TiE - Boston

Last night, instead of doing my plethora of homework, I went to TiE - Boston's Software Services Business Forum which was being held in the E51 building at MIT. TiE appeared on my radar a couple of months ago (they have a Raleigh chapter) so I thought this would be a good opportunity to see what they are about. Last night's session was a gathering of the Software SIG and Open Source was the topic. Larry Bohen, a VC that funds open source companies, was the moderator and the panel included Doug Levin, the CEO of Blackduck Software, Justin Steinman, North America Solutions Manager at Novell, and Bob Gett, President & CEO of Optaros.

I made a couple of good contacts. I met the CEO of a small firm that is in the business of turning companies around. It was quite interesting to hear him talk about companies as "systems". I asked him what are the biggest problems he sees in companies and he responded unsurprisingly with: people issues. Lack of visibility with what people are working on, people working inefficiently, people working on too many things, etc. He also said not having a comprehensive intellectual property strategy was a common big problem.

It was interesting to hear from the panel about how they try to sell Open Source software. Justin, from Novell, made an good analogy. He said selling Open Source is kind of like selling water. Sure water is ubiquitous and "free", but you are willing to pay every month to have it delivered to your house, have it purified, etc. I'm not sure that is a high growth, high margin model, but it will be interesting to see if Novell can sustain it. Larry, the VC said that they rarely see startups using .NET as their development language. I thought that was pretty interesting. I know some that do, in fact I'm a technical advisor for one, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if startups use Java or C++ significantly more than C# or VB.NET. There were several references to Tim O'Reilly and considering I was at the center of the Open Source world a few weekends ago, it shouldn't be surprising that I didn't hear anything new. The crowd was largely professionals with only a couple of students present.

The event cost $15 for student non-members, which included dinner. Membership to TiE is $100 annually and the TiE rep said you would easily make that up in a couple of meetings. I'm not sure about his Math. It cost student members $10 for the same event it cost me $15 to attend. If all events have a similar fee structure, I'd have to attend 20 events to break even and I don't know if they even have that many per year. I'm sure there are other benefits of being a member, but I think I'd rather pick and choose the events I want to go to and stick with being a non-member.