Blog of Roger Greene, CEO

This morning a terrible earthquake hit Japan, the worst ever recorded. Following the quake, tsunamis struck the Japanese coast and headed for Hawaii and other areas. Our thoughts and prayers are with our employees, customers and partners in Japan, as well as all of the people of Japan and other areas  affected by the tsunamis.

Sky Car, 1979 / Felhőautó by Geoff Hendricks

The cloud has been a source of inspiration for many years. (Here my uncle poses in a car from his cloud period. He once rented a billboard in New York to paint clouds on it. The space was cheap because it faced the wrong way on a street recently made one way. I bet it made pedestrians smile.)

These days, it is hard to tell how much of the cloud is transformational and how much is hype. The media and investors are always looking for the next big thing, and are thus inclined to extol the promise of new technologies. As a software company, we have to predict whether and how quickly new ideas will be adopted. (Anyone remember the perennially proclaimed “Year of the LAN” in the 80′s?) Make the wrong bet, and either miss a market shift or waste years of development. Microsoft and other vendors are always touting the latest technology  ‘revolution’. If you adopt all, you consume all of your resources and get nowhere. So we have passed on some technologies. One was client-side Java, which never lived up to its cross-platform, common-UI promise. It turned out to be a lowest-common-denominator approach that could be beat in both speed and elegance by single-platform development. It has an important role today, especially for server and mobile applications, but still has not achieved cross-platform prominence.

The cloud for our markets, we believe, is real. It is a well-known success for some applications like CRM – witness SalesForce.com. But our customers face different issues. For WhatsUp Gold to monitor devices and applications, our software needs access to customers’ networks. Not something many customers so far want to trust to an external application. For WS_FTP, MOVEit and Messageway, we are guardians of an organization’s most sensitive data. Where data resides and how it is protected are of critical importance. How network management and secure file transfer applications are made available via the cloud is about much more than hosting an important application. We must determine what customers are comfortable with, while recognizing that this will constantly change. Our plan is to keep talking to our customers about their plans and offer them a choice of shrink-wrap or cloud applications, plus software and services to manage the cloud. Today, we offer MOVEit DMZ as a hosted service and are talking about using file transfer to govern and manage cloud services.  We also have a hosted offering for IMail Server. We are convinced the cloud is real for our markets. We will release more cloud-based products and services. But we will let the market decide the timing, pace and extent of the transition.

We are moving soon. In our current office, we probably have miles of Ethernet run through the ceilings to our offices and conference rooms. Our IT team did quite a nice job setting it all up years ago. It is flexible, convenient, reliable. We would like to leave all this behind for another tenant to take advantage of. But building code now requires that departing tenants rip out all network cables before they leave. So we will pay to have this massive amount of Ethernet removed. Then someone else will move in and pay to have more cables run. Seems like a waste of time and money. There ought to be a better way. How about making us leave a deposit until the next tenant moves in? If they want the existing cabling, they keep it, and everybody wins. If they don’t want it, we pay to have it removed.