LinkedIn DirectAds, early thoughts

I just started my first LinkedIn DirectAds campaign a few days ago. I had significant previous experience with Google Adwords, and I was interested to see how DirectAds could perform compared to Adwords.

From an outsider perspective, LinkedIn looks the perfect marketplace for a niche B2B software technology such as Lokad which specializes in demand forecasting. Indeed:

• I know exactly the profile of the people I am trying to reach: vertical, job description, company size, location, etc.
• My willingness to pay for each super-targeted lead is rather high.

DirectAds are extremely similar in their format with AdWords. The only minor difference is the presence of small 50x50 icon along your add (the illustration of this post is a screenshot of one of my DirectAds).

The core difference with Adwords is that instead of betting on keywords, DirectAds are selected based the profile of the audience you want to reach. The criteria available for audience filtering are:

• Company Size
• Job Function
• Industry
• Seniority
• Gender
• Age
• Geography

Yet, it must be noted at that, at present time, only 4 (out of the 7 available) can be selected at the same time within a campaign. This restriction is rather odd and annoying. In my case, company size, job function, industry and seniority are good enough, but geography would have been a bonus too - especially for localized ads.

Then, the job function offers only 18 categories which is a very rough granularity. Again, I would have preferred to be able to directly specify keywords listed in job description entered by the LinkedIn members.

Finally, my initial selection is giving me about 14k members as my target audience. After 48h of display, I have 2k impressions for a single $2 click ($2/click is the minimal bid).

Very low traffic is probably the downside of LinkedIn DirectAds. With such a limited audience, even assuming a good conversion rate, but it will take months to recover the 2h spent initializing the campaign.

Why perfectly reliable storage is not enough

Cloud computing now offers near perfectly reliable storage. Amazon D3 is announcing a 99.999999999% durability and the Windows Azure storage is in the same league.

Yet, perfectly reliable data storage does not prevent data loss - by a long range. It only prevents data loss caused by hardware failure, which nowadays are no more the most frequent cause for losing data.

The primary danger threatening your data is just plain accidental deletion. Yes, it's possible to setup administrative rights and so on to minimize the surface area of potential trouble. But at the end of the road, someone yields sysadmin powers over the data, and this person is just a few clicks away from causing a lot of trouble.

 A long established pattern to avoid those kind of trouble is  automated data snapshots taken on a daily or weekly basis that can be restored when something will go utterly wrong. In the SQL world, snapshots are given as any serious RDBMS do provide snapshotting as a basic feature at present day.

Yet, in the NoSQL world, things aren't that bright, and at Lokad, we realized that such obvious feature was still missing from the Windows Azure Storage.

Thus, today, we are releasing Lokad.Snapshot an open source C#/.NET app targeting the Windows Azure Storage and running on Windows Azure itself. Kudos to Christoph Rüegg, the primary architect of this app. Lokad.Snapshot offers automated snapshots for tables and blobs. In addition, Lokad.Snapshot exposes a Really Simple Monitoring endpoint to be consumed by Lokad.Monitoring.

The Lokad.Snapshot codebase should still be considered as beta, although the app is already in production for our own internal needs at Lokad. If your Azure data isn't snapshotted yet, make sure to have a look at Lokad.Snapshot, it might be a life-saver sooner than expected.

Wish list for Relenta CRM

At Lokad, we have using the Relenta CRM for nearly two years. It's an excellent lean CRM that comes with a core focus on emails which happen to represent about 90% of our interactions with clients and prospects.If you happen to be an ISV, Relenta is worth having a closer look.

Although, I have been missing a few key features in Relenta for a long time. Hence, I taking the time here to post my wish list for Relenta.

1. Accounts

Relenta only deals with Contacts yet, when prospecting larger companies, many contacts are typically involved. It would be much nicer if it was possible to create 1-to-many relationships between Accounts and Contacts. In particular, this would let the Relenta user browse at a glance all the latest interactions related to a particular account, instead of jumping from one contact to the next.

2. Recent updates

One of the feature that I like the most in wikis are their abilities to display the recent changes. Through recent change, you can gain immediate insights in what other people are doing, without having to bother to actually ask them.

