Continuing Minds

Was a Texas Senate committees bipartisan enthusiasm for auditing the Texas Enterprise Fund a bipartisan dig at Gov. Rick Perry, the funds biggest champion?

Even if it were, would that make the bill a bad idea?

Not from a taxpayer-responsive, good-government standpoint.

Only the five senators who voted SB1390 out of the Senate Economic Development Committee on Wednesday know in their hearts what their political motivations were. But its notable that the group included more Republicans than Democrats.

Democrats Wendy Davis of Fort Worth, the bill sponsor, and Kirk Watson of Austin were joined by Republicans Bob Deuell of Greenville (the committee chairman), Brian Birdwell of Granbury and Kevin Eltife of Tyler.

Republicans Kelly Hancock of North Richland Hills and Troy Fraser of Horseshoe Bay missed the hearing.

SB1390 would require the state auditor to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the multimillion-dollar job-creation fund and make sure it has adequate financial controls to maintain accountability for the public money it spends luring businesses to the state.

The Legislative Budget Board estimated the cost of the audit at $537,688.

Created in 2003, the fund has invested more than $487 million in 106 projects that have committed to create 66,094 jobs, but it has never been evaluated through an external audit.

The pool of money is a favorite Perry tool for enticing companies to Texas. They receive grants and agree to meet hiring goals within a specific timeframe. If they dont comply and terms arent amended, funds must be returned.

In a 2013 report to the Legislature covering the last biennium, the governors office said the fund gives Texas the competitive edge in attracting businesses and helping those already in the state expand instead of looking to move. (bit.ly/4quRC9)

The governors office does keep details about grants made to date on a website about the fund. According to the legislative report, grants made from January 2011 through December 2012 included $194,000 for 3M Co. in Angleton, $21 million for Apple in Austin and $550,000 for plastics recycler Coll Materials in Waco.

In Fort Worth, $450,000 went to Ferris Manufacturing, a medical supply company; $4.2 million to GE Transportations locomotive assembly facility; and $1.2 million to investment firm TD Ameritrade.

The report also includes information about grants that were terminated.

The legislation would provide for a comprehensive, independent analysis so taxpayers can be sure awards have followed proper procedures, recipients have complied with their contracts and money has been recouped when projects havent panned out as promised.

In a news release, Davis called it critical that we put the fund under a microscope to ensure that every penny of these grants is being best used to attract good-paying jobs to Texas.

The enterprise fund has found critics on the political left and right, with some questioning whether its a mechanism to reward cronies and others calling it wasteful corporate welfare. Without casting aspersions, Deuell has been quoted as saying lawmakers and the public need to be satisfied that the moneys being spent wisely.

That worthy goal should make this measure an easy vote in the full Senate and the House.

In Silicon Valley, and high technology in general, theres a common narrative about how the new disrupts the old, and the old subsequently dies. Its a compelling narrative, especially in an industry such as technology where fortunes are made in the name of innovation but its important to separate the signal from the noise. That narrative is applied too often and too broadly, leading to faulty company strategies and poor investments.

According to new replaces old assumptions, the mainframe computer would be long deceased. We all know thats not the case. I recently met with the CIO of a large, well-known insurance company, who said that for 20 years the company has tried to reduce its reliance on mainframes. The problem is that the company runs several complex processes and algorithms, built by people who have since retired, on those systems. Everybody knows that they work, but nobody really knows how they work, which is why theyre still around two decades later.

Shocking as it may seem, enterprise software giant BMCs mainframe software revenue is on the rise, thanks largely to scenarios such as the one my friend at the insurance company is dealing with. And remember Lotus Notes? According to The Wall Street Journal, its still a $1 billion business, too rooