devoid of opportunity. More to the point, these markets can themselves themselves have ripple effects back into the more staid, traditional markets. Or did you think that everyone wants to copy Google’s scale-out architecture for the fun of it?

Important as this market is, however, its pretty much blank spot when it comes to sales for IBM, Oracle, SAP, and yes, Sun. And that, to my way of thinking, is a problem – a fairly significant one. Here’s how I put it a week ago:

Consider the problem that faces virtually every major software infrastructure vendor in existence at the moment. The startups during the bubble – and I should know, as we worked with many of them – were almost universally deploying on top of quote unquote “enterprise” technologies on the advice of their VC advisors: EMC storage, Solaris for the OS, Oracle for the DB, and so on.

Today, the vast majority of the startups we speak with are running on one LAMP flavor or another, and occasionally Microsoft a la a MySpace. Assuming for the sake of argument that the folks who bought IBM and Oracle in the past will stick with that, but startups eschew those technologies in favor of free and open source alternatives, where does that leave us? The mature, sizable and fairly static market goes to the old guys, while the new and growing market goes to the new guys. Obviously it’s not all that simple, but that’s the worry – or should be – for most of the major software vendors on the planet. While their installed base has and will continue to make them money, it will not give them the growth that Wall Street tends to demand; only access to greenfield, growing markets can do that. And to date, those markets have traditionally been won by open source technologies.

So the trend, the underlying theme of the analyst conference for me, then, was this: Sun appreciates the magnitude of both the problem and the opportunity presented by new markets (i.e. not the Bank of Americas or Verizons of the world). Probably to a degree that few outside of Microsoft do. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that, as Sun’s discovering, knowing of the problem and fixing it are two different things. They’ve got the seemingly hardest part out of the way, as they’re now manufacturing products that are actually applicable to the startups of the world, but they may find that the last mile to these customers is the worst one. I’ve complained previously about their store, which is being revamped as we speak, but the challenges go far deeper. Sun’s organizational processes are designed around their traditional customer base – very large enterprises – and as a result, are unsurprisingly a significant pain point for downmarket customers. Further, selling downmarket – particularly if they take a more 1:1 role with their customers as they should – will inevitably have impacts on their relationships with their VARs. And while they’re not likely to be competing heavily with their traditional rivals for customers like Automattic, they will be seeing a lot of Amazon and the whitebox providers. They may even need to add bodies to attack the problem, as most of Sun’s DNA is heavily enterprise oriented.

To make matters even more challenging, they’ll have to make this adjustment on the fly without sacrificing or jeopardizing their existing customer base, not to mention their profitability. As I put it to a couple of folks, like every other large technology provider that’s publicly held, Sun’s a lot like the Red Sox (or, if you’ve fallen out of the light, the Yankees) – they can’t afford to take a year or two off to refit and retool. Rebuilding, as it were, is not an option.

But what’s important, and what I took away from Sun’s analyst event, is that they’re trying. And a couple of years from now, when the importance of these markets becomes as apparent as the effort that’s required to service them, I think they’ll be happy they did.

Disclaimer: Sun is a RedMonk client, and hotel was comped for the show. Travel was not.

So Matt says says that Sun isn’t relevant to startups, citing issues with the recently launched Startup Essentials program. To their credit, both Curtis and Jonathan took the entry seriously, quickly and sincerely apologizing for this particular failure.

From his opening, it’s apparent that Matt thinks – despite his frustration – that Sun could be relevant to startups. And I concur. The problem here isn’t having interesting products: they’ve got some of those, which is good, because that’s the hard part. The real issues are a.) how to increase awareness of them, and b.) how to reduce the purchasing friction.

I actually think Sun is doing an adequate job with the first part. Yes, there are still a host of developers that don’t know that Sun even sells x86 gear, let alone that it’s probably in their price range, but a.) Rome wasn’t built in a day and b.) things like Try and Buy at least demonstrate the willingness to be creative. It’s the second part, in Matt’s experience – and mine – that’s the issue.

Here’s my own history with Startup Essentials (we qualified for the program by a matter of weeks, as we turned four December 2nd):

• November 3rd: Heard about Startup Essentials at Startup Camp, applied.
• November 8th: Received an email update saying the following:
  

  Thank you for your interest in the Sun Startup Essentials Program.

  Due to the volume of interest in this exciting new program, it is taking us longer than expected to review your application. We will let you know your status within the next few days — thanks for your patience.

