Mike Klein wrote this now two year old article on a talk Epic Systems CEO Judy Faulkner gave at an Accelerate Madison meeting. This article provides a rather useful look at Epic’s culture.

Kathleen Gallagher visit’s Madison’s Third Wave Technologies:

Since arriving at Third Wave, he has helped guide the closing of two of the company?s three production facilities and the departure of more than 200 employees, stanch the cash drain and transform its product line to emphasize higher-margin offerings.
?He realized as a numbers person that getting profitable was the key to the success of the company,? said Daniel Kane, an analyst at the State of Wisconsin Investment Board. The pension plan manager is the biggest shareholder of Third Wave, holding 13% of its stock as of Sept. 30. ?What they?ve been able to do in terms of developing more products and becoming more customer-focused, that?s something John has understood all along.?
At least initially, Puisis didn?t ask for the job. In October 2001, Third Wave chairman and founder Lance Fors hired Puisis, then an executive recruiter at Egon Zehnder International, to conduct a search for a new chief financial officer – a position the company had not filled even as it went through its IPO.

Aaron Nathans:

“Lands’ End was one of the most brilliant brands of the 20th century, and under Sears, one of the most irrelevant brands of the 21st century,” said Burt Flickinger III, managing partner at the Strategic Resource Group, a retail consultant in New York. “Lands’ End in the Sears stores is poorly positioned in between men’s suits, snow blowers, tools, denim and work clothes.”
As for bringing Lands’ End products into the Kmart stores, Mr. Flickinger said: “J. Crew, Eddie Bauer and Abercrombie & Fitch would never stand to have their brand image eroded by going down-market to Kmart. Kmart is associated more with a rough-and-tumble blue-collar consumer.”

It seems obvious that Lands End will be spun off or sold at some point.

Gallup found that more and more consumers under the age of 65 are using the internet for shopping. The average online transaction grew 10% to $140.00.

Sun Microsystems Executive Jonathan Schwartz writes a blog (which is a rather big deal). His most recent post summarizes the sales challenges when competitors are writing Sun’s obituary. Schwartz’s story is quite useful and interesting:

The customer started by telling us what our competitors had been saying about Sun, our platforms, and our future over the past two years. HP told him Sun was going out of business. IBM told him the future was all about linux, and that Sun was all about lock-in. Both competitors expressed a sympathetic concern that we weren’t “going to make it.” How charitable. The CIO wanted to know why they were wrong. This was going to be one of those “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” sessions. And we got right into it.
He told me consolidation was his number one priority. That’s why they were standardizing on HP. I asked “Which systems?” He responded “their enterprise systems.” I asked, “Itanium?” Wondering why they’d introduce a fork (new apps, new OS, new skills, and the expense of porting) if they were trying to consolidate platforms. He said they weren’t interested in Itanium. “No way, we’re going with PA-RISC.” I asked, “But isn’t that an end of life’d platform?” Silence. “Well, yes, I guess it would be.” How times change. Maybe HP had a specialty service for dead platform consolidation.

I’m rather certain that many Lands End folks would be happy (and relieved) if the Sears/K-Mart folks spun them off….. Doris Hajewski reviews analysts views on this matter.

John Moore summarizes Dunkin Donuts’ strategy to take on starbucks: sell latte’s faster (time from order to delivery) and cheaper than Starbucks.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy is noted for his viewpoints on a variety of topics. One of my favorites is this: “The quality of a Company’s software has an inverse relationship to the amount of money spent on marketing.”
I often use this quote when speaking about our products and services as we try to be a function over form type of company. There are others like this, including Sybase. Sybase is not a household name vis a vis it’s database competitors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft. However, it’s software runs some of the largest financial institutions along with our products.
Interestingly, Microsoft’s very popular SQL server was originally based on Sybase’s database (MS did a licensing deal with Sybase in the 1990’s. I wonder if Sybase would do that again today?)
Sybase is taking a bit more of an aggressive posture with small business opportunities. They now have a free linux version available. There are some limitations on this product (memory and database size), but for many projects, it’s potentially great place to start.
Free doesn’t pay the bills, so they do need to have a realistic glide path from “free” for a low end implementation to a pricing model that small businesses can actually afford. These are interesting times for many tech firms.

Norm Brodsky offers up some useful tips on employee retention in his article: “Pennies from Heaven”.