Swiss Company Proved Value of Services Architecture Before the Name Was Even Coined

Wow, that’s us :-)

I am very excited and proud to announce you that Edward Cone (contributing editor at Wired magazine; a senior writer for Inter@ctive Week; an opinion columnist for Greensboro News & Record; a freelancer covering business, technology, and a wide variety of other stuff; and a staff writer at Forbes) – Oh Ed, I haven’t known that you have a blog… – interviewed us end of 2005 for CIO Insight.

His article about the ecenter, called Insuring the future, is really great, thanks a lot Ed for your time and your great challenging questions! Have a look ;-) You can find the whole article here.

Before all the hype over service-oriented architecture, before the cumbersome acronym had been coined, and before the now infamous Microsoft memos were sent, one small insurance company in Switzerland had a big head start. Helvetia Patria Group, a St. Gallen, Switzerland-based insurance company put its service-oriented architecture in place four years ago, before anyone even knew what to call it. [...]

Built on an electronic banking platform from Hewlett-Packard Co., with assistance from H-P consultants, the Helvetia Patria eBusiness Center makes more than two dozen products available on line. The company says it has realized a return on investment of 111 percent in the system’s first three years, and anticipates a six-year return of 201 percent.

Actually, the ROI study was done by a neutral external specialized company called Thoughware Worldwide. You can find an Executive Summary of this study here. We had really a great time during this study with Tim, Jacob, Fotios and Rose-Marie, thank you all ;-)

I am soooo sorry :-)

In about 5 days we will be in Anguilla and the week after, in St.Barths, with my wife and my son. Oh oh, we are waiting for these holidays as crazy. Just too much time since the last one. I am completely behind for the last organization and preparation tasks… Plus a *bunch* of things to do before going, plus by birthday, grrrrr…

It seems that the weather was not so cool there the last days BUT the sun should be present again from Wednesday, good timing :-) As usual, 24°C during the night, and 26°C the day, sea at 25°C. Oh I WANT TO BE THERE!!!

In the citycar, we had the chance to see some very nice Bentley’s cars. Wow!

Continal Flying Spur

• 12 cylinders, 6-litre engine
• 560PS, 650Nm
• 0-100km/h: 5.2s
• max.speed: 312km/h
• twin turbocharged engine
• weight: 2’475kg

Continal GT

• 560PS
• 0-100km/h in 4.8s
• 12 cylinders, 6 litres (W formation)
• twin turbochargers
• weight: 2’385kg

Bentley Speed 8 (winner Le Mans 2003)

Oups… I have just seen that, on last Monday (January 23), I had my biggest traffic peak ever in one day:

• 5’092 pageviews
• 2’681 visitors
• 0.52 GB transferred

And no, it is not coming from an attack and/or spam ;-) Somewhat slowly disturbing…

[via BetaNews]

One of the General Public License’s biggest supporters will not be converted to version 3 out of objections over its position on digital rights management. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux is the first to take issue with the first revision of the GPL in a decade and a half.[...]

At issue for Torvalds is the provision within GPLv3 that opposes digital rights management and would apparently open up parts of the kernel to copying. He says that GPLv2 currently prevents this, but GPLv3 would not.

“The Linux kernel is under the GPL version 2. Not anything else. Some individual files are licensable under v3, but not the kernel in general,” he argued. “I think it’s insane to require people to make their private signing keys available.”

Wow, I am back now, it was a very fruitful and intensive Strategic Management session (about extending/creating Business Models) in Wolfsburg – Germany, at the CityCar of Volkswagen. This place is very strange, a lot of beautiful and modern buildings, near the power plant of the car factory.

I will be off till Friday for our internal International Executive Program. This time, we will be in Germany, exactly in Wolfsburg, well-know for hosting the Headquarter of Volkswagen and the so-called citycar. We should participate to a “driving safety training”, whatever that means ;-)

It will be cold and snowy. The travel is completely crazy:
- car: home-france => basel-switzerland
- train: basel => zurich airport (switzerland)
- plane: zurich airport => hannover (germany)
- train: hannover => wolfsburg (germany)
Pffuuuuu……

On the other side, it seems that we are in a great Hotel.

The main topic will be “Successful business models and best practice”.

