The Paddy's Valley tour, which will see a group of Irish technology entrepreneurs visit Silicon Valley this December, suggests that, despite all the talk of globalisation, the area south of San Francisco continues to cast a long shadow over the rest of the technology industry.
That's primarily due to the availability of venture capital funding in the area from experienced technology entrepreneurs who have backed everyone from Intel to Google. The Sand Hill Group takes its name from the valley road leading to Stanford University on which the venture capitalists congregate.
The firm, founded by valley veterans Constantin Delivanis and MR Rangaswami in 1996, provides investment and management advice to start-up enterprise software companies as well as publishing its own research. In addition to its weekly newsletters, Software Pulse and Week in Review, it now provides more regular commentary via its blogs and podcasts.
The latter are particularly worth a listen, featuring keynotes and Q&A sessions with industry chief executives such as Microsoft's Steve Ballmer, Motorola's Ed Zander and Salesforce.com's Marc Benioff. Blog posts come from Sand Hill's own staff, client companies and others in the industry, and provide a fresh perspective on issues such as virtualisation, software as a service, open source and vendor consolidation.
Sandhill.com is also a good jumping-off point to find out what others in the valley are saying about emerging trends as it provides links to blogs from others it considers to be software industry experts.
Sand Hill bloggers aren't just worth listening to on the basis of their musings - they have a proven track record. In the past, the company has punted its clients to major players such as Amazon, IBM and EMC, while its conferences attract a who's who of the technology world.
You won't find the latest industry gossip at Sandhill.com, but if you are serious about building an enterprise software company, it will provide plenty of useful food for thought.
http://sandhill.com/opinion/
