2012 Recap

Published on : Jan 1, 2013

Category : BizTalk360 Update

Saravana

Author

I know this is going to be boring task, but I guess everyone should take this opportunity to look back and see what you have achieved. It is important to celebrate your personal and professional achievements from the past 12 months. This will build a sense of confidence, energy and momentum. My life revolves around 2 important things at the moment. My family and their welfare and BizTalk360 and its welfare. Whatever I do during my day will involve either one of them.

BizTalk360 Releases:

If we look back, its an incredible year for us at BizTalk360. We released 3 major versions during 2012, bringing in features asked by our customers. We are still working on the same principle, NO ROADMAP. BizTalk360 features are driven by customers and community members based on real world issues. Feb 2012: Version 3.2 Released
  • Tracking Data
  • Graphical Message Flow Viewer
  • Throttling Analyser
  • SMS/Text alert capability
  • Tracking Manager
June 2012: Version 4.0 Released
  • Service Window Support
  • Custom SQL Query
  • Complete BizTalk monitoring capabilities
October 2012: Version 5.0 Released
  • Monitoring Dashboard
  • Process Monitoring
  • Backup/DR Visualizer
  • HP Operation Manager Integration
We increased our customer base by 5 fold in 2012, including 5 of the Fortune 100 companies. We also partnered with lot of consulting companies round the world working in the BizTalk space.

Interesting Blog posts

I’ve written over 60 blog posts in 2012, averaging about 1 per week. Here are some of the interesting ones that are very popular Of course there are lot of posts around BizTalk360 key features, all the core product related ones are structured in a nice BizTalk360 Blog Posts Table of Content

Books

I believe everyone should invest their time learning new things constantly.  I read an interesting story that insist this point in the book “The Ultimate Sales machine by Chet Holmes”. The tale of wood cutters: Woodcutter A cuts wood all day. Woodcutter B keeps stopping and sitting down. At the end of the day, Woodcutter B has three times more wood than Woodcutter A. Woodcutter A asks: “How could this happen? You were resting all day!” Woodcutter B says: “I wasn’t sitting. I was sharpening my saw.” It will be difficult to find some time to sit down and read books. I use all my travel time purely for reading (I travel quite a bit, which helps). I avoid opening my laptop in a flight. image Mother Teresa CEO : We all remember Mother Teresa for her humanity, but often forget about her leadership principles used by Mother Teresa in building and running one of the world’s largest and most successful organisation. Drive The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink: Very interesting read about how to motivate people. Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does-and how that affects every aspect of life. Like a Virgin by Richard Branson: Being British it’s not a surprise I like Richard B, the way he runs his businesses. This book contains lot of small chapters, every chapter teaches you something Outsiders Edge: I bought this book at Seattle Tacoma airport and finished it in my journey. Very interesting showing how successful people are slightly different and why they are treated as outsiders. Anything you Want by Derek Sivers. This short 80 page book is incredible. It will basically teach you money is not the driving factor. He basically given back the wealth he accumulated in selling his company cdbaby ($22 million) back to music industry

Conferences Presented

Running your own company will push you to your limits, one such thing that happened to me is public speaking. In 2012 I talked in a conference almost every alternate month, with the highlight of presenting at BizTalk Summit 2012 in Microsoft Campus, Redmond. Feb: MVP Global Summit 2012, Redmond, USA Feb: BizTalk Innovation Day, Nieuwegein, Netherlands May: London Connected System User group, London May: BizTalk Innovation Day, Milan, Italy Jun: Microsoft World Partner Conference, Toronto (attendee) Jul: September: BizTalk Innovation Day, Stavanger, Norway Dec: BizTalk Summit 2012, Redmond, USA

Social media Statistics

Social media is becoming key part of each and every business these days. I’m going put the current stats here to keep it as a reference point. Facebook: 170 likes LinkedIn: 208 members Twitter: 525 followers Blog Readers: 10002 daily readers I haven’t noted down the numbers for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter last year. But the blog reader count was 7056, when I wrote my 2011 recap. We gained 3000 readers in 1 year, that’s an incredible number given the niche BizTalk area we are working on. A sincere thank you to all of you have get connected to us in one way or the other.

Our great friends

A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.  – Grace Pulpit When you are starting or running a business its important to have close friends who are willing to help you without any expectations. I’m very fortunate to have such a great friends circle. They help me out in various forms.  Here are some of my close ones. BizTalk Crew: Unofficially we started this small group called “BizTalk Crew” last year consisting of me, Steef-Jan Wiggers, Sandro Periera, Tord Glad Nadhl, and Nino Crudele  as part of the BizTalk Innovation Day events. The plan is to conduct one or two day event across various countries in Europe spreading the BizTalk love. 2012 was a very successful year, we did the event in Netherlands, Italy and Norway. The next event London has gone completely out of proposition and now it’s called BizTalk Summit 2013, London with support from Microsoft and attracting over 140 attendees. I also need to thank Kent Weare. When you are getting into an enterprise market, its so difficult to get your first few reference customers. However good your product is, there will always be a level of scepticism to put a third party product on a production servers. Kent Weare recommended BizTalk360 to his company that time and provided positive references to various new customers. I haven’t forgotten some of my other close friends, especially the BizTalk MVP community.