Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a SaaS service providing email marketing and on-line survey tools for small business.  Constant Contact is in Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500 list.

I have been very interested in the potential of social web and since some of my friends are lawyers, accountants, etc. – I had been thinking about how small business’ bread and butter is networking and how the potential for the social web overlaps with that basic offline workflow.  Hence, I see a huge opportunity for making use of that synergy.  That, obviously, is not an original thought and some companies, like Constant Contact, are already mining that potential.

Check out their 4th Q and Full Year 2008 Results – they are growing and sound like a great place to work.

Interesting Video Series on the End of Wall Street by WSJ

I watched this three part series by the WSJ on “The End of Wall Street” a couple weeks ago and thought it was interesting.

The only part that is missing from the first part is the reason behind the drive for the Broker Dealers to 1) borrow more money, and 2) proliferate exotic products.

For the past decade the traditional Broker Dealers had a business model  that had several spokes that were intricately tied together like one big wheel.  In a very simplified nut shell – Research drove the Trading Desk which drove IB and M&A (the money makers) which drove Research, and so on.  It’s a much longer story of how that actually works – but for now the important point was that the Buy-Side who traditionally got Research and Liquidity availible at all times (predominantly through the Brokers Trading Desks) was now able to source liquidity through other venues such as ATS (Alternate Trading Venues such as Dark Pools, ECNs, other Crossing Networks, etc.)

That part is also a much larger discussion of the multiple factors in ‘Fragmentation of the Markets’, but for now the important point was that the traditional role that the Sell-Side played for the Buy-Side was changing and that meant that the nicely oiled circle of departments in a Sell-Side Broker Dealer whose workings fed each other ultimately to produce the real money making in the M&A (and to some extent in IB) was staring to slip away.

The Broker Dealers have been in a tight spot, seeing the writing on the wall for the end of their traditional business model as it now stood – and were frantically trying to find new revenue opportunities – hence borrowing more money because it was so easy to bet on more avenues to see what pans out and making more exotic instruments to capture the interest of the Buy-Side.

A ‘Dummies’ Definition for CEP

CEP, Distributed Caches, In-Memory Databases – these (as vendor supplied products) are all ‘newish’ technologies that have some rather interesting overlaps.  In addition, there are aspects of these technologies that could definitely be used together for many problems going forward – but those are posts for another day.

The way I like to think about CEP is if you have high volume/low latency inbound data that you would like to apply ‘rules’ to, that then can spin out ‘actions’ based upon matching said rules.  These ‘actions’ can also be inbound flows into other sets of rules, and so on, forming EPNs (Event Processing Networks).

There are certainly aspects of this that start to sound an awful lot like SOA/ESB at a high level.  If SOA/ESB is the flow of information between systems and/or system groups, CEP is more micro – its value is literally at the more granular level.  The emphasis (and the reward) is  ‘ high volume/low latency’.

Whenever someone states words like high usage, high volume, low latency, etc., one should always ask the values to be quantified.  A while ago, I thought 8,000 concurrent users on one of my web products was ‘high usage’, then I was handed a different project whose initial number of concurrent users was 250,000.  It’s all a matter of scale.   ‘High volume’ in regards to CEP technology two years ago meant processing >65,000 events/sec.  Nowadays it can mean processing millions of events/sec.  Average latencies can be in the microseconds, and it is common to have SLAs – guaranteed minimum latencies – in the single digit milliseconds.

To process that level through a single server requires architecting things differently than most general trends over the past decade.  For a large body of problems, extensive threading is the way to go.  Whether you talk about high number of connections per server, pooling, multi-threading processes, etc., the predominant coding model today is lots of threads.  The one area where too many threads hurts is if you loose too much time on context switching between the threads.  For a much smaller class of problems, limiting the number of threads is better for overall throughput rates.  Processing business logic on 65,000 events/sec on a single server is such an example.

CEP vendor solutions start from the basis that you want to minimize and easily tightly control the threading in your system.  Part of the value (and ROI) is not having to code all that infrastructure to easily do so.  The other part of the ROI is the obvious one – easily defining inbound adapters for different data sources, easily defining business logic in rules, and easily defining user defined actions based on rule hits.

So in short, if some part of your system benefits from easily being able to ingest tens of thousands of events per second or more on a single server and be able to quickly and easily define sets of business logic – especially if you may want to change said rules easily – and perform actions based on those rule hits, then take a look at CEP.

In the Beginning…

Ok – this is where I tell a little bit about myself first.  My name is Stephani Smith and to sum things up in two words, I’d have to say: Passion and Curiosity.  If you are on LinkedIn you might be able to see a recommendation that an employee of mine, Jim Lombardi, did that summed it up pretty well.

Passion may not be as important in a blog in and of itself, but curiosity – especially with passion – certainly can be useful.  I am certainly proof that curiosity does not kill the cat (either that or the cats have infinite lives – my five ‘kids’ have declined to comment on that, ).  In addition, when something peaks my interest I deep dive into it – I love learning the detail level why’s and how’s because that is how I understand the higher level vision, usefulness, trends, future, how it connects to other areas, etc.  Once I understand it, then I can succinctly explain the heart of it to others in terms that are relevant to them – that is also what makes me very good at leading cross-functional teams, but I digress…

This is what I think might be useful to you, the reader – I’ll write here about a wide variety of topics.  Small deep dives, as you will.  In this blog I will be sticking to the professional or semi-professional interests.  If you find it interesting, then you’ll read.  At the moment I am searching for my next career move and this has given me a chance to dive into a whole slew of industries/markets/companies to see where they are and where they are going.   I can certainly summarize some things I found to be interesting that may be helpful to others.

In particular I am very excited about getting back into the entrepreneur/early-stage startups scene.  (Not by a long shot is this an original thought… ) But the whole social online web potential and how that overlaps with the current/past offline workflows of small business and other areas that relied on human networking like the music scene, (then analogously video/movie), etc.  As everyone knows, tapping into unrealized potential as well as slowing moving from current practices to new ones, i.e. transitioning to what the social web has to offer, is ripe for exploration. Among those ideas, also thinking about what new market needs develop from the initial pushes – i.e. what tools, SaaS services can help the plethora of new early-stage startups.

I have worked in two startups grown from the 10 person level up – so you could say I am learning about the steps before that.  That is what may be of use to you – as I learn more, I can collect what I found to be interesting in one place.

Some of the ‘professional’ areas that I have been an ‘expert’ in that may also be of interest to people: CEP/EP (complex event processing), distributed caches, in-memory databases, high volume/low latency systems, equity trading pre-trade/post-trade analytics, data mining databases, instant messaging (public and private networks/integrating IM into products), non-linear dynamics, chaos theory, web 2.0 – mining data generated by your clients to build new products…

If any of those are interesting to people, comment here and I’ll pick one to write about.

Thank you for your attention!

Stephani