In The Press: BlueSky Award Winner
From CRN:
Sitemasher wins inaugural Blue Sky Award
Posted Thursday , June 5, 2008
by Robert Dutt
Vancouver-based Sitemasher has won the first-ever Blue Sky Award for ISV innovation from Microsoft Canada. The award, which was kicked off in March, was presented Thursday at Microsoft Canada’s ISV Leadership Summit at its Mississauga, ON headquarters.
To win the award, Sitemasher was selected from a first class of more than 40 solutions produced by ISVs around the country. The solution is a Web-based Web development product, designed to make it easier for developers to offer customers the ability to update sites themselves and to reduce the amount of time developers have to spend in the minutiae of coding a site.
“This isn’t a complicated pain we’re trying to solve – you ask anybody what it’s like to build, manage and update their Web site, and they start speaking Klingon,” said Ron Moravek, president of Sitemasher.
Moravek describes the traditional model of building a Web site as building a beaded network – it works easily enough until you realize you need to change one of the first few beads you put on the string.
“Sitemasher is designed to let you touch any piece of the site at any time without the need to program – it removes the string,” Moravek said. “You remove the rudimentary programming and allow people to leverage the power of the Internet.”
Differing routes
The other two finalist solutions, PlanIt from Oakville, ON-based Sales Resource Group and Toronto, ON-based Oculus Info come at the awards from dramatically different paths than both Sitemasher and each other.
PlanIt is a sales compensation automation system, a software offshoot of an organization that was formed in 2001 to consult on sales compensation management best practices. David Johnston, president of Sales Resource Group, started the company after selling his Pivotal integration business to the CRM company. PlanIt aims to automate and accelerate the process of getting salespeople paid, as well as improving the accuracy of those payments.
“It’s very disruptive in how [customers] design and process sales compensation, which is a very large line item for most companies,” Johnston said.
And probably larger than it needs to be – in one head-to-head comparison of the same sales data over a quarter between an Excel-based tracking system and PlanIt, Johnston said the company found his customer overpaid by $40,000, and had no idea they had done so using the Excel sheet.
Oculus is a customized 3D and 2D visualization offering, recently redesigned to take advantage of Windows Vista and the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Mike Peters, partner at Oculus Info, said the solution is particularly popular in the financial, government, pharmaceutical and healthcare spaces, and with “any entity that has too much data and wants to understand rather than distilling it into rows and columns of numbers.”
The company’s background is as a services organization, and it is currently working on productizing the new version of Oculus. Peters praised the role of WPF in expanding the capabilities of Oculus.
“It allows us to do all the things we dreamed of with Java and with .Net,” he said. “Instead of just barebones graphics libraries, we have a toolkit to give you a quick way of making your own charts and bringing in components from elsewhere.”
Other benefits are the creation of complex charts with minimal coding, and high compression of data.
Building awareness
Mark Relph, vice president of developer and platform evangelism at Microsoft Canada, said he was thrilled with the first class of Blue Sky Award candidates, calling the group of 40-plus submissions robust.
“The whole point of the award was one part recognition for innovation and disruptiveness, and one part to stimulate the software economy in Canada,” Relph said. “I’m quite pleased that we had the number of submissions we did in the end. That’s a really good sign.”
Along with getting recognition, all three of the finalists said that being involved with Blue Sky was opening doors for them – both within Microsoft and in the market. For SRG’s Johnston, the results were immediate.
“We had a client that we had sent off a proposal to,” he said. “When we let them know we were a finalist for this award, they immediately said they wanted us to come in and do a demo.”
For Sitemasher’s Moravek, winning an award is nice – but the real power behind Blue Sky is the effect of the endorsement from Microsoft. “They are saying that we’re doing something cool, and they will help us be more successful,” he said.
The three finalists all had different goals from their increased interaction with Microsoft, but all three saw value as smaller organizations getting a chance to work more closely with the software giant.
“It seems a great way of getting access to more Microsoft resources for ISVs,” said Oculus’ Peters. “We’re getting our name out there, and letting people know what are capabilities are, as well as getting help form Microsoft proper.”
Plans for the future
Relph signaled that the Blue Sky Awards would be brought back for a second year, with the goal to be “louder” about the award next year, especially because part of the goal of the award is to build awareness for the ISV community.
He also said that in year two, the software giant would be looking to “help drive into areas where Canada wants to grow from a software economy perspective,” and use the award to stimulate activity around hot topics like mobile computing and SAAS, S+S or cloud computing.
“As the inaugural event, we’re really pleased with how it went,” Relph said. “We’ve proven the experiment. Now we need to do more fostering of innovation, and if we could kickstart that process in Canada, that would be the ultimate success.”
