2009 Bickel Business Year in Review

For the past 16 years I’ve been doing a personal Holiday Greeting that is kind of a quick year in review. This year I figured I would add a Bickel Running Year in Review as well as a Bickel Business Year in Review. It is kind of a personal log that hopefully I will keep up. I kind of split my life between the running side and the business side… My basic model on the business side is to work with several small technology companies and take a small ownership stake. It has worked out well for me at Bluestone and JBoss, but also a couple of other more part time gigs like Princeton Software, Bristol Technology and this year Hyperic. Hopefully a few of the others will experience similar growth and success.

Well, 2009 was much better than 2008 (see Ringside Winding down). Here are the highlights of the businesses that I am involved in…

Hyperic This was the highlight of the year. Over the past several years I had gotten to know the guys at Hyperic very well – great group with technology that just was not getting widely spread fast enough. In the spring, Spring acquired Hyperic. I know a number of the people over at Spring (Rod Johnson, Rob Bearden, Peter Cooper-Ellis and Shaun Connolly) and thought this was a great combination – basically fulfilling the same vision we had back in the JBoss days of combining development thru production and management. Rob Bearden had built a great sales force, and the Hyperic technology gave them a lot of value to sell, and the widespread use of Spring gave Hyperic much broader distribution and market recognition.

Apparently VMWare thought this was a good combination as well and they acquired Spring. It was a great acquisition because VMWare structured it so the whole team was highly motivated to stay and be very engaged (so many tech acquisitions fail from overlooking this point). The Spring technology will be a useful part of VMWare’s strategy for cloud computing and engaging the development community. The Hyperic technology is becoming an important part of VMWare’s management strategy. And the business continues to grow.

Metaverse I have been involved with Metaverse for a number of years. First when they were a content management company, then more recently over the past couple of years as they have grown their online Art business. The past year has really seen the strategies we implemented in 2008 come to fruition. The acquisition of Liebermans in 2008 has been fully integrated and our volume and size have given us some very nice efficiencies that have allowed to become very profitable by the end of this year. Operationally, we moved into a brand new facility to accommodate our growth (we do thousands of orders per day – I find the facility amazing after being in the software business (where there is nothing physical happening) for so long and seeing the whole inventory, shipping, framing, canvas transfer processes). The other major initiative was to decrease our dependency of Google Adwords. We have implemented a project we call “Chameleon”. It takes advantage of our content management roots and we are now in the business of running the art portion of other online retailers websites. For example, in addition to our flagship website – www.fulcrumgallery.com, if you buy art at Sears, Kohls, Spiegel, Overstock and over 100 other online sites, Metaverse is actually doing all the fulfillment. Kind of similar to the business model that GSI Commerce is using. When one of our major competitors went bankrupt and Art.com acquired their assets, we were able to pick up many of the old customers due to our better web infrastructure and operational efficiencies. The team is great


Moorestown Running Company I write about this in my Running Blog. This is more of a passion business for me. And it is very fulfilling from that perspective. We have been open 2.5 years now and have finally reached a stable break-even level. We did over $600K of business this year, and have started to expand our offerings into coaching services and team uniforms. These both fit with our core mission of helping serve and build the running community. More on my running blog.

RunSignUp.com In another cross-over with running, I started up a company to compete with Active.com for allowing runners to register online for races. I had become frustrated with Active.com as a user over the years and finally got around to doing something about it. We have been thru a very successful trial phase this fall with about 20 races. This coming year, Stephen Sigwart is joining as a full time developer, and my old running buddy from college, George Buckheit is joining to help connect with race managers, timing services and race directors. We are taking an approach of focusing on helping race management and timing service companies serve their races better – essentially creating a channel for our business where we share in the revenue. We can do this with lower costs to runners than Active.com, much better user experience, no advertising or spam. We have some great technology plans coming this year with Facebook integration and management tools for race management and timing service companies. There are over 9 million runners per year who signup for 15,000+ road races, so this is a big market. My intention is to build this business as a “lifestyle” company and not take VC money or sell out like many of my other business ventures.

