56 Quarters

So I am back home from a week out at the Mothership for our 2009 sales and company kickoff. I was tweeting like a banshee on all the goings on. Tons of good and quality presentations not only from the exec team but from some incredible customers as well.

The theme this year was 'ignite'...as in we want to light the wick that is going to absolutely blow some stuff up in the community! And by that I mean goodness through some straight forward and obvious value-based programs designed for our customers to benefit and the sales force to be proud of. Combined with that a new and madly aggressive stance on our competition (YEE HAW!) and this is shaping up to be a fun year. Truthfully, we've been 'nice'. Too nice. It's time to jump into the fox hole with the incumbent and duke it out rather than sit idly. This is my very nature and I'm psyched to see us get aggressive.

David I and I presented on the community...a roughly 3.5mm-strong truly global end user community and what is shaping up for them. Stay tuned for a new community based announcement in early February. Think about the union of the CodeGear and DatabaseGear end-user communities, all the technologies they work with (Delphi, Java, C++, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, DB2, Web development, etc etc etc etc) and the sophisticated integration of their knowledge and experience to benefit each other (+ a wee bit of Web 2.0 thrown in to make it all gel) and you'll get the point. We're excited to make this happen for the community of end-users...and ANYONE who wants to learn more and share ideas about software development....code AND data mind you....and the management of these systems once rolled out. Watch this space in early February.

Wayne's pitch was excellent. It set the tempo for the year. We're embarking on some new ways to present our company vis-a-vis our product line to our customers in such a simplified way, it should have been done ages ago. This is a major breakthrough for us and will be announced shortly as well in parallel (by design) with the community announcements. Think of a product that basically gives you complete access to the company (products, R & D, community) and you will get a sense of where we're going for you. What was also great to review was where we came from to where we are. 56 quarters. 56 quarters STRAIGHT of profitability. We have been making money, even in some of the worse periods in recent memory (including now) since 1995. Every quarter. 2008 was no different. We had a MASSIVE 12 months in terms of events....like being within the first year of our privatization by Thoma Bravo in 2007...oh, and acquiring and integrating CodeGear....its people, products, community and systems. Just a wee little challenge, right? All this was done with nary a sales blip. These incredible sales teams continued to make it happen and stayed focused these past ~12 months allowing the internal folks to weld together the companies while they started their cross selling and product integration campaigns with customers. We are lean and know what the priorities are to continue to make money and Wayne called it right out: be good at what we are good at and pour what we need to into the quality of those things which we are good at. That's it. Selling tools to software professionals to make them excellent at their jobs is what we are good at and buttressing those household brands we collectively have (ER/Studio, Delphi, DBArtisan, Interbase, etc, etc) are what we need to fundamentally focus on full-stop.

So, that's just a re-cap of the week. WAY more to come and stay tuned for some announcements!