BigTime Strategic Investments

On October 3, Runa Capital invested in its first startup, located outside the CIS - the American company BigTime Software, Inc. , a leading provider of cloud-based software to improve the performance of professional services firms.

There is no doubt that BigTime is the future leader in the business administration software market. For this, the company has two serious trump cards. First, one of the investors and members of the advisory board of the company is the famous John S. Howell, who in 1980 created Solomon Software, which in turn created the most famous ERP system in history - Solomon for Windows. In 2001, the company was bought by Microsoft, and Solomon was named Microsoft Dynamics SL, which does not require presentation. Secondly, BigTime’s architecture initially had tight integration with QuickBooks, Intuit’s accounting system, which accounts for 94% of the US market share.
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But more important is the importance of the entire “management automation” industry. Administration decisions are the most important element in any project; the larger the business, the more important the administrative component. And when managing really big projects, their administration becomes the main element of success.

I think the Egyptian pyramids can serve as a good analogy.


They are more than they seem.

One glance at them is enough to assess the laboriousness of the work, and it is clear that cutting blocks, delivering them and laying them in a certain place is a matter of technology, even without construction machines. But to organize such construction, manage it and bring to the end is a serious task even for modern managers. I am afraid that without computers and databases, no one will even undertake such work.

Another example is the skyscrapers of New York. The ideal office building is a great view, a prestigious building, cheap rent, and even in the very center. Why did they start to build so late? Few people know that their secret is in brilliant management. In principle, such steel structures were mastered at the end of the 19th century (Eiffel Tower), but for their construction a large construction area was required - mainly for a warehouse of steel beams, from which the frame structures were mounted. Naturally, the cost of renting such an area in the center of close Manhattan for the whole year made the whole venture with cheap offices unprofitable.


Monument of the industrial age.

But skyscrapers became a symbol of America’s power as soon as they managed to solve the problem of their construction management. First, the workers at the site were grouped into units trained for the utmost coherence of the work — if one worker did not go to replace them, they shot the entire brigade. Secondly, all the work was divided into several simple operations, measured by a bell (each team has its own), the teams of installers were reinforced by the Indians of the Mogawk tribe, who were not afraid of heights (they could not descend at all).

And finally, the delivery of the beams was painted by the minute - they were smelted at the plant in Pittsburgh, 605 kilometers were carried along the roads to the construction site and immediately mounted. Moreover, the process went straight to three or four streams, and for a simple or a truck being late, just one minute, the bonuses deprived the entire brigade.


And why don't the Indians have lunch?

Imagine how detailed the management of all units of this enterprise should be, so that Pittsburgh blast furnaces and assemblers of the Indians work in the same rhythm with (tact less than a minute). As a result, the success of the Empire State Building was so great that the work of the offices in it never stopped. Even when in 1945 a ten-ton B-25 flew into the 80th floor because of fog at full speed, the fire was extinguished in just half an hour and the offices continued their work.

But all these are examples from the industrial era, when the information flow of even large projects was relatively small, to be processed using paper tables and dial-in telephones. This good old time ended in 1954 with the creation of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, which became a symbol of the technological progress of the twentieth century. To date, six accelerators have been consistently built in it, each was several times more complicated than the previous one and required more and more administrative resources for construction and management.


Mounting the CSM detector resembles the Tetris World Championship Finals.

At CERN, most discoveries were made in twentieth-century physics, many of which were of historical significance. For example, for the discovery of the W and Z bosons, two CERN employees in 1984 were awarded the Nobel Prize. This discovery had a side effect important to history: efforts to improve the organization of the work of accelerators ultimately led to the creation of the world wide web - WWW. For which, in 2004, Elizabeth II produced Tim Berners-Lee, mentioned in the last post, in the rank of Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, thereby giving him the prefix "sir" to the name and the right to add the KBE abbreviation after the signature (the gentleman is the second seniority rank in the Order).


On the right is the person who created the Internet.

By the end of the 80s at CERN, the problem of joint processing of information by large groups of people, often moving from place to place, became particularly acute.

First, experiments were conducted by teams of hundreds of scientists from different countries.

Secondly, the effective energy of particle collisions increased, the counting of events inside accelerators went to microseconds, and the complexity of the reconstruction of particle collisions also increased.

