Bravadosoft Presents at CapVenture Final Night

We had the final night of CapVenture last night. Southeast Innovations, a publication which covers startups and investment firms in the Southeast, has a nice writeup on it.

CapVenture, as I’ve written before, was a great program run by the ATDC and TAG to help early stage companies in the fund raising process. Bravadosoft was one of 15 companies selected out of 100 applications.

Last night we had the final night. We were very fortunate to have the chance to be one of the 4 companies selected to give an extended 10 minute pitch. What a great time! I had quite a few potential partners and investors talk to me after the presentation, and I know several of the other companies did as well.

Many thanks to the ATDC and TAG, especially Cindy Cheatham and Charles Ross for organizing the program. Also thanks to Jim Morgan and Lance Weatherby for coaching and help during the program.

This is a great time for Bravadosoft. We’re in Beta now with 3 customers (more on that soon) and we’re actively speaking to potential investors.

Socialytics: Where Business Intelligence Meets Social Collaboration

We’re happy today to talk about Socialytics, our first product here at Bravadosoft.

Socialytics is the first Social Analytics Extranet, an on-demand product that helps companies share information with their customers and partners.

Taking features from both Business Intelligence and Social Collaboration applications, Socialytics is the best way to enable a wide, external group of users to create, share, rate, and discuss analytics.

There are other Business Intelligence products on the market that provide a space for users to create ad hoc reports, place them on a dashboard, and publish static reports. Those products though, from our experience, tend to break down when deployed in an extranet environment. It takes too much expensive customization to configure their internally-focused security and deployment models to work in an externally-facing environment.

Socialytics is built from the ground up to support extranets. Need to share data with 50 other companies, and make sure that Company #1 doesn’t see data from Company #50? No problem, we handle that. Need to show benchmarks across companies, but remove any identifying information? We’ve got that too, out of the box. We make it easy to support hundreds or thousands of users across hundreds of different organizations. And we live on the web as an on-demand application so you don’t need to worry about hardware to buy and manage.

Stay tuned for more information–we’re a month away from Beta and we’ll have more information soon.

CapVenture

So Bravadosoft is part of CapVenture.

In short, we’re part of a program run by the ATDC which helps early-stage entrepreneurs raise capital for their businesses. It’s been great so far. We’ve had speakers from the venture capital industry, from software startups, and from a major law firm that deals with startups.

At Bravadosoft we’re as early-stage as you can get, but it’s been good to see that we’re tracking nicely against some of the more established companies in the program. Our first release is almost ready and we’re speaking with customers. It’s a good group to be in, too.

I’ve said it before that Atlanta is showing a lot of good progress in becoming a startup-friendly city, and programs like this are really helping.

Update from Apple

This is just great. Steve Jobs has written a letter apologizing for the quick price cut on the iPhone. Furthermore, they’re giving all iPhone customers a $100 rebate towards a future purchase.

I love this decision. The $100 premium I paid to get the iPhone when I did seems fine. Apple lowers prices and sells more phones, and I now have an unexpected $100 to go spend on more Apple products.

iPhone Pricing–A mistake or a clever plan?

So Apple simplified the product line yesterday by discontinuing the 4GB model; now there’s only the 8GB model. They also dropped the price $200 (33%) to $400.

So was this a mistake on their part? Did they price the product too high at first? Hubris on Infinite Loop?

Or, perhaps, did they have a clever plan all along. Maybe they realized that a certain group of people would buy the first ~ 500,000 units at just about any price. Apple loyalists, gadget freaks, and startup entrepreneurs who didn’t quite realize they didn’t have an income anymore (ahem) were all going to buy the device as soon as it came out. It was the cool thing, the bleeding edge. Only after this group has satisfied its craving for new gadgets would Apple simplify the product line and reduce prices.

I’m not sure. I personally think it was all planned out to happen like this. Obviously they knew they’d be releasing the new video iPod Nanos and the iPod Touch devices, and maybe it made sense all along to tweak the iPhone line at the same time. Then again maybe it was just their turn to make a mistake.

