Lyndon Rive – Green energy CEO (SolarCity) and Underwater Hockey player
Even though Lyndon Rive is the architect and builder of a successful IT company and now serves as CEO of a growing solar power operation, the most interesting thing about this 30-year-old South African may be that he plays mid-mid position on the (and I’m not making this up) U.S. Men’s Underwater Hockey Team. The sport works pretty much like ice hockey except, of course, the playing field is the bottom of a swimming pool. Two teams of six players each hold their breaths for as long as they can and smack the puck around the pool using a foot-long stick. Rive’s been playing since 1992.Hockey aside, his head seems to be placed well above the water. Rive, along with brothers Peter and Russ head SolarCity, the leading provider of solar energy systems to homes and businesses. They want to bring solar power to the mass market by making it affordable. SolarCity’s method of accomplishing this is by group buying. The company’s sales force blankets a targeted neighborhood and when it gets 50 or so commitments, buys the solar panels and sends out installation teams to erect them. Customers save 20-30% from the group discount.Rive thinks America is ready for solar power. “People want to go green,” he said, “but they won’t do it if it costs them an arm and a leg. Even the extreme environmentalists can’t justify it.” He feels mom and pop solar operations don’t offer the stability that SolarCity provides, backed by capital provided by his cousin, Internet giant Elon Musk (who serves as chairman at SolarCity) and JP Morgan Bank. They recently received $21M in new funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson. SolarCity employs around 150 full-time employees and installs 60 to 70 systems a month. It concentrates on California but has plans to expand to Colorado.
Rive @ the Going Green 2007 conference.In 1998 Lyndon and Russell Rive created Everdream, which serves small businesses that have fewer than 20 employees by providing computer hardware, round-the-clock technology support services, desktop management services, Internet access and free online training for a single monthly subscription charge of about $150. Offerings include application management, software distribution, hardware integration and help desk services. The brothers started selling their services going door-to-door on skateboards and, after securing some seed money, grew the business within eight months into a 100-employee operation occupying a 40,000-square-foot space. The Rives have since replaced themselves at Everdream with another management team so they could start SolarCity, but Lyndon still serves Everdream as vice president.Rive’s past business ventures include an alternative health production and distribution company, which he grew to over 1000 sales representatives with multiple product lines within four years.At this month’s Solar Power Conference in Long Beach, Calif., Rive said that payback is not the way to look at the decision to use solar energy. “Return on investment is the way to think about it. A savings account gives you 2% return. Solar system return on investment with a utility like Los Angeles Department of Water and Power that has lower rates is 5%-6%. Solar system return on investment with a utility like Southern California Edison that has higher rates is 10%-12%. And studies show a solar system increases the value of the house more than the cost…..It is the best home improvement you can do for property value.” On why he is now in the “green” market Rive, in an interview with ABC News, said,”Looking at the world’s biggest problems, software is not going to address it. It’s one of the few industries where you have the opportunity to make some money and do good.” Here’s another writeup on SolarCity in Fast Company.Rive does have other interests besides business and underwater hockey. He lists his hobbies as kitesurfing, wakeboarding, snowboarding and mountain biking.
Blogs on SAP’s Business ByDesign
My plan was to report in depth on SAP’s Business ByDesign product, however I decided to rather point you to a number of well crafted blogs summarizing the launch.
- My friend Tom Otter provides an insider’s view.
- Bob Warfield writes a great blogs on all things SaaS, and Web 2.0. His BbD summary is very good.
- Jeff Nolan over at Venture Chronicles is always insightful. Another good summary.
- Joshua Greenbaum is another good read.
and for fun check out these:
SAP’s official magazine SAP INFO is also interesting reading. SDN may have some interesting information soon. Not too much at the moment. I still have many open questions:
- How (if at all) will SAP partner regarding BBD? ADP is listed as the only partner.
- Will SAP release an SDK for BBD?
- Will BBD be the end of SAP’s All-in-one and Business One?
