Jeremiah Peschka is joining Quest Software. Que? Oh yes…Jeremiah is joining Quest Software. Read about it here, and here. But hold on Christian…you haven’t learned diddly from the grand experiment! You are meeting your own definition of insanity sir. Au contraire…au contraire. Yes, Jeremiah is joining us, but it isn’t to take over Brent’s job, just his budget.
As I have been talking about lately with anyone who will listen (my 4 year old daugthers seem to be the only ones listening and even they listen to me for about 30 seconds before tuning out) we have a tremendous opportunity in the non-relational distributed database world to build and educate the community. We wanted someone with a passion for community, a passion for RDBMS, a passion for development, and a passion for learning about new technology. Fortunately, we did not need to look. Brent, Andy and I had already been talking about how we might evolve the role as Brent was moving on to pastures new and Jeremiah’s name came up. Then, one morning, as if by magic (although maybe suggested by one Mr Ozar – don’t know???) a hilarious email appeared in my inbox. It was from Jeremiah and it listed out why he would be right for the role and why he would be different from Brent. I was laughing hard. To be honest, if the email had been about why Jeremiah would be same same we would have gone no further, but he laid out what he could bring to the party, and we had plenty of chips but no dip, so we were hooked.
So, over the course of the next few months we look forward to working on and unveiling our evolved strategy for servicing the community. Don’t fret that Jeremiah will be turning his back on the SQL community – won’t happen; he’ll keep one foot firmly in that camp, but don’t be surprised if he starts trying to talk you in to giving Cassandra, MongoDB, HBase or Hadoop a whirl. Don’t be surprised when he turns PASS into the largest NoSQL conference in the world.
I read a really interesting article today on Processor.com (I have no way of explaining why I was on this website). Anyway, the article titled Cloud Integration Services gives a very interesting overview of some the more prevalent issues businesses are realizing by adopting cloud based services. A parallel here: in our experience working in the SQL Server space, there was a real problem with something called “SQL Server sprawl” due to the fact that this particular database is so easy to implement and bring online. Well, in the cloud space there is an amazing ability to experience this same type of “sprawl”. With non-technical users able to deploy an application without IT sign off, the risk of having fragmented data stores and greatly increasing the data management challenge for the organization. I won’t continue trying to paraphrase the article as it’s totally worth reading. I will say this, it’s very surprising to me to see how cloud based services bring the difficulty of application deployment down to a level where a potential ‘every person’ can deploy an app and cause such data management issues. A familiar issue in a whole new light.
This morning we announced the launch of two new sites; siblings to sqlserverpedia. You can read the press release from this morning here.
SQLServerPedia has exceeded every metric and every expectation we had set (we like to keep our standards extremely low so we always leap over the bar ), so now it’s time to see if the experiment works in other domains. We’ve decided to tackle a bit of the old and a bit of the new to see how different communities respond. OraDBPedia is a knowledge-base aimed at the Oracle database crowd (bet you never guessed that right?). This is an area that Quest has a lot of thought-leadership in, and a long history. It’s where we made our name, and Toad is still the most widely used tool in that space. However, at first glance the characteristics of the Oracle community are different to the SQLServer crowd; users don’t seem to be as prevalent on Twitter and there isn’t the volume of independent blogs that we are used to seeing in SQL Server. Oracle themselves are much more of a closed community-type company than Microsoft, so maybe that’s why. Anyway, we look forward to learning more and reporting back our findings. CloudDBPedia is a knowledge-base aimed at the non-relational world (cloud databases, NoSQL databases, Hadoop). We want to become the thought-leaders in this new world, as we are in the RDBMS world. Now, the characteristics of this community are absolutely fascinating – it is all you would expect of a community that is growing in a world of Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook – so the learning curve we experience here will be steep and we’ll have to respond fast if we are to succeed. We look forward to the challenge and to keeping you apprised of lessons learned the hard way.
