This month marks the tenth consecutive year that we have been a proud sponsor of Microsoft TechEd North America, which is Microsoft’s premier technology conference for IT professionals and developers. It’s hard to believe that a decade has passed since we first attended this event, at the time touting products for backup and restore as well as migration from SharePoint Portal Server 2001 to SharePoint Portal Server 2003.
AvePoint, SharePoint, and technology itself have evolved dramatically, now addressing trends including big data, cloud computing, mobile device management, and social networking. Building on that, how can you utilize SharePoint amidst your other enterprise technology investments as part of a comprehensive data management strategy?
Interoperability is a major trend in today’s multichannel landscape, and is helping to drive our focus of collaboration with confidence to the market. To that end, I’m proud to share what we unveiled to the market at TechEd North America, falling firmly within our mission to help enterprises collaborate with confidence through the prism of productivity, cloud computing, compliance, and governance:
· Cloud Computing: Powerful backup, administration, and management capabilities for cloud, hybrid, and on-premises deployments. AvePoint has become a master of the hybrid, supporting our customers running SharePoint 100% on-premise, 100% in the Cloud (Office 365 in multi-tenant mode, or Azure or Amazon in dedicated hosting mode), or any combination of deployment scenarios. The future will be hybrid for a long time, so whether it means supporting across deployment locations or across any number of geographically dispersed environments, AvePoint provides a scalable, hybrid-enabled, global roll-up management approach.
· Compliance & Governance: Visit our website to learn more about our latest features and products to ensure information is available to those who should have access, and protected from those who should not. Two new notable additions from AvePoint include Compliance Detector, our latest community educational solution allowing anyone to scan websites for free in order to report on a variety of guidelines for accessibility and privacy; and Policy Enforcer, allowing our customers to not only report but also enforce best practice policies and rules in real-time against their SharePoint deployments.
It’s evident that our evolution is also aligning closely with the vision of Microsoft and that of our customers and partners. At TechEd North America, our flagship management platform for SharePoint governance, DocAve 6, won Best of TechEd in the SharePoint category – the second time in our company’s history that we’ve won this prestigious award.
· Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year
· Office/SharePoint App Developer Partner of the Year
· Public Sector Partner of the Year – Public Safety/National Security
This broad recognition truly demonstrates AvePoint’s breadth and depth of support in our ever growing eco-system.
Lastly, at the very beginning of June, we were honored with being named Best Collaboration Solution in the 2013 GOVTek Executive Government Technology Awards, commissioned by the Government Technology Research Alliance, which honors industry leaders whose vision, innovation, and remarkable accomplishments improved the way government delivers services, interacts with citizens, shares information, and protects its national assets.
All of this is showing us that collaborating with confidence, ensuring that enterprises have solutions that can stitch together all of their enterprise technology investments to ensure they are increasing productivity while ensuring data security, is resonating with our customers and partners. It’s also a testament to the core values that have been the bedrock of our company since we first opened our doors in 2001 – passion, drive for excellence, teamwork, and innovation – that have armed us with the ability to continue meeting the needs of our customers and partners, a need that stretches across products, regions, and industry verticals.
It’s been an extremely busy and exciting past month for us here at AvePoint, but stay tuned for even more product and solution updates that will continue to help organizations worldwide collaborate with confidence. The best is indeed yet to come!
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AvePoint recently sponsored an IDC survey with Microsoft in Asia that found 80 percent of businesses in that region want to adopt enterprise social platforms including Microsoft SharePoint in the next 18 months, but are reticent to do so because of data leakage, security, and compliance concerns. This tells us that more than ever, despite the macro-economic slowdown, businesses recognize the fervent need to improve their innovation velocity and competitiveness in today’s hyper-connected information world. This means ensuring information is available to those who should have it and protected from those who should not is of paramount importance.
This brings up a seemingly simple question, then: How can we help enterprises leap frog the adoption curve and truly bring enterprise collaboration and social into the confines of the enterprise?
It’s a simple question but requires a nuanced answer. While this is already a given in the consumer space, enterprises are different from consumers in that they have much more liability when it comes to intellectual property (IP), public relations, and other legal concerns with regard to the exchange and flow of information. The differentiator now, as opposed to even just a few years ago, is that merely terming this collaboration initiative as a pipe dream is no longer sufficient. It’s no longer sufficient for knowledge workers, and it’s certainly not accepted by enterprises’ customers and clients.
Let’s be honest with ourselves – business users will always find ways to get their jobs done, regardless of what legal and compliance stakeholders desire. A real-world example includes compliance officers rejecting an ask to share data externally through SharePoint. Instead of taking no for an answer, workers decided to use the “free” Google Apps platform to share information – thus opening up the organization to a tremendous liability risk to its corporate IP.
This reality that keeps many compliance officers awake at night opens the door for AvePoint to provide the elixir through our traditional strength in infrastructure management and governance as well as our expanded integration story of compliance and risk management for enterprise collaboration platforms. We can provide that peace of mind risk averse yet growth seeking organizations desire today, the ability to truly embrace enterprise collaboration and social initiatives.