Update – Sept 26, 2007: Interesting read on Infoworld.Update – Nov 7, 2007: Kagermann says SAP BBD is not for enterprise customers.Do you have answers?
SAP’s A1S launced today and is called: SAP Business ByDesign
SAP officially launched A1S today and it’s called: SAP Business ByDesign. It will cost $149 per user per month. A quick initial review of SAP BBD looks a lot like current self service scenarios and webdynpro transactions. I will do a more detailed review soon.
Mark Shuttleworth – Ubuntu founder and first African in Space
Mark Shuttleworth is a young, South African multi-millionaire who places himself in the category of people who are both privileged and lucky and want to do something positive with their good fortune. His Ubuntu Project, HBD enterprise, and the Shuttleworth Foundation all serve as reflections of that thought.Born in Welkom, South Africa in 1973, Shuttleworth grew up in Cape Town and graduated from the University of Cape Town with a business science degree in finance and information systems. While still in college he founded Thawte, a company that specializes in Internet security and digital certificates. Thawte became the first company outside of the United States to offer an encrypted server, making commerce over the Internet more secure. In 1999, he sold it to VeriSign for stock valued at $575 million.
Using the profits from that sale Shuttleworth founded HBD Venture Capital, a group that invests in South African companies that hold the potential of serving a global marketplace. HBD refers to “Here Be Dragons,” a term used on ancient maps to mark uncharted territory. HBD invests in an interesting array of business ventures, from Themepack, a company that uses pencil cases to deliver messages to schoolchildren, to incuBeta, a Web2.0 company supplying paid search engine advertising and optimization. HBD recently invested ZAR25mm ($3.5mm) in incuBeta.Other investments include EDH, Metricap, Mybeat, and CSense Systems. HBD also offers managed investments: Impi Linux, Ubuntu’s provider in Africa; HIP2BSquare, which presents math and science to students as cool subjects and well-worth their time; and Fundamo, a leading company internationally of providing ways for organizations to do banking and other transactions from their mobile devices.
In 2004 Shuttleworth founded the Ubuntu project, a free, open source, Linux-based operating system that’s growing in popularity among businesses and individuals. “Ubuntu” is an African concept and was once described by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as defining an open person who is available and affirming to others, and who knows that they are part of a greater whole. The Ubuntu platform contains around 1,000 pieces of software that include spreadsheet, word processing, Web browsing, instant messaging and presentation programs. Several Dell computers now come preloaded with Ubuntu. Google also uses Ubuntu on the computers in their offices. Shuttleworth’s Canonical Ltd., headquartered in Europe, is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu.Another example of Shuttleworth’s philosophy of sharing his wealth to benefit others is his Shuttleworth Foundation. This organization funds projects aimed at improving the quality and reach of education in Africa, and has done work in all nine provinces of South Africa. It also serves to fund ideas that can create positive change in civil society. The ideas selected must originate in South Africa or come from another part of the globe but be beneficial to South Africa. It is estimated that Shuttleworth has given away nearly half of his fortune to charitable causes.In April of 2002 Shuttleworth fulfilled his dream of space travel by flying with the Russian crew Soyuz TM-34 to the International Space Station. He spent a year of his life and $20 million of his bank account training for and paying for the privilege of becoming the second-ever private citizen (and the first African) to be launched into space. His trip wasn’t just for fun, however; he conducted several experiments during the flight, including research on AIDS, stem cells, and muscle development and atrophy. He trained in Star City, Russia, for the eight-day mission. Since he has been back on earth he has shared his experiences and at the same time promoting science and math to more than 100,000 students. This, in turn, led to Hip2BSquare.His blog, lists many of his likes and dislikes. They include Cesaria Evora, Sinatra, flashes of insight, skinny-dipping and the string theory (likes) plus legalese, wet grey winters and public speaking (dislikes). Shuttleworth is single and lives in London. He spends his spare time reading and lists travel, naturally, as a favorite hobby. He gets to travel the globe in his own jet, a Bombardier Global Express.
