Interview With Benjamin Scherrey – Chief Systems Architect of Proteus Technologies

Benjamin Scherrey and his team were responsible for the kick-ass presentation of eJAMMING AUDiiO, a collaborative platform for creating music. We interview Benjamin about eJAMMING, his company Proteus Technologies and software development.

eJamming AUDiiO has been around for some time. How did your company Proteus Technologies get involved?

eJamming contacted us to build a prototype of their upcoming product, eJamming Jamcast, for Intel’s Developer Forum in Shanghai last year. It went very well and we were able to close a licensing deal with MTV a few months later. As a result, eJamming has retained us to do all their web services development and operations.

What is the problem eJamming AUDiiO is trying to solve?

The founders of eJamming are all top level artists and music business people. Check out this page for details. Their goal is to build a product and service to enable musicians to meet and collaborate over the internet. eJamming also believes that without being able to play live and interact real-time it can never be good enough so dealing with the latency issue for real-time jam sessions was the primary obstacle to overcome. I believe they are the first to successfully accomplish this.

How is eJamming’s solution unique to the competitors out there?

eJamming has a few patents on addressing synchronizing live music amongst multiple data streams in real-time. This means that 2-4 musicians can be at their individual homes or studios and not only play together as if they were in the same room, but can also record their session in better than CD quality audiio. We’ve had this in beta for quite some time with excellent feedback from amateur and professional musicians alike. They always tell us they couldn’t imagine it was possible but now can’t imagine not having it. Also, we view other music site “competitors” more like future collaborators because we think our service only expands the opportunities for the music business and that so many other services have lots of value to offer as well.

Any new features planned for eJamming?

eJamming AUDiiO, our core musician to musician service, is launched commercially now. It is, however, only the beginning. The next product, which we demo’d the prototype for at last year’s Intel Developers Forum in Shanghai, is called JamCast Live. JamCast lives allows AUDiiO users to play live concerts online to fans around the world and get paid doing it. JamCast live will complete our social network by bringing in the other participants in the music industry that the major music sites have disenfranchised. The people behind the scenes who make the business work are the promoters, managers, sound engineers, etc + the fans can all participate and profit from the online economy that is enabled by eJamming.

The old music business model was controlled by record companies because they controlled distribution. When the record companies behind the RIAA tried to defend this unnatural monopoly and proceeded to litigate themselves right out of access to internet revenue streams, Steve Jobs stepped up and proceeded to duplicate their same business model but stick it online and make iTunes the distribution network. But how is it that old school distribution monopolists can control the music industry when the INTERNET IS THE DISTRIBUTION NETWORK?!? It’s completely upside down, has clearly impacted the quality of new music and new artists and is not sustainable.

This is where we’ll demonstrate the disruptive new business model for music over the internet because now an artist or band can make money by playing live shows over the internet. Those disenfranchised but critical support roles are back in the game helping bring the new & innovative music directly to the fans. We’ve got some unique features that will make it as close to being in the live audience as possible that I, as a live music lover, find particularly compelling. After JamCast Live we have a video product which I can’t say much about except it builds on top of our previous two products and will blow you away. It’s in early prototype stages and just waiting for the funding to take to completion.

Could you share with us about Proteus Technologies and your roles in Proteus Technologies and the eJamming AUDiiO project?

I’ve spent most of my career since 1989 building software development groups for customers. As an independent consultant I would be hired to build a product for a company but, in doing so, I would also hire a team for them, select the appropriate technologies, introduce and train them on the development process, and build their technical infrastructure. Once the first release of the product was done I’d move on to a new customer and they would be left with a group that could maintain an extend what they had invested in. Eventually I decided I would rather not deal with a new set of internal politics each project and build a team exactly the way I wanted.

Proteus Technologies was the result of this idea. One thing I do well is identify strong technical talent and challenge them. So I’ve already got the best people and we are an Agile development shop, so we have an effective, low-overhead process, and we’ve built an excellent development infrastructure with source code control,automated testing, and continuous integration – all on Open Source, Open Standards, and Open Platforms.

In my previous life I did tour and photography promotion for independent bands and I can’t think of a better way for a young act to build awareness and promote themselves than JamCast Live. I was known for (amongst other things) bringing in Japanese punk & garage bands who toured small clubs in the United States. As a promoter or club owner, I can host live shows for my particular genre, say Japanese Punk, and people around the wold into this genre will know that they’re going to hear a well known act headlining the show plus get exposed to one or two new bands they may never heard of before. I’ll split the money we make for the show with the headliners and the opening bands will get great exposure and new fans that they otherwise would not have access to who will then pay to hear their own private shows. We’ll get a work-at-home sound engineer to re-mix the live tracks and split the download sales with him. Managers will get their cut bringing new acts to audition for my show (live via AUDiiO by the way). eJamming re-enables the music economy with a twist that makes it bigger and better than anyone ever imagined possible and no one gets stiffed because eJamming can handle all the transactions.

I also hope JamCast Live can be the lever that helps bring a live indie scene that I miss from USA & Japan to Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia. I’d love to do tour shares with some of my bands from American & Japan which is where we bring in an outside band to tour with a local popular band and then take the local band back to America or Japan to tour with them in return. Helps ensure a good audience and lots of exposure for first time tours in new parts of the world – only I need an indie scene here to make it happen. JamCast Live can help make that a reality and I find it all very exciting.

What other products have Proteus Technologies been involved in?

We have primarily been contracted to build web services and are known for being capable of building highly resilient, highly scalable systems that you must have to become a viable online business. We like to say we help our clients turn their web site into a web business.

Few people consider the non-functional capabilities of a service until they become victims of their own success and find they can not scale up once they become popular and, therefore, viable as a business. We leverage the most up-to-date Open Source and Open Standards technologies to assemble loosely coupled redundant systems that can remain operational and upgradable indefinitely. It also helps our
customers significantly reduce their IT overhead as we make more effective use of their real or virtual servers than more naive designs typically do.

Other areas we have worked in include geospatial information systems, telecom, industrial controls, manufacturing, and business information systems. We love challenges and enjoy redefining the cutting edge.

Could you share with our readers about ‘Other Shore’ Development.

The best way to describe ‘Other Shore’ Development is by contrasting it with ‘Offshore Development’ which is what many people initially mistake us for. Nearly all offshore development situations involve one of two situations:

1) Large companies exporting their ineffectual and expensive development/maintenance efforts to a foreign group for cost savings.

The best case outcome for this scenario is that the company now has an ineffectual less-expensive development/maintenance organization. The more common result is that it is significantly more ineffectual and not as cheap as they were hoping for since they’ve laid off much of their institutional knowledge which cannot reasonably be documented because no one knows it exists until it’s missing.

Making up for these losses is quite expensive. Neither is a good outcome, the former is simply less bad than the latter. Hardly a wise decision unless a company is just trying to squeeze the last remaining value from a legacy system slated for end of life anyway.

2) A client trying to develop a new system hires an outside consulting firm with a big name to define the requirements then implement the project with their offshore group.

Too many times the relationship starts off with a conflict of interest that precludes any kind of satisfactory outcome. The client pays the firm to develop a full set of requirements and then pays the firm to tell them how much they will be charged to develop the system once these requirements are “signed off”. This involved a negotiation where the client needs to reduce their costs and get as many feature commitments as possible while the consulting firm desires to generate as many billable hours as possible but must commit to enough features in order to win the business. This conflict skews estimates which are of dubious value in the first place if they go out longer than 60 days. The only problem is that by time the project starts new issues inevitably get discovered and requirements change. This leads to a continuous cycle of more paying to learn what you’ll be paying to get what you want. It’s painful, expensive, and inevitably results in
wearing down expectations while driving up costs.

In both scenarios the perspective of software development is that of a factory of exchangeable resources to be applied to produce a product. If it takes 3 of one to replace 2 of another but they only cost 25% as much then the bean counters in charge know how to carry that to the bottom line. The problem is that software development is far more art than science (no real science actually has the word ’science’ in it – physics and chemistry versus political science and computer science for example).

Talented software developers are actually creative individuals strongly influenced by logic and cause & effect. They need to be challenged and feel ownership over their work product to remain excited, creative, and productive – or, as is more often the case – remain at all because what typically happens is they update their resumes with their new skills you paid for them to learn and move on to the next outsourcing group down the road for a 30% pay increase and start the process all over again. They sense and resent hypocrisy acutely and react accordingly as can be read on a daily basis in Dilbert. Intelligent, creative & capable staff will find an outlet for their energies and this will not be a good thing for organizations that create a cynical work environment and discourage ingenuity.

Other Shore development recognizes and addresses these issues. We build a cross-functional team of product manager, designers, programmers, testers, and systems infrastructure as needed who have the matched authority and responsibility to deliver the requirements as prioritized by the customer. We work closely with the client as an extension of their organization in a completely open and transparent manner – not behind a wall. Rather than trying to fix the features and deal with flexible time & costs, we make features flexible and fix time & costs by charging a fixed amount of money for fix length iterations (typically two weeks) for that team. This is inherent in the Agile development process we use. We provide a general estimate of the total number of iterations the original project scope will take but only do detailed design and cost estimates of the initial priorities as determined by the customer. At the end of each iteration the customer is given a demonstration of completed work and is now free to set new priorities for the upcoming iteration so there is a constant correction opportunity to keep up with market changes rather than a fight over how much to charge for diverging from the obsoleted contracted features.

Ultimately the customer gets what he wants within a budget he’s willing to spend and the development team becomes an extension of his organization so they feel ownership over their deliverables. To encourage maintaining the same team on an ongoing basis we provide various discount levels based on the number of iterations the client pre-commits to. The client and consulting group invest in each other and keep their goals aligned which eliminates so many of the conflicts found in most external contracting arrangements.

We actually look forward to our client calls as they become an exchange of ideas rather than a negotiation with winners and losers.

Are the processes that Proteus Technologies use to deliver value to clients exportable to other software development firms?

I’ve been doing this for other development firms for some time as a consultant so clearly it is. In Thailand we partner with a training company, GPI Asia, to provide instruction to local firms on how to do just that. The biggest reasons I think people don’t adopt this our approach is because it requires a completely different perspective of the software development business and people (who are used to operating under a conflict of interest) generally feel they’re giving up too much control when, in fact, the opposite is ultimately the
case. My perspective is so far skewed as a result of the positive experiences I’ve had that I can no longer imagine working any other way.

What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who want to establish a successful software development consultancy?

Do whatever you can to identify, attract, and retain the best technical talent you can. It is no exaggeration that the best developers are 10x as effective as a good average developer yet hardly cost twice as much. Make sure that you can align your interests with your customer’s interests. Fire bad clients as soon as you possibly can – they will destroy your company by paying late and lowering your team’s morale. Find an area where you can specialize or offer a competitive advantage and then network with others to deliver work
outside of that area (as we have done with GPI Asia in providing training). Finally, don’t be too clever. One of my favorite quotes by Brian Kernighan illustrates this best:

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

Keep things simple in your code and your business and you’ll never wonder what went wrong.

Related posts:

1. eJAMMING AUDiiO – Collaborative Network For Musicians