Fingad.com

FinGad mentioned in the Amazon AWS Blog

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:55:08 EST

FinGad mentioned in the Amazon AWS Blog - by khanan

I met Jeff Barr who is the Evangelist of Amazon Web Services and we talked about how useful the Amazon services are to startups. At FinGad, we use what's called EC2, which is the Amazon compute cloud that allows us to scale our servers in a very short time. We also use S3 which is the storage cloud at Amazon. This is where the images are stored. Combining these services together provides super high availability. The Amazon network is already proven and stable, and since our servers run in that network that increases our uptime. If you see FinGad down, it's much more likely due to us making a mistake, e.g. code problem, as opposed to a network or server outage.

The post is here: http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2008/06/fingad---using.html

Now word documents can be uploaded!!

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 19:49:55 EST

Now word documents can be uploaded!! - by khanan

We have good news for everyone!

Word documents can now be uploaded via a post. Powerpoint and Excel files are also supported.

Thanks to our amazing team for getting this done and we'll continue building innovative features to keep FinGad as a key place for anyone interested in finance.

Below is an example:

Yahoo! Money to be made?

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:57:54 EST

Yahoo! Money to be made? - by khanan

Yahoo! vs. Microsoft Chess Game

Everyone is looking at the spectacular news of Microsoft walking away from the Yahoo! deal. Some really interesting articles I've encountered are by Marc Andreessen:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/05/examining-micro.html

This talks in great depth about the risks associated with such a large acquisition. Especially with regulators.

Other CEOs have expressed what was Microsoft thinking? Why offer $31 per share when the stock was trading at $19.1? At a 40% premium, Microsoft could of offered $27 per share and would have room to negotiate.

It's super interesting how each side makes their move. Now that Microsoft walked away, the carefully crafted email to Yahoo's management/board talks all about the shareholder value that Yahoo! lost. Will be interesting to see how the shareholders respond and what effect that will have on the Yahoo! stock price. I think this makes the most strategic sense, as going hostile by Microsoft would undermine an already declining morale at Yahoo!. When Steve Ballmer says to his employees that Microsoft will build out their own Internet strategy to compete with the likes of Google - I don't buy that either. How long will it take them to accomplish the massive scale Yahoo! offers?

It appears that many Internet entrepreneurs have been in favor of this deal - including myself. There is way too much dependence on Google. Yahoo! has not been effective in competing with Google advertising capabilities, especially when going overseas. Many times the Yahoo! software does not match from country to country, and this makes having a consistent marketing strategy difficult. Google has realized this flaw and have executed very well on it. Having Microsoft/Yahoo combination would potentially solve this problem.

In my view, from these events we know Yahoo! has a strong offering and considering there was a buyer for $33 per share, shall the stock dip below what it was trading during the time the offer was made, I think it makes an attractive long term investment.

What are your thoughts?

FinGad's Matt Castle won first place on CNBC Fast Money Madness!

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:19:59 EST

FinGad's Matt Castle won first place on CNBC Fast Money Madness! - by khanan

I tried to embed the video here, however looks like it's only available at the CNBC site.

Without further ado, enjoy:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/24001857

From all of us at FinGad, congratulations Matt!

Jeremy Siegel comments on Bear Stearns

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:01:04 EST

Jeremy Siegel comments on Bear Stearns - by khanan

... on the Fed rate cuts, inflation risks.

suggestion

Stocks are hard

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:20:32 EST

Stocks are hard - by khanan

An entertaining video on a rather sad subject.

Bear Stearns - WOW

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:37:46 EST

Bear Stearns - WOW - by khanan

One of the reasons I started FinGad is to get investors connected to talk about events like this. I admit I'm an investor, but don't call myself a pro. This project has been a huge lesson into the investment world and we'll keep that going.

It seems to me that there will be plenty of stories saying that the Fed is helping out the needy and encouraging more risky behavior. Some folks on the Yahoo boards have expressed losing huge sums. Some have responded that they should call the Fed and ask for a 28 day credit line. Argument being the Fed is helping out friends. But joking aside, what really peaked my attention is a WSJ article saying that "If Bear fails, the Fed will take responsibility for the loan." We know the Fed will be responsible, but there is serious consideration that Bear will fail. A company that has been around this long, surviving two world wars, Great Depression is in serious trouble and even may go bankrupt, unless rescued.