At Bravadosoft we like the iPhone. I’d like to get our software running on it. I really believe it’s a superb platform for web apps. Our problem though is that we use Flash in our application, and the iPhone doesn’t support it yet. A chart like this one doesn’t render right now, and that’s a shame.

We have a sharp looking application and we’re Apple fans. My guess is that we’ll figure a way around this, even if means having a separate iPhone-compatible version of our application. I think Apple wants us to use QuickTime but I don’t see that happening.

Final note–I like the concept of simplifying a product line and having pricing that makes sense. At Bravadosoft we’ll keep our configurations and pricing as simple as possible. Traditionally in the Business Intelligence market (and really the enterprise software market as a whole) the pricing schemes are byzantine in their complexity. Vendors have had a goal of selling as many components of a large suite as possible, and playing around with the pricing models to make it all look right. We’re not going to do that.

Atlanta Startup Scene–Capital Connections

Bravadosoft is Atlanta-based, and for the most part that’s a cool thing. Two out of the three of us grew up here, we went to Georgia Tech, we like the weather, and our pro football team has a new quarterback.

Going into this startup we had some questions as to whether we should be based in Atlanta. We’d been to Silicon Valley and we know that Atlanta wasn’t the same. We figured we were lacking that great vibe and scene of a vibrant startup community. We don’t have very many local venture capital firms, entrepreneurs don’t live here, and our local support businesses (law firms, accounting firms, PR firms) don’t get the startup scene.

Happy to say now that we were wrong! I spent some time yesterday at a big event thrown by the Startup Lounge. Capital Connections was a pretty big gathering of 200 local VCs, attorney, angel investors, entrepreneurs, incubator staff, and other folks connected to the startup scene here in Atlanta.

I took one pathetic picture of the event:

It was dark and I only had my iPhone so this was the best I could do. At least it gives the sponsors a bit of a plug.

Here are a few thoughts on the event and on Atlanta in general:

1. Big turnout! Scott said that were were probably 200 people there. It was storming and apparently some folks missed their planes into town, so it might have hit 250-300 people.
2. Different feeling from a Silicon Valley mixer. A bit older crowd, a few more ties and suits, and nobody there wearing a camera.
3. Another big change–not too much emphasis on consumer-based, Web 2.0 businesses. I saw quite a few people in the BioTech and health areas, and enterprise software and hardware was well represented. Bravadosoft was classified as “Infotech” which I guess fits in an extraordinarily broad sense.
   
4. Cash bar. I just can’t see this as being acceptable in Mountain View.
5. Conversation, and lots of it. You could see investors talking to each other, you could see startup guys frantically trying to meet an investor, and there were product demos going on in the corner. It was cool to see.
6. The ATDC looked to be well represented by staff and member companies. As a Tech alum that’s a good thing to see.

So I’m excited about being Atlanta-based. We’re having a BarCamp coming up soon and things are only going to get better here.

The Original “Business Intelligence Extranet” Post

So I did a post about a year ago when I was starting to form the ideas for our product. It’s cool looking back at it to see where we’ve come. We’ve got something working that does what I wrote, and that’s very cool.

During a recent client engagement it became apparent that there is a need in the market for a Business Intelligence Extranet.What do I mean by a Business Intelligence (BI) Extranet? It’s a good place to start–the definition. For the purposes of this posting, a BI Extranet is defined as:

A secure web portal made available to an organization’s clients, partners, or other external groups for the purpose of presenting structured, relevant information through reports, ad hoc analyses, dashboards, and other visual elements.