Third, superconducting magnets began to be used at accelerators, requiring frequent replacement and repair. In the swamp of constantly changing links between individual modules, groups of specialists, etc. it was easy to get bogged down.

Important achievements in the development of information technologies were made in 1980 and 1989 - in preparation for the launch of the two penultimate colliders. The ENQUIRE program, written in 1980 by T. Berners-Lee, was a model of a system of interconnections between various devices in the form of hypertext and, importantly, made it possible to quickly track all changes.


The visa of the boss on the proposal of Tim: "Vague, but interesting."

The program came in handy in 1984 when he was instructed to provide access to real-time research results. Today's user, accustomed to web services, it is difficult to realize that the file system with hyperlinks within the local network, reproducing the system of connections between various devices, was a remarkable achievement a quarter of a century ago.

Only in 1989, in the year of the launch of the Large Electron Positron Collider, did Berners-Lee propose a project of distributed hypertext systems. But the majority of his colleagues did not see the potential in his “startup” - I think this majority simply did not understand his confused structure.

During the year, Berners-Lee reworked his project, making it a brilliant addition. He decides to use hypertext not only within pages, but also in addressing sites — this is how the Universal Resource Locator system was born, or simply “URL”. We use it every time we type the site name in the address bar of the browser and get directly to the server we need, even without knowing its ip address.


And the boss was right.

The improved proposal, which was eventually adopted in 1990, belongs to T. Berners-Lee and R. Cayo. The idea of ​​implementing hypertext on the Internet was non-trivial, its importance was not immediately recognized - even under the conditions of CERN, it took 10 years to carry it out! This is despite the fact that people used the Internet since 1978 (an e-mail address appeared at CERN in 1980), and the implementation of hypertext on computers has been evolving since the 60s, the very word “hypertext” was invented by Ted Nelson back in 1965.

08/06/1991 the first web system appeared in the library of CERN programs. It included a web browser, general information about the WWW project and instructions for creating your own web server. Before Christmas 1991, T. Berners-Lee, R. Cayo, J.-P. Groff and B. Pollermann launched the era of the Internet as we know it, declaring in our historical letter that you only need to type telnet to download the WWW browser info.cern.ch.

In 1991 several web servers appeared in Europe; the first server outside of Europe appeared in California at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in December 1991. Well, then you know.

• November 1992 - there are only 26 servers in the world;
• October 1993 - 200;
• December 1993 - 500;
• November 1994 - 10,000;
• December 2005 - 50,000,000;

How many of them had accumulated by 2011 can no longer be counted, however, it is known that now only in the USA servers consume 5% of the total capacity of the federal grid.


BAC consumes about 10% of the total annual energy consumption of the canton of Geneva. In the photo is the central computer BAK.

In December 1993, the WWW accounted for 1% of Internet traffic. The network went beyond the CERN in 1994: by the end of the year, the number of users exceeded 10 million. To date, there are already more than two billion. Just three years later, a new type of site appeared, allowing visitors to leave comments and in a special way related to each other. So there were blogs, which currently has more than 160 million.

There were of course fatal mistakes. “In fact, if you think about it, it turns out that the double slash in the URL is not needed. If I created it again, I would have done without it, ”Tim admitted at a symposium on technologies for the future in Washington in 2009. In addition, Berners-Lee regrets the amount of paper and ink for the printer, which over the years had to spend to print an unnecessary icon.

The success of the WWW-project has directed financial flows to the development of the Internet. It was the WWW that made the Internet a commercial and public domain, turning it from a means of communication for geek scientists into the global information field. Now the words WWW, Internet and Computer have become almost synonymous.

If Runa Capital existed in 1980, we would certainly have invested in a seemingly insane startup Tim Berners-Lee. Just because we understand the prospects of information management systems. But now is the year 2011, and we are investing our investments and knowledge in the BigTime management system, made in full accordance with the spirit of the work of the pioneers of the Internet.

By the way, Sir Berners-Lee is currently working on a UK e-government project, and even got himself a twitter . Let's hope that old Tim is not offended at the way we ordered his brainchild, and will not overdo it with the new government, but it’s hard that:


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