Sad to think about how the 14,000 employees are feeling… And the shareholders.

I have been a fan of Marc Andreessen, who way before this event wrote an interesting take on Bear in 2007 here. It was clear Bear had problems then, but could this event have been foreseen?

Appreciate your thoughts.

Technical Issues at FinGad

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 15:50:21 EST

Technical Issues at FinGad - by khanan

We've had some technical problems. We're working diligently to resolve them and make the site stable. If you see any issues, please email support@fingad.com

Thanks and happy surfing!

Bladelogic - Shying away

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:24:22 EST

Bladelogic - Shying away - by khanan

What is the new direction of IT?

Today’s IT organization plays a central role in virtually all business planning. Executives look to information technology as a primary source of business agility, an essential determinant of market success. IT is asked to provide critical, real-time business services and information to enhance the decision making of the entire enterprise. New IT requirements are attached to virtually every new business initiative, and the overall success of each initiative is tied to the cost effective delivery of new IT capabilities.

This unprecedented link between business decision making and IT requirements coincides with an equally unprecedented increase in the complexity of IT management. Smaller, denser and more powerful computing assets have proliferated. Internal customers require more readily available management information and more predictable service levels. The IT organization is adapting simultaneously to new technologies and to new expectations and is now facing an all-too familiar challenge: do new things with an old budget, and do them better.

The focus is on the customer rather then the technology. Requirements from customers drive all technology decisions; they are rapidly prioritized and rapidly executed. Service level promises are described in advance and thoroughly documented. Implementation deadlines are always met – unless otherwise communicated to the customer. Quality problems are closely analyzed and lessons are constantly ingrained to avoid repeated mistakes.

All decisions are based on a cost-benefit analysis. Decisions affecting both customers and the business are made with full analysis of cost versus benefit. Services are fairly priced. Off-budget investments are possible when analysis suggests a desirable return. Excess costs are redirected to the originating customer. Costs are consistently driven downward by best practice adoption and the effective use of enabling technologies.

The focus is on information rather than data. The business maintains a ready source of critical information to support all decisions; information is either proactively delivered or available in real-time. Environmental monitors report known or impending failures to meet established service levels. Requests from customers for new capabilities are met with accurate, timely cost estimates. New cost-saving, feature-rich technologies are rapidly researched and the results are proactively distributed.

These objectives represent the ideal goal for any company seeking to run IT as an internal service provider. The remainder of this paper will make concrete recommendations to help IT executives transform their approach, become better aligned with emerging trends in the market and reconcile rigid requirements for cost containment with equally firm requirements for agility and quality.

Traditionally, companies have deployed applications with separate development team from different business units. But to serve customers, the business requires cross-organizational communication from different business units. So there exist two directions of views: horizontal view from business and vertical view from IT.

The tiered silo infrastructure complexity brings the following problems:

Lack of consistency among platforms, configurations, architectures, management tools and processes
Inefficient resource utilization (infrastructure & staff)
Inefficient to reclaiming and repurposing hardware and software that is underutilized
Provisioning for new services

The current model further presents the following problems as it relates to the business of IT:

Server Provisioning - Preparing a server for operation once the hardware setup is complete.

IT organizations face constantly changing requirements from the businesses they support and the applications those businesses rely on.
Accuracy in the server provisioning requires the interaction of system administrators, security engineers, data center operators and others.
The operating system is installed, configured to work within the security and network environment, patched to established standards and then tuned with relevant utility packages.
Exacerbating this situation are server utilization rates that average less than 20% due to the widely accepted practice of creating dedicated hardware and software islands for each new application rather than re-purposing existing IT resources

Code Deployment - Deploying new code or content across the environment

Code deployment is done by using framework tools, manual methods, or ad hoc scripts that lead to inconsistency and risk outages.
The distribution of code, content and configurations to applications occurs across multiple operating systems, including Windows and various flavors of Unix – creating an even more complex task for administrators.

