I am spending a nice relaxing morning, on a beautiful day in Seattle, finally getting a chance to catch up and reflect a little on a busy week. We had a very successful launch of the Klir Analytics 3.0 Beta on Monday, and also spent the first two days of the week (Monday and Tuesday) down in San Francisco at IDG's SaaScon event. I wanted to share some thoughts on both of these exciting events for the company.
A significant release like the one we had on Monday is always an exciting team event. The work that goes into a release like this is almost always intense, and pushes individuals as well as the team. It is sometimes easy to get lost in the forest in the closing weeks of a launch, as there are so many tasks that go into the final release, that you tend to forget the significance of the changes and the work going on. It really is incredible how much work was completed in such a relatively short period of time. Now that we are through the release (and surely back into another big push!) I hope everyone on the team will at least get a chance to take a step back and realize what an amazing job was done by all.
So what was done? A TON! We had four significant components to the new release. First is an entirely new front end UI. Included in the facelift was re-coding the front end in AJAX. Taking a page out of some of the interesting developments on the consumer side of applications, the interface is dynamic, flexible, and easy to personalize to each individuals preference.
The second significant update with the release is launching a community based forum and user group in connection with the service, allowing for collaboration and sharing of best practices. There will be a lot more to talk about on this subject in the coming months. There is incredible excitment, interest, and opportunity for the market - especially for small to mid-size companies with this new capability.
The third part of the release is that we are now delivering relevant industry content directly into the application. This means that users will have important and helpful content delivered directly to them at the time they need it most. This is going to lead to a significant improvement in the workflow and process that IT users typically go through when managing their IT investments.
And lastly, with this release, we are now offering a free entry-level version of the service. We are already seeing a large number of users coming in and registering.
So, as you can imagine, there was a lot to talk about in the release, and we were fortunate enough to get a fair amount of press around the announcement on Monday. Articles were published by eWeek, Network World, CRN, IDG News, and others. If you are interested in reading some of them, check out the news section of our main site. One of my favorites was Phil Wainewrights posting on his ZDnet SaaS blog. I have been following his writings for years, including a few years ago when he was writing a lot around the idea of Loosely Coupled. We also had the pleasure of meeting with him and other industry thought leaders at SaaScon, which brings me to the other item I wanted to share.
As I mentioned, we spent the first part of the week down in San Francisco at SaaScon. The event was interesting and well attended. One of the highlights of the show was getting to meet with some of the thought leaders in the space. In addition to meeting with Phil Wainewright, we were able to sit down with Tim Chou (former head of Oracle's On-Demand effort and author of "The end of Software"), who gave the opening address on Monday morning, and John Gallant from NetworkWork. It was rewarding to get really positive reaction and feedback from both of these guys, as they see any number of new ideas, approaches and companies in a given week.
So, all in all, it was a fantastic and exciting week. The new product looks incredible, the response from users and industry experts has been fantastic, and working on a great team has been rewarding.
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