From my travels worldwide speaking with CEOs, CIOs, compliance, and risk officers, I clearly see the need to consolidate platforms, improve information worker efficiency, and empower stakeholders to have access to the right information anywhere and anytime. With that said, the enterprise must have visibility and control over who, what, and where that information is being shared – both inside the walls of an organization and outside to its customers and partners.
This tension is where AvePoint has its greatest strength – we can help customers refine their enterprise collaboration and social vision by utilizing all their various investments today (be it SharePoint, Exchange, Yammer, Box, Dropbox, Jive, and others) and stitch together a cohesive information collaboration story that offers strong security, compliance visibility, and enforcement capabilities that risk and compliance officers need. Our unique capability in cross-platform compliance and governance, in addition to our background in infrastructure management across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, help customers worldwide leap frog the SharePoint adoption curve and focus on improving worker efficiency.
In the coming months, we will continue to share real-world success stories on how AvePoint’s focus on collaboration with confidence helps enterprises smash barriers to productivity and unlock the next wave of innovation from their most important asset – their employees. |
Just a few days removed from Microsoft SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2012, it’s gratifying to me to know that a little project code named Tahoe back in 2001 has grown to bring in more than $2 billion annually in sales for Microsoft and generated an $8 billion ecosystem, according to Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Marketing at Microsoft.
More than 10,000 people packed the keynote address at SPC 2012 in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV, where Spataro specifically named AvePoint as the premier infrastructure and governance management company for SharePoint in the first three minutes of his keynote address. He, and other Microsoft executives including Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, SharePoint, went on to showcase SharePoint 2013 and all of its new features, including:
· New SharePoint Experience – The User Interface is redesigned in an effort to make the user experience cleaner and simpler, with quick access to newsfeed, documents, and sites as well as streamlined ways for saving documents, editing lists, sharing content, and theming sites.
· Social Networking – SharePoint 2013 adds rich new microblogging, newsfeed, community, and other social features. With the acquisition of enterprise social networking platform Yammer, it’s clear that we will see more connections between Yammer, SharePoint, and other Microsoft technologies. While it’s still early on, it’s important to give time to see how this integration plays out in the future.
· Search – Microsoft made it very clear during the keynote and throughout the conference that one of the largest investments it made in this release of SharePoint was combining FAST technology with learnings from Microsoft Research and Bing to provide more powerful navigation of documents, sites, people, conversations, videos, reports, and more.
And that wasn’t all. Another key takeaway for me was the reinforcement that Microsoft is in fact “all-in” on Cloud. Microsoft announced during the keynote that all new releases will go into Office 365 first with 90 day release cycles. This represents a very significant shift in Microsoft’s product release strategy – Spataro said himself that “We’re at the end of three-year release cycles.” – and AvePoint is well situated to meet that new paradigm with our tremendous R&D and support resources.
It was also fantastic to hear from Yammer executives – Co-Founder & CEO David Sacks and Co-Founder & CTO Adam Pisoni – talk more about the future of enterprise social and how they are looking to integrate Yammer into Microsoft technologies. Interestingly, Yammer will still act as a standalone cloud platform given its 200,000 customers. I believe that right now Yammer/SharePoint integration is in its nascent stages, and it will be interesting to see as the acquisition closes how deeply Microsoft decides to integrate Yammer. Pisoni had an amusing comment, stating that “Yammer is the water cooler of today’s companies.” From a Compliance Officer’s perspective, though, do you really want your water cooler conversations heard by everyone in the company?
And therein lies the rub in today’s business landscape: addressing the dichotomy of vast collaboration and security. As SharePoint continues to grow into being a total information worker productivity platform, AvePoint and its solutions for compliance, governance, and management are better positioned than ever to enable enterprise collaboration with confidence. |
Here at AvePoint, we make it our mission to pursue enterprise readiness in every area of our business – from our sales and product teams to marketing, customer support, and operations – in order to not just meet but exceed the needs of our ever-growing customer and partner ecosystem. We know that our success will only go as far as the success of our customers and partners, so we tirelessly drive forward in order to always meet that gold standard.
Consequently, we very rarely look back – instead, we constantly look ahead to what’s next. Where’s the next challenge; what’s the next burgeoning trend?
For starters, it is one thing to start quickly out of the gate but lose stamina and eventually fall to the back of the pack. It is a completely other – and much harder – task to start strong and continue to lead the pack. There are always challenges around every corner, obstacles and hurdles one must jump through in order to not become a story of an explosive rise – and just as explosive fall from grace.
The interesting thing about this is that virtually all of these honors have taken place during one of the worst economic times in our recent history – that amidst a time of trial and tribulation, of dreams being shattered and companies unfortunately not able to survive, AvePoint has continued to forge ahead.
And again, it’s not always about where we’ve been, but where we’re going. The future is extremely bright at AvePoint, and I’m fully confident we will continue our forward momentum as we close out 2012 and embrace 2013. In this year alone, we have:
· Released the enterprise class management platform for SharePoint governance, DocAve 6
· Charted the course to productivity for all with AvePoint MyView in the SharePoint 2013 Marketplace
The journey continues – and there is plenty more to come as we wrap up 2012! Expect more news from us as we step up our tempo in expanding our integrated software solutions to help organizations comprehensively govern and scale their enterprise social collaboration platforms with confidence.