Application Change Management

No environment remains static for long. Changes are most often performed on applications and application servers and other software infrastructure – which unfortunately are also the most frequent sources of downtime.
To manage change safely and effectively, application installation parameters, configuration techniques, component installation orders and start-up prerequisites must all be available to authorize change agents – and withheld from those lacking authorization

Software Provisioning

Installing and configuring packaged software – database servers, messaging servers, web servers, application servers, directory servers, and other software infrastructure – is one of the most common and time consuming tasks system administrators perform
After basic installation, administrators often spend weeks or months configuring the software components to make the systems ‘work.’
The best practices that one administrator learns is rarely shared across the organization, making new deployments experience independent that contributes to more instability and downtime

Patch and Compliance Management & Security

Security is synonymous with control. Given how data center assets are managed today, IT organizations have very little control or visibility of what is happening with their servers, who is touching them, what changes are being made, by whom, and how the configurations of the servers and applications compare to their desired state
Due to increasing regulatory pressure to implement strict management controls, requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SAS-70 and HIPAA have put an additional burden on IT organizations to allocate resources to document, track and measure the compliance of their data center processes and assets to regulatory and corporate policies
Non-compliance with security patching has cost CIOs billions of dollars in system damages over the last two years

Current Automation Process

In most cases, the “script-based” form of automation is the de facto prerequisite for more challenging work
Consideration is needed for how these tasks are performed with limited expertise and an incomplete, or inaccurate understanding of the environment
Lack of knowledge sharing seen throughout the environment as one SA writes the script and delegates responsibility to others for execution
Scripts are sometimes stored in system administrator’s home directories, making knowledge sharing of both script creation and execution more difficult

What is the future of computing infrastructure in a data center?

The number of servers in today’s data center is exploding due to the proliferation of Web-based applications.

Most IT organizations are still using manual processes or, at best, tools from mainframe or client/server eras to manage those servers and applications. Those existing techniques and tools cannot cope with the explosive growth of servers and applications in today’s data center. Compared to applications running on mainframes or in client/server architectures, today’s environment is characterized by:

More servers: Today’s applications run across more servers in an n-tier architecture to support more users and take advantage of the price/performance economics of commodity hardware.

More applications: Web-based applications are simpler for development teams to write, so the number of applications has mushroomed. Where IT organizations might deploy a handful of large client-server applications a year, they (or developers) are now deploying dozens of Web applications a month.

More complex integration: The “plumbing” ‘underneath applications has also become more complex, forcing IT teams to tie together infrastructure products such as operating systems (and their associated patches), databases, application servers, as well as link them to other existing applications.

More uptime: Because Web applications have become a mission critical part of the IT landscape, and since external customers and partners—not just internal employees—access applications, the need for 7x24 uptime has never been higher.

Without a new breed of automation solutions designed from the ground up to manage the complexities inherent in today’s Web-based architecture, IT teams are forced into the impossible position of deciding between increased spending (not likely in today’s environment), lower service levels guarantees, compromised security, or inflexibility (in other words, trying to put the brakes on new applications development because operations can’t manage them).

Fortunately, a new breed of IT automation solutions is now available to help IT organizations take a fundamentally different approach to managing their distributed server environment. These new types of automation solutions enables IT organizations to control costs without compromising quality or business agility. This new generation of automation solutions helps IT organizations answer key operational challenges, such as

How do I automate configuration and change management to ensure consistency, reliability, and accuracy?

How do I rapidly provision and deploy new applications to support the business, while maintaining cost controls?

How do I define and enforce best practice policies and processes to improve my organizational efficiency?

How do I ensure data center security, including managing access to servers and applications as well as patch levels to prevent internal and external threats?

How do I ensure rapid, cost-effective disaster recovery so I can quickly recover from a disaster scenario?

To address each of these challenges successfully, IT organizations need a comprehensive platform to automate IT operations.

This is where data center automation companies come in, like Bladelogic

Who gains the most?
IT departments responsible for large, geographically dispersed data center environments; those managing numerous, disparate technologies and platforms (e.g. UNIX, Linux and Windows); those who make frequent changes to their environment; and those with high rates of turnover achieve the highest ROI from implementing DCA solutions.

Measuring the ROI of DCA

The return on investment from DCA software is measured in terms of reduction in the number of IT staff required to operate the data center, increased IT efficiencies, improved accuracy of changes to improve the first try success rate, and improved quality of data center operations.

