From the Desk of the CEO: An Optimistic View for 2009 and Beyond!

Optimism?  It would be a bit indulgent for me to write a year-end blog in 2008 without at least acknowledging that the economy is in a mess and we are living in uncertain, if not really uncomfortable times.  I know that in part because I receive about fifteen emails each week from various service providers who each promise to educate me about how to "survive difficult times."  Trillions of dollars of deficits, billion dollar losses, foreclosures and bailouts dominate the news, along with inevitable comparisons to the Great Depression.  The news feels like the History Channel, filled with stories about asteroids hitting the earth, Mega-Disasters, Nostradamus and projections of various types of doom. 

I'm not buying it.  Actually, I am just incredibly optimistic about the future - for SharePoint, for IT in general, for your company and for Bamboo Solutions in 2009 and beyond.  So I'd like to take this opportunity at the end of 2008 to reflect a bit, give you some contrarian views based upon what we here at Bamboo see happening within our customer base, and then share a bit with you about how we plan to continue trying to help in 2009 and beyond.   

So why am I optimistic?

First, IT analysts that we track say that growth in IT spending will be down in early 2009, and pick up at end of year.  But wait! Read that sentence again. Growth will be down a bit, and then pick up.  Unlike the days of the dot-com crash, perceived excesses in technology spending have long been wrung out of much of the IT budget.  Information Technology projects are now more often viewed as real enablers of doing more with less.  So while IT is certainly not recession-proof, much of IT spending is much less discretionary than it was 10 years ago.

Second, underserved demand for business collaboration remains huge.  In the past decade, the notion of using Web-based information sharing and collaborative applications both within and across companies has been a key vision for a lot of companies.  Portals, shared content, collaborative and composited business applications remain part of that vision. But many companies, especially mid-size companies, have still been hesitant to broadly deploy until a clear technology emerged as the de facto standard.  With respect to our friends at Oracle and IBM, I believe Microsoft's SharePoint has, or is certainly becoming that platform, with tens of millions of licenses shipped, and with MOSS 2007 emerging as the fastest growing product in Microsoft's entire history. If you are a company with a mixed investment into IBM, Oracle and Microsoft technology, you may argue relative technical pros and cons. But the plain fact is that the marketplace is voting for SharePoint with its wallet. That means the economics of scale will only drive further innovation and more adoption, which in turn means lower overall cost, which will again increase adoption.  So the way I see it, pent-up demand is only just now starting to be fulfilled as the risks of implementing continue to go down.

Third, based on what I hear from our customers, I'm convinced that SharePoint is just starting to deliver on its potential.  Bamboo Solutions may be small and scrappy as compared with behemoths like Microsoft, but between our storefront and Bamboo Nation^TM we now touch tens of thousands of individuals every month. Over 4500 companies and 110 partners across 38 countries around the world use our products.  From this perspective, I think we can claim at least a pretty good read on what is happening.  And what I hear is this:  The vast majority of our customers are in the early stages of deployment; three quarters say that the SharePoint will be deployed enterprise-wide; and, the overwhelming majority plan to do even more with SharePoint in 2009.    

As for the recession, I read the newspapers too.  There's plenty of downsizing and budget cuts in almost all parts of the economy, and even in the high-flying tech sector, companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, HP and scores of others have shed staff.  But remember that recessions are only defined in retrospect.  So when the doom and gloom news seems the worst, that's precisely when things are probably rebounding.   What we hear from our customers is that within companies today, and relative to other IT spending, solutions built around SharePoint seem are getting relative high priority.  As a result, technical design and development talent around SharePoint remains very scarce.  Individuals who possess technical knowledge of SharePoint along with with knowledge of business requirements are in very high demand.

What We Believe

If you are in the trenches and working day-to-day on deploying or managing SharePoint, the statement I'm about to make will sound fluffy.  Sorry.  But I think it's important to say anyway, so I ask your indulgence:  SharePoint is not what the world thinks it is. In the long run, SharePoint is the key part of what amounts to an information operating system for business. Now, there are plenty of operating systems and enabling software technologies around.  But they only start to really matter once they become ubiquitous.  SharePoint fits the bill.  And the operating system metaphor implies that as SharePoint grows, companies will want to deploy more and more business solutions quickly while avoiding "re-creating the wheel."  So from our perspective, it's inevitable that commercially available off-the-shelf tools based on SharePoint will become increasingly important as well as increasingly purpose-built.  

Now don't get me wrong - complex enterprise solutions will always require a lot of customization.  But pre-built business solutions on SharePoint will become increasingly prevalent. And as SharePoint continues to win in the market, even vendors with content based applications built on their own proprietary stacks will eventually stop seeing SharePoint as something to defend against. After saying no for the requisite time (probably measured in years), I suspect they will eventually just have to closely integrate or even migrate to it.  But in the meantime, our aim here at Bamboo is to continue to provide the largest collection of integrated technologies, components and accelerators to support this new business solution environment based on the SharePoint "information operating system." 

We also believe that the whole notion of cloud-based computing will start to become reality in companies of all sizes over the next few years.  Right now this area is new and cool and often viewed as some kind of "alternative" to having your own IT infrastructure.  The leading indicator is that hosted use of SharePoint by small and medium size companies is booming.  But in the future, cloud computing and internally deployed systems will not be either/or.  The real change will be that it just won't matter.  This should expand the use of a complete MOSS environment even further to virtually every company that needs to compete in an information-based economy.  Microsoft's Azure announcement, along with their recently announced hosted SharePoint offering is sure to be just the tip of this iceberg, and as this trend becomes increasingly obvious, technology vendors will expose their own products as real Web services to adapt, again making the notion of easily assembled applications within the SharePoint environment not only feasible, but commonplace.

