| QUESTION & ANSWER |
Internet millionaire gives integration a whirl |
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By John Hogan, News Editor
19 Jan 2004 | SearchWebServices.com |
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Halsey Minor is one of the few Internet entrepreneurs who was left standing after the dot-com bust. A founder and former chief executive and chairman of online media company CNET Networks Inc., Minor has also had his hand in other technology companies, such as content management software maker Vignette Corp. and CRM specialist Salesforce.com. His latest venture is Grand Central Communications Inc., a San Francisco-based company he helped found in 2000, but which he left to pursue other interests. Now he's back as chairman, chief executive and president of Grand Central, a provider of business process integration technology, which it delivers as a service rather than as software. In an interview, Minor talked about the maturity of Web services standards and where the service provider model fits in an on-demand computing world. What's your background with Grand Central?
Halsey Minor: I left CNET to start Grand Central. I ran CNET for about eight years. … In 1997, I was approached by a guy who had an idea for software as a service. [He] came back to me in 1999 and said that he was ready to start the company, and would I be a board member and investor, which I did. [I] ended up putting in about a third of the capital, and I'm still the largest shareholder outside of the founder. And that company is Salesforce.com here in San Francisco.
How did the Salesforce.com experience lead to Grand Central?
Minor: I was able to see across the industry that it was only a matter of time before a lot of the software that was being bought was proved to be relatively wasteful, given the inordinate cost and complexity.
In 1999, I came up with the idea of [business process] integration delivered as a service. Obviously, a lot has changed in the industry [since then]. When I started this notion of integration as a service, there was no real talk about Web services. In fact, the name hadn't been coined, and I don't think SOAP [Simple Object Access Protocol] had even been adopted as a standard.
What's changed since then?
Minor: Over the last four years, what we've seen is probably the largest giveaway of intellectual property in the history of the technology industry. A lot [of] smart companies like IBM and Microsoft and BEA [Systems] and others have worked feverishly to define a set of standards that would make integration easier.
My philosophy, and the reason the company is named Grand Central -- after Grand Central Station in New York -- is that the history of many-to-many problems is exclusively solved by shared infrastructure. Whether it's the utility industry, whether it's the public switched telephone network, whether it's the highway system, whether it's the way FedEx works -- the center always acts as a vortex that sucks complexity in, so that the edge can become relatively benign and simple.
The core process of connecting up a nearly infinite number of endpoints ultimately becomes a service, rather than requiring everybody to build out their own infrastructure.
The service provider model has taken a tremendous beating over the last couple of years. Is it still a viable idea?
Minor: If you talk to any of the large enterprise software vendors about how many of their customers have moved up to their latest release, a year later they'll tell you it's 10% or 15%. And the reason is, the complexity of doing that is significant. If you ask us, or you ask Salesforce[.com], when we upgrade, every one of our users gets simultaneously upgraded.
I think we have only begun to see software as a service. I don't think there's anybody in the industry at this point who debates that this is the future -- whether it's IBM with on-demand, whether it's HP with adaptive enterprise or whether it's Salesforce[.com] with their 'no software' -- it's become accepted, even by [Siebel Systems CEO] Tom Siebel, who's held out longer than anybody.
How does this concept apply to Web services?
Minor: Web services is predicated on the model that you don't need to buy software. In fact, you can consume these things called services, which do not necessarily exist in your data center.
Can you briefly describe what your integration service provides?
Minor: Instead of providing an application, we're providing [IT] infrastructure to solve a many-to-many problem. The most important thing is the ability to build things and share them. At the core of our product is a directory, public and private, which allows companies to build services and processes. Our directory facilitates discovery and sharing of individual processes and endpoints -- where the data resides.
What we try to do here is to get companies out of the business of trying to figure out how to connect their systems to other systems in a very heterogeneous world. Whether you can connect to your suppliers is not going to be a point of differentiation. It is what you do after you connect.
| | | | "Over the last four years, what we've seen is probably the largest giveaway of intellectual property in the history of the technology industry." -- Halsey Minor, CEO, Grand Central Communications | | | |
Your product acts like a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration registry. Does your product support the UDDI standard?
Minor: We'll support UDDI and LDAP [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol] at the same time, but we view LDAP as being a heck of a lot more interesting to our customers than UDDI at this point. That may change. People have a huge investment in LDAP already. By our 5.0 release, we'll support federation, so you'll be able to federate your LDAP directory or UDDI directory directly into us as a central repository.
Why should an organization pay for business process integration as a service?
Minor: It's going to be hard for individual organizations -- forget about the costs and complexity of building it -- just managing these business processes and keeping them running is a major undertaking, unless that's your core competency.
Why did you relieve Craig Donato as CEO and president last year? Was the company not heading in the right direction?
Minor: I'm a very straightforward person. I'll tell you exactly what is was. It came down to a couple of things. The first was I was gone for two years and I was bored as hell. And I started the company, and this company was always a passion of mine. I always thought it would be the largest company I was involved in. The second thing was I thought that clearly the market was starting to turn, and I thought we should have been generating more sales over the intervening period I was gone.
To be honest, there were some performance-related issues, but I was ready to get back in and run a company.
What will be the difference now?
Minor: I don't mean to overly castigate Craig. It was a very difficult environment. The one major change that has happened, which is making the job much easier for me, quite frankly, is that a lot of the Web services standards have matured a lot more, and companies are now at the point where they're ready to start making some bets [on technology]. Budgets are really beginning to open up.
What's your value proposition for those who are looking to do business process integration through Web services?
Minor: We tell customers: Come in, do a tactical integration. You don't have to buy any hardware or software and spend three weeks to a month setting it up. You come in and do it. If it works, expand your relationship with us. If it doesn't, it [will] cost you very little -- in fact, if they stay under 25 MB [of space in the directory], it costs them nothing.
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
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