• November 23rd: We’re approved for the program, and receive an email containing an agreement number and link w/ password to the Sun store. The Startup Essentials portion of the site is rather primitive compared to the regular Sun store.
• November 23rd – last week: Receive 4 to 6 voicemails (I’ve been traveling quite a bit the last few months) from Sun representatives wanting to follow up on my entry to the program.
• January 20th: Retrieve email, click through to the link, put an Opteron workstation in my cart, attempt to checkout. Checkout fails, as I can’t login. Attempt to reset password for my email address. Unknown to me, I’ve created four separate logins, which is exceedingly rare (can’t think of another site where I’ve done this). While attempting to login, I remember why I have so many login IDs: I’ve got the wrong password, but the reminder feature has some serious latency to it.
• January 21st: Try to login in again, still timing out.
• January 22nd: First login fails with an error. Try a second login id – success. Add Opteron workstation (2.2 Ghz, dual core Opteron, 1 GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro FX 560, 80 GB hard drive @ $1250, plus another 2 GB RAM) back to cart. Checkout successfully.
• January 23rd:
  • 7:42 AM ET:Receive an email from a Sun representative asking for my Sun Startup Essentials number. Not sure why that isn’t part of the ordering process.
  • 7:45 AM: Search through email for the number, email it over.
  • 7:55 AM: Receive a thank you email, which brings us up to present.

There are likely many conclusions and questions to be drawn from these and other experiences with Sun’s program – like how many customers would be patient enough to see this process through? For my part I see one very obvious conclusion, and one more complicated question.

The simple part is something I’ve written about before, and talked to Sun about, actually. Here’s what I said last month:

Know how to separate the wheat from the chaff:
Chaff being, in this case, very small startups with minimal purchase requirements. RedMonk, as an example, qualifies as chaff: I signed up for Sun’s Startup Essentials (we just made the cut, as I applied a month before we turned four) so that I could purchase a box or two at a discounted rate if I need them. No more than that. Having a salesperson call me for that is a waste of everyone’s time. Courting the Joyent guys, on the other hand, is probably a good idea seeing as they (want to) buy a lot more hardware than we do. The point is that all startups aren’t created equal, and you shouldn’t treat them that way. Court them all, but differentiate wherever possible.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this: the folks that were wasting time calling me should instead have been burning up the lines to talk to Matt. This is nothing more than failed triage and customer segmentation; a difficult problem, to be sure, but a solvable one.

But after considering the problem, I’m beginning to wonder whether Sun should even bother trying to fix this by themselves. Sun’s business is hardware, software and services – not designing easily used, convenient web storefronts. Unsurprisingly, this means they’re far better are designing hardware and software and delivering services than they are at producing ecommerce sites. Nor are they alone in this regard; while I love their machines, Lenovo’s website is not exactly headed for the web commerce Hall of Fame. So the question that I’m considering is this: should Sun – or Lenovo, for that matter – outsource their storefront to a third party – be that Amazon, eBay, or whomever? Hell, maybe they could even barter.

No, this would not immediately solve problems like customer segmentation, and yes it’s trading one set of problems for a new set of problems. But consider what Jonathan has said on a related subject in the past:

I was recently with a customer in the retail industry that continues to run its own private Linux distribution. The distro was developed a couple years ago, by a team that stepped off the beaten path for good reason (at the time) – that same development team now owns maintaining the distro, and making decisions about whether to replace it. As time has moved on, the customer has found no major ISV willing to certify to their private distro (without a check, that is – we declined the opportunity to port our Identity engines), and the team involved has found themselves buried with support obligations – driving more resource requirements while the parent company is looking to prune costs. I’ve seen a number of companies in this predicament (a few on Wall Street, btw).

My view, in this instance, is the “private distro” mud path should be paved with a commercial product, on the assumption Sun, Red Hat or Microsoft will all outinvest and outsupport the dedicated team – and bring with them a bevy of already certified ISV’s. But neither the team, nor their management, will hear any of this. “Our OS costs less than Solaris, it’s free.” Right, free like a puppy.

Then ask yourself: are Amazon, eBay and so on likely to outinvest and outsupport Sun’s dedicated team? Seems likely, from where I sit. I mean how bad could one click purchasing of Sun’s x86 gear really be?

The other likely counter argument is that storefronts are far too strategic to be outsourced. Perhaps. But are they really that much more strategic than, say, your human relations? Or your customer relations? Or your payroll? I don’t buy it, and that’s speaking as someone who was rightfully skeptical of early commerce front ends like Iconomy during the early part of this century.

As Jonathan admits, decisions like this tend to be emotionally charged, and ones that the entire industry will have to grapple with. But with customers like Automattic on the line, I think it’s important to get to it rather sooner than later.