The future goes to those who are confident, willing to take calculated risks, and challenge traditional thought. AvePoint has lived by these principles since 2001, and we will not change course – we owe that to our customers, our partners, and the global SharePoint community. |
Part of what it means for AvePoint to be enterprise ready in every aspect of our business – from our product development to our customer support and global operations – means staying ahead of business and IT challenges that enterprises worldwide are facing today with regard to their technology investments.
In speaking with our customers and partners worldwide, the message has never been clearer: Organizations are mandated to do more with less as well as empower employees and partners to work more efficiently to increase their competitive edge. Enterprise collaboration systems, social media, mobile devices, and cloud solutions can help promote innovation, encourage free thinking, and spawn creativity, but they also drastically increase content and create a new set of compliance and risk management challenges.
The trend toward big data presents an increased level of risk (Gartner estimates that enterprise data will grow 650 percent by 2015). At the same time, accidental data exposure, privacy breaches, loss of secure data and intellectual property, and exposure of personal information is on the rise, resulting in a greater emphasis on governance and risk reporting.
In terms of compliance and risk management, organizations’ biggest challenge is navigating the delicate balance among the trends of Enterprise Social, BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and maintaining control of the information flowing through enterprises. So while the need is real to ensure employees are more connected and practicing transparency through enterprise social initiatives, it is vital that companies have a clear view of who, what, when, where, and how information has been accessed and distributed.
The reality is that while in a perfect world, risk and compliance officers would love to forbid the use of enterprise social platforms due to fears of information leakage – a recent IDC study found more than 60% of today’s data leaks come from within organizations – but people will find ways around restrictions to exchange and store information in order to get their jobs done. The need for efficient information exchange to gain competitive edge or just to stay relevant is more pressing than ever, and organizations and IT leadership can no longer afford to just run away from facing these challenges. In fact, Gartner predicts that “by 2016, 20 percent of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs for failing to implement the discipline of information governance successfully”.
The time has come for an end-to-end solution that brings business, IT, and risk officers to the same table and speak the same language in order to proactively address the joint challenges they face today. This is why AvePoint offers a combination of our award-winning DocAve Software Platform, Governance Automation, and Compliance Guardian to help our customers stitch together a better enterprise collaboration story.
Mitigating risk is just one – albeit important – piece, though. While we bring cyber security to the forefront by proactively preventing, detecting, tracking, responding, and resolving the 60% of breaches that occur internally, we also address the need for enterprises to incorporate cloud computing into their technology investments. AvePoint comprehensively supports this story for enterprise collaboration as well, whether it’s through our support of hybrid environments , or software-as-a-service DocAve Online offering for organizations only using Office 365 – SharePoint Online, or for those who wish to utilize Windows Azure for SharePoint Infrastructure-as-a-Service.
AvePoint is well positioned to tackle tomorrow’s challenges today – helping customers govern and scale their social enterprise collaboration platforms with confidence. |
It’s hard to believe that it’s already been one year since the horrific earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan. I vividly remember my flight to Tokyo being re-routed in mid-air to Sapporo before I could contact our Tokyo office employees to make sure they were all right.
At the time, I was absolutely floored by my team’s poise during disaster. They weren’t just safe, but they continued to serve our customers and maintain a “business-as-usual” attitude despite the 6.0+ aftershocks and unfolding events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Not only was I gratified and encouraged, I also learned a lot about bravery and professionalism from our Japan colleagues. Their work ethic and dedication really made it clear to me that in order to build a world-class company – as I fervently believe AvePoint is today – you need a foundation of world-class citizens. We have that with our global AvePoint family, now more than 1,000 strong.
As Japan continues to rebuild and replenish one year later, so does AvePoint. With two offices, in Tokyo and Osaka, AvePoint continues to expand to meet the needs of the vibrant SharePoint community in Japan with renowned customers such as Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, Seiko Epson Corporation, Toshiba Corporation, Nikon Corporation, and Canon Inc., just to name a few.
Looking back, the longest lasting impressions I have of the aftereffects of the disaster are the perseverance and can-do attitude of the Japanese people. Despite all the media coverage on the leaking nuclear plants, all the regularly scheduled rolling blackouts across the city of Tokyo, and all the empty shelves in convenience stores – everywhere I went, the streets are clean and everyone remained calm going about their regular business. The general tone is that the Japanese people, with their hardworking attitude, will be able to overcome and persevere regardless of the situation at hand. It was also the time the Japanese youth – whom until then had been branded by older generations as being lazy, selfish, and lacking ambition – galvanized the country with their tireless and completely selfless volunteer work in tsunami-stricken areas. And interestingly, in a society that really values privacy and rarely posts anything online using their real names, March 2011 was the time when Western-style social media forums like Facebook really took off in adoption and worked wonders in helping people organize, gather information, and foster a real sense of community.
One year later, these impressions and lessons learned on persevering against all odds; community building and the bond between individual human beings; and motivating our community with a sense of purpose remained with me and our AvePoint management team. In large part, it also helped to shape our philosophy of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more diverse AvePoint global family.
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Note: This is part of our "In AvePoint's Own Words" blog series. Please click here for more information.
