23 March, 2006 - Day 4 of EclipseCon

Met with Steve McClure from IDC to see if he could help me understand more about the Eclipse Market. He is working on something that's called something akin to the Software Development Collaborative. It appears to have a lot of interesting dimensions.

The room was taken over by Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundation. He hosted a meeting of about a dozen people to talk about the marketing around the next release of Eclipse code-named Callisto. The BIRT team came out with two action items. The first is to show off a scenario that shows off three products that will be available on day 1 of this release - Eclipse Web Tools, Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Project (TPTP), and Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT). The second is to show off an integration between the Eclipse Data Tools Project and BIRT. Both sound like fun.

22 March, 2006 - Day 3 at EclipseCon

Another interesting day. We were able to identify at least three other exhibitors that have already incorporate Eclipse BIRT into their products: Ivis, JFire, and Scapa. We wanted to survey each of the exhibitors - except maybe Crystal ;-) - to find out what reporting solution (if any) that they included in their product or application offering. Maybe next year.

The BIRT technical sessions were filled to overflowing. The exhibitor booth was filled at all times. We even sold about four times the number of BIRT books - both BIRT: A field Guide to Reporting and Integrating and Extending BIRT - that the publisher Addison-Wesley expected. A number of folks from the Eclipse Foundation told me that they sensed a significant buzz around BIRT at the EclipseCon show. Nice to hear!

Someone gave me a very amusing survey to take... take a look.

21 March, 2006 - Day Two at EclipseCon

Today was focused on seeing old Eclipse friends, analyst friends, and making new friends with some members of the press.

Before the exhibition opened it was an opportunity to talk to Eclipse friends. I ran into Mike Norman - Chief Executive and President of Scapa Technologies. Scapa is an Eclipse strategic developer and embeds Eclipse BIRT in his product. Scapa's reporting strategy is to use the APIs to design a standard BIRT XML report design using application parameters and then execute it. I showed him what component libraries could do and suggested it might be useful for presenting test results to upper management.

Our first press meeting was with Calvin Carr the publisher and Executive VP at Database Trends and Applications. The EclipseCon formula was to get the news across in a 15 miunute burst. It felt like I imagine speed dating must be like ;-). Calvin's key focus to know which database conntectors are built into the "one button download" for Actuate BIRT and what partnerships we have with database companies (MySQL, IBM, etc.).

Our next meeting was with Alan Zeichick, Editor-in-Chief at SD Times. He's also creating a new quarterly publication Eclipse Review that focuses on open source Eclipse-based development. I'm hoping that he'd be interested in an article around what's new in Eclipse BIRT 2.0 from the BIRT Evangelist, Jason Weathersby. One of the fun part of the meeting was Alan seeing the BZ Media research on the penetration of Java development products (Eclipse came out at 65% up from -na- 5 years before !) and offering to share the BZ Media logo with me. Thanks Alan! Now about that interview with me in Eclipse Review in January of 2007... ;-)

We spent a good chunk of the lunch hour with Brent Williams. Our BIRT Technical Marketing Manager, David Trainor, took through a detailed technical walk through Actuate BIRT 2.0. It was great to watch two strong techies zoom through a 60 minute presentation in about 35 minutes. Brent appeared to like the library / component re-use capabilities. My favorite comment was "wow, this is more like a 3.0 product than a 2.0 product!"

We had an impromptu lunch with Forrester's Carl Zetie, my earliest mentor on Eclipse architecture. He gave us some good insights on who to talk to in Forrester around SOA. We tried to nick him for the lunch but he was too fast for us!

These kinds of comments were reflected from the OEMs that came by Booth #505 to see BIRT.

We finished off the day with a meeting with Terry O'Donnell the Managing Editor for Java Pro and Enterprise Architect Magazines and Lauren Dresnick, Associate Editor. Lauren felt that BIRT would appeal to a lot of different users (e.g. Java developers, PHP developers, report developers, etc.). Terry resonated with the vision of a growing BIRT ecosystem. The latter also led to a discussion of ecosytems around Mt Tam in Marin. But that's a totally different story...

Looking forward to day three!

