Well looking back at the last blog post I did, it’s been over a year since I wrote it and I thought I would provide some insight into why the long hiatus.

As any of you who read my Bio here on the blog know, I had been working for IBM as Executive IT Architect for Financial Services when I wrote the last post, a role which I really enjoyed. One of the problems with the role though as it pertained to this blog was that I found myself constantly having to abandon articles out of concern about whether someone at IBM would feel it was against the official company party line. Particularly, since a number of IBM executives subscribed to this blog. Now in IBM’s defense they never gave me any grief over this blog and in fact encouraged myself and others to blog openly so this was more my choice to stop for a while in an attempt to remove any potential conflict of interest.

Another factor that made me stop blogging was the fact that I was already considering starting a new company and was being particularly careful about what I did or wrote during my employ, again to make sure I did not violate any potential IP agreements or other implied contracts. This is an area, if any of you read blogs from Venture Capitalists such as Brad Feld, Mark Suster or others, where many founders are not sufficiently careful and can get themselves and their new firm into trouble, before it even starts. So when combining these two issues I felt it was best to take a vacation from blogging until such time as any potential conflict of interest was removed.

Now is that time.

As of the end of September 2010, I have left IBM and started a new company with a couple of senior colleagues of mine, who will be introduced here over time.

The company is called Nebility and it will be focused on a couple of areas:

1. We will be designing both custom and shrink wrapped commercial software which we will offer as both stand alone and as Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings
2. We will be doing some consulting to other firms where it is focused on helping them design and build custom Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based applications
3. We are developing an integrated library of enterprise caliber, prebuilt service components for a range of uses which acts as an accelerator for 1 & 2 and which we are calling NebulaBlocks.
4. We are also developing some very advanced, proprietary technology which will help us do items 1, 2 and 3 and which we believe provides us with a game changing competitive advantage. So for now I will remain quiet about it .

So, what does all of this mean for this blog? Well it means:

1. I will be back to blogging and this time with fewer restrictions than before.
2. We will also be starting a blog on the Nebilty web site at www.Nebility.com and will be dividing articles between the two depending on their focus. More on this to follow.
3. Some of my colleagues in this new venture will also be blogging on this site and the Nebility blog and will thus provide additional perspective reflecting our individual areas of expertise and specialization

So you may be wondering how will the two blogs TechnologyMusings.com and the Nebility.com blog be divided? While we don’t think there will be a really hard and fast rule our plan is as follows:

1. TechnologyMusings.com will cover a range of topics including discussions of technologies including our experiences as we play with new technologies that we are evaluating and using for nebility.  Technology Musings will also have material on startup issues and considerations were are deliberating as we go through this startup journey.  It will also include general rants and wide ranging discussions about whatever strikes our fancy on any given day.
2. The Nebility.com blog will attempt to focus almost exclusively on business and technology discussions,  how-to type articles at both the design and implementation level (much like I have done here on this blog in the past).  On the Nebility blog we will also discuss a lot about business and technology strategy, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS) and issues and challenges in specific application verticals we are working on.  In addition we will also cover general issues and frustrations experienced by ourselves and our customers with enterprise software and other related topics.

We will post a link to any articles which are posted on the Nebility bog, here on TechnologyMusings where appropriate, but we would encourage you to subscribe to both blogs to be sure to catch all of the articles.

In addition, you will notice that there is a new layout to the blog and some new features which we hope will allow you to reach us and interact with us better.

Well that’s about it for now.  I hope you enjoy the new articles on both blogs.

As always, you can reach me through the comments, at Nebility, on Twitter, LinkedIn or by using the Ask the Experts form.

Technology Musings - Thoughts about Technology and Startup's Back From The Dead

Well I have been traveling out of the country a lot these past few weeks so its been a while since I posted.  I will try and do better in the future.  During my travels I had a lot of interesting discussions with people about a wide range of technology issues, solutions, and technology acquisitions and one theme kept coming up again and again which is the misalignment of problems and solutions.  This got me thinking about a blog post Dave McClure did a while back titled “Your Solution Is Not My Problem” .

In this article, Dave discusses one of his pet peeves about pitches that he and other VC’s receive.  The net of his beef is that people always start off by describing their solution without having first defined the problem that the solution is intended to solve.  Dave’s point is that if he doesn’t understand or believe in the problem,  then telling him about your solution to it, is meaningless and a waste of time.  If you really think about this, you will come to realize that this is a really profound concept that applies not just to assessing an elevator pitch, but to many other areas as well.

Unfortunately,  I find that too often we go around saying “Here is my hammer.  Show me your screw!”

I can’t tell you how many times I see people selling their solution to clients without having identified if the client even believes they have a problem never mind whether your solution fits that problem.  It drives me crazy to have to constantly play the bad guy stopping sales reps from pitching a misaligned solution to a client or explaining how a proposed or worse yet newly developed product or solution doesn’t address a client problem and thus won’t sell.  Then, if and only if, the product or solution truly does address a well articulated, painful problem to which we can associate a dollar value, do we get to examine whether the solution we propose is truly able to solve the problem better than the alternatives.  If you cannot do that then you are in big trouble and you solution will fail to be successful.

The process, whether you are selling a product, solution or your company needs to be as follows:
1) Define the problem.  You and the target audience need to agree on what the problem to be solved is or else there is no common ground on which to have the rest of the discussion that’s needed to result in a transaction.
2) Once you have agreement on the problem to be solved, then and only then can you define your solution, and you better make sure that your solution is truly aligned with the problem as defined in step 1 or you are wasting everyone’s time
3) You need to convince the target audience that your solution is the best solution to the agreed problem.  Remember its more that just the software or product that is being assessed.  Your solution includes you, your credibility and the credibility and viability of your company to support, maintain and improve the solution for the time horizon the client intends to use it for.

So if you want to have a successful solution, you need to make sure you know its a screw,  whether its a Philips or a Robertson and that your solution is the right screw driver and not a Hammer.  Even better, convince them your solution is a powered screw driver.

Technology Musings - Thoughts about Technology and Startup's Here is my hammer. Show me your screw!