Last week The Times of London (really just called The Times) moved to a premium/pay for content model – you can read about it here. I love stories like this because seeing if people will pay for what is considered ‘premium’ content is something that I’m sure ALL content providers would like to know. The problem that I would want to see overcome is the immense drop in traffic that a site experiences when this model is adopted – and you see in that story that online readership dropped over 90% – yikes. They are committed to keep on with this strategy and absorb the drop in traffic to their content in an effort to realize revenue from it. In my experience, asking users to pay for content is a very tricky proposition because you really come to rely on the eyeballs that you bring to your site in order to establish a strong web presence and compete with other sites that are providing like content. Such a huge drop in visitors would be devastating to the sites that we help promote – but we aren’t in the news business. The New York Times has also made plans to move to a pay for model as well in January of 2011 – read here. It looks like there is potential for this to move to other news sites (where I guess there is safety in numbers), but with the ability to have information proliferate across the web – especially news – to sites that will not charge to read, that this could end up being detrimental over the long run for a short-term profit. I don’t know the news business (full disclosure – shocking, right?), but it seems like getting as many eyes to your site as a news producer and then determining ways to generate revenue from these visitors (ad sales?) would be an option…
I must be in some sort of rhyming mood today, because that just popped in my head. Looking at it now it looks a little twee, but it conjures up the gist of what I want this post (or probably series) to be. Recently, Brent Ozar moved on from Quest Software to join SQL Skills as a consultant/trainer. Before ploughing on with this post I recommend reading Brent’s post and also the comments for background. Since he moved along I have been inundated with questions, resumes from others in the SQL Land wanting Brent’s job, and I have spent more time than I would have liked explaining to internal folks and members of the SQL Server Community that it’s very positive for both Quest and Brent that he has moved on. Brent’s success is a reflection of what we were able to achieve together, and that’s always good. I’ve been some sort of manager of people for over 10 years now, and there’s never been anyone that I have managed that I haven’t been happy for when they voluntarily move along (and also most whom have moved along involuntarily).
I, and other members of my team, feel very proud to have worked with Brent. Together we achieved a lot in a very short space of time. When Brent joined us SQLServerPedia was stuck on 10,000 unique visitors a month; now it’s over 200,000 not even two years later. That’s remarkable growth right there. Our high level goal was to make Quest synonymous with SQL Server, and thanks to experts like Brent, Kevin Kline, and our SQL Server community projects we have largely achieved that goal.
Over the past months I had been talking to Brent about how we could evolve his role but it always felt like a long shot. We’re not set up as a consulting company; we sell software. There wasn’t much upside we could offer under our current structure and putting Brent in a role where he couldn’t excel at what he loves would not have been good for anyone and would have led to the same outcome anyway.
So what’s the point of this post? We experimented, we learned, we had fun, and we achieved a lot. That’s a success. Now what we do with what we learned is the key takeaway. So often in business we fall into the same insane trap – we learn a lesson, but because we are reluctant to change, we doom ourselves to repeating the same process with the same outcome. That’s something our team is very cognizant of, and why we are always up for trying new things.
In the next post in this series I’ll talk about where we are headed with our initiatives.
Last night I got back from our third Quest Database Management Customer Advisory Board. I can’t stress strongly enough how valuable these advisory boards can be. Our previous CABs had a heavy focus on Microsoft SQL Server, whereas this time around we aimed for the DBA Manager level with cross-platform responsibilities. This blog you are reading, as well as our community initiatives in general, are a direct result of our previous Customer Advisory Board meetings. In those we heard loud and clear the refrain of ‘help us get more value out of your tools; educate us on them; unlock functionality we don’t know about already; help us learn new platforms; help us interact with our people in the community.’ We’re pretty proud of what we’ve achieved there, but we know we have a long way to go. With this board we showed some of what we have planned over the next year with our educational and community initiatives, and the response was good, as well as giving us some ideas of how to make them better. There’s a real need for a one-stop shop portal for all our initiatives; right now we are a little dispersed, and this causes you some pain. We’ll be addressing that soon.
Also, we were very excited to hear that our customers want a way to get intelligence out of the data that our tools generate and store in repositories. We have some technology at Quest, which should allow us to deliver a proof of concept to our board within a week or so. We’ll have them test it, develop use cases, and hopefully validate the approach. If that works out, then from the CAB to delivering a solution to a considerable pain point will be extremely fast. And, if the feedback comes back negatively, that they wouldn’t use the solution, then we’ll have saved ourselves a whole host of time and effort.
