Its been more than 2 months since I joined Ensuant Inc as a Software developer Intern. It was a nice surprise when I had to report directly to client site at Vegas for my first day. Its been an amazing experience to work with clients so soon in one’s career. Lots of questions to answer, responsibilities that needs to be shouldered, and the pride of learning and developing interfaces is all that matters for a small time intern like me.

Presently in to the new world of web development, which again has me writing front end and back end for a small piece of the project. Superb co-operation and excellent environment to work is all what makes Ensuant so special to me.

I have seen so many people who are extremely talented and  are knowledgable of almost every technology in this world.

Through my short time being here I have been very inspired and have hopes of working to become like them in the future.

Its 2011, year of the Super Hero Movies (boo-ya!), where people are creating technology breakthrough’s daily enabling us to set new records for life longevity annually, seriously thinking of going to Mars, and enjoy air conditioning …and yet in the enterprise IT space I have never, in my life, seen a company implement a monitoring system completely conducive to the actual business process as opposed to IT system-centric, partially ITIL compliant solutions. In other words – folks implementing monitoring and management tools generally are thinking IT first, which makes sense if that is what they are well versed in. Consider then it is much more convenient for IT, and cheapest for outsourcers to boot. Taxonomies are built focused on individual technologies…unfortunately most business processes in this environment traverse numerous technologies spanning multiple file systems, servers, data centers, network segments, intranets, extranets, etc. – meaning you will need many groups, and possibly some external assistance from a customer/supplier/bank/3PL/etc.

It is often up to the individuals owning the business area to decipher what is going on in an incident – generally by running upstream and working through the various technology teams if something funky is happening with a transaction that does not process in the end system. When folks are troubleshooting this they may start and roughly run serially – did a DMZ get & process this? Check. AS2 Decrypt? Check. Post-scripts all run? Check. Pre-scripts run ok? Check.  Transported to an EDI validator? Mediation Layer runs? Check. EDI translated into any formats you need? Check. EDI Router passes to EAI system? Check. Content based routing or enrichment ok? Check. Back to EAI? Check. Consumed by service on end system? Check? Pre-processing run? Check. Throughout all of the above is the metadata snagged and sent to a DB for track and tracing visualizations/reports? Check. Data to be archived consumed? Check. Even if you go backwards, it can take equivalent time.

When you traverse a multitude of groups of different technology, each one self-aware for the most part, possibly with different SLA’s not optimally aligned to the business, you begin to realize how long and painful the process can be. Just the discourse and time spent via a ticketing system can really add up (enter update, status, blah, blah, blah) for one group to put it in the system and another to accept, read, and react. Rinse. Repeat. This could happen over multiple teams, even if in the same organization, and causes the business to turn red in the face waiting to figure out where the problem is and immediately restore service. Naturally there is some parallelism that would occur – but it takes time to spread the word – support for one group (e.g. your Infrastructure group) may be next door, but your applications group may be on the other side of the world.

After all the effort just described, now the business owner still doesn’t necessarily know the problem. The value of knowing this, and associated the business impact immediately with associated context helps prioritize and identify impacted systems automatically and, in the end, reduce your downtime. So how do you start to move in this direction? Stay tuned and we’ll share some ideas – and thanks for checking us out!

Things we learn along the way… 

• Build your customer base from the word go.
• Customers always, always comes FIRST
• Sense of Urgency is key to success
• Trust & Believe, in yourself, your idea and your people
• Weekends cease to exist
• Get used to being on the phone a LOT
• Get used to staring at the laptop a LOT
• Get used to hearing ‘No’ a LOT
• Listen hard and listen well
• Read, learn and never be afraid to ask, always.
• You will wear many hats all at once.
  If you can manage only a couple hats at a time, get people you trust to do the rest for you. Make sure they do it well.
• There are more downers than uppers in the world. So be prepared to go the Redbull way, get wings.
  And a thick skin..
• Sell your product, even before it exists.
• Sell your company vision to get the right people to believe in you.
• Build your company with the best folks you can find.
• Build on your product & solutions every chance you get.
• Keep an eye if not two, on Cash Flow.
• Optimize your business operations as much as possible as soon as possible.
• Get used to dirty competitor tactics
• Patience is always key.
• Give people a second, maybe a third chance.. after that, well, you’ve got a business to run.
• A good way to kill yourself is to try and make everyone happy at the same time, or you could die trying.
• You have got to make it fun, fun does not just happen.
• There is no such thing as luck, only 10, 000,000 hours of pure unadulterated hard work, with a smile.