What’s a great way to celebrate another record breaking year and get everyone energized for 2012? At AvePoint, we celebrated our achievements, talked about lessons learned, and strategized the way forward at our early January Management Summit. It’s a tradition dating back to 2004, and as we welcome more new AvePoint leaders from our 25 global offices, it’s truly an honor for me this year to share an intense, candid, and passionate two-day exchange with such a diverse and talented group of AvePoint leaders. My biggest take away is that what make AvePoint resonate with our customers in the global SharePoint community as the true enterprise-ready global SharePoint ISV, is that we provide end-to-end, enterprise-ready infrastructure and governance solutions for our customers, regardless of geography, language, or industry verticals.
This enterprise-ready strategy is at the core of AvePoint’s values. It is what we at AvePoint have focused on from Tahoe to today, from a two-person company to today’s 1,000+ strong global brand. Our consistent focus on enterprise readiness means that we deliver to our customers not only an integrated end-to-end technology platform as a solution for on-premise/cloud/hybrid SharePoint environments, but also includes with that the human factor of:
· True 24/7 live support by our 70+ Microsoft Certified Technology Specialists support staff
· More than 600 engineers in research and development focusing on delivering not only best-in-class solutions, but often times customized solutions to meet the most stringent Service Level Agreement requirements
· Over 100 field engineers providing in-person, 100 percent localized guidance and support for our customers regardless of geography & industry vertical
· 100-plus product and project managers to work with our customers and provide more insight and feedback on enhancing our current products as well as design new solutions
· Hundreds of account managers, speaking more than 18 languages, to serve our customers and partners in 63 countries
· Over 50 global marketers and product marketers to understand the localized message of our customers in our various global markets
Our combination of people, process, continued growth, and technology provide the foundation of our enterprise readiness strategy and is what I believe makes AvePoint unmatched in the industry. I’m proud to be in the league of Microsoft’s top Global SharePoint ISV partners, proud to serve our SharePoint customers 10 years running, and proud of our AvePoint global family.
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Only weeks away from the end of 2011, it’s time for us to reflect on our successes and challenges we all encountered this past year.
There is no denying that, from a macroeconomic perspective, 2011 was another recession year rife with volatility around the globe. Many entrepreneurs may not have been able to achieve their targets for 2011, but it would behoove you to not use the economic climate as the sole reason for missing your goals. Leave the blame game in the break room. Smart companies are looking internally at their processes and execution to determine where areas can be optimized, streamlined, and primed for a quantum jump in 2012.
A common first thought for many companies during unsure economic times is to hunker down. In a world of recession, high unemployment rates, and no signs of let-up, many will decide to freeze hiring, trim their employee base to a skeleton crew, and put a halt to virtually all spending.
This knee-jerk reaction could be misguided. Does this mean continue to spend recklessly? Absolutely not – a very critical eye should be cast upon all spending to determine any places where you can lower costs.
Retaining and acquiring the best and brightest is always the best option in today’s economic landscape. At AvePoint, we’ve continually grown our employee base throughout good economic times and bad – increasing our family from 700 at the beginning of 2011 to more than 1,000 today. We opened several new offices worldwide, now with 25 in 13 countries on five continents. And we don’t plan on stopping there, either.
From a macroeconomic outlook perspective, the technology market remains one of the strongest performing sectors. In a recent sign of strength for the Technology Initial Public Offering (IPO) market, Jive Software went public with valuations at 10x+ multiples of 2011 revenue, was multiple times oversubscribed, and saw strong market reception with 20 percent share price jumps within days of its IPO – despite the fact that the company has yet to reach profitability. The investor support and strong belief in high-growth technology companies reaffirms this principle: Regardless of the economic backdrop and market volatility, strong companies with solid fundamentals must continue to forge ahead and execute with growth in mind.
The future goes to those who are confident, take calculated risks, and are willing to challenge traditional thinking. We’ve abided by these three tenets since our first days in 2001, and we have no intention to change course now. |
As we quickly move into the final quarter of 2011, I’d like to take a moment and reflect upon what our team here at AvePoint accomplished at the biggest tradeshow of 2011, Microsoft SharePoint Conference (SPC) in Anaheim, California – including our key takeaways as well as how it will apply to AvePoint’s future initiatives.
SPC was our platform for truly launching – and promoting – our newest product offerings, DocAve 6 and Governance Automation. Through the efforts of our global marketing, product, and sales teams, at SPC we:
· Unveiled our new, world-class AvePoint booth: Always inundated with eager crowds, it was truly the destination point for attendees to check out our latest video demos and product literature.
· Professional in-booth theater demonstrations: Our industry experts teamed up with partners such as Dell to share proven practices for SharePoint management, governance, and storage optimization. After each theater session, we video interviewed attendees for their feedback.
· Industry defining conference sessions: As a platinum and keynote sponsor of SPC, AvePoint’s renowned industry experts led four sessions during the Office and SharePoint track. In one session, an attendee tweeted that our Chief SharePoint Evangelist Dan Holme is the “new messiah of the SharePoint community”.
· Celebrated SPC with our renowned AvePoint Red Party: Our attendees raved that it was the best party of the conference.
· Continued our show-stopping tradition: We drew the biggest trade show crowd over our famed “Red Ducati Drawing” giveaway on the final day of SPC.
