TiECon 2009

I was there at TiECon 2009 , in Santa Clara , CA.


Here are some of the trends in technology I am seeing, at the close of the conference:

1. Clouds: Yup, they are everywhere. Pioneered( in some ways) by saleforce.com, there are now numerous vendors in the cloud bandwagon. The majority of the players I see are in the SaaS (software as a service) space. The SaaS players have now started offering PaaS(Platform as a Service) - exemplified by force.com, an offshoot of Salesforce.com. There are also players focussing on just the IaaS(Infrastructure as a service space) such as, Nirvanix(cloud storage) and certain components of Amazon EC2. There were companies talking about how they are seeing revenue improvements by building out apps on top of the cloud. "Cloud" is the new "Virtualization". The VCs too like the buzzword though there are claims by the tech press that the terms "cloud" is overused.

2. The Funding Scene: VCs are seeing a significant drop in follow on rounds. One of the VCs just said "Dont even think about it". The big delimma for companies now is what they would do should they be running out of a series A during this time. One of the VCs advised trying to work with existing Series A investors to keep the company afloat during these tough times. If you try to "sell out" there is no chance that the common share holders can get any returns at all - in fact , with high chance, the preferred will be under water too. One of the VCs mentioned that the big delimma for them is what to do with companies that have "significant" Series A/B ( tens of millions).

For early stagers, if you have "Cloud Apps" or "Mobile infrastructure/platform apps" in your story and have a reasonable customer base, maybe its time to pitch for a Series A. Be careful of the valuations though.

3. Building on top of new infrastructures: The infrastructure laid for the internet, gave rise to the bif search engine, the social networks , et al. The infrastructure laid in the late 90s for wireless gave rise to the mobile phenomenon and the rise of the iPhone, and all the wonderful apps. We now have an infrastructure of utility computing, where there is no need for setting up an inhouse hardware environment. We will probably see an era of great enterprise apps and business models using utility computing as the infrastructure.


Two great speakers in the show were Brad Smith ( CEO, Intuit) and Tony Hsieh(CEO, Zappos). One of the quotes I was particularly inspired by was Brad Smith's comment on the importance of business relationshops and parnerships in the new economy. He said, this was what his grandmother told him when he was a kid:

"We are all born angels with just one wing. The only way we can fly is by holding on to each other"

Great stuff!