I’m usually an excruciatingly happy person.  I’m a little cranky this morning because I have a cold and didn’t get a good night sleep the last two nights, but I’ll get over it.  Oh – and even though I’m cranky, I’m still happy.

Ted Leonsis just gave the morning keynote at the New New Internet Conference.  I first met Ted in 1990 at the first Birthing of Giants event that I participated in.  Ironically, five minutes ago, I bumped into Verne Harnish – the creator of Birthing of Giants and the founder of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (that co-sponsors Birthing of Giants.)  Since I’m now way off the rails on the actual content of this post, I thought I’d mention that Verne was the only guy I knew in Boulder when Amy and I moved there in 1995 – and Verne split for the east coast a few months later leaving us completely alone in our new mountain hideaway.

Back to the post.  In Ted’s keynote, he stated that he’s been a 25 year student in the pursuit of happiness.   He asserted that deep scientific research (not cited) has uncovered five key things that generate happiness in humans.

• Relationships
• Community
• Self expression
• Giving back
• Pursue a higher calling

Interesting to ponder.  He also mentioned that AOL’s peak market cap was around $200b and Google is now closing in on $160b.  Also interesting to ponder.

While I know a lot of entrepreneurs and folks in small companies read this blog, I also know that there are plenty of folks in big companies that do also.  I ask those of you in a big company two questions:

1. Does your organizations use packaged applications like Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, or SAP?
2. Is managing the implementation, upgrades, and customization of these applications a nightmare, especially in a world of company and vendor consolidation?

In case you are wondering, these are rhetorical questions.  In 2002, Niel Robertson sat down with me and my partner Seth Levine and went through his vision of how the packaged application market was going to evolve.  He had a few key premises, including:

1. Packaged applications were not going away anytime soon and, in fact, would become the central platform for IT because of their back office nature (as opposed to web sites or Exchange infrastructure).
2. While customers who bought PeopleSoft, Oracle EBS, SAP, etc.. thought they were moving away from custom development, they were in fact just exchanging traditional custom development for a new kind of customization development on those platforms.
3. Packaged applications, while different, had all evolved to have the same basic architecture; one based on metadata and the classic MVC design model. As a class they were more similar than they were different.
4. Managing a packaged application was a change-centric activity while traditional development was a build centric activity.

This was a set of PowerPoint slides and a bunch of ideas in Niel’s delightful brain that fit nicely in a theme we loving refer to as “IT Management.”  Five years later, his vision is embedded in a rapidly growing company called Newmerix that we are proud to be investors in. 

Newmerix recently launched their Newmerix Automate! for Oracle E-Business Suite and Automate!Test for SAP completing the development of the third generation of their products (for those keeping score at home, remember the Microsoft 3.0 cliche – if you don’t know it, hang around and I’ll tell you about it some day.) 

Congrats Niel and the entire team at Newmerix.  It’s really cool to see a vision like this come together in real products for real customers. 

I’m in Reston, Virginia today at the The New New Internet Conference.  Brian Williams – the CEO of Viget Labs – invited me to speak on a panel after spending some time this summer in Boulder with the TechStars gang. 

A lot of my friends that live in Silicon Valley rarely stray out of Silicon Valley.  “Center of the startup universe” is no longer a cliche – rather, it’s like a scab that has been picked so many times it no longer will heal.  Silicon Valley is a critically important place in the world for creating companies, but it’s not the only place smart people that are doing interesting and important things hang out.

Last night at the pre-conference dinner I found a bunch of this type of person including dudes like Ryan Carson, Frank Gruber, Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Rohit Bhargava.  Om Malik hung out, teased me about my clothing, and had a conversation with James Surowiecki that I snooped on. 

While Silicon Valley is on a fault line (literally and metaphorically), it’s important not to forget all the other interesting stuff going on “not in Silicon Valley.” 

For example, at this conference there is a “Government Track” with topics such as “Web 2.0 at the State Level”, “Current Web 2.0 Initiatives within Government Agencies”, “Virtual Government: Real Life Uses for Second Life”, “Intellipedia”, and “Let my data go! Making the case for transparent Government.” 

Now – before you go “yawn” or “Government 2.0” – remember my premise that the next 36 months will see massive crossover adoption into the enterprise (and government) of the consumer Internet innovations we’ve seen in the past 24 months.  Assuming that is correct, the dollars that will be spent are going to be massive and much of it will happen in Fortune 5000 headquarters and large government agencies that aren’t based in Silicon Valley.

A wise man once told me “go visit your customers.”  Today, he might say something like “son – buy a plane ticket and fly somewhere other than the center of the startup universe just to see what is going on and how people are thinking about this stuff.”