I am not sure that we will have an Internet access, see you on the other side ;-)

[via Jeff Bussgang]

You surely know the motto “the grass is always greener on the over side”, what Jeff calls “the circle of envy”. Great and funny post about the different perspectives of an Entrepreneur envying the VC, the VC envying the Private Equity Executive, the Private Executive envying the Hedge Funds Executive….and finally, to close the circle, the Hedge Funds Executive envying the Entrepreneur :-)

Entrepreneurs envying VCs

Entrepreneurs are recently famous for sulkily observing that the VCs have the cushiest of lives. Unlike entrepreneurs who live and die by quarterly and annual milestones, VCs get paid generous management fees whether they seem to actually perform or not. In the mind of many entrepreneurs, VCs don’t work all that hard, parachute into board meetings without having done their homework, make a few trite, unhelpful comments and then leave. In short, entrepreneurs are envious of the VC way of life, which seems to have lots of financial upside and none of the quality of life downside.

VCs envying Private Equity Executives

VCs are recently famous for grousing about how much money their private equity cousins are making. A VC struggles to invest $5-10 million at a time while their private equity cousins pour hundreds of millions of dollars, and recently even billions, into a single deal. Since the fee income portion of compensation is a function of assets under management, the more you manage, the more you make. The other compensation component is the carried interest, and VCs are green with envy when they see buyout guys use cheap leverage to make money while retaining large stakes in their firms. In short, VCs see the outrageous financial lifestyles of the private equity hitters, flying around in their private jets and think: “if only I could be like them, they’ve really got the model figured out”.

Private Equity Executives envying Hedge Funds Executive

Private equity executives are recently famous for expressing their envy for hedge funds. Unlike private equity and VC firms, who only get paid on the gains when a portfolio company is liquidated, hedge funds take their carried interest off the table every year. And when a private equity or VC firm gets hot, it has to wait three or four years in between fund cycles to raise new, larger funds. Those lucky hedge fund executives can sweep big money in at a moment’s notice, raising their fee income with a snap. Further, complain private equity folks, the hedge fund executives rarely travel to chase around high-stakes auctions and have none of the responsibility or liability that “owning” companies and controlling boards represents. They just seem to coast along, accumulate more and more capital, and live it up.

Hedge Funds Executives envying … Entrepreneurs :-)

And hedge fund executives? The top of the heap? Hardly. I often hear them discuss with envy the life of the entrepreneur cycling through exciting new start-ups every 5-6 years and then taking long sabbaticals in-between gigs. Meanwhile, the hedge fund executive is chained to every international market every minute of the day for fear they miss spotting the latest currency or interest rate fluctuation. Entrepreneurs actually create things of value and leave a mark on society, rather than simply financial engineering. And that nonsense about money flowing in so fast being such a great thing? Remember, it can flow out just as fast. And, besides, the hedge fund business as a whole has little barriers to entry and struggle to find true proprietary elements of the busines, resulting in too much money chasing too few good investment opportunities. Those entrepreneurs who can come up with original ideas, build proprietary technology and products, and then sell them out get all the glory, reap all the rewards and then unplug. Now that’s the life.

[via brandchannel.com]

In 2005′s results, Google took the lead from Apple in what is shaping up to be a back and forth contest through the years for these two innovative tech companies. Each year one out-does the other, and this time it is Google’s turn to shine.

Nokia pulled back up to number one for Europe & Africa after slipping in the past years from first place (2001 and 2002) to third (2003) and then fourth in 2004.

[...] Swedish retailer Ikea has lurked at the number one or two spot for the last four years; in 2005, it settles into the second spot behind its eastern neighbor Nokia. Ikea opened over 20 new stores in 2005, helpfully showing 410 million shoppers how to fill a space and budget with cheap Scandinavian design.

[via Tom Peters]

You have surely heard about this story:

Last September college student Alex Tew launched a new business to fund his college education. It was called “The Million Dollar Homepage.” His scheme was to sell advertising space on a 1 million pixel homepage to advertisers for $1 per pixel. Believe it or not, The Million Dollar Homepage is sold out.

Very strange, typical “one-shot-action” to my point of view, with quite a lot of buzz. And definitely nothing to do with marketing! If this is really cool for Alex on the long-run… It seems that the “Dark Side” effects are coming.

How anyone could think this is great marketing is beyond me. It represents the worst of clutter culture, where the customer is so overwhelmed by noise that nobody (except Alex Tew) can possibly get something out of it. [...]

So Alex Tew seemed like the only winner, until some extortionists threatened to hack his site if he didn’t pay them. He refused and they shut down his site for 5 days, and now he’s being sued by advertisers whose ads weren’t viewable during that time. Yes, these litigants are just looking for more “PR value.”