We are what we aren’t

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!

How Great It Is

Written By: Behzaad ‘Bez’ Morid

So i have been working for this startup company called Ensuant Inc. for about 9 months now and although I have been in charge of managing all these blog posts, i have never actually written one myself.  So I guess today is the day that I have decided to walk down the strange and wonderful path of social media and throw in my ’2 cents’.

The title of this post “How Great It Is” spawns from the realization of how great of a job i have. The job i have working for this crazy Application Network/ Enterprise 3.0 / Connecting the Dots/ Architect’s Guild startup that is Ensuant Inc. This job that when people ask me what i do for the company, which usually is a one or two word answer like sales or accountant turns into a paragraph. “So what do you do?” “… well i do graphic design, web design, seo, administration, event planning, office purchases, logo design, business cards, ppt word and resume formatting, social networking, T-shirts, and occasionally i make Costco runs for the office” and i always add at the end “its a startup” and then the expression on the faces of whom ever I’m talking to goes from puzzled to the ‘a-hah’ face. And yes, its true I have and still do a little bit of everything that i have listed above and to tell you the truth, I love it.

How great it is to have a job where i am learning something new everyday and on top of it all im getting paid for it. Its like taking the Start-up 101 course at your local community college but instead of credits your receiving money, experience, and references that builds oneself to be a stronger well and well-rounded worker in this god-forsaken economy.  A job where i am constantly working on  new projects and assignments that requires me to research, learn and expand on different things every week. I am constantly doing new things, each day is different, exciting, and unpredictable.

Not to mention the cool working atmosphere here at Ensuant. From being able to work this job wearing shorts sandals and dreadlocked hair, to co-workers playing catch with a nerf football in the middle of the office, and casual fridays means lets go to the bar after work and have a beer. Here is another great example, my first assignment when i got this job was to organize an off-site in Miami Beach!  While a majority of my peers have a jobs that are a little easier on their wallets than mine, they aren’t working in a rich learning environment like i am and their certainly not out in south beach for an offsite sippin on mojito’s.

But i guess what do you expect when you land a job by meeting the CEO in Mission Beach San Diego hitting the bars sippin on Jameson and playing a game of pool.

Overall, all i have to say is.. How great it is, to work at Ensuant Inc.

Google I/O… Failure to Disappoint

Written By: Matt Weaver

Google I/O failed to disappoint with many significant announcements:

• Ford & Google are teaming up to create cars with the ability to autonomously adjust, monitor and predict turns and more, based on the Google Prediction API. This type of predictive analytics could do wonders in the supply chain, or most other enterprise use cases.
• Android fragmentation is supposedly solved in Ice Cream Sandwich, and the vision is to embed Android in everything, leveraging a very cool hardware processing solution called Arduino.
• Chrome and the Chromebook, at the opposite end of the netbook spectrum from Macbook Airs, are being pushed with a price point similar to an entry Ipad. This is hailed as significant for Google in the enterprise, but logic (IMO) would state unless there is a security gap it is better to allow end-user’s choice and reimburse via a standard stipend. More companies utilize virtualization than you think anyways- whether virtualizing XP desktops or all PCs and making your desktop a virtual instance with state, all accessible from any popular, approved device.
• Google Music Service will launch without a Recording Industry Association of America license, just like Amazon. Expect a lawsuit in the news soon methinks.

This is but a sample of amazing things Google is leading – personally great to see a company invest and think long-term vs. typical corporate short-term/make the numbers, and can’t wait to see what’s next.

The Amazon EC2 Outrage… Reflection

Written By: Matt Weaver

The recent Amazon EC2 outage has been well documented in the press and IT blogosphere, with many prognosticators saying this will greatly slow near-term cloud adoption. Several thoughts come to mind related to this event, which Amazon shared was “A networking event early this morning triggered a large amount of re-mirroring of EBS volumes in US-EAST-1” (their North Virginia Data Center):

• You are only as strong as your weakest link in business process resiliency, all the way up and down the stack. Most enterprise’s in my experiences have several data centers, whether internal cloud ‘Infrastructure / Platforms As A Service’ (IAAS/PAAS), high or low density physical servers, virtualized or not, all of which are are intra/inter-country between and across regions. Those that do it best ensure all key systems, virtual and physical, are redundant with minimal Recovery Time & Point Objectives defined.  Net – don’t forget all the layers! The physical DC layer provides no value if your apps and databases are not also resilient.
• If your SLA with internal or external providers is not crystal clear – zero nebulous language – and related penalties/operational contingencies well defined then you are putting your enterprise at risk.
• It is easy to talk about building and maintaining internal data centers, but the capital and operating expenses associated with operating a Tier 3 or 4 data center are exorbitant, and true elastic utility computing offers a compelling economic proposition to improve balance sheets which is difficult to ignore.
• I am not aware of any enterprises that have never experienced significant outages like this across their systems landscape. Enterprise IT is a complex beast when you view it at all its layers, and ultimately shit does happen.
• One learning Amazon could take from enterprises who manage critical outages well is to provide regular, transparent updates. After sitting on the client and service provider sides of the fence, it is critical all data points are shared transparently with customers in calls/emails on a cadence defined based on escalation (criticality) level. This ensures the business can begin executing their business continuity plan (BCP) optimally, able to staff/plan based on the best possible understanding of where the problem resolution process/ETA is. Based upon data, the most likely hypothesis on which component(s) are the cause are reviewed and ruled out, and so on until the incident is resolved.
• Effective post-mortems allows the business and IT sides the ability to mitigate all weaknesses in the manual and automated systems and processes.
• The cloud will continue – private, public and hybrid – and hopefully this serves to educate current and future users on how to operate and manage their business and IT assets appropriately in this environment.