Most importantly, get a cook, cleaner and if you can afford one, a masseuse & a bartender. Cheers!

Have you ever seen a 10-12 year old boy staring blankly at a video game on a screen (or a television), fully engulfed in what he is doing – nearly completely oblivious to the physical world around him, unless shaken or yelled at repeatedly? That was me at age 11 when my family picked up an Atari 2600. Even before that I enjoyed games on the Commodore 64, Apple IIe – but the console really got me, and I still enjoy games to this day, although rarely play them.

Video games have come a looong way from 8 Bit graphics taking up a few Kilobytes of memory and storage. Moore’s law and technology breakthroughs make things faster and more capable, the size of the addressable market and industry size (estimated recently to be worth $65 Billion USD) is staggering, and video game production budgets are now rivaling first rate summer movies. Corporate sponsorship within video gaming existed for years, as games often provide access to youth who have yet to make up their minds on which brands they identify with/purchase.

The industry itself has been monetized by entrepreneurs, some doing something ethically and completely legal – such as the former P&G employee who resigned years ago to form a business to buy and distribute virtual goods bought in lots and then broken down and sold via ebay, spurring questions around intellectual property of things that don’t exist outside of magnetically stored 1’s and 0’s back in the day. Everquest (or Ever-crack as the one person I knew who played it called it) was the game – and its economy at one point in USD was equivalent to the 77^th richest country in the world.

More recently the grey markets created by Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPG) games such as World of Warcraft have shown a seedier side of gaming, employing factories of prisoners in slave labor type conditions to play video games all the time they are awake, building up stockpiles of virtual goods/cash, and then exchanging these for tangible cash in USD$.

I wonder – why not do more from a corporate point of view? In a culture where gaming is so pervasive that Angry Birds has nearly replaced the newspaper or magazines for bathroom reading for many (the REAL reason the Birds are so angry – it’s hard to get angry at green pigs) – why not?

If you incentivize users with an entertaining and engaging experience (I’m talking to you Minecraft), generally with ongoing points or status awards, you can:

• Reinforce your brand and build loyalty for it within your target demographics
• Know your customer better over time, build up a tremendous amount of data
• Establish a relationship they care about – not just another weekly email
• Get actual results – crowd-sourced work parsing and validating unstructured data, for example, in a game-like forum. Stand-up some servers – better yet use EC2 with game mods – or build a much more engaging iOS/Android App – MORE than marketing!

All at minimal cost! It does not cost much to develop a game – there are open source alternatives, as well as commercial, with open SDKs.

My 6 year old spends considerable time on a toy company’s website, with very rudimentary flash games. He’s a fan of the brand for life but not b/c of the website – imagine what could be done if more thought outside the box. I define ‘the box’ as a web-site with simple flash/html5 games heavily based on product being sold – occasionally building a simple app for IOS or Android. That is great – what companies don’t realize is they could do so much more if they connected the dots, they have a willing audience willing to work under game mechanics as long as the experience is worth it for no cost, sometimes even paying more than their time.

Microsoft is opening up the Kinect, paving the way for low-cost robotics for outer space, bomb defusement – the applications are as endless as the human imagination. The military uses video games as part of the training process for enhancing situational decision making. Where are the large enterprises?

13 years ago a guy on my team built a Doom-mod which triggered scripts to take action when various things were shot by the ‘player’. He wanted incidents to show up as monsters – but that wasn’t happening in a production environment. Nonetheless – he was very ahead of his time. Can’t wait to play what’s ‘next’!

Last week we offered some general tips and thoughts on vendor agnostic Complex Event Processing (CEP) performance. I’ll expand on that this week with some more thoughts – and broaden the scope a bit. CEP is NOT just a technical problem – you obviously need people and some very pragmatic, effective processes – which are as unobtrusive as possible. Below are some technical, other procedural, items to consider which may impact the scalability of your enterprise CEP initiatives.

1. One general philosophy applies in CEP – “less is often more”. If components are not needed to deliver the project and its business goals, whether objects in the ontology, elements in an event, number of concepts needed, they should not be used or introduced. This sounds easy enough, but the mind-set shift needed from traditional app dev to CEP can be difficult for some. We have observed, and helped remedy, several projects by simply scaling back unnecessary ‘moving parts’, and re-engineering what was essentially simplicity & common sense. Remember – you can add extensibility into your schemas and add more content if needed, so no worries.
2. CEP Vendors utilize various threading models in their different CEP offerings. It is important you understand different thread types, why they exist, and how to leverage them for your project’s benefit.  Ensure your threading settings are proper for the HW or virtualized server(s) you are using
3. If you are deploying in a private/public cloud, or virtualized OS’s, ensure you keep a close eye on the controllers. Depending upon the automation tools you are leveraging it is possible issues could arise during peak traffic periods, specifically if multiple apps are handling peak periods at the same time, while sharing the same provisioned network controllers. I have seen this before, albeit not related to a CEP system.
4. Understand the impact to the underlying network as touched on in the last post. Are you handling events at lower OSI layers via multicast vs. unicast? Depending upon the amount of DCs, LAN segmentations within a DC and your networking equipment this can make a big difference. Relatively straightforward – but another thing to check, as there are numerous messages being sent across the network as underlying system advisory messages which you may never see in the logs.
5.  Performance has a direct correlation to uptime, and minimizing down component’s mean time to restore (MTTR), and extend mean time between failures (MTBF) for system components is key. A well-documented system where engines, projects and deployments are captured in a ‘single source of truth’ document is invaluable to the support team, and reduces MTTR figures. With proper problem service management (e.g. leveraging parts of ITIL), covering problem management for RCA/systemic problems should help extend MTBF.  These documents may also provide ‘Current Best Approaches’ to remedy issues without having to escalate to your final level of support resources/engineers. This is a set of living docs.
6. In addition to the production information captured for operations and service management, it is critical you capture and document assets involved in your CEP initiatives. Developing the proper asset catalogues, and ensuring they are living documents kept up, and included in standard change processes, is important for objects, events and relationships, and ultimately the success of your CEP initiative long-term.
7. Ensure you understand all the caches you are using, and what you are using them for. Your L1 cache sitting on a CPU for highly requested data is great, but you can’t use too much. The cache built into the CEP engine located in the various JVMs, depending upon vendor, provide more space than a multiprocessor, is faster than an in-memory cache, but obviously cannot handle as much data as an in-memory cache such as Oracle Coherence.
8. Is your test data good? Are you able to stress test with good data from the business, representative of peaks to be seen in production? It sounds like common sense, but you should know by now that common sense is uncommon. I have seen the business off by a factor of 10,000% in one case in BAT testing (vs. production data), which crippled a really well designed ERP system for over a week while it was being triaged.

Ever wondered who is driving the marketing for you product? Is that your marketing department that’s collecting a list of potential leads and bombarding them with emails? Is it the latest Advertisement campaign launched on the last big sporting event? The sales guy who is trying to entice you by explaining the new features on the car? Well this used to be the way to market but seem to be fading away faster. The new wave of marketing is driven by the once to whom the companies had to market – THE CONSUMER.