Improved server to system administration ratios

By enabling remote, scalable management of hundreds or thousands of servers, organizations can improve their server to system administration ratios. On average, non-automated IT departments currently achieve 18:1 server to administration ratios. Leveraging a data center automation solution has been proven to significantly improve those ratios, to as good as 100:1.

Increased efficiency

By automating many of the manual tasks involved in deploying and managing hundreds or thousands of servers running software, IT departments see productivity gains by using automation solutions to speed operational tasks. Deployments, upgrades and patching processes that used to take weeks and months can now be completed in minutes, hours or days.

Improved operational consistency and quality

Because data center automation technology allows for accurate record keeping and best-practices repository that maintains an up-to-date record of the customer’s environment, IT departments reduce their reliance on specialists and document management systems and processes. These specialists normally capture knowledge of the systems and take that knowledge with them when they leave an organization.

Reduced downtime

Because automation brings an improved consistency and hence higher level of quality to IT operations, system downtime and the costs associated with downtime are significantly reduced.

Improved security

Using a model-based, centralized tool such as RBAC (Role based access control) allows organizations to enforce processes and best-practices for building and making changes to servers. This reduces the risk of ad-hoc changes causing an unforeseen breach in overall system security. In addition, data center automation provides the ability to maintain automatic audit trails of all changes made to each and every managed server in an environment, and who made the changes. This creates a greater degree of accountability within a staff, and reduces the risk of internal tampering.

Improved IT visibility

Data center automation system maintains an always up to date inventory of the hardware and software running in your environment. This automated server inventory and software tracking gives IT greater insight into their operation activities, enables resource analysis, and provides IT with greater visibility into server and software states. IT departments can use data center automation tools to easily deliver detailed reports to finance or other departments for compliance and other accounting purposes.

Improved disaster recovery and business continuity planning

IT departments can use data center automation to manage geographically dispersed application environments from a single console. This allows for simultaneous updates across multiple data centers and ensures consistency in complex, distributed application environments. In addition, as server changes are made in one location, data center automation tools capture and store those changes in other data center locations – enabling rapid re-build of an entire environment in the even of a disaster.

Efficiency Gains from DCA (Data Center Automation)

The most significant gains are found in the following tasks:

Operating system provisioning

Organizations need an automated way to provision a complete server baseline onto new or existing servers so the application-ready system is in a known, consistent, and secure state. This need for automation is apparent when the task at hand is to provision just 1 or 2 servers – and so much more apparent when the need is to provision 20 or 30 servers over a weekend to quickly ramp up capacity for a demanding business application. Automated OS provisioning gives administrators the ability to provision operating system baselines quickly, consistently, and with minimal manual intervention onto bare metal servers. Automated OS provisioning provides greater improvements to IT efficiency by enabling rapid, scalable OS provisioning across UNIX, Windows and Linux servers.

Software provisioning

Installing software and business applications, across a large number of servers, requires significant time and expertise in the installation procedures, configuration, and best practices for each software package. Automated software provisioning improves the quality, consistency and security involved in installing software into the production environment – by capturing and leveraging the expertise required to deploy software. It also allows IT to rapidly and consistently deploy software simultaneously across hundreds or thousands of servers, using best practices and proven configurations. Users can reduce the time required to build new applications and reduce the cost of operations by automating knowledge transfer between organizations.

The automation system also models all software changes, validates changes before propagating to the physical environment; differences between the modeled environment and physical are automatically reconciled.

Patch Management

Typically, an organization must use several tools to detect vulnerable servers and patch levels, apply patches to large numbers of servers, and create patch reports. Adding to the overall cost, any new patch distribution to existing servers requires an update to the standard server builds, to include that same patch on any future servers. Research from the META Group estimates it takes 1920 hours to apply four patches (the average number an IT department deploys per month) across 120 servers. Multiplied by hundreds or thousands of servers, and again by the number of patches published per month, and an organization’s annual patch cost is typically measure in the millions of dollars. By automating the process of detecting and applying patches across hundreds or thousands of servers simultaneously, rather than manually one by one, data center automation saves IT organizations significant time and money.