eXo When Hyperic and Spring got acquired I started thinking about replacing them with something else. After talking with many companies, I finally decided on eXo. It is a good fit since they are trying to become the next generation of Java Middleware - http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10419892-62.html. Benjamin Mestrallet is the founder and CEO of this French company. They have a strategic deal with Red Hat/JBoss that significantly expands the company’s reach. With that, Benjamin made a decision to open a US office and take VC money. We are in the process of finalizing that and hiring some great people in the US that I have worked with in the past in addition to a cool set of advisors that include Sacha Labourey, my friend and former CTO of JBoss, as well as Edwin Khodabakchian of Collaxa and Oracle fame. I am really excited about this company as I think Java has kind of gotten behind PHP and .Net. They have Drupal and Sharepoint to bring a much higher level set of services to their communities – and I think eXo can bring something similar to the Java market. This could make Java relevant again, as it seems JBoss and Spring keep focusing increasingly on lower level development and core middleware functionality rather than enabling Java developers to bring Consumer Web type experiences to their users.

Secret Project My good friend, Sacha Labourey, is working on a new secret project and I will be trying to help a bit. After retiring from Red Hat earlier this year, he got the itch again to start up something. I think he’s got a good target market and hopefully in next year’s summary I can talk about how we have an initial version out and showing some market success.

In addition, I am an adviser to several firms. Jaspersoft has had a very successful year in the business intelligence space with their open source strategy. They are starting to create separation from the other open source player, Pentaho, and they seem to be more and more a part of companies strategic plans. Funambol is another open source company who is innovating a lot in the mobile space. Mobile companies are suing this across the globe to deliver Blackberry functionality on any phone - pretty cool. Sonatype is the company behind the Maven project, which has a huge Java developer community and could service they run in Maven Central. It will be interesting to see if they can mature their initial “Enterprise” offerings this coming year and gain some real revenue traction.

I guess that is enough to keep me busy for 2010! It should be another fun year…

Atlantic City Marathon

The Atlantic City Marathon is a nice alternative to the Philadelphia Marathon and New York Marathon for the fall of 2010. The Philly Marathon tends to sell-out, and we get a lot of phone calls at the store looking for alternatives. This year Ralph and Ed both ran the AC Marathon and set PR's and qualified for Boston. They really liked the fact there was about 5 miles at the end on the boardwalk, which is a lot softer surface than roads. It is also so much easier to get to (step out of your hotel room and onto the race course instead of a 3 hour commute like the New York Marathon). You can SignUp here.

Running Shoes for Charity!

We just created a website that will sell running shoes online and benefit Back on My Feet.

We got involved with Back on My Feet thru the efforts of Ed Scioli. He ran the crazy 20 in 24 relay last year. This year we had two teams from the Moorestown Distance Running Project run the relay and raise nearly $10,000! While at the relay Ed started talking about how else we could help out.

BackonMyFeetShoes.com is the result of that brainstorm. You can buy your shoes online and 20% of your order will be donated to Back on My Feet. It is a great way to help your running and help those less fortunate get back on their feet by running!

So go get that new pair of Brooks Adrenaline, Saucony Triumph, Asics Kayano or any of the other dozens of great shoes we have available.

RunSignup.com - Alpha Ready!

We went live with the Alpha of RunSignup.com today.

Right now we are focusing on just the user registration side (although we have most of the race creation and editing done as well). We just want to make sure we get this part right and are able to focus on it. So far today we’ve had about 100 people test it out and things seem to be going well. We are processing credit cards and Paypal transactions and are giving users a very simple way to cancel the transaction and not register.

Our little effort to make life easier for race directors of running races and their participants is off the ground!

A New Venture

Well, I am about to launch another new little venture. It combines my interests in running and technology.

The basic idea is a web service that makes it easy for races to allow users to signup online. We will go live with an Alpha version of the service in the next day or two (hopefully) for a local race that has agreed to test the service.

This is an old idea that I have been harboring for several years. I’ve used the big market leader, Active.com, as both a runner and as a race director for a number of years. However, they have become un-focused on the running marketplace. Their website is hard to use and certainly does not take advantage of Web 2.0 technology or approaches.