Consumer led marketing or social marketing is not something new. It was how things got marketed before the mass media came about. Ever think of the days when your Mom bought a product that her friend so dearly admired. That sounds more like the Social Marketing, isn’t it. The social media, product reviews and the blog sphere is rolling the clock back to make consumers in-charge of marketing the products. In this new age of marketing knowing your customers needs and their social connections pays huge dividends.

This indeed is good for product companies as they can start putting more energy into what they do the best, innovate for what consumer needs and let the product and its consumers take care of the marketing. Its about making your consumers not just loyal customers but rather brand advocates. The traditional marketing still has its value in building the product awareness, but the real marketer is the consumer.

You have invested a significant amount of capital, time and ongoing expense into your Complex Event Processing (CEP) initiative. Regardless of which vendor you choose, CEP engine interaction with in-memory caches, numerous event streams and options available for development, creates many opportunities for design misses or oversights which could cost you dearly in production when dealing with material performance degradation.

Below are just a few questions and thoughts to consider when thinking about your CEP project:

1. Is your ontology nailed? Just like a DB not properly normalized, if your object model is not right in the beginning this alters queries and how the CEP engine functions. Use inheritance smartly.  Just like a DB, if this part is not right the consequences are similar – complex, difficult queries, less than ideal processing speeds, and potential outages.
2. CEP Engines, regardless of vendor, provide the ability for inference engines to “know” about all objects in the cache at all times via handles in working memory. This is a short-cut for developers so they don’t have to manually load instances into and out of working memory.  Its far better to manually load objects from a cache to your CEP engine(s) Enterprise class implementations for large enterprise class projects. If done properly this can be abstracted to provide simplicity and standardization, resulting in performance improvements via more efficient usage of active memory vs. cache.
3. Are you running with 64 bit software on a 64 bit platform?  If the amount of memory addressed on your platform is large, you may have too. If you do not have too, don’t! 64 bit is slower – all pointers are double in size relative to 32 bit systems, Java garbage collection takes longer, and some 64 bit JVMs (HP’s Red Hat) cause memory requirements to increase 20-30%, with additional degradation of performance.
4. Have you done hardware tuning analysis to ensure traffic and processing is properly spread across not only your servers, but also the controllers within the server (I/O), memory is not being paged, and the impact to the kernel during peak load is manageable. Have you configured/tested the backplane if you are utilizing blades?
5. Have you checked and ensured timing is as expected for events or event streams absorbed into your CEP cache? Is the integration mediation tool in front of your CEP engine doing any mapping, content enrichment or audit logging before sending the events to cache? In certain circumstances this could give the appearance of slow CEP engine – it is important to assess not only your CEP engine but other system actors which interact with it as part of a higher level end-to-end business process.
6. Are the systems the end consumers of the CEP engine’s rules and actions able to handle in a timely manner requests sent its way? If your CEP engine provides data to a mediation server, which then sends to an app server for end-users, have you cleaned up unnecessary fields in a SOAP reply in your integration broker, as an example? This can cause noticeable performance impact to end users.
7. Is your backing store which sits behind the in-memory cache optimized? Are the DB tables indexed, scripts complete and variables defined with proper type?
8. If using multiple inference engines care must be taken to ensure that one engine or thread does not overwrite another engine’s changes or perform processing based on an inconsistent view of the data by locking it.

These are but a few high level recommendations on vendor agnostic CEP performance – oftentimes the magic itself comes in the design and subsequent code, and there are a number of tenants you should follow to ensure your CEP project is successful, maximizing performance while providing your business value.

If you would like more information on how to design, develop and manage an enterprise class CEP project, please contact us. We have some of the best, most experienced CEP architects in the world, and can provide you honest and clear vendor agnostic advice.

I made a wager on the NBA finals with a colleague: if Dallas won I’d articulate just how great the Mavs are in a blog (this one) and I owe the man they call Ken lunch; if Miami had own Ken would be providing weekly blog posts for a month. Ah well – you’re stuck with me, so on to the Mavs.  Since we are an IT software and services company, I’ll do my best to weave that in where possible.

