From the Desk of the CEO at Bamboo Solutions: An Optimistic View for 2009 and Beyond!

Optimism? It would be a bit indulgent for me to write a year-end blog in 2008 without at least acknowledging that the economy is in a mess and we are living in uncertain, if not really uncomfortable times. I know that in part because I receive about fifteen emails each week from various service providers who each promise to educate me about how to “survive difficult times.” Trillions of dollars of deficits, billion dollar losses, foreclosures and bailouts dominate the news, along with inevitable comparisons to the Great Depression. The news feels like the History Channel, filled with stories about asteroids hitting the earth, Mega-Disasters, Nostradamus and projections of various types of doom.

I’m not buying it. Actually, I am just incredibly optimistic about the future – for SharePoint, for IT in general, for your company and for Bamboo Solutions in 2009 and beyond. So I’d like to take this opportunity at the end of 2008 to reflect a bit, give you some contrarian views based upon what we here at Bamboo see happening within our customer base, and then share a bit with you about how we plan to continue trying to help in 2009 and beyond.

So why am I optimistic?

First, IT analysts that we track say that growth in IT spending will be down in early 2009, and pick up at end of year. But wait! Read that sentence again. Growth will be down a bit, and then pick up. Unlike the days of the dot-com crash, perceived excesses in technology spending have long been wrung out of much of the IT budget. Information Technology projects are now more often viewed as real enablers of doing more with less. So while IT is certainly not recession-proof, much of IT spending is much less discretionary than it was 10 years ago.

Second, underserved demand for business collaboration remains huge. In the past decade, the notion of using Web-based information sharing and collaborative applications both within and across companies has been a key vision for a lot of companies. Portals, shared content, collaborative and composited business applications remain part of that vision. But many companies, especially mid-size companies, have still been hesitant to broadly deploy until a clear technology emerged as the de facto standard. With respect to our friends at Oracle and IBM, I believe Microsoft’s SharePoint has, or is certainly becoming that platform, with tens of millions of licenses shipped, and with MOSS 2007 emerging as the fastest growing product in Microsoft’s entire history. If you are a company with a mixed investment into IBM, Oracle and Microsoft technology, you may argue relative technical pros and cons. But the plain fact is that the marketplace is voting for SharePoint with its wallet. That means the economics of scale will only drive further innovation and more adoption, which in turn means lower overall cost, which will again increase adoption. So the way I see it, pent-up demand is only just now starting to be fulfilled as the risks of implementing continue to go down.

Third, based on what I hear from our customers, I’m convinced that SharePoint is just starting to deliver on its potential. Bamboo Solutions may be small and scrappy as compared with behemoths like Microsoft, but between our storefront and Bamboo NationTM we now touch tens of thousands of individuals every month. Over 4500 companies and 110 partners across 38 countries around the world use our products. From this perspective, I think we can claim at least a pretty good read on what is happening. And what I hear is this: The vast majority of our customers are in the early stages of deployment; three quarters say that the SharePoint will be deployed enterprise-wide; and, the overwhelming majority plan to do even more with SharePoint in 2009.

As for the recession, I read the newspapers too. There’s plenty of downsizing and budget cuts in almost all parts of the economy, and even in the high-flying tech sector, companies like Google, Yahoo, Cisco, HP and scores of others have shed staff. But remember that recessions are only defined in retrospect. So when the doom and gloom news seems the worst, that’s precisely when things are probably rebounding. What we hear from our customers is that within companies today, and relative to other IT spending, solutions built around SharePoint seem are getting relative high priority. As a result, technical design and development talent around SharePoint remains very scarce. Individuals who possess technical knowledge of SharePoint along with with knowledge of business requirements are in very high demand.

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