20 March, 2005 - Day One of EclipseCon

I passed on the training and focused instead on the members meeting. For me one of the highlights of the day was hearing about Eclipse from the perspective of a financial analyst - Brent Williams the Director of Equity Research at Key Banc Capital Markets. One of the neat portions was a primer on what drives a stock's price up. The answer? Two things - the numbers and the multiplier. The numbers were around growth. The multiplier was around the market's perception of growth. Brent showed a price to sales multiplier showing the 3 to 1 ratio for COGN and the 1.5 to 1 for BOBJ. With that concept in mind, Brent charted the growth in the ACTU stock from the time that it announced BIRT 1.0 in June of '05 through BIRT 2.0 in January of '06. His comment was that the market was reacting positively to the potential future revenues for building Eclipse-based products. Fascinating. Also commented that Eclipse was doing the right thing by expanding beyond Java developers to include PHP scripters.

It was also cool to see a glimpse of the about-to-be-approved Eclipse PHP IDE from two members of the project - Zend and IBM. Andi Gutmans, co-founder and VP of Technology from Zend talked about two reasons to join Eclipse - the technology and the ecosystem. He said that the biggest draw for Zend was the ecosystem. He used Actuate as an example of a good partner gained from the Eclipse ecosystem.

Stew Nickolas, IBM Emergin Internet Technology talked about new Eclipse project around AJAX. I'm intrigued to learn more since it focused on writing and debugging Java Script, a personal challenge for yours truly!

During the "Lightning Round" I was fascinated to hear that Sebastien Meyen from Software-Support plans to publish an English-language counterpart to his successful German-language Eclips Magazin.

After the break Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of Eclipse did a state-of-union address for Eclipse. I couldn't capture them all but there was a ton of new Eclipse members. The ones that caught my eye were MySQL, Salesforce.com, SugarCRM and Software AG. With M and P members of Eclipse, I wondered whether the LAMP stack is destined to evolve in totally new ways as it becomes more and more Eclipse-based...

Mike's Eclipse stats were impressive. Here's just a few:

• 1,400 EclipseCon attendees, double 2005
• 130 Eclipse members vs. 91 in 2005
• 16 strategic members - "from Actuate to Zend"
  
• 92 add-in providers
• 17 associates
• 630 committers

Ian Skerett, the Director of Marketing at Eclipse, talked about the past and future successes of the foundation working closely with members. The past one was how members of Eclipse were embracing Eclipse BIRT 2.0, and how 10 members will be delivering projects on top of Eclipse 3.2. This simultaneous release project is called Callista.

More news tomorrow...

Meeting With The Eclipse Foundation

Meeting With The Eclipse Foundation
On Wednesday I traveled to Ottawa to meet with the Eclipse Foundation folks.  It was good to see old friends, and to make some new ones as well.
I asked Mike Milinkovich, the Executive Director of Eclipse, to provide some feedback on how we are doing.  My recollection is that he liked several things He was pleased that we have added Jason Weathersby as the BIRT evangelist and he is doing a good job of building up the BIRT community.  He liked the fact that Actuate views the Eclipse BIRT project as strategic and has committed VP-level resources from the business side as well as the engineering side.  He continues to wish for more non-Actuate committers to the BIRT project, and for commercial products to be built on top of the BIRT platform.
I met Ralph Mueller, the new Director, Eclipse Ecosystems – Europe who is located just outside of Frankfurt.  Mike described him as “Skip in Europe.” (I’m not sure whether Ralph or Skip should be more offended! ) Ralph offered to help with the Eclipse BIRT 2.0 product launch in Germany, and I’m going to take him up on it!  Also, after I gave him a glimpse of BIRT 1.0.1 (using the Bugzilla/MySQL example) he suggested that the Foundation be using BIRT for the dashboards that Bjorn is doing.
I also met Wayne Beaton, the Eclipse Evangelist.  He seemed very interested in the library/component re-use part of BIRT 2.0 and also had questions about RCP.  I directed him to ask those questions of Jason Weathersby.  I’m just a simple marketing boy after all ;-)
I spent the majority of time with Ian Skerrett, the director of marketing at the Eclipse Foundation.  We split our time between talking about the BIRT 2.0 launch and EclipseCon 2006.  His key message to me was to not focus on a features release but to focus on how both the open source community and commercial products were getting behind BIRT, and then to drill down into the key features that have been added in Release 2.0 that was accelerating that process.  He also pointed me to the folks in the other strategic projects that have put themselves on the hook for the project’s marketing strategy.  I like Mike Milinkovich’s comment that “everybody has to become a marketer” more than Ian’s talk about “firing all the marketers!”
I asked Ian the same question about our performance to date, and what he’d like to see us add.  What I heard was parallel to Mike – we’re doing well at building community with BIRT, but we need to get more commercial product offerings atop the BIRT portion of the Eclipse platform.  And to help him get more ink for Eclipse in general, and around RCP in particular.
It appears that Mike and Ian actually do talk to each other beyond FRO (some local Canadian TLA they wouldn’t ‘splain to me).