To start you should know that over half of the company, including our CEO and another co-founder, are huge NBA fans. I’m one, that’s for sure. I spent the majority of my childhood close to Indianapolis, and had family season tickets from 1983-84 – when the Pacers went 26-56 and even the stadium was just awful garish orange/brown cushions against black steel…until they punched away their last chance when Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson attacked fans in the Detroit Fiasco in 04-05. When we started going the product they offered included Granville Waiters (more hair than career points, not counting the beard), Steve “Stipo” Stipanovich (a 7’ uncoordinated stiff who fouled himself, and sported a porn mustache until he retired, realized it was 1990, and shaved it), and a menagerie of D-League talent.

Watching them grow throughout the Reggie Miller years was fantastic – it is amazing to see what a great team can do when everyone is pulling for the same goal and really cares. Everyone with the same agenda, following the same strategy and plan, understanding and doing the best with their role and helping out others always. While you can’t compare individuals well you can see correlation between successful teams/organizations and leading technology organizations. The Mav coaches, management and players really believe in what they are doing – they sacrifice for it, care about each other and work extremely hard. When it matters, they come through more often than not…a lot more often than not – they pick each other up and do more b/c they are a ‘team’ – greater than the sum of their parts.

Sweet & Sour Memories being a Pacer fan…

 

After 14+ years working for Fortune 500 companies, I often hear a couple questions from old colleagues and friends –  “What is it like in a start-up” and “How different is it from a large corporation”.  Below are a few observations on Ensuant, and how it differs from corporations I have worked with in the past:

-          Everyone is a Superstar – literally. I have never worked with such a strong team in all areas. At larger enterprises you have stars like this, but you also have more folks who are just floating by and/or are lesser performers for a variety of reasons.

-          Everyone Believes & Cares - Everyone here believes in what we are doing and in each other, it is more than just a job. Everyone works around the clock because they want to. I contrast that to what I have seen in large enterprises where many just put in their required hours, and a few even relish they can collect a paycheck remaining largely hidden because the company they work for is so large.

-          A Dream Culture – Everyone here is extremely positive, is ready and willing to help others, and empowered to make a difference. It is like an extended family more than a disconnected organization. Developing a positive culture is critical to start-up success, and thus far I’d say our founders have done an exceptional job in hiring.

-          We Do Not Fail our Customers, Ever – Thus far we, and our clients, have not failed on any initiative Ensuant has participated in, and we expect to continue this streak. When things change in the environment we don’t spend a week escalating with the customer, we’d rather work with the customer on making things right. We deliver, enable the customer, and move on to the next business or IT problem or opportunity. Common sense is not common.

For full disclosure I don’t think of Ensuant as a traditional start-up given the growth we have experienced in our consulting division – a result of integrity, knowledge, hard-work and more than anything results for our clients! Meanwhile our engineering team is hard at work on our product offerings, working with our consulting division to ensure what we deliver is relevant and truly ‘enterprise ready’.

It was quite a bit of culture-shock when I started, and I continue to learn things every day. Life is short, it is great to enjoy and believe in what you are doing and the people you are doing it with.

Written By: Matt Weaver

Last month we launched our new website with exciting details on our product vision and consulting offerings. With this blog in the mean time we hope to give you a general feel for what Ensuant is all about and the things we sincerely believe make us different than any other vendor. This post is focused on several things we aren’t to help build your understanding of how we roll.

Let me first calibrate you on my experience which shaped my points of view – in college my first experience with consulting was as a management consulting intern at Ernst & Young, back when the “big 6” accounting & consulting firms still were solvent.

After graduating I was privileged to spend the first 6+ years of my careers working for one of the most ethical, best managed and marketed companies in the world, Procter & Gamble, which helped shape how I approach doing business. While at P&G I was able to interact with numerous software, hardware and consulting vendors as the customer.