Disclaimer: Sun is a RedMonk customer, Amazon, Automattic, eBay, and Lenovo are not. Lenovo, however, has provided me with a free laptop for testing purposes.

Joyent’s David Young, a notable Sun customer and frequent beneficiary of pointers from Jonathan Schwartz’ blog, doesn’t get Sun’s new program to offer discounted pricing to startup businesses. He lists several objections to the idea, some of which I agree with and some of which I don’t. The following, IMO, is the most important bit:

Paul Graham says start-ups can get going on $10,000. How? They aren’t buying Sun. (Not that Sun is expensive. But no one knows that, or believes it. Joyent knows otherwise.) These start-ups are on a 1U server they bought on woot.com with a copy of Ubuntu installed. But let’s face it: if you’re running your start up on Linux and some white box brand, you don’t view infrastructure as a competitive advantage. It is a cost. These companies view their software as the advantage, and they can’t buy that from Sun.

While David’s comments are directed at Sun, their importance transcends any single vendor. This is, in fact, a problem that a host of firms large and small are struggling with. We get asked the question all the time: how do I get startups to build on my stuff? While there’s no easy answer here (as if there ever is), I thought a quick Q&A might flush out some of the issues.

Q: You mention a host of vendors: can you be more specific? Which vendors do you believe are concerned with the problem of selling to startups?
A: Most purveyors of general purpose software are or should be concerned with getting startups using their products. Look no further than SAP’s recent ad campaign, which features a company that “definitely needs to go global – right after it goes national.” Or the success that MySQL has had selling into markets that DB2 and Oracle would not traditionally be interested in. Startups are a compelling market for the vast majority of software vendors I speak with.

Q: Do you feel that the value placed on the market is justified?
A: Well, it depends. In strict finanical terms, no – or at least, probably not. David’s not wrong when he says that startups are not keen on paying for service. To borrow MySQL’s way of phrasing it, they’re typically willing to trade time in order to save money. This is particularly true of bootstrapping firms operating off of shoestring budgets, but it’s also the case for a great many VC backed entities. So the simplistic to the question is no, the startup market is likely overvalued.

But that answer is, as far as I’m concerned, overly simplistic. Google being as anomalous a firm as Microsoft, they’re perhaps not the best case to extrapolate from. So let’s instead look at YouTube. A year ago YouTube was nothing more than a startup absolutely smoking through cash. Today, they’re a $1.6 billion acquisition commanding more and more attention from media outlets seeking to use them as a vehicle to users. They’ve graduated, in other words, from a point where they’d be willing to trade time for money. It seems far more likely that YouTube and its parent Google would be willing to trade money for time. That’s great news if you’re the technology they built on top of, sad news if they’re not. While migrations away from the original platform do happen – Google reportedly tried to cut away from MySQL for its AdSense offering – they’re infrequent and problematic (the Google migration failed). The easiest way to turn a startup into revenue, then, is to get in at the ground floor.

Q: Isn’t this a bit like the lottery, then? For every YouTube, there are a hundred firms that fail. What kind of odds should vendors expect?
A: The answer is yes, it’s very much like the lottery. The odds of any given startup hitting it big are minimal. As one person put it to me this week, “so vendors should be looking at themselves much like VC firms do.” The key here is betting widely and betting intelligently. The good news is that in the software space, there are ways to make the betting easy. Open source, for example, is a terrific strategy for lowering barriers to adoption. It allows you to potentially leverage even those customers that are not paying you, either by the potential of future returns or with soft benefits such as bug reports, forum participation, etc.

Also, just because a startup fails does not mean that efforts to recruit them to your platform do. Jon Shea, in a comment on David’s original entry, explains it thusly:

And imagine this: You’re fresh out of college. You join a startup as a “SysAdmin”, even though your only experience is dorm room experimentation. Your company, 53People.net, goes with Startup Essentials from Sun, because it ties Dell in price, and you’ve read awesome things about Sun on Joyeur. Two years later, 53People.net’s second round of funding dries up, and the company folds. Now your looking for a regular SysAdmin job. And at that new job, you’re going to be a Sun evangelist. Sun could end up with a little fan club sprinkled through Fortune 500 tech departments.

We’ve had experience in this directly, as we often seek to leverage our connections with large vendors to the benefit of promising startups. Some succeed, most fail, but they can all add value.