Meeting with Red Monk About BIRT Marketing

Meeting with Red Monk About BIRT Marketing
It’s only week one and I’m already understanding the pressure to blog.  I spent a few hours with Stephen O’Grady  talking about a variety of open source marketing issues in general and about BIRT in particular.
At the Eclipse marketing meeting in Chicago, Stephen talked about how “traditional” marketing launch activities that focus on industry analysts, the IT press and print advertising aren’t particularly effective, triggering Ian Skerrett to call for “Fire the Marketers!!” In an attempt to save my job, we followed Stephen’s suggestion.  We presented the new channels that we’ve added to the marketing mix and received a “thumbs up.”  He also suggested focusing this blog on providing transparency to the open source launch process.  He said that should appeal to the person on an open source project who is chartered with generating awareness.
Feedback on BIRT WORLD
Jason Weathersby, the BIRT Evangelist, has created a blog called BIRT WORLD.  Stephen felt that BIRT World was a good blog, with a good volume of demos, screenshots, links, etc.   He suggested that Jason keep up the volume of information that is useful to developers to keep them coming back.  He also suggested that the focus of www.eclipse.org/birt be to engage developers with content, tutorials, demos, screenshots, and “how tos.” He talked about “lowering the barriers to entry” in this case meaning that once a developer was aware of BIRT, it needs to be dirt simple for him/her to have a quick success with the product.  The man who taught me all I know about PR, Ed Niehaus, calls this “reducing flash to bang time.”  Stephen cited JBoss, MySQL, and Zend as open source companies who understood how to lower the barriers to entry.
Feedback on BIRT 2.0 Positioning
I shared a comment from Bill Hostmann at Gartner that BIRT 2.0 was all about “broader community and better product.” I always find that quoting one analyst to another can create some amusing responses.  After I went through the features overview, Stephen seemed to understand how Release 2.0 broadens the types of applications that BIRT can handle.  The three features that I highlight were:

• Libraries/component re-use for developers of the reports


• Paging navigation, etc. for consumers of the reports


• Additions to the engine architecture to improve scalability and performance

I also walked through a series of fit and finish features that Java developers had asked for to improve reporting, customization, integration and extension.
Libraries: Stephen suggested that this had the potential of making BIRT “the FireFox of reporting” in the open source world.  He said that the Firefox model of components and extensions showcase the sharing of libraries made possible by open source.  He said that Sugarsource was a good example.  The key thing is to emphasize community throughout the release, and to work at giving back to the community.
Paging: since this is not scheduled to show up until Milestone 3 I wasn’t able to grab his attention with demo.  I probably should sent him a link to the 2.0 BIRT Project Plan in advance so he could have read it on the plane.
Scalable Architecture: Stephen was underwhelmed with the scalable phrase and indicated that it was too vague and needed a specific context to be relevant.  However talking about how BIRT 2.0 could handle larger reports (e.g. 400 page documents) made more sense to him.
Fit and Finish: I wasn’t able to have much impact talking about improvements in reporting and charting, (need screenshots), customization (should have printed out the New and Notable BIRT 2.0 M2 document!), and integration.
Insights into Open Source Business Issues
Stephen shared his insights on the experience that other firms have had in generating revenue from their open source strategy.  Fascinating stuff.
A Call to Open Source “Marketers”
If you’re on the hook for generating awareness for your open source project I’d love to hear from you.  I’d like to learn from your experience.  I’d also like to know if this blog is “on track” or “on crack” as relates to actually being helpful in  launching a new release of an open source project.  I’m particularly keen to hear from the de-facto marketing committees of other Eclipse top-level projects.  

7 November 2005

Injecting Transparency Into the Launch Process
I spent the morning with Stephen O’Grady from Red Monk.  One of the topics was this blog.  Instead of doing a traditional “big-bang” product launch, Stephen suggested that I follow the model done so well by Ian Skerrett from the Eclipse Foundation.  So, for the next four months, I will focus on “injecting transparency into the launch process” by documenting what’s happening each step of the way as we launch BIRT 2.0.   Stay tuned!