That’s the power of a CAB right there.
It’s funny that so much focus and energy is placed on the target market of the product or service that a marketing team must promote to when the hardest audience to reach is often inside of your organzation. This is driven home more and more with each activity that we (2blokes) undergo in our workplace. While this can certainly be frustrating, I would venture to say that these internal challenges actually help us position a better mousetrap publicly when the internal stakeholders buy in. Case in point, it has been our extreme pleasure to be a part of a very successful ongoing outreach program in the form of a website catering to the SQL Server market called SQLServerPedia. This began as a simple Q&A style blog and has since exploded with almost 1k pages of content and a syndicated blogger list of 65 and growing. Our next program is to provide the same offering to the Oracle market (specifically the Oracle DBA and database developer market) in the form of OracleDBPedia. As we get closer to launch, we’ve had scores of internal suggestions and critiques – which, while maddening at times, really is going to make this offering to the Oracle community that much better. Once we launch the site, there will be plenty of more experiences to share for sure. Have a great weekend!
We’re huge proponents of ensuring that you control your content. Our friend, and former colleague, Brent Ozar, has addressed it a lot on his blog, most recently here. Andy passed along some of that good advice today to another of our colleagues, SQL Server MVP, Kevin Kline. After watching this video you gentlemen will start thinking about your content in a different way.
For the past few months I have been involved in researching cloud databases, Hadoop, NoSQL, specialized dbs and starting to build Quest’s presence in this nascent space. I’ve been working closely with Guy Harrison, who’s been around the RDBMS world for a long time, and he told me from the get-go that this space is different.
In some way, shape or form, whether in sales, marketing or product management I have been in RDBMS land for 10 years now. Marketing has never been easy in that space; you always face the database vendor themselves, and an array of small companies, so clear product positioning, aiming your message at an identified target audience and competitive differentatiors are vital to how effective your marketing is. So…imagine my surprise entering a space, where marketing doesn’t rely at all on identifying a clear target audience, product positioning, or competitive differentiators. All it relies on now is being in the space. If you’re in it, you get the marketing mojo going, if you’re not you don’t.
We’re just coming off a very successful launch of Toad for Cloud Databases by any measure; we have had more requests for interviews, more coverage, more re-tweets, more beta downloads in the first two weeks since we went live than any product I’ve ever been involved in. There’s a thirst for knowledge in this space that’s staggering, and we want to be there to quench that thirst.
I am having so much fun learning all about these evolving technologies, and a bit of advice to our traditional RDBMS audience; download Toad for Cloud Databases, spin up an Amazon account and go have a play. You’ll be glad you did.
OK, so I tweaked some messaging that Cloudera is using in their video content on their website. We had the chance to meet with the folks at Cloudera the other day to discuss the exciting opportunities that are avaialable to us due ot the new relationship that was developed with Quest Software. Specifically, this relationship is based on a partnership to develop, support and distribute an Oracle connector for Hadoop. My first comment about this is simply “wow”. To say that these people are incredibly smart and driven by the desire to provide accessibility to, management of; and, more importantly VALUE from distributed data to the market is somewhat of an understatement. The Cloudera peeps are making their mark and it’s amazing to be able to work with them in doing so. The Oracle – Hadoop connector is the basis of the relationship, but it’s going to be truly fun to not only contribute to the success of this partnership, but to also grow the relationship in creative and beneficial ways for our companies and the community. Fun stuff!
Jeremiah Peschka is joining Quest Software. Que? Oh yes…Jeremiah is joining Quest Software. Read about it here, and here. But hold on Christian…you haven’t learned diddly from the grand experiment! You are meeting your own definition of insanity sir. Au contraire…au contraire. Yes, Jeremiah is joining us, but it isn’t to take over Brent’s job, just his budget. 
), so now it’s time to see if the experiment works in other domains. We’ve decided to tackle a bit of the old and a bit of the new to see how different communities respond.