Parkinson’s laws – THE management guide
Published in the mid-1950’s — Parkinson’s laws are still very relevant today.PARKINSON’S LAW: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
- “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals”
- “Officials make work for each other.”
PARKINSON’S SECOND LAW: Expenditure rises to meet income.PARKINSON’S THIRD LAW: Expansion means complexity, and complexity decay.THE LAW OF DELAY: Delay is the deadliest form of denial.THE LAW OF TRIVIALITY: The time spent on any item of a committee’s agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.INJELITANCE: A vital Parkinson contribution was his diagnosis of why certain organizations suddenly deteriorate: the rise to authority of individuals with unusually high combinations of incompetence and jealousy (“injelitance”).
SAP, Oracle and Workday HCM product strategy updates
Bill Kutik’s recent HRMS Happenings article is a very good overview of what’s coming from the prominent HCM vendors. The following highlights caught my attention:
- Oracle will continue to develop Peoplesoft, Oracle HCM and Fusion HCM as separate product lines.
- Workday is busy developing a payroll engine.
- All the vendors have interesting Web 2.0 plans.
- SAP is partnering with companies like Aspire HR for functionality.
- HR Tech 2007 in October is going to be an interesting event.
What are your thoughts regarding the new functionality coming from these vendors?
Elon Musk of SpaceX
I’m finally getting round to blogging about successful South African businesspeople.At 36 and with a net worth of over $300 million, Elon Musk is one of America’s richest people under the age of 40. After two extremely successful ventures in the dot-com world, he is now focusing on space exploration and earth-friendly technology. Musk was born in South Africa in 1971. His father is a South African engineer; his mother, a Canadian nutritionist. At age 17 Elon left home. He enrolled at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, but his goal was the United States. “It is where great things are possible. I am nauseatingly pro-American,” he is quoted as saying.He got his chance through a scholarship to The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two undergraduate degrees, first in economics, then in physics. He was accepted at Stanford, but quickly left to start Zip2, the company that created the technology to put newspaper-style ads and city directories on the Internet. After selling Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million, Musk, in 1999, helped launch and build PayPal (formed as a merger between PayPal and Musk’s X.com venture). The monster online payment system was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.Now Musk has put his money and efforts into two enterprises: building low-cost rockets to advance space exploration, and producing electric cars that are both environmentally clean and fast. His Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, builds the Falcon, a reusable, two-stage rocket, and the Dragon, a spaceship for carrying cargo and later, humans, to the International Space Station. Musk serves as chief engineer at SpaceX and designed much of the Falcon himself. The rockets are simpler and cost a fraction of the price of most other rockets. The Malaysian government and an arm of the Pentagon are in line to use the Falcon for launching their satellites into orbit. In addition, NASA signed a $278 million contract with SpaceX for services. A recent Wired article provides a great overview of entrepreneurs like Musk and Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) entering commercial space exploration. Musk is also the primary investor in Tesla Motors, enabling the company to develop its Tesla Roadster. The automobile has no tail pipe or gas tank, and runs on 7,000 lithium ion batteries the size of a tube of lipstick. The car can go from 0-60 mph in less than four seconds and has a price tag of $100,000.Musk is also on the board of Everdream, and Solacity and well as being a trustee of the X Prize Foundation. He is willing to invest up to $4mm in next generation battery, especially ultra capacitors, ventures. Search for his name in the CNN Money article.Considering that Musk once told a friend he wished he could find a way not to eat so he could work all the time, hobbies don’t seem to be a priority in life, but he is married, to author Justine Musk. The couple lives in Bel Air, Calif., with their five boys: a set of twins and a set of triplets. He also has a $1.2 million McLaren F1 car to drive to work in and a L-39 Russian jet that he pilots.Musk was a voracious reader as a child and by his teens was studying philosophers such as Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, but came to the conclusion that they didn’t have much to say and considers much of what they believed as “rubbish.” He does, however, view Douglas Adams, the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, as one of the great philosophers of all time.Nov 16, 2007 update: Interesting story in ValleyWag regarding the PayPal mafia article in Fortune.
