Bickel Blog

As reported last year, I am trying to do a Business and a Running Year in Review at the end of each year. It is a good way for me to kind of think thru what has happened and where I am going. It also leaves a trail (I have personal Christmas Card write-ups that go back to 1995 that are personally interesting to read). 2010 has been a big year with very major changes in CloudBees, eXo, Metaverse and RunSignUp.com. Maybe a bit too busy at times, but very cool to be working with so many smart peo ple and figuring out ways I can take credit for their brilliant ideas. Marlise noticed the Microsoft Cloud commercial the other day and asked if that had anything to do with what I work on. I said pretty much every one of the companies (besides the store) I work with is focused on the Cloud. This along with mobile/tablet devices will be the #1 topic the next several years in the world of technology... I thought for sure my middleware experience would be totally useless by now, but the indu

There are going to be many companies in the Platform as a Service space. In spite of (now two in the past two months) acquisitions, it will take us a long time to get bigger than VMWare, Salesforce and Red Hat. But what we can do is be the innovation leader in PaaS. There are two ways we will become the innovation leader: 1. Really smart people. 2. Get stuff done. Spike and Garrett are the leads that join us from Stax. They saw the vision of PaaS back in 2007, and have been building a great, rock solid platform the past three years. Their deep background in middleware and data service layers enabled them to see the opportunity and pitfalls and challenges. And while they have a few arrows in their backs from the early leadership they have shown, they are even smarter from the experience. They join a "rock star" team that includes KK, Michael, Vivek, Ryan, Adrian, Caleb, Fabian and others who are all just very bright. So we probably have the highest concentration of top t

The typical logic is for companies to move up the stack. Salesforce this week took a pretty substantial set of steps toward becoming an infrastructure company for the new era of the Cloud. To be honest, I am blown away (and happy that I am a Salesforce stockholder). Certainly Salesforce made it's mark as a CRM application that was deployed on their Cloud so it took away any need for software and IT. Salesforce drastically lowering costs and let businesses run at their own pace rather than the lethargy of many IT-heavy apps like Siebel and Oracle CRM. For the past several years it has really built out a community and platform with AppExchange. I have also heard interesting stories about companies like the Japanese postal service deploying a major application on the platform. But deals like these were kind of hidden and not a central part of the business. This week, Salesforce announced three significant endeavors: Database.com - Just like Amazon opened up their servers with A