This event truly showcased how the AvePoint global team continues to step up its game and position itself as the No. 1 SharePoint ISV. In meetings with Microsoft executives, we were continually praised for our thought leadership initiatives, the way we conduct ourselves as a company, and for our efforts as a valued Microsoft partner from the first release of Microsoft SharePoint in 2001.
Now, what did we learn at SPC? Microsoft officially announced that there are 125 million user licenses, representing 65,000 companies worldwide using SharePoint. Of these, 62 million users are using SharePoint 2010 today! With 1,162 SharePoint books published and a 700,000-strong SharePoint developer community, SharePoint remains the fastest growing and strongest business application platform – a shining growth story against today’s sluggish economic backdrop.
Another key takeaway from SPC is that our competitors are scared. When the head of the SharePoint business at a publicly traded, multi-billion dollar company specifically – and pointedly – launched a campaign against our company and our products, you know AvePoint is where the party is at when everyone is trying so very hard to crash it!
So moving forward, what does this mean for AvePoint? It affirms for us that our thought leadership campaign is working, and that we continue to firmly entrench ourselves as the No. 1 brand in the SharePoint space. With this comes great responsibility to not just celebrate our success, but to be diligent of our competition and to never to rest on our laurels in this “innovate or die” software industry.
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When Kai Gong, AvePoint Chairman and Co-CEO incorporated AvePoint, Inc. in New Jersey on July 24, 2001, he didn’t know there was a product that went by the name of “SharePoint”. The name “AvePoint”, in fact, came from Kai’s driving trips in New York City. Near Times Square, several avenues merge together; thus AvePoint, where all roads come together, was the concept that drove our company’s name.
While Kai first started AvePoint to develop a Microsoft Exchange backup solution, his focus quickly turned to SharePoint when Microsoft officially released SharePoint 2001, which happened to use the same Web Storage System based data repository as Exchange. In October 2002, AvePoint officially released DocAve 1.0, the industry’s first document-level backup and restore solution for SharePoint 2001. Soon after, AvePoint released DocAve 1.5 in April 2003 to back up workspaces, history versions, webparts, and dashboards. Our attention to recovery Service Level Agreements (SLA) and full-fidelity recovery is what first brought the mention of “item-level, full-fidelity restore” to the SharePoint industry.
In June 2003, timed to coincide with Microsoft TechEd 2003 in Dallas, Texas – my first time attending a TechEd show representing AvePoint’s marketing and sales – we released DocAve 2.0 and Migrator 1.5 to support the new release of SharePoint 2003. Our Migrator 2.0 product, released in March 2004, was the only solution in the industry that could migrate customers’ contents from SharePoint 2001’s Web Storage System based data store to SharePoint 2003’s new SQL storage. It was this product that truly drew the attention of Microsoft SharePoint’s product team, and we haven’t looked back since.
We continued to set the standard for SharePoint infrastructure management solutions by proving ourselves as an ISV with the most technical depth and longest history serving the global SharePoint community with products including, but certainly not limited to:
· TrashBin 1.0, released in September 2005, which provided the industry’s first real-time Recycle Bin solution for SharePoint 2003
· DocAve Archiver and Auditor, released in March 2006, as the first SharePoint archiving and auditing solutions
· DocAve Platform Backup, released in November 2007, as the first SharePoint platform level, beyond just SQL servers, backup solution for SharePoint 2007
As I reflect on AvePoint’s last 10 years as a 100 percent SharePoint ISV, I fervently believe that we are truly the poster child of SharePoint success. Born as a company in 2001, named AvePoint when SharePoint is still called project Tahoe, we have become a global company with more than 1,000 employees across 19 offices in 10 countries, serving over 8,000 customers in more than 63 countries. With all of our original founders and entrepreneurs still hard at work, AvePoint has blossomed into the largest global SharePoint ISV by focusing on developing an integrated management platform for SharePoint governance.
Today, commemorating our 10 years with Microsoft SharePoint, we at AvePoint are honored to be part of the SharePoint history, proud to serve the ever-growing global SharePoint community, and remain infinitely thrilled to see the exciting future of this enterprise collaboration and application platform we all have grown to love and embrace. May our joint future be prosperous and bright!
TJ |
McKinsey’s recent publication of “Big Data: the next frontier for innovation, competition, and productivity” has a lot of people talking. Some key statistics from this report include:
· $600 to buy a disk drive that can store all of the world’s music
· 5 billion mobile phones in use in 2010
· 30 billion pieces of content shared on Facebook every month
· 40% projected growth in global data generated per year versus 5% growth in global IT spending
· 235 terabytes data collected by the United States Library of Congress in April 2011
· 15 out of 17 sectors in the U.S. have more data stored per company than the U.S. Library of Congress
These staggering data growth statistics are not surprising in today’s information age. Everyone knows that we are accumulating an overwhelming amount of data an ever-increasing rate. However, what many of today’s software industry analysts don’t see is how the story of SharePoint growth also mirrors one of data growth. Instead, many point to SharePoint growth as simply a function of Microsoft’s reported SharePoint license growth, which has now slowed to approximately 10% year-over-year. So while SharePoint was Microsoft’s fastest revenue growth product in Microsoft’s company history – faster than Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office – many argue that this was due to Enterprise Client Access Licenses (CALs), and that’s how today Lync is becoming Microsoft’s fastest revenue growth product.