CIO’s Challenge

Written By: Kannan Ayyar 

The last three months have been quite busy here at Ensuant. We have been traveling the country meeting CIO’s and IT (Information Technology) executives at major enterprises.  There are a couple things that stand out as two very large trends that are going to be with IT from now on.

1)    The consumerization of IT

2)    The continuing larger role IT is playing with respect to business processes and procedures

The consumerization of IT is not just the desire of employees to use their iPhones and iPads for and at work, but also sets an expectation for what they want to see in all their enterprise applications.  The user experience and metaphors of Facebook, Twitter, the iPhone (news feeds, followers, app stores) are what is expected in enterprise applications.  User experience is now a clear driver in application acceptance.

News feeds pushed to employees on a series of people and topics, which they self select and an app store that has a dynamic selection of relevant applications employees can use are fast becoming the expectation in enterprise IT.

The percentage of business processes that are automated continues to rise.  IT used to be about provisioning PC’s, ordering servers, and resetting passwords.  In todays world CIO’s are key participants in every major business decision. It is no longer sufficient to be technology competent and be very successful in IT, a knowledge and curiosity of the business processes and procedures is necessary.  This closing of the gap between technology and business procedure has long been the holy grail of computing.  Letting non-technical business analysts be able to control business rules and processes in real time—  at run time.

It is time for there to be an enterprise specific development platform that goes a long way to bringing these services to bear.  By building an application on this platform you should get integration, collaboration, workflow, user experience metaphors and mobile compatibility to name a few.

Personal Battle That Is Not So Personal

Written by: Jack Vinijtrongjit

Feels like I just returned from a battle field. Not the usual kind of battle, but a battle for my myself in London. I was running in the Virgin London Marathon 2011.
It has always been my goal to complete the Big 5 Marathons (Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London, and New York) and so far I gotten the Chicago and London marathons in the bag.

Completing a marathon requires discipline, determination, and most importantly, time. Unfortunately, time hasn’t been on my side as much as I would like to and I usually end up not having time to train. But that has never stopped me from traveling 6,000 miles to do what I set out to do.

My coworker recently asked me “How do you motivate yourself to run another step? What goes through your mind?”

This is not at all uncommon question and many people would not understand unless they have participated in a race. After all, people get carried away in ambulance and the statistics for death during marathons is very crazy at 1 in 50,000 people.

Although a marathon is all about battling with yourself, you are never really in it alone. There are always people cheering and supporting you when you feel like you can’t finish. Many of my favorite moments are from my past marathons. A lot of time you just can’t help, but smile even though you are in so much pain when there is a little 5-year-old running to you and gives you a slice of orange. There’s also so much determination from other runners around you that you just feel like they are carrying you with them in every step.
It’s an amazing feeling really when you know that you are not alone.

You can probably compare the feeling to how many feels at a start-up like ours. It’s the enthusiasm and motivation that drives each one of us to achieve the same common goal. Everyone is supporting each other and as long as someone has the drive to push forward, everyone else will follow suit. We take turns.

Besides thriving on the support of people, be it the audience or fellow colleagues, I hate giving up! I do have a few regrets of past moments and opportunities that were not achieved.
Demons & defeat are most always within us and every step forward only proves that I can keep going until the end.
Life is too short to not get up when you fall.

Think Apple When Building a Product

Written by Jack Vinijtrongjit

Just a quick disclaimer. I’m not just another one of those Apple fanboys. My concentration in the previous life was graphic design so a Mac was more of a natural fit for me. After almost 7 years of using it though, I would say that there is no going back (I was previously using every Windows OS since 3.1.1).

Why?

It’s simply more reliable, more innovative, more user-friendly, and built upon a solid foundation. My time is too precious to have to try to figure out why things don’t work the way they are supposed to. I don’t buy a product so that I can do QA testing for them.

So what can we learn from Apple?

People want things to just work and work for a long time. They need the “cool” factor that doesn’t compromise the usability. They need a product that  is carefully built so that it is extensible and doesn’t become obsolete in short period of time. You may have solved all possible problems that exists today, but it’s almost a guarantee that you will face another one the day after.