Presently, there is no way to easily figure out who has been doing what in Relenta.  It would much nicer if a stream of recent updates was available for browsing. In particular, display could be made more or less compact by aggregating updates per contact (or per account). Eventually, the stream could even be made available as RSS.

3. Activity capture API

The Lead Capture API of Relenta is a killer feature due to its simplicity. For an ISV, it's a super simple way to collect all trial registrations that keeps flowing through our online apps with extremely limited integration grunt-work.

Yet, although it's very simple to automate the Contact creation in Relenta, it's not possible to automate the insertion of Activities later on the very same contact. This feature would be extremely handy to automatically report payments, or any kind of noticable activities (in the case of Lokad that would be large forecasts retrieval for example).

4. Refined tagging

Tagging is one of the best idea of the Web 2.0 wave. It's a great way to organize complex yet little structured content.

Relenta already provide a minimal tagging system, yet there is no tag auto-completion (killer feature) and it's not possible to search against multiple tags. Pushing a bit more work on tags would be a great move forward to make the most of them.

5. iCalendar support

iCalendar is a very nice and popular format to send meeting request. Presently, Relenta does not support .ics attachments and meeting requests appears as completely garbled. It would be really nice if Relenta was support iCalendar with the possibility to acknowledge meeting requests.

Top 10 cloud computing predictions

The Microsoft World Partner Conference 2010 is due to begin next Monday, and it's clear that Windows Azure is going to be one of the product that will get the most attention this year.

Over the last 2 years, I have attended and even took part to many cloud computing talks, and I am hearing tons of very confused opinions on cloud computing, and even more concerning the future of cloud computing. Hence, here are my top 10 cloud computing predictions for the next 5 years.

1) Cloud will become mainstream in enterprise adoptions

Cloud computing is already mainstream in consumer markets. Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, ... all of them are running on top of their own clouds. If you're using a web search engine, then you're using the cloud already. In the next 5 years, I expect the cloud to become the mainstream adoption pattern. I am NOT saying that the cloud will dominate the enterprise in just 5 years from now, I am saying that it will dominate setups and upgrades. It might take one or two decades to progressively move away from strict on-premise solutions.

2) ISVs will vastly dominate the overall cloud consumption

Yet, the migration toward the cloud will be implicit. Indeed, enterprises care little about cloud computing itself, they will buy SaaS solutions not raw processing power. The vast majority of those SaaS solutions will be powered by public clouds, but for non-IT companies this fact will be irrelevant. The economical forces will drive ISVs toward the cloud, which will vastly dominate the overall cloud consumption. Single-tenant apps have very hard time competing with the low management costs of multi-tenant apps. Nothing will actually prevent companies to buy raw cloud processing power, but I expect this behavior to be marginalized as the SaaS ecosystem grows.

3) Private clouds are nonexistent and will remain marginal

We keep hearing about private clouds, yet, if we exclude the few private clouds designed by internet consumer leaders (eBay, Yahoo, Facebook, Yandex, ...) that have not been turned into public clouds, there is NOTHING even close to a private cloud at present day on the market. The only product that would start looking like a private cloud is Eucaliptus, but it's still lightyears away from global solutions build on top of containerized data-centers that public clouds represent. The skills and the costs required to operate a cloud are steep, I can't figure out why would companies go for private clouds. Some will argue that control is of utmost importance, but shareholders might not agree when they will realize that a small cloud costs millions upfront, and millions for ongoing management. Although, companies with ad-hoc data centers will keep improving them, probably importing best practices established by major cloud hosters, but that's it. Yet, those improved data centers will still be extremely far feature-wise, reliability-wise, security-wise from public clouds.

4) Hybrid clouds are fantasy and will remain fantasy

Another myth I keep hearing about is the idea of hybrid clouds: you have your own private cloud, and when you lack capacity, you rent some extra from a public cloud. Although the idea is fascinating, IMHO, it's vastly impractical. Designing a true auto-scalable app on top of a cloud - any cloud - is already quite hard. Clouds are easing the scale-out process by offering some very normalized environments, but scaling-out remains a challenge, especially for enterprise apps. Offloading processing power into some heterogeneous computing environment is bad idea, software complexity would skyrocket, and it will fail like grid computing failed before. What was a nice idea in theory was just way to difficult to be routinely implemented. Although, please note I am not stating that hybrid clouds are impossible; I am just stating that it's very unwise, and that complexity will comes back as punishment.