On the other hand, for those of us living in the SharePoint ecosystem helping thousands of customers worldwide over the last decade, the story of SharePoint growth is just beginning. Data explosion, content sprawl, and data sink are all familiar terms by now for your typical SharePoint deployments.
From just my travels around the world talking to customers in both developed and developing markets, I see the typical SharePoint adoption/growth story as follows: Companies tend to start with the SharePoint administrator locking up SharePoint, where the platform becomes a just a glorified variant of a file share. Then, when companies have more comfort in the technology and increased confidence in the platform, they then open up MySites to individual users, making SharePoint an information collaboration platform where documents can be shared, versioned, permissioned, searched, and tracked. Next, organizations evolve to a more advanced usage of SharePoint, either as a record management (RM) system, enterprise content management (ECM) platform, or even as a general purpose application development platform. This is the essence of the layman’s description of SharePoint, that it is “Facebook for companies”.
So in effect, SharePoint’s footprint tends to expand and deepen as companies becomes more confident in the platform overall – and this is where the real SharePoint growth story lies. While SharePoint growth – from a Microsoft license perspective – has slowed down to just over 10% year-over-year, the data stored in SharePoint, connected to SharePoint, and extended out from SharePoint have grown exponentially.
Thus to leverage SharePoint effectively, to truly unleash it’s collaborative potential for today’s information workers, SharePoint infrastructure management considerations – including data import, connection, backup, archiving, and management – should NEVER be an after-thought. Thinking about scalability, performance, and governance of the SharePoint platform must be an integral part of the initial architecture discussions and considerations.
At AvePoint, we had the foresight to support this big data growth story years ago with our integrated, end-to-end infrastructure management solution that helps customers manage and control the exponential data growth within SharePoint in order to accelerate enterprise adoption of the platform. This is how AvePoint differentiates in the global SharePoint market, and we have now become a trusted advisor and partner in some of the largest global enterprise SharePoint deployments. We never aspired to simply provide tools here at AvePoint – through our continued innovation our message to the market is clear: AvePoint is the gold standard SharePoint infrastructure management solutions company worldwide.
The recent announcements of Dan Holme, Jeremy Thake, and Randy Williams joining our AvePoint family validates the professional community’s opinion of AvePoint. AvePoint’s nine straight years of exponential cash positive growth is the global market’s validation of AvePoint. And with the help of these top-tier SharePoint MVPs, we will step up our efforts to embrace the SharePoint community, continue to innovate by listening to your opinions and needs, and strive to help our customers benefit from the data explosion.
Going back to the McKinsey report on Big Data, the value of capturing data have already been estimated to have:
· $300 billion potential annual value to U.S. health care – more than double the total annual health care spending in Spain
· €250 billion potential annual value to Europe’s public sector administration – more than the GDP of Greece
· $600 billion potential annual consumer surplus from using personal location data globally
· 60% potential increase in retailers’ operating margins possible with big data
From a labor force perspective, McKinsey report this means additional job opportunities for:
· 140,000-190,000 more deep analytical talent positions
· 1.5 million more data-savvy managers needed to take full advantage of big data in the United States
Big data continues to get bigger – that’s also the real story of SharePoint growth. So let’s embrace this reality now, and take control of the growth and capture the real value of data! |
The journey to have 60+ SharePoint and DocAve certified engineers covering our Tier 1, 2, and 3 support levels around the clock 365 days a year is not an easy one. Just to put things in perspective, most SharePoint ISVs that play in some of the same markets as AvePoint do not even have that many employees combined, let alone engineers or Research & Development staff. Our support engineers are fortified by our 500+ R&D organization, which by the end of 2011 will exceed 800. This journey has certainly brought AvePoint a long way since we started building out our international presence in 2005 from our little office, deep in the woods of Somerset, New Jersey.
Much like the principles distilled in Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, AvePoint has crossed the chasm from a cool, small startup technology company serving early adopter customers of SharePoint 2001 and 2003, to today’s true enterprise-strength product company that helps our more than 8,000 customers worldwide scale and manage their rapidly maturing SharePoint 2007 and 2010 deployments. To accomplish this, AvePoint’s management team made a conscious, concerted effort to expand our footprint internationally. While many companies found comfort in staying in their local markets, we went out of our comfort zone to go international.
Another big initiative at AvePoint is to reinvest every single dime back into the business year after year, without incurring any debt. This highly disciplined business practice, while at times seeming overly frugal and restrictive, has become the hallmark of our culture, DNA, and mantra: “Invest for the future and anything is possible.” This practice is what paid us dividends through the great recession years of 2008 and 2009, enabling us to continue our exponential growth for nine straight years. Even today, all top AvePoint executives still fly economy class – even for long-haul, 14-16 hour non-stop flights. Our attitude is to never rest on our laurels, be grateful for our present opportunities, and always challenge ourselves to go above and beyond expectations.