A solid foundation is key to any great lasting product, be it software of anything you buy in your life. It’s like a house!
Without the core foundation, a product is just a product that people use today and toss out tomorrow. Think iPhone. Why do some people still happily use iPhone 3G when it is 2 generation behind? If you are a user of a smartphone, you would probably have already guessed that Apple App Store is the key. You can have an old phone, but you can make it feel brand spanking new by simply downloading new applications. With a good foundation, there is no end to innovation and extensibility. Apple has also proven this by extending App Store for iPod Touch and iPad (and possibly Apple TV). They have even started using the same concept for Mac App Store. If you still remember when people say that it’s difficult to find software for Mac, that realistically no longer applies.

So if you want to build something that sticks out among thousands of products out there and not be just another pin in the haystack, it’s time to reevaluate.

Is Management As Usual Dead?

Written by Puneet Arora, CEO

Think about it!!

When we were growing up, there were limited touch points and sources of knowledge. Usually in an impressionable age, it would be parents, teachers, friends, libraries, books, television and newspapers in a typical pyramid scheme leading to trickle down knowledge. The concept of crowd sourcing of knowledge existed albeit limited in its influence.

The new generation of employees is growing up in the midst of a complete revolution around globalization and democratization of knowledge and information that’s never been seen or experienced before. It’s got to have intended and unintended consequences on how we work, live, play, innovate and compete.

I have never been a fan of pyramid and hierarchical organizational models and for a good reason. The core principles of this model are:

1. A manager is smarter and has more knowledge than the sub-ordinate.
2. A sub-ordinate only works to satisfy a manager.
3. A manager gets to decide how much value a sub-ordinate adds to the organization.
4. A sub-ordinate has to pay its dues in terms of time to move up the ladder.

Do you know what I mean?

The whole model is catered to less than 1% of the population in any organization who game the system. In terms of decision science, the model is predicated on the lowest risk criteria of organizational behavior.

As a young company, we will continue to find the right organizational model with a balance of risk and reward to foster creativity in all good folks at Ensuant. The model is geared towards an open, innovative environment where everyone in the company is involved based on their skills, interests and relevance. We should kiss good bye to corporate “know alls” making decisions about company’s present and future and rely on the operational intelligence and wisdom of the crowds. Let’s make two promises:

1. We will not appoint any managers who haven’t been in the trenches.
2. Get rid of the old adage “Do not expose engineers to customers? Dare they speak the truth”.
   Our engineers and consultants are the ambassadors of the company and we think customers will appreciate an honest company in this ever-confusing world of buzzwords.
   Don’t we expect that from our doctors, lawyers, plumbers and financial planners?

Let’s continue to refine the model and have a system designed to catch the exceptions rather than punish the 99% with rigid, useless and brain dead processes and reporting relationships.

The big bang beginning..

Written by Yeshodhan Kulkarni

I complete a month today working at Ensuant Inc. which also marks a month here in the US and California. Even though such a short time, it is packed quite a punch and I can safely say that this is has been one of my best times spent with few of the best minds in the Silicon Valley.

It has been a great experience and only within a week of joining I felt like I was part of the team. I was fortunate enough to witness the transition of Ensuant from a bare 5 cubicle startup amidst 500+ startups in Sunnyvale to a brand new Ensuant HQ at Landings, Mountain View. We were part of the entire process right from packing boxes, setting up internet at new location, printer, coffee machine to assembling the IKEA furniture! In a way, these activities helped me know and better understand the team I now work with. I believe in building trust and understanding your own team, which leads to a good work environment and helps accomplish great results.

Since I’ve joined, I’ve been working on clustering solutions, distributed caches, hash tables, ipad programming, complex event processing solutions, design issues; all within a month and that too, under guidance and help of gurus who have a proven track record of developing multi million dollar products, own messaging systems and even have registered patents under their name! Awesome, isn’t it? Talk about starting with a bang!

I had joined here with a set of preconceived notions but Ensuant proved to be different in all the aspects. My mind’s a clean slate now and there are many more things to be done, tons of code to be written but all in all with loads of sun & fun!

Organic Computing Systems

Written By: Matt Weaver

Could you imagine an organic, brain-like information processing system, created by science in the future? I did when traveling back from our new headquarters, literally next door to the Googleplex and just a really cool area. I think this may eventually happen, and create the next leap in ‘super-computing’ – a system utilizing neurons , adapting to scenarios similar to the brain, yet only utilizing specific components, actually DNA, of the brain. It would be waaaay in the future, when the brain is understood, technology, knowledge and society has evolved (and assuming they evolve in this fashion). Perhaps they show up in Matrix 4 or 5; unlikely, although cool at least to me they are making the movies and Neo is still Keanu.

I googled ‘organic brain-like computing’ when I got home and was surprised to see how far others have taken this to date. Last year a team from Japan and Michigan Tech University created a an organic molecular layer processor, able to process instantaneous changes to ~300 bits, vs. 1 at a time with today’s supercomputers. You would think this is generations away, if ever, as today little is known of the brain (relatively speaking), and in general it sounds pretty odd & weird.

The trip was great btw, meeting folks I had only talked too and emailing was nice, especially seeing how elite they are in every way – really kind folks, super sharp. So far so good in maintaining a brilliantly unique, honest and warm culture here which rocks!