Where We're Going at Bamboo Solutions

Our business ambition is pretty simple.  We want to provide you with value over the entire life of your SharePoint experience.  So if you've come to Bamboo, tried and purchased one or two of our products - THANK YOU.  But we know that if that's the only value we ever bring to you, we have lost an opportunity.  We succeed when we provide information and technology that brings you back to us - as you prove the concept, do your initial deployments, broadly roll out the new platform, and continue add business value.  As your needs expand, we want to be there with thoughtful extensions and purpose-built tools for your SharePoint platform.  Even though our actual products provide just one piece of your overall solution, we know that piece can be bigger if we can continue to provide value that makes implementation and management easier and faster.

In fact, during 2008 we introduced an average of 3 new products each and every month.  Going forward, we'll continue to build out our family of products with new offers, and with increased emphasis on system level integration between each of our products and other business information.  In 2008 we introduced MashPoint as a platform for business data integration on WSS and enabled our Web Parts to support it. In 2009, we will enhance these offerings with an API based on REST. We'll also be exposing our Web Parts as Web services, so that with MashPoint you'll be able to more easily integrate SharePoint and our Web Parts into your overall environment ... today, inside the firewall, and tomorrow, on the cloud.

We're really excited about our product lineup for the first part of 2009, which includes improved WIKI content handling, additional custom column capabilities, better style management, enhancements to User Management, and more.  Stay tuned to the home page of our store for new product announcements.  In addition, in response to your suggestions in our forums, we're continually working towards improving versions of the free beta tools you can download in Bamboo Labs, such as SharePoint Analyzer, the Silverlight® Media Player, and others.  We will continue to introduce innovative tools, such as SharePointOnVista, that allow developers work more easily with SharePoint and our products.  And finally, going back to the notion of SharePoint as the "information operating system," you'll even see a few other entirely new product areas from us in 2009 that we think you'll be really excited about! 

In our engineering area, we believe our team of more than 80 engineers is one of the largest commercial product development teams for SharePoint around.  This includes one of the largest collection staffers - over 30 - who have earned their SharePoint certifications from Microsoft.   We are also working closely with Microsoft in early reviews of the next version of SharePoint in order to help ensure a smooth transition for our existing products, and to continue providing innovative products to complete your SharePoint experience.  We've also beefed up our custom projects team to support the increased amount of custom Web Part work that you've requested.  So if you have a need that you don't see on our storefront today, just let us know. 

In the customer support area, we are continuing to improve MyBamboo® to improve your overall support experience.  If you've downloaded our products for trial and had to wait too long for support, we really apologize. We are working hard to improve the content of our KBs and to continue adding support staff to improve the time to response and the time to resolution.  But we must prioritize our premium support contract customers first, our basic support customers second and then our free trial customers next.  Yes, we know very well that your trial is a possible sale to us!  But with thousands of trial downloads happening each month, our only viable options are to provide this support in as automated a manner as possible, put you ahead of paid support customers in the queue  - or to charge you for the support incident.  Given the options, we think it's far better to make our products available for free trials and let you decide.

And by the way - if you are a trial customer and your name is "anonymous," we really do get the fact that you don't want us to call and hassle you while you are evaluating our products. But if you take the time to join MyBamboo and trust us to tell us who you are before becoming a customer, your overall support experience is just going to be a lot better.  I can't promise that we'll never ever contact you - but I can promise that we won't hassle you, we'll respect your time, and that we will do our best to only help. 

Here on Bamboo Nation, you will see us continue to invest in the SharePoint community. What started as a way to connect with our customers has grown organically into so much more. In 2009 you will see more free tools and utilities like SharePointOnVista, MashPoint, SharePoint Analyzer and the SharePoint Price Calculator. We will continue to publish a steady stream of new articles and features, including original blogs like SharePoint Daily and SharePoint Blank. And we'll continue to bring you exclusive content from the biggest names in SharePoint with guest blogs from Joel Oleson, Jeff Webb, Dux Raymond Sy and an exciting lineup of new voices. Stay tuned to Bamboo Nation, and you'll always be on the cutting edge of what's new in SharePoint and especially at Bamboo.

So as we forge ahead into 2009 we here at Bamboo are going to be pretty busy.  Like you, we are all ultimately driven by the same needs:  accomplish more, be more productive and improve our customer's experience.  In the end, this mantra is the same as in the boom times.  So if you have not yet considered it, think about turning off CNN for awhile. Stop looking at your 401k and surf past the asteroids on the History Channel.  Realism is important, but bad news sells and the sensationalism of the media is doing a great job of warping our collective minds.  Instead, look around at how companies are using SharePoint to do more with less right now.  Look at the fundamental shift towards SharePoint that the market is making right now. Consider the increasing demand for expertise.  Then look at where these tools are going and extrapolate the positive business impact on improved collaboration, productivity, virtual teaming, immediate information availability and overall competitiveness.  If you do, I think you'll join me in my optimistic view. 

But before we turn the page to 2009, I invite you to join me for a comprehensive look at Bamboo's 2008 year in review, presented in conversations with the following department heads:

• Julie Auletta - Custom Solutions
• Emily Bien - Sales
• Wes Bryan - Product Management
• Steve Gaitten - Online Operations
• Lily Griffin - Marketing
• Jill Kunkel - Partner Programs
• Anh Le - Engineering