AvePoint Chairman and Co-CEO Kai Gong always tells our top management team, “Nothing in business comes naturally.” So our new level of 24/7 excellence in customer support is treated internally at AvePoint as serious as the development of any of our new products. As today’s customers rely more on SharePoint as their strategic collaboration and application development platform, risk-averse and high-performance customers demand off-hour technical support. For example, what IT team would conduct major SharePoint migration or upgrade projects during production hours or even weekdays? Interestingly enough, given today’s critical shortage of SharePoint expertise, our support organization found that more than 60 percent of the calls and support tickets we field are about teaching our customers how to fix issues with their own SharePoint deployments. So, in many ways, our global support and technical pre/post sales organizations act as Microsoft SharePoint evangelists and consultants. This is why it’s critical for every one of our engineers to be certified in SharePoint in order to provide technical know-how and tackle any SharePoint deployment variants, be it on-premise, hosted, or Office 365 hybrid environments. Fortunately, DocAve as a SharePoint infrastructure management software platform also lends itself scalable in managing multiple SharePoint environments, across different networks and domains as well as versions of SharePoint.
2011 is a very exciting year for AvePoint. As our existing and potential customers and partners worldwide will learn throughout the year, there are many exciting new developments – and even surprising announcements – coming out every single month. So stay tuned to watch AvePoint progress, as we work hard to implement and roll out global expansions and upgrades to guide our entire organization across the chasm and into greatness.
TJ
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Although AvePoint has sponsored Gartner’s famed Portals, Content & Collaboration (PCC) summit in both North America and EMEA for the last two years, this is the first year I personally attended the conference. Why? The reason is very simple. As AvePoint continues to raise its global profile as the leading SharePoint infrastructure solution platform provider, learning from – and providing feedback to – industry-leading analysts and top thought leaders in the portals & collaboration space has become a part-time job for all AvePoint senior management. SharePoint, as a technology platform, has “crossed the chasm” into the mainstream market. As such, it is no longer sufficient for us to only speak with early adopters. We must also engage the risk averse, yet demanding enterprise clients whom we have seen fully embracing SharePoint 2010 at a record pace.
Here are some of my key takeaways from the latest Gartner PCC Summit – taking place earlier this week in Los Angeles – after attending multiple SharePoint sessions and meeting with top SharePoint analysts:
- SharePoint is now firmly established as the leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrants for ECM (November 2010), Portal (September 2010), and Social Software (October 2010), a truly general platform offering
- SharePoint as an application platform, is now becoming the backbone for many companies as a social collaboration platform
- Gartner recommends “loose coupling integration with 3rd party tools instead of tight integration”, where tight integration into SharePoint is subject to failure whenever Microsoft releases patch updates
- SharePoint Workspace has seen NO user adoption, so geo-replication solutions remain a valuable alternative to address access issues to SharePoint environments over long distances
- SharePoint Workflow still needs help in order for SharePoint to become a true, enterprise-ready Business Process Management platform
- 64-bit architecture requirements are pushing many customers toward managed/hosted SharePoint offerings, but Gartner is actively advising companies to NOT adopt SharePoint Online (aka Office 365) for now
- Gartner sees vast majority of SharePoint users as Windows SharePoint Services users – in terms of user adoption, “Chaos is good” vs. “built it and no one use it”
- In a poll conducted among clients, Gartner found that, on average, companies use seven different content management systems – and believes SharePoint should play a key role in consolidation
- SharePoint governance continues to be a big pain point, though governance means different things to different people. Is it compliance, permission management, or content sprawl? Companies need to first clearly define what governance means in their own SharePoint initiatives first before researching available third-party solutions that can address those governance challenges.
- Gartner believes Microsoft’s decision to NOT certify SharePoint with Department of Defense Records Management certification – and other foreign government certifications – is a big mistake, because it discourages government agencies from adopting SharePoint for general platform/application usage
- From a Records Management (RM) perspective, Gartner cites Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) articles that discuss RM as an object defined a record by one user can be changed by another user who doesn’t think it is a record. This, Gartner cites, means SharePoint out-of-the-box is still not a true RM platform like that of Documentum and FileNet.
To solve many of the above pain points, Gartner cites that SharePoint has a very rich 3rd party solution eco-system. Of the 4 major areas identified by Gartner, AvePoint is presented by Gartner in 3 areas: Storage Optimization via Microsoft BLOB API, Administration/Taxonomy/Governance/Migration Extensions, & Replication and Backup. The 4th area of partner eco-system is Process Capabilities.
I also really enjoyed Mark Gilbert’s presentation entitled “Is SharePoint 2010 Ready”. Mark, Gartner’s Chief SharePoint Analyst, discussed many of the above points and highlighted the strengths and weaknesses of the current SharePoint offering. His final recommendations, listed here verbatim, are:
Immediate Actions:
- Develop a content management strategy before buying technology
- Establish a plan and set guidelines for SharePoint usage
- Get off the email treadmill. Use SharePoint for collaborative processes.
Longer Term:
- Focus on people and behavior: Fit the tools into processes where they are needed
- Establish a SharePoint Center of Excellence
- Inventory all sites/repositories, identify their owners and purposes
- Set a firm policy on the life of team sites and documents within team sites
- Allow and encourage “team taxonomies”
- Build a library of purpose-specific templates and accepted 3rd party add-ons
- Identify all SharePoint dependencies with other applications (for example, content sources)
My overall impression from the Gartner PCC event further reinforces what we at AvePoint are experiencing: The SharePoint market is rapidly evolving and morphing. From serving our 8,000+ global customers since the inception of SharePoint back in 2001, AvePoint has seen a tremendous amount of real-world example usages, best practices, and headaches across all versions of SharePoint and its adoption stages.