5) Cloud mashups will be the dominant pattern

I expect SaaS mashups to become the dominant pattern in enterprise environments - for consumer environments, it's already the case. Companies and people alike will combine the apps they want most, irrespective of the underlying clouds. As a results, scenarios where a single company adopts Salesforce for the CRM, Microsoft BPOS for the collaborative suite and Netsuite for the ERP are likely. Obviously, those mashups will requires very capable integration tools, which will also be offered on the cloud. RunMyProcess would be a good example of such tools.

6) Self-hosted servers will be considered as liability

Some people consider self-hosted servers as more secure than remote or cloud-hosted solutions. As far I can tell, 99.99% of the time, this appears to be complete fallacy. Securing a computing environment takes skills that even my bank (a very large international bank) is obviously lacking. The situation is worse in nearly all non-IT companies I have investigated while running Lokad. Some companies happen to be very confident in their IT security, but most of time, it's just over-confidence, with no tangible processes to support this confidence. As cloud computing grows more mature, I expect the community consensus to gradually converge toward the opinion that unless proven otherwise, any self-hosted server should be considered as an IT liability.

7) No1 cloud issue will stay the lack of qualified manpower

Media, influencers, integrators, and cloud providers keep discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of the cloud, but there is one issue that dwarf all others, and yet, this issue is barely mentioned: the extreme lack of talented workforces to develop in the cloud. Not believing me? Just try to hire any experienced cloud computing software architect. Hiring good developers is already extremely hard, hiring good developers who happen to have skills and experience in large scale distributed systems is only harder.

8) Fine-grained geolocation will be the No1 entry barrier

Two years ago I was stating that cloud computing was an arena for big players. I still believe this isn't going to change. In particular, geolocation capabilities - aka the possibility to bring the computing resources close to the end-user - are already exponentially increasing the entry costs in the cloud market. Closer data-centers will mean lower latencies, and smoother UI behaviors for cloud-hosted apps. Ultra-responsive UI are so much more enjoyable that it's little wonder than Google recently started to add website speed as an extra criterion for their website ranking. In 5 years, clouds will no more be expected to have half a dozen of worldwide locations (Windows Azure has 6 locations at the moment), but dozens, with a data-center close to every major megalopolis. Considering that each data center costs more than a few hundred millions USD, entering the cloud market will be just impossible for anyone but the largest IT companies of the planet.

9) Cloud computing is not going to kill desktop apps

Some believe that the cloud is going to kill desktop apps. I don't. I believe that all software areas will be growing (cloud / desktop / embedded / games, ...). There will be more desktop apps in 5 years from now, and WAY much more cloud apps. Although cloud computing will shift the purpose and the value of desktop apps. The AppStore is a good example of the strong interactions that are likely to exist between non-web apps and the cloud: apps are available on the cloud at any time, typically interact with the cloud, and bring a top user experience that would be very hard to deliver otherwise. And no I don't think that World of Warcraft is going to run on HTML 5 any time soon.

10) Dev stacks are going to develop their cloud affinity

The software world is basically divided between a hand-few development stacks: Microsoft/.NET, Linux/LAMP, Oracle/Java, ... I expect each stack to develop some growing affinity with one public cloud in particular. The .NET world as already a very natural orientation toward Windows Azure. Linux-based solutions will keep moving forward with Amazon, eventually Rackspace. As Google is expending the coverage of its App Engine, I expect more development Java/Python tools to be released - basically the ones internally developed and used at Google. Some are dreaming about cloud interoperability, but considering the pace of change in the cloud computing world, I don't see that happening in the next 5 years.

What are your predictions for the cloud in the next 5 years?

BIG award for a TINY company (Lokad)

Lokad just won the Windows Azure Partner award of 2010. That's an extremely big award for an exceptionally small company. The last French company to get such as an award was no less than Dassault Systèmes, the largest software company in France. I am proud of the work done by the Lokad team.