Thursday January 18, 2007

Diary of a startup - Week 3

Week 3:  Things are moving fast now. When I talk to Monty today, he's dog-tired. He got back from Dallas late last night, and is still feeling the after-effects of the trip. He flew there with Marian, the CEO, and "Dan", their project manager. They went to Dallas to check out "CIS" (not its real name, but close) one of those amazing new-breed tech companies that's bigger than Sun, yet that no one has ever heard of. At least I hadn't. More than 50,000 employees, and they're completely off the radar. 

CIS does a lot of things, but Marian, Monty and Dan went to see them to talk about outsourcing the mundane details of their new mortage startup: taking the staples out of loan documents, scanning them, and converting them to indexed images. According to Monty, "All the big mortgage players use them." Who knew?

I guess I am pretty naive about how the hardware world really works. I had assumed that when Monty gets done buying the servers he needs, he will put them in his own little data center next to the broom closet. Hah! If he can come to terms with the boys in Dallas, CIS will put them on a rack in their giant data center, behind armored walls and sucking on uninterruptible power, along with the racks that belong to a thousand other companies "co-located" in the same facility. Monty may never even see the servers, because he will have them shipped there directly from Sun.

At least I hope they come from Sun. This is beginning to look a little dicey. CIS is happy to rack any kind of box, but they have a distinct preference for  IBM, and don't have the Solaris expertise to be much help in adminstering the servers. So if Monty goes with Sun, he will be administering the servers himself at the end of a very long phone line, albeit a very reliable, double-terminated, hardened phone line.  CIS will see to that.  Also, if he lets CIS procure IBM gear, he will have the advantage of their considerable negotiating power with Big Blue.

 Ironically, when I do a Google search on "CIS" and "Sun Microsystems" up comes a "Customer Success Story" about how Sun has sold a boatload of servers to CIS for its co-located hosting activities. Hmm. I guess the boys in Dallas didn't get the press release.

In addition to operating a big-as-Texas data center, the good ol' boys from CIS are no slouches when it comes to entertaining, either. They treat Monty and his colleagues to a memorable dinner at Al Biernat's legendary steakhouse. Monty is pretty worldly when it comes to fine dining, but he rates the 21-ounce, bone-in New York sirloin as the best he's ever eaten.

"Sally", the Sun account executive, is supposed to call Monty in a couple of days to take the sales process to the next level. I hope she knows how to sell against IBM.