Monday January 08, 2007

Diary of a startup - Week 2

Week 2:  I talk to Monty this morning. He says the call with Sally, the Sun account executive, went well. It was mainly a get-acquainted call, and they will do a followup call this week. Marian, the CEO, was able to join for a few minutes at the end. 

Monty has his work cut out for him. The problems he faces in getting the enterprise IT operation set up are non-trivial.  He envisions a portal for mortgage brokers to submit their deals, but also the capability to accept paper applications, which will have to be scanned into the system. There will have to be a pricing engine, an underwriting engine, and a secondary marketing system to submit the packages to the agencies and to Wall Street. These will all come from one vendor, but other vendors will supply the middle office system and the document preparation system. The portal and the scanning system will be sourced from yet other vendors. Bottom line: a massive integration problem.

In Monty's view, the integration system is the most critical, since it ties everything together. As a former integration product manager, I think this criticality is not well appreciated in the software world. Industry pundits tend to write off integration as just another commodity. Like hell.

Monty is leaning toward Oracle Fusion middleware. Naturally, I pitch Sun's Java CAPS to him, but his mind seems to be made up. Fortunately, he is also leaning toward Solaris for the mission-critical tasks of running the database and the app server, although this is by no means settled. Sun will definitely have to earn his business.  He is already thinking of Dell for the portions of the system that will have to be Windows-based.  It dawns on me that he doesn't realize that Sun also offers Windows-based servers, and when I give him the news, he seems interested in the idea of having a single hardware vendor. I think to myself  that if this savvy CIO doesn't know about our x64 offering, Sun's marketing efforts have a long way to go. In a sense, it appears that our constant emphasis on Solaris has put us in a classic PR trap.

I press Monty about his impression of Sun's open-source strategy. With Solaris freely available, does he intend to purchase a support contract? Yes, he does. He notes wryly, "It's hard to run an enterprise if you can't talk to the vendor."  Score one for Jonathan's vision! As Monty points out, it's all about reducing risk. He wouldn't want to put the entire enterprise at risk just to save a few grand a year in support costs.

 I also ask him why he doesn't go with an open source stack like Ajax. His answer surprises me. I had thought that maybe a commercial enterprise wouldn't go that far into the open source world, but he has no problem with it, and has worked with open source applications in mission-critical tasks at another organization. Rather, he sees Ajax and similar open source stacks as more suited to from-scratch development than for solving an integration problem. For integration, you still have to go commercial.

 I have a hunch that integrating a bunch of  relatively unknown mortage origination applications is going to be very, very tough. Any fool can integrate PeopleSoft and Siebel, but tying together vertical-specific stuff is a task that separates the walkers from the talkers. We'll see.