Following P&G’s IT outsourcing in 2003 to HP, besides meeting even a bunch of incredible folks at HP I was able to see things from the other side as the vendor, working together in alliances with a myriad of other consulting and product firms.

After seeing the industry from a few perspectives have seen a lot and wanted to share a few things that drove me absolutely nuts when dealing with vendors. The items on this list are NOT the way business is done at Ensuant – we think it’s illogical if our job is to make our customers successful. Do any of these sound familiar to you.

1. HW/SW companies selling their products and throwing in X weeks of consulting services….knowing full well that you’ll need additional weeks/months of their consulting services to produce anything meaningful.
2. Consulting companies who talk about themselves first vs. listening to you, the customer, and your needs.
3. Sales folks who mysteriously disappear after a contract is signed, and mysteriously re-appear as their company’s quarter is ending to try and have you open your wallets further.
4. Vendors who are extremely difficult to work with – whether its inflexible contract or licensing options, terms & conditions or difficulty finalizing scope and deliverables.
5. Vendors who hear an initiative is generating X million dollars of benefit for you, and use this value to try and articulate their value….forgetting there are several other vendors and most importantly many people who are the ones who are actually delivering the solution.
6. Sales folks who never say “no” when you ask questions about what their product can/should do.
7. Consulting companies that look to low-ball themselves into a project with the strategy that they will recover more than sufficient margin by change ordering the customer to hell.
8. Consulting companies pontificating about going “above and beyond” for customers – yet always bill their customer for every minute and second they do anything related to the project.
9. Consulting companies delivering to you 90% boilerplate and 10% meaningful content in their deliverables.
10. HW/SW and consulting companies who never fully enable the customer to manage the product or project without additional consulting support. They hold back information and self-service collateral is sparse and/or rarely useful.
11. HW/SW support who provide SLA’s on response time – and do meet these SLA times but generally by requesting more information from the customer (repeatedly). Occasionally this is needed – but it should not be the status quo for every issue.
12. HW/SW companies only living quarter to quarter – viewing customers as short-term revenue and rarely, if ever, working to establish a true long-term relationship.
13. Consulting companies taking your business problem and fit it into one of their offerings. This rarely works – every customer is different and it often resembles putting a square peg in the proverbial round hole.
14. Consultants with robotic or cardboard personalities – never negative which is great, but also never positive. Besides never becoming part of the customer’s team, which hinders enablement, these companies forget that optimism breeds increased productivity (based on numerous studies – please Google this to see for yourself).
15. Companies selling their products and services into any niche possible, even if it provides you, the customer, minimal to no business value.

These don’t apply to all vendors – this is just a list of things I have run across during my career dealing with a wide variety of companies. With that said, what makes Ensuant different? It is easy to say Ensuant doesn’t do these things – and as I said earlier, no company ever says they suck. With that, here are a few things which differentiate us:

• Our company is young and is very focused on hiring only the best of the best, assuming they share specific personality traits needed to fit in with this culture. Scaling this will be a challenge, no doubt, but we’re convinced there are quite a few exceptional folks who think like us.
• Everyone in our company loves what they do – this is their passion. This is not a job
• If it was you wouldn’t see us spending hours of our own (non-billable) time regularly on customer projects to exceed expectations nor would you see consistent optimism.
• We have a very diverse group of exceptional individuals with backgrounds in corporations & countries spanning numerous verticals, not to mention leading software companies.
• Ultimately it is our people– a group of caring, hyper-intelligent individuals who are oriented at pleasing the customer by nature.

I could go on and on but talk is cheap, particularly so on a blog I do understand. We would love the opportunity to prove ourselves, if you would like to learn more please Contact us and be on the look-out in the coming weeks for our website. Please note I haven’t touched on our product offerings which are personally very exciting – what they offer does not exist on the market today and we believe can provide value to a lot of companies. You’ll be hearing more about these soon with the website re-launch.

Thanks sincerely for your time to read our blog and hope you and yours have a wonderful week!