SAP’s on demand/SaaS ERP solution, codenamed A1S
My aim with this post is to summarize the information currently available on A1S. A1S has been in the works for at least 3 years and is SAP’s on demand or SaaS (Software as a service) ERP solution. According to ZDNet A1S is targeted to launch in 2008 and is part of SAP’s strategy to grow its customer base from 39,000 to 100,000 customers by 2010. SAP is planning to unveil A1S at an event in New York on Sept 19. A1S is designed for the mid-market and initially it will be hosted by SAP as an on demand solution. Later it will be available as an appliance that can be plugged in behind the firewall.Henning Kagermann’s (CEO of SAP AG) recent presentations provide more A1S hints. Here is SAP’s 2007 Q2 analyst presentation and also the May 2007 Sanford Bernstein presentation. On page 26 Kagermann summarizes the salient features of A1S:
- A New Product: Broad cross-industry coverage, enterprise SOA by design, model-based design, configuration via business questions, and self-service & embedded training.
- A New Business Model: Try-Run-Adapt, on demand, embedded services & remote management, order of magnitude lower TCO, and quality/robustness is key.
In this blog post searchSAP talks about SAP’s mid-market push including A1S. Here Venderprisey summarizes some SaaS blog postings including an interesting reference to A1S. The Register and others suggest that SAP picked the Sept date to overlap with the Salesforce Dreamforce conference.Hasso Plattner’s “new idea” presentation is basically the technical underpinnings of A1S. You can see the keynote here, however you’ll have to register first. SAP calls A1S, Enterprise SOA by Design vs SAP ERP it calls Enterprise SOA by Evolution. Here is a list of the new idea aspects of Plattner’s “New Idea”: in-memory databases, real-time analytics, harmonized UI, cloud computing, on-demand, events & triggers, modular deployment, model-based configuration, no code exposed, new markets, community, standards and finally SOA.Competitors include: Salesforce.com and its AppExchange marketplace for on demand applications, Oracle on demand, Netsuite.com and Successfactors.com. Workday, co-founded by Mr. Peoplesoft himself, Dave Duffield, is also an interesting play. They market Workday as: On-Demand Enterprise Business Services.Also see my post regarding integration between SaaS solutions and SAP.I’m sure we’ll know more after September 19.
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud – EC2
Amazon and Google are launching some amazing services these days. Amazon’s services include: Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Simple Storage Service (S3) and now Flexible Payments Service. These services may be accessed via APIs (web services) and are used by developers to introduce new products and services. Amazon charges a small fee for using their infrastructure and this is a new income stream for them. The solutions catalog lists a number of solutions built on Amazon’s Web services. Interesting solutions include: RightScale.com (instance management), File123.com (file management) and Jungledisk.com (internet backups). The following blog gives a good overview of what EC2 means for entrepreneurs.I think that utility computing is finally here. This is what IBM’s been talking about for a while, on demand computing.Google offers another set of interesting web services. It includes APIs for interacting with Google Apps and Google Gears that enables web applications to work offline. Adobe offers something similar called, AIR (formerly Apollo). Offline web applications will bring the power of Web 2.0 applications to the offline desktop (Did I just say that? Web apps more powerful than desktop apps?)Intuitively I know that this is a huge disruptive change — if only I can figure out how to take advantage of it! Let me know if you’ve figured it out…Update Sept 6, 2007: Check out SynthaSite’s use of Amazon’s Computing Cloud. Nirvanix recently launched as an alternative to Amazon’s S3. Nirvanix provides an SLA — Amazon doesn’t.
The States or Bust article
David Cannington of Traction USA shared the following article with me. It was published in a couple of Australian newspapers including the Melbourne Age. It provides a great deal of information to Australian companies trying to enter the US market. I think most of it would apply to South African companies as well.Any comments?
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