Q: What should companies looking to court startups do? How should they approach the challenge?
A: There are lots of things firms can do; it’s all dependent on the product and market. But a couple of general suggestions:

1. Give startups what they want, not what you think they should have:
   LAMP is the dominant stack within the startup communities, so vendors need to accept that. You can compete with an individual element or two, but if you’re trying to push a completely different stack it’s going to be a Sisyphean task. Given them what they want, not what you think they need.
2. Make their life (significantly) easier:
   As I’ve told a few audiences recently, Amazon’s EC2 & S3 offerings are perhaps the most interesting new offerings I’ve seen in a long time. Why? Because they make (or could, if the tools were better) deployment and scaling a push button activity. The simplest way to think of them is as the hardware equivalent of Software as a Service (SaaS): EC2/S3 are, essentially, Hardware-as-a-Service. This can make a startup’s life significantly less complicated – just ask SmugMug.
3. Let them trade time for money:
   If you’re a commercial provider competing for the attention of a startup, licensing costs are going to be tough to swallow. Unless the product area is relatively specialized, there are likely to be free, open source alternatives available that you will be forced to compete with. Charging for the right to use the software (RTU) will be a non-starter in most markets. There’s a reason the Oracle FAQ runs MySQL.
4. Know how to separate the wheat from the chaff:
   Chaff being, in this case, very small startups with minimal purchase requirements. RedMonk, as an example, qualifies as chaff: I signed up for Sun’s Startup Essentials (we just made the cut, as I applied a month before we turned four) so that I could purchase a box or two at a discounted rate if I need them. No more than that. Having a salesperson call me for that is a waste of everyone’s time. Courting the Joyent guys, on the other hand, is probably a good idea seeing as they (want to) buy a lot more hardware than we do. The point is that all startups aren’t created equal, and you shouldn’t treat them that way. Court them all, but differentiate wherever possible.
5. Speaking of salespeople…:
   Jonathan has argued that it will be important for his firm to be able to market and sell to customers they never touch directly. I happen to agree. I’ve bought a couple of Dell’s and probably half a dozen Thinkpads over the years, and have yet to talk to their respective salesforces. But it goes beyond questions of scale: salespeople are the bane of many an enterprise IT manager’s existence. Unleashing them on time-strapped startups is not likely to win you many friends. Be prepared when they come to you, but limit the outbound side lest you appear overeager.

Lots more we could talk about here, but those are where I’d start.

Q: How would you go about courting startups, if you were in a vendor’s shoes?
A: Well, the first step is to have – as discussed – an offering that’s attractive to them. Trying to pitch them on the uber-server package with all the bells and whistles probably isn’t going to get their attention; free software, free hardware, free hosting, and free services are likely to.

So primarily, my channel of choice would be other startups. Word of mouth amongst smaller, technology oriented startups is hyper-efficient in the new world of blogging, wikis and forums. As the guy responsible for RedMonk’s purchasing, for example, I rely primarily on the experiences of my peers. This presumes, of course, that you have startups that you can work with. In the absence of such candidates, you might look around for folks in need, or if you’re a customer of ours just give us a call – we talk to startups all the time that could use some gift hardware or software.

I’d also frequent and support conferences like those thrown by David Berlind and Doug Gold – the Mashup Camp and Startup Camp unconferences. While these are my favorite conferences because I get to walk around in jeans, my Sox hat and flip-flops (kidding), they’re also not bad places to meet entrepreneurs with the goal of becoming the next Google. They’re essentially The Place to be to meet and mingle with that crowd, which I’m making an exception to my January travel moratorium to attend Mashup Camp in Boston.

Q: You mentioned Amazon’s EC2/S3? Do you think those are promising approaches for startups?
A: Yes. They’re not perfect either in pricing or technology, but they have serious advantages over dedicated, self, or colocation type hosting. Not just in terms of ease of use, but with respect to handling the challenges of scaling, cost containment and more. While I expect to see one or more of the eBay/Google/MSN/Yahoo/etc parties to develop competitive services within the next 12-18 months, I think at this point EC2 & S3 must be viewed by IT vendors both as threats and opportunities. Threats, because startups that base their businesses on this technology could be hard to win back, but opportunities because ultimately HaaS needs software to run on top of it.

Q: Anything else to add?
A: Lots, but it’s a Friday. If you have questions you’d like answered, drop them in as a comment or shoot them over to me and I’ll try and get to them in a follow up.

Disclaimer

: IBM, MySQL, and Sun are RedMonk clients, as is Oracle via the Sleepycat acquisition. Also, Joyent provides me personally with a comped hosting account, while Amazon, Canonical, Google, SAP are not (Amazon’s subsidiary A9, however, is a client).