Distributed script execution

Executing scripts can be a manual, repetitive process that entails logging to each server, executing the script viewing the output, taking any necessary follow-up action, and moving on to the next server to perform the exact same steps. An automation script solution automates script execution by allowing administrators to perform tasks across hundreds or thousands of Unix and Windows servers simultaneously, greatly improving IT productivity.

Code Deployment & Rollback

Deploying new code or content can be a tedious process that frequently causes outages in a customer’s operations infrastructure. An automated code deployment & rollback solution reduces the risk of causing downtime or poor performance by automating the deployment (and, if necessary, rollback) of code, content and configuration changes on multiple operating systems. Automation administrators use a console interface to manage the process end-to-end. Because code and configuration changes are a frequent cause of application downtime, the code deployment and rollback system has built-in rollback capabilities: administrators roll back to a last known good release across all affected servers with a single push of a button. Users can distribute changes across hundreds of servers at once, greatly increasing IT efficiency.

Some questions companies would ask before deploying a solution like Bladelogic

Companies that have paid attention to the importance of automation and its rapid growth in the industry are likely to implement these tools internally. They realize there is a significant gain in productivity from implementing these tools and have discovered ways of doing so. Some may have an internally grown tool created by application developers or other IT personnel that are custom suited for their environment. Others may have already formed alliances with vendors that specialize in automation tools. In either case, there exists a potential opportunity with the customer if they have an unsatisfactory result from using these tool(s) or if they wish to expand in other areas of server consolidation.

Questions that are relevant in this scenario are:

Is the company required for audit & compliance of servers? If the company already uses a tool, what is the tool and how are the results? Is management satisfied with the tool’s reporting?

Are there requirements for consistent change configuration of servers? If so, how is the company executing this change? If the company is using a homegrown or vendor tool(s), are they satisfied with the results? Are they able to rollback changes and are those changes recorded? Has the company experienced any problems with their tools?

Does the company have requirements for application provisioning? How is application provisioning performed? Are there external tools that are used? Is provisioning consistent across the environment or is it done on an “as is” basis?

If the company does have a tool in place, are they satisfied in the performance of application provisioning on many servers?

What are the staffing efficiencies for provisioning & configuration management in a multiplatform data center? What is the current server to admin ratio in the environment? Is the company satisfied with their amount of administrators related to the number of servers in their environment?

Are there requirements for patch management of servers? If so, what tool(s) is the company using to deploy patches? Is the company satisfied with this tool in terms of compatibility with heterogeneous operating systems (UNIX, Linux, Windows)? Are they using different tools for Windows and Unix patching?

Are there requirements for secure access of administration resources against a growing number of servers, applications and platforms? How is this access controlled right now? Is the company satisfied with their current security model with respect to servers and applications?

Are there requirements for gaining a structured environment through server standardization? How consistent is the company’s environment at the moment? How is this consistency maintained?

If the company is satisfied with respect to questions 1 through 7, the next line of questioning may be used to introduce virtualization. What are the utilization rates of your servers? If the utilization rates are between 20-40%, have you thought about consolidating your environment? Do you have tools that are used for server partitioning – making it possible for running multiple operating systems on one server and increasing utilization rates?

Conclusion

Although this article doesn't directly look into Bladelogic - it looks at the environment from a macro perspective and shows why this type of technology would be of interest. Also, time is not spent looking at the accounting side of things as that can be gathered from the annual reports. We are interested in focusing on the long term business potential.

What's important to understand is full blown automation does not exist. What does this mean?

Lot's of complex software cannot be automated. That is the kind of software that requires frequent manual intervention to have it operational. What falls into this category is software that is not yet mature or has a large user base. (Don't want to point fingers) The pitch the automation companies make sounds very compelling, but in the end manual intervention is still required and is still happening.

Another important view is that other verticals are not automated - for example storage. Bladelogic has to partner to fill this void & the same goes for networking. There is still lots of room for improvement there.

At the same time, the competition from the open source will continue to increase with very nice offerings.

This is very important because companies that invest in automation solutions shell out a lot of money. These costs have to be justified - and having another option, like an open source tool, can signficantly impact the numbers.

For these reasons, I would personally not invest for the long term in these type of companies. It is not certain how they will evolve with time, and how the competitors through acquisitions, HP & Opsware for example, will take over this space. The risks here are not in favor.

