2007 Tech Innovators: Unlocking The Secrets Of Innovation

NO MAGIC FORMULA
Interviews with this year's Tech Innovator Award winners show there's no magic formula to developing innovative products. Extricom's Confalonieri said innovation is "imagination followed by dogged persistence"--a variation on Thomas Edison's comment that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

What are the elements of a winning strategy? Listening to what channel partners and customers are saying, anticipating leading customers' future needs rather than just meeting their current demands, leveraging a company's technology and intellectual property in new ways, and getting employees from different operations across a company to work together are the foundations.

To develop its Oracle SOA Suite, this year's winner in the enterprise business software category, Oracle conducted research with a panel of 100 "early adopter" customers to understand how they are using service-oriented architecture technology and what they wanted in the Oracle product, said Kevin Clugage, product director of Oracle Fusion Middleware. "Our challenge is getting our arms around all the technology elements our customers need to be successful with SOA," he said.

Said HP's Potter: "I know it sounds trite, but we really start with the customer and their pain points." Potter said that as the pace of innovation accelerates, coordination between HP teams developing various components of a product becomes critical--otherwise customers will end up with a collection of technologies from the company's hardware, software and data storage groups rather than an integrated product.

"We're always mindful about maintaining compatibility and the connection with the installed base," said FalconStor Software CEO ReiJane Huai. "You have to think [a new product] through and how to plug it into a real-world IT environment. You can't be too far ahead of the curve." FalconStor's Continuous Data Protection Virtual Appliance for VMware was voted this year's winner in the storage category.

THE CHANNEL'S 'VITAL ROLE'
Partners have a big stake in the products their vendors develop, so it's not surprising they frequently have a role in the process.

"We find some of our channel partners to be particularly savvy when it comes to managing products over time," said Oracle's Clugage. While Oracle understands the technology that underpins its products, he said, solution providers often have a better sense of how customers will use a product and manage its total cost of ownership--all of which can influence design. For that reason, channel partners sit on a number of Oracle's customer advisory boards.

HP shared its ideas and designs with channel partners when developing the BladeSystem c3000. Among the feedback: The system's remote management capabilities needed to be not just good enough but best-in-class, Potter said. Partners "are kind of the front lines. They know firsthand what customers need."

One HP partner on the front lines is Altos Technology Group, Sacramento, Calif., which offers IT infrastructure consulting services and resells HP servers, including the BladeSystem c3000. "HP relies heavily on us for customer input," said Altos President Brady Flaherty, noting HP "does a really good job sending engineers into the field" to meet with partners and customers for feedback on prototypes.

Huai, meanwhile, said the idea for the FalconStor Continuous Data Protection Virtual Appliance for VMware came out of a conversation between solution provider IPM and Wendy Petty, FalconStor's executive vice president of sales.

IPM, a New York-based technology consulting and systems integration company, is also a VMware partner and does a lot of work with virtual storage. "We said, 'Can you do this in a virtual environment?' " IPM President Myron Bari said, recalling conversations between his technical team and Petty. "We thought that would be innovative and provide a lot of the functionality you can get from a physical device." Noting the rapid growth in demand among SMBs for data protection systems, Bari said: "A significant portion of that market can be handled by a virtual device rather than a physical device. Clients are always looking to maximize their return [on IT] and make life simpler. Especially in our field, companies like FalconStor need to innovate all the time--or someone else will."

WHERE IDEAS COME FROM
Ideas for innovative products can pop up anywhere, as Jason Owen, product manager at networking technology developer Hawking Technologies, can attest. During a company Christmas party in 2004, an employee off-handedly remarked that he wished he could have in his home the same kind of networked automation system Hawking develops for office environments. That led to lots of scribbling on paper napkins--the first draft of plans for the Home- Remote home automation system that was this year's Tech Innovator Award winner in the connectivity category.

"It's pretty bold. We've never made a move like this before," Owen said of its entry into home automation. Hawking took the approach that it's an IP networking company--rather than an office automation company--and that its wired and wireless technology and expertise could be applied to new markets.

But for all the work by manufacturers to innovate, they recognize that many of their inventions are just the foundation that custom-system builders, ISVs, solution providers and other partners build upon. Said AMD's Bixler: "After we develop our product, that's where we see the real innovations begin."

Next: AMD On Opteron: We Listened And Learned