It’s definitely very reassuring to see similar findings by Gartner as it continues to survey its global client base. This goes back to AvePoint’s firm belief in providing a truly integrated, end-to-end solution to our customers. Internally, our moniker has become “Got SharePoint? Need AvePoint!”
So if you have SharePoint, I will bet you MUST see pain points where AvePoint has existing solutions to help you solve and accelerate your return on investment with SharePoint.
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To be fair, my expectations were low heading into the growth forum, believing it would be just another marketing driven, workshop packed conference. Yet to my surprise, as soon as I set foot in this beautiful desert oasis, my schedule was filled with insightful, business-objective driven forums and workshops led by industry heavyweights as well as refreshing conference-wide Q&A sessions with some of today’s most well-known thought leaders and entrepreneurs – from the likes of Sir Richard Branson to William Clay Ford Jr. It was also great to immerse myself in an environment where attendees rub elbows with slightly less God-like entrepreneurs such as Guy Laliberté (founder and CEO of Cirque du Soleil) and Tom Adams (CEO of Rosetta Stone).
While listening to the top echelon of today’s most successful entrepreneurs and business leaders was inspiring, the real gems of the forum for me were having lunch meetings, drinks, and impromptu hallway chit chats with like-minded 2010 entrepreneur winners. One memorable story from chatting with Joe Ratterman of BATS Exchange is what private electronic exchange boards do to change the game in today’s financial markets. For someone who had spent years in the financial industry dabbling in designing and implementing real-time global trading systems, I received a great refresher update on today’s state of the art. Lastly, but certainly the most valuable benefit of the forum by far, is the ability for the attendees to request quick, half-hour “speed-dating” network meetings with other C-level executives. I really enjoyed those high-energy senior meetings and found them tremendously valuable in helping extend and expand joint business ventures. My only regret was going to the 2010 event by myself instead of bring my executive team for a more full-immersion–type business networking experience.
For four consecutive days, the Strategic Growth Forum kept me constantly engaged from 6:30 a.m. to midnight learning and networking today’s top entrepreneurs. To top the event off, watching fireworks and live band performances in the evenings as well as seeing Jay Leno deliver his punch lines at the final awards ceremony was a nice touch. Of course, sitting next to the famed Larry Silverstein at the awards ceremony was also pretty cool.
So for those entrepreneurs who ever wondered about the Ernst & Young Entrepreneurship program and its benefits, my advice is try to get in … and try again if you don’t win. It’s definitely an endeavor well worth your time and efforts. I, like many previous entrepreneur of the year winners, am personally looking forward to attending the annual event for years to come!
TJ
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I am truly grateful for the AvePoint global family, represented by more than 800 employees in 17 offices across 5 continents, not to mention all the 50+ field engineers and enterprise sales folks located outside of our main office hubs and locations. In my travels to visit our customers and partners worldwide, I am always touched by our local AvePoint staff’s dedication and professionalism. One really poignant case recently that clearly illustrated the superior character of our staff is my experience traveling to Japan during the massive earthquake on March 11th. My flight to Tokyo from Los Angeles was supposed to land on Friday afternoon, but due to the massive quake, I was diverted to Sapporo. The captain informed us of the devastation, and how Tokyo was also hit hard by the natural disaster. Clearly anxious and worried, I IM’ed our Tokyo office as soon as I landed to make sure everyone was OK. To my delight, not only were all of our 20+ Tokyo employees safe and sound, but they were – and continue to – work and help our customers in the aftermath of the largest recorded earthquake in Japanese history.
All the negatives of the natural disaster aside, I have witnessed for myself in just a few short days how Japan stands on top of the world in handling this crisis. I’ve seen individual Japanese citizens truly shine as world-class human beings by helping each other cope and find comfort through this chaotic situation. I am particularly proud of our Japan team members’ acts of bravery and professionalism during the big quake of March 11th as well as the aftermath. Our employees stayed in the office through the entire night following the earthquake while still handling customer trouble tickets from Osaka. And due to significant reduction of train services, many of our employees had to spend the night in our office. The entire team stayed together, even those who lived within 10 minutes walking distance to the office stayed overnight to support rest of the team. While just one week later the situation is still tenuous given the numerous 6.0+ aftershocks and the unfolding events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant , we still have Japan team members visiting customers and carrying on business as usual.
These selfless acts exemplify why I’m consistently proud of our AvePoint global family – our unique work ethic and dedication to our job and our colleagues sets AvePoint apart. These are the key ingredients behind our meteoric eight consecutive years of exponential growth both in revenue and in employee count.
We are no longer the two-man shop of 2001 when SharePoint was simply referred to as the “Lake Tahoe project”. We are truly a global family now – as the sun never sets on AvePoint – and this enables us to be the enterprise-strength SharePoint ISV making a real impact in the global SharePoint market. We stand tall, on the shoulders of our dedicated family of employees around the world that consistently serve our customers diligently and with the utmost professionalism.
I am proud to be a part of AvePoint, and I am immeasurably proud of our global AvePoint family.
TJ
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