Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkurt | Hacker News Reader

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This is important to us, and was a factor in our decision to go to IBM (which is a little counter intuitive, given IBM's history). Our entire sales model is predicated on people being able to start easily, and grow if they need to. Price, self service-ness, and the content we produce are all important in this model.

The thing about lone wolf developers, and side projects, and one off things people hack together over the weekend is that they sometimes "flip" and become big customers. That's when we win, and we monitor our funnel like crazy and continuously see that it's working. Interestingly, some of the bad customer experiences you see in this thread are the direct result of this model. We aren't very good at handling one offs, or doing things by hand, or consulting, because we focus so much on repeatable, self service offerings — which have to work for small applications.

IBM is interested in three things from us. The technology is good, the team is great, and the way we sell to customers is something they have told us they firmly believe is the future of selling tools to developers. There's a really, really good chance that you'll see other parts of IBM acting like us (and building things for you) before you see us becoming all enterprisey.

We'll keep the name Compose (because it's fabulous!), we'll keep the cheap Postgres option, and we'll do our best to keep that true for years and years.

For what it's worth, I greatly appreciate your comment.

I'm sorry, but you may think this is the way it goes, but I suspect you'll find it isn't so. My prediction is that you will be booted as CEO within a year, not because you aren't awesome but because you are a big part of Compose and IBM will go directions you won't like.

Hope I'm wrong, but I can't see how this will be anything but disastrous. Your key company abilities were you controlled your own destiny to a degree, and you could react quickly. Now you are part of a larger group within IBM, I doubt this will be possible.

I do wish you the best though, and that my dire prediction is completely wrong. I've just seen what happens when a smaller company is bought by a massive one.

Well I can't be CEO of IBM! Not this year, at least.

I've seen utterly awful acquisitions, and good acquisitions. You're right that there's a lot we can't control, and we could be ground up by the big corp machinations, but I do actually think IBM has a big interest in not screwing us up. We shall see.

If it helps any, from my prior observations in situations like this, you'll know things are going bad when IBM starts "recommending" their personnel for management positions in mid-level and above.

That's "the canary dying in the mine" to watch for IMHO.

A relevant counter-example: the group bringing Compose into IBM is run by the former leadership team at Cloudant (including yours truly). We're incredibly excited to have mrkurt & co. on board; Compose does a great job of filling out the Bluemix services portfolio and gives us a solid platform for launching new offerings going forward.

We had many of those fears when we (Vivisimo now Watson Explorer) were acquired. I'm a consultant on the implementations side. It's been almost 3 years. The C levels did leave but most of the founders and original employees still work for IBM even after the mandatory period. Basically, my job is still the same with a little bit of extra bureaucracy that comes with companies of that size.

Our client base seems to be growing much quicker now after getting fully integrated. It seems like people may be buying our technology almost by accident (packaged deals, etc) and now realizing they have it and want to actually use it. That's something that seems unique to these huge tech firms. Before we had to sell each person.

Will this change the platforms you target?

I'd love to see your services running on Google Cloud Platform, for example, so that they could be used with co-located customer services.

We'll target more. We should have a good GCE option soon.

Good to hear, a managed PostgreSQL service is the one big thing missing on GCE for me.

Check out www.elephantsql.com, we provide managed PostgreSQL on GCE, AWS, Azure and Softlayer

Yeah aware of ElephantSQL but the concern is lack of SLA and lack of big company backing. If you guys disappear, what happens to my databases since they run on your subscription, not mine. Hence why having an IBM backed Postgres on Azure is attractive - even though big companies can be frivolous, there's a comfort in knowing they're less likely to go out of business.

+1, except would awesome to see this on Microsoft Azure. The current SQL database as a service offering on Azure is expensive with mediocre performance. A highly available Postgres as a Service offering backed by a big co like IBM would be most welcome on Azure.

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