Review of Alibaba IPO

Sun, 18 Nov 2007 19:07:52 EST

Review of Alibaba IPO - by khanan

Alibaba IPO is a great investment

Alibaba.com which hit the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on Tuesday, Nov 6, had a large success with an increase over its initial offering price. The company is a spin off from Alibaba Group, the company that owns Taobao.com, Alipay and Yahoo China and is 40% owned by Yahoo. As of 3:40pm – 2:40am EST the trading price is at HK $39.50 ($5.09). I think an investment in this IPO would make sense for the long term and here’s why.

Alibaba is a B2B e-commerce company in China. According to iResearch, (China Internet Research Center), Alibaba is the largest B2B company in China for the year 2006 based on user registration and e-commerce user share. Alibaba operations take place in two markets, the China market and the international market. These are www.alibaba.com.cn and www.alibaba.com, respectively. In their S1 form, the company claims to operate one of the top trafficked websites in the world according to Alexa.com data for 2007. The core of the business is “Suppliers and buyers come to our marketplaces to establish their presence on the Internet, identify potential trading partners and interact with each other to conduct business online. For many suppliers wishing to market products and services through online channels, their listings on our marketplaces are their only presence on the Internet.” This is perhaps true today, but leaves room for change. However, given the large established user base and growth, it would be difficult for a rival to take over in a short time frame. There are 2.4 million listings by suppliers. The users had 2.9 million new listings as a monthly average for the first half of 2007. This shows the market establishment and proven growth. There is also social features on the site, however I think it’s more important to focus on the market and why this is a business that will continue to thrive.

The business model lies in charging suppliers who purchase services. These are paying members. The user base has increased significantly, from 6 million in Dec 04 to 11 million in Dec 05 and 19.8 million as of Dec 06. The paying members as of 07 is 255,000 as of 07. The revenue generated is RMB957.7 million as of June 30, 2007. Also, it’s important to note that currently this is where the revenue comes from, but I would expect Alibaba to consider advertising as a revenue stream as well – as is very profitable by companies like Google.

China has 137 million of Internet users as of 2006 according to CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center). The compounded annual growth rate of users is at 23.4%. This means that China will have more Internet users then the US. Also, SMEs (small and medium enterprises) have been a key driving force in China’s economic growth. According to research at the S1 form, Alibaba claims SMEs contribute 58% to China’s GDP and 48% of China’s tax revenue and employed over 75% of the work force in urban areas. Considering that so many manufacturers are operating in China and they are focusing on growth, Alibaba has a key success factor: They are helping their customers make even more money. There is no better recipe.

Alibaba’s management is focusing on the right thing, to keep suppliers on their site. This is a winner takes all market. If we look aside for a second and consider how Ebay operates in the US, this would be helpful. Ebay is the place to sell items. The reason is if it doesn’t sell on Ebay, it most likely will not sell anywhere else. Why is that the case? Because most of the sellers list their items on Ebay, which makes it the most compelling platform for buyers with the most variety of choice and availability of products. This is why when competitors launch their sites, it’s extremely hard to compete – with the key reason of not having enough sellers. Alibaba, it seems, has figured out this recipe and according to the S1, they intend to focus on the suppliers, which will bring in the buyers.

According to the risks, if the Chinese economy suffers, then Alibaba would suffer, which is from a risk point of view is not that significant – as all global companies operating in China would suffer the same fate. The other reasons at the S1 do not raise any alarms to me. Feel free to prove me wrong on this one.

Considering that more and more people will come online and China will have the most Internet users in the world, and throw into the mix that there are so many manufacturers looking to grow their services, this leaves a lot of room for Alibaba to grow – at least in it’s own domestic market. On the international front, this is unclear as domestic entrepreneurs would target their individual countries. This has yet to be seen.

It’s also interesting to note that Yahoo is a strategic investor along with Cisco Systems International B.V. The proceeds from the IPO would go to primarily for acquisitions. This would be targeted to complimentary products and services offered by other companies and technology companies. There is a strong management team in place, great growth possibility, and use of proceeds to continue growing the business with no concrete competitors in sight – according to the S1.

This is a buy and hold for long term in my view.

Mon, 01 Jan 1990 01:01:01 EST

- by khanan