Introducing Digital Fortress

Today, my Partners and I at Meritage Funds announced that we’ve established a new platform in the data center colocation market. Headquartered in Seattle, WA, Digital Fortress operates nearly 50,000 square feet of data center colocation space, focused on delivering high-power density installations to enterprise customers. A  Meritage Funds blog post announcing the investment has much more on our thesis and goals for the investment.

Introducing Digital Fortress

Finding the Proverbial Pony

Tech people use the phrase “there is a pony in here somewhere” to describe a tough situation where there is a hidden big opportunity. I hear it most often in the context of a stagnating business that can’t seem to break-out and needs a new catalyst for growth. For example, in businesses that need to make a pivot (btw, the most overused word of 2010/2011 in my mind).

I like the idea behind finding the pony, although not the specific phrase for reasons made clear below. Which leaves a very important question: How do you find the pony? I recommend the following process:

Finding the Proverbial Pony

Cognitive Dissonance: Are you a technology or a service?

One of the trends I’ve observed over the past several years is that more and more technology entrepreneurs are starting service-delivery business.  By services businesses, I’m referring to the category of businesses that some venture investors refer to as technology-enabled services (“TES”). We at Meritage prefer the term network-enabled services (“NES”), which we think more accurately demonstrates the fundamental innovation in the business model, which is that there is a high-level of connectivity between the service delivery platform and the customer. Services is a big tent, so to ground it, put your mind on business models like SaaS, cloud computing, and even search.

Cognitive Dissonance: Are you a technology or a service?

The future is in services

Last week, I attended GigaOm’s Structure ’09 Conference: Put Cloud Computing to Work. It was worthwhile to attend and I intend to return next year. It was exciting to see how the services business model is being rapidly adopted by the technology-delivery value-chain.

In a talk titled The Cloud in Context, Russ Daniels, VP and CTO of Cloud Services Strategy at HP put it most succinctly, describing HP’s vision as:
“Everything is a Service”.
Full video of Daniels’ talk here. While the “everything is a service” mantra is almost certainly overreaching, it drives home an undeniable point; the action is in services. To make it fully, I think you have to start with the view from the customer’s perspective.

The future is in services