Tealeaf: Visibility. Insight. Answers.

Pat-downs, Packed Planes and Surviving the Online Travel Season

"2010 will be the busiest holiday travel season in years."

"Don’t bother trying to find cheap airfare during Thanksgiving, it doesn’t exist and never will again."

"Get ready for the pat-down of your life at the airport..."

National Opt-Out Day?

These are just a few of the horrifying predictions that we're being bombarded with in anticipation of the dreaded Thanksgiving holiday travel week. After just having traveled from California to the East Coast for the holiday, I can assure you that the worst part of my trip was not the crowds at the airport (nor in the plane). I didn't pay a lot for my ticket and there were none of those new security body scanners in sight. No, the real horror began over a month ago, when I went online to book my ticket.

A Common E-Commerce Platform

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

When I was thinking of starting Tealeaf, the VCs had me play me a game called "The Rock."

I had to demonstrate that there was a vast, untapped market for what Tealeaf would do — and also convince the folks with money that my approach was relevant and defensible… as in "Bring me back a red rock showing a multi-billion market potential for your technology along with a business plan for how we would address it."

So, back in 1999 our dream was to attach Tealeaf to the standard e-commerce platforms and ride the coattails of their success.

BroadVision, Intershop, Blue Martini, OpenMarket, Commerce One, Vignette, ATG were my red rocks.

Yesterday, ATG announced that they are being acquired by Oracle for 1 billion dollars. At least they had a happy ending.

The others had meteoric rises into the stratosphere. However, they all came crashing down like Spacelab.

From what I can tell, the most common e-commerce platform is "Other" — custom solutions built on top of IBM WebSphere, Microsoft Commerce Server or just plain old code. Given the rise of SOA and Web Services, certain components of the stack may be third-party services, but most sites are largely built from the ground up.

Remember, in the childhood fable of the tortoise and the hare, it was the tortoise who won. So too shall Tealeaf as Customer Experience Management goes mainstream.

The New Hardware?

by Robert Wenig, Founder and CTO —

What happens when VMware becomes the hardware platform?

VMware is a software virtualization platform, so why am I talking about hardware?

Allow me to prove my sanity and explain what’s going on.

We’re all familiar with concept of "thin provisioning," otherwise known as "lying" or more commonly the "airline seat model." Basically, an airline will sell 120 tickets for 110 seats. They expect some percentage of people not to show up or misconnect — and they still want to fully utilize the physical resources, i.e. the seats.

In the airline model, if 120 people show up, 10 people get bought off with free tickets and a later flight.

And so now we have thin provisioning in the computer world. Thin Memory (Virtual Memory), Thin Disk (San disk allocation), Thin CPU (Compute Resource Allocation) and Thin Network (Network Resource Allocation).

Last year, Cisco, EMC and VMware banded together to create a reference platform of Thin Cubed (CPU, Storage, Network) called vBlock.

Gone are the days of referring to the HP computer or Dell or IBM. Parts are parts — you’re just using Thin Cubed Resources, just like electricity. You don’t care (unless you’re a California Green nut like me) if your electricity comes from natural gas, coal, solar or wind, you care only that when you flick the switch, the light comes on.

So, what are some of the benefits of such an arrangement: