I retired from personal blogging in July 2008 but you can find me over at blog.xero.com
Follow @roddrury
I’ve had quite a few media calls on the Google/YouTube deal over the past week.
The media, understandably, mainly sees the consumer deals. So that naturally wonder, why can’t we do one of those out of New Zealand.
Perhaps we might. I think its unlikely. Not impossible, but unlikely. However the question is wrong. I think it is more where are big NZ deals likely to come from.
In these deals there are often very smart people, and money attached to them. The YouTube founders have grown up in Paypal. In the Silicon valley environment there is a culture that supports these deals. There is market mass, bandwidth, and the marketing balls to go after these big consumer plays.
Because of our lack of Broadband we are unlikely to see the innovation that comes when you are used to having big pipes. More likely from NZ in the consumer space we’ll see innovation around trickling and caching video content because our puny Bandwidth encourages being clever over small pipes.
An exception to this is Christchurch company Eurekster, who are playing in the very big world of Vertical Search. (Eurekster is hosted overseas. Only software updates need to be pushed through to the server farms.) They could be a YouTube out of NZ because they are address a huge market and providing a technology that is inevitable. Search has to go Vertical to be more useful. They are a NZ company to watch.
What is getting me excited though is applying Web 2.0 thinking to Enterprise applications. This really suits us in NZ for a number of reasons.
- Relatively low capital requirement
- Relatively inexpensive to market
- Allows the potential of the network effect
- Our services heritage allows us to identify lots of opportunities
- Our small networks allows us to quickly pull teams together to exploit the opportunity
- Departments can shortcut central IT for solutions that are billed as OPEX. We are department sized.
This is turning into my 2.0 post. But Enterprise 2.0 has some interesting dynamics.
- A big part of Enterprise 2.0 may actually be Software as a Service (SaaS) which finally looks to be ready for primetime.
- The big SaaS vendors like SalesForce.com are starting to look bloated. Everything needs to be redeveloped to be lightweight and AJAX’d.
- As noted above, Departments can bypass IT to get SaaS offerings.
In Enterprise 2.0 there is also a new category of applications that take consumer technologies and put them inside the firewall. Australian Atlassian is doing Enterprise Wiki’s (Enterprise Wiki = Wiki + Active Directory) with their Confluence Product. There are number of new Enterprise Blogging platforms.
In 2006, a lot of the barriers to doing a significant global company from NZ are reduced. It’s opportunity time.
The technologies of this wave is Interaction Design and increasingly Ruby on Rails (if the data can be partitioned horizontally). I’m doing a mix of .Net and Ruby projects.
You may have noticed I’m looking hard for staff. I’m betting in these areas. I’m going to focus on one particular product but I’m also actively investing in tech start ups to build up a number of small teams to see where they go. Hopefully this will give the next generation of Entrepreneurs a jump start. You’ll see these surface over the next few months.
Much, much more to come, but there has never been a more exciting time to be in software.
blog
I believe that we are entering the “2nd Renaissance of the Internet”. Ajax, Web 2.0 and Software as a Service. All of these elements are making it easier to build cost effective solutions cater to niche markets. (Spot the Long Tail plug) Innovation is back in the Internet space.
As a veteran of the last .com rollercoaster, I am really excited at the new opportunities. I see a marked difference this time round, in terms of the quality of websolutions. Look at the success of basecamp and delicious. Its a good time to be an entrepreneur or a skilled developer.
Rock on….
Rod said, “What is getting me excited though is applying Web 2.0 thinking to Enterprise applications.”
I totally agree. Look at the success stories of Web 2.0. At a personal/individual level, they have been staggering, and we’re just starting to see things accelerate in the SME space.
I think the big challenge will be the shift from the traditional (and protective/closed) business thinking mindset over to the community/collaboration based Web 2.0 model. Business simply needs to be more agile, and whilst technologies out there can help, if mindsets don’t then nothing is going to happen.
For those that ride that first wave (hopefully us Kiwi’s) it could be very exciting times.
Surf’s Up.
Orginal Signal aggregates the 15 most popular Web 2.0 sites and is a great place to look to see what ideas might work. Ajax has changed everything in my view and while there are some security and privacy concerns - there is no reason why much of the desktop can’t be replaced by saas thinking.
NZTE are doing well actively supporting kiwi export products - do you have any idea if the government is even considering assisting SaaS ‘exports’ to get off the ground Rod? Or is this something we shouldn’t expect to be on their radar for another few years?
I don’t think we need NZTE to think SaaS, they just want to support companies with good potential and right now it is good timing for SaaS software companies. We have great support from FRST for R&D around SaaS architecture. Happy to share what we’ve done and learnt.
Thanks Rod and agree. Just fyi though, we want to do a bit of work with MED on how our NZTE toolkit can be made more responsive to SaaS type businesses. International market development for a SaaS type business can be quite different to market development for a packaged goods business, and our toolset needs to reflect that.
Rod, I’ll be really interested in a Foo Camp download next time I see you - maybe next time I’ll get an invite :) Sounds like it went great.
Hans
Well that’s even better.
I think it would be great use of the New Zealand, New Thinking banner. SaaS is new thinking and is good fit for NZ development skills.
Perhaps we need a SaaS summit!