So our site will have focus on running races, it will be simple to use, and it will be much more cost effective than the alternatives in the marketplace. Hopefully people will like it and it will provide a valuable service to others. I’ll be blogging about this a lot over the next few months…

Wanted: Running Web Wizard

We are looking for a new person at the store since Marc Pelerin is going to be moving to California.

Moorestown Running Company is a specialty running store in Moorestown New Jersey.

We are seeking a motivated web designer and enthusiastic store associate.
You will work in our Moorestown store helping to build and design our website, doing customer marketing and helping runners and walkers select the proper equipment.

You will have the opportunity to serve the running community, work with passionate staff and an experienced technology consultant as you develop an expanding running specialty website and growing store. The applicant should have related experience in web design and development, working with tools like Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator. PHP and Javascript experience is a plus. A strong desire to learn and keep expanding your skills is required. In addition to web development, you must demonstrate a willingness to work with customers and learn about properly fitting customers with running shoes.

The qualified candidate has related education and experience dealing with online marketing and/or web design. Email your cover letter, application and examples of your web work to info@runningco.com.

My History with Middleware and Management - like Peanut butter and jelly

In 1996 we started a project called the Bluestone (actually Sapphire at the time) Application Manager. Kevin Minder led the project, Larry McCay and Rich Friedman were also key guys on the project as well. We felt it was very important to have Management tightly tied to our middleware. We saw tremendous synergies where customers could go way beyond simple Systems Management and move toward Application Management. I remember Kevin talking with me about how we could actually build something that was way better than things like Tivoli. Here is a link to a snapshot of the old Bluestone site -

Fast forward to 2002 and when I first started working with Marc Fleury and JBoss. In my first presentation to Marc on my recommendations on where JBoss could go I had a slide that said we needed to create something like the Red Hat Network for middleware. It would give us value that we could bundle in our Subscription and it would allow us to go from the developer side of the house into the operations side of the house where the IBM and Bea guys got paid. It was not until late 2004 when we hired Rich Friedman to figure out how we would build the JBoss Network that we got serious about it.

While Rich was investigating what was out there, Raven Zachery sent an email to Ben Sabrin (Jan. 24, 2005) suggesting we take a look at Hyperic. Rich did and we eventually got into a series of discussions about how we could use their technology to be the foundation of the JBoss Network. We were too cheap at the time to actually acquire the company (although a number of us wanted to), but we did enter into a license deal that gave us rights to the software and the ability to modify and take our own product to market. Friedman and the JBoss Network team (including John Mazzitelli, another Bluestone alum) delivered that product by Q4 of 2005. Customers really ate it up and our sales accelerated quickly, helping to drive the valuation discussions with the various companies looking at acquiring JBoss. During those times, I recall Friedman and myself trying to pitch the idea that if we were going to stay an independent company, then we should acquire Hyperic. JBoss chose to go down the other path and combine forces with Red Hat.

Having learned so much about Hyperic and the great team there, as I left JBoss I started to work with them on their strategy moving forward. Javier asked me to be on the board and let me become an investor. The past couple of years have been great in terms of growth and new opportunities. Today, customers like Comcast, CNet, Intuit, RealNetworks, (and several I am not yet allowed to name, but you likely use some of them every day) now rely on Hyperic for their Web Infrastructure Management.

About a year ago when Spring entered into discussions with Hyperic to license the HQ technology I started dreaming again about a real combination. I saw Spring as the next generation of Middleware – designed for the new needs of the market. Faster and slimmer. More adaptable, ready for Cloud computing and a natural fit for Virtualization environments. The same things we had shifted our emphasis to at Hyperic.

As the new wave of applications are built and deployed there is an even greater need for a tight combination between middleware and management. It is entirely different than the old style – focused on operating systems and Application Servers. There is a new emerging Internet Application Infrastructure (IAI) that is made up of distributed services with a need to scale very quickly. Far more flexible and lower cost. Built on an open source paradigm to ensure that this distributed community can all interact and move forward rapidly.

The new Spring has become the default IAI. Spring has achieved this by simple market demand. Spring has huge market share, the ability to help customers integrate their old environment with the new, and the cost advantages of a simple, integrated Develop-Deploy-Manage product set.

I’m glad that after a dozen years of being a part of this to see it come to life in a meaningful way.