Ok so let’s break that down:

1. Secure Web Portal–Essentially you need a web application that is able to authenticate users across different organizations, provide a framework for authorizations down to the report component or web page layer, and keep track of a user’s identity and group membership across page views.
2. Clients, Partners, External Groups–The users in an Extranet in general are those outside to the organization developing the application. For example, a software company might create an extranet to demonstrate to its consulting partners their YTD performance on several metrics (sales revenue, client satisfaction, etc.).
3. Sharing Structured, Relevant Information–This seems obvious I guess, but the whole point is to present information that has been structured into something interesting to the user. You can’t just have a standard portal page with a few documents to search through. You need to spend the time in the normal functions of analysis & design on the underlying data. That data needs to be structured in such a way as to allow relevant and valuable reports to be created against it.
4. Reports, Ad Hoc Analysis, Dashboards–This is the meat. Create a dashboard of the high level metrics, present a guided path from there to some static and parameter-driven reports, and then allow ad hoc analysis when the information calls for it.

Now that we have a good working definition, let’s talk about the market. Many times when I’m speaking to a client about a possible BI project the first thing they’ll ask for is a rating of the different products on the market. I’ll hear questions about Business Objects, Hyperion, Microsoft, Targit, ProClarity (now Microsoft), Cognos, and other vendors. My standard (and correct I feel) answer is to say something like, “Each of these are excellent tools and they may work for you. Let’s explore this a bit more in the first phase of a project and we’ll see where we end up. It looks like at this point that is looking like a good choice, but that could change as we find out more information.”

The issue comes in when you start to consider the mix and depth of requirements that tend to come up and compare those requirements to the base features of any BI product suite. Very few of the product suites support an extranet. They are much more focused on features for corporate intranets, small groups of power users, etc. They are also now more inclined to target an entire BI environment with their product mix–data quality, ETL, reporting, analysis, dashboards, etc.

What the market seems to be missing (or perhaps what I’ve missed in the market) is a product made specifically for the BI extranet.

Meet Jacob, our Sun Fire X4200 M2

We’ve recently gotten to the point with our software that it was time to consider deployment and hosting. I did quite a bit of research on the standard hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, IBM, etc., and then found Don MacAskill’s blog over at SmugMug. Don has written some great posts on his datacenter and on their new machines from Sun Microsystems. I grew up using Sun back at Georgia Tech so I’m happy to see them back in the mix.

It’s a big time in a startup’s life when the first server arrives, and we’re proud to introduce Jacob:

Jacob came to us as part of Sun’s Try and Buy program. We get to use the server for 60 days to see what we think, and it’s completely free. They paid for shipping to our office, and they’ll pay for shipping if we send it back before the 60 days is up.The specs of the machine follow this configuration from Sun:

• Two Dual-Core AMD Opteron 2.6Ghz chips.
• 4GB RAM
• Two 73GB 10k rpm SAS Drives
• 2U rack space
• ~ $5k list price

We’re part of the Sun Startup Essentials program so our pricing is a good deal better than this. Recommended for startups.

Here are a few more shots of Jacob. Warning–these veer into the geeky and severely fun-deprived world of working hard on a startup. We actually do think putting a Heineken bottle on a server is funny.

First up, me with the server in its box:

We took Mark’s picture also, mostly to highlight that we have at least one sandals-wearing co-founder:

Once we got the box opened and we started setting up the server we just had to open it up. Here are the processors:

So that was cool and everybody was happy. It was time to get busy though.

First we booted into the pre-installed Solaris image. Everything worked, but I’m not as current on Solaris as I am on Ubuntu.

So how hard would be to install Ubuntu? Could we just create a Live CD and let her rip? You bet!

Jacob, like the rest of Bravadosoft, enjoys a refreshing Heineken after a long day.

We’ll keep the blog updated on our work with the server.  My guess is that our eventual datacenter (after this Try and Buy) will use mostly the Sun Fire X2200 M2 servers due to their 1U configuration, but we’ll see how it goes.

Hello Again

Hello! After a long hiatus of stealth mode we’re finally ready to start talking about our company.

Please stay tuned for some additional posts soon.

Bravadosoft–Share Information

Thank you for visiting our blog.

We’re in stealth mode now so we don’t have a lot to say. That will change in a bit. As for now, please feel free to email us.

Thanks,

Team Bravadosoft