EISM's Blog README file

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Welcome to the first entry in my "Entrepreneurship in the Infrastructure Software Market" blog (and yes, suggestions for a better and more pithy blog name are appreciated). By "entrepreneurship" what I am referring to is the strategy to build a product and company into something successful. By "infrastructure software" what I am talking about is the market for operating systems, systems and network management products, storage software, security software, and similar products; i.e. your classic "systems software." An analyst group such as IDC sees "infrastructure software" as one of the three major categories of software, with the other two major categories of software being "application development and deployment software" and "applications and information access." As you can see from my bio. I do have some exposure to the later two markets (namely when I was at Oracle for a few years at the beginning of my career), but frankly my career over the last 15 years has been in the infrastructure software space, and that's the space I will blog about.

So why am I doing a blog on entrepreneurship in this particular category of software? With this being my third startup in the infrastructure software market (with over $50 million raised in VC money between the three, with exits including one IPO, one acquisition and the current one going strong) I was thinking with this blog that I can give back a few pointers that I learned (and am still learning) along the way that may be of value to others looking to create the next great infrastructure software company. That being said, I will humbly note that my lessons learned are not on the same scale compared to what some others have accomplished and learned here in Silicon Valley, but hopefully I can add some value to the discussion and have people avoid some of the mistakes I did make (and probably a few I am making) along the way.

I also think this blog may be relevant to product managers, marketing people, sales people, etc. at existing infrastructure software vendors (be it from an established vendor or a pre-existing startup) who are interested in reading how others in the same industry are practicing their craft. Finally, I am also writing this blog as a means to self-reflect and constantly ask myself questions such as, "Am I forgetting the basics?" and "What can I do better?" as I work with an excellent team over here at Centrify to make our product and company a great success. This blog is a companion to my Centrify blog, where I blog about my specific company/product/market/etc., but for this blog I will on bring up Centrify only in the context of lessons learned.

OK, so now that we've gotten the preliminaries out of the way, what I want to focus this and the next set of blog posts on is what I consider to be the "key DNA" elements that your product and company must have to be successful in the infrastructure software market. The DNA elements I describe are not in any particular order, but I do think you need most if not all of these DNA elements to have a shot at being successful in the market.

Clearly key DNA #1 is luck, so be sure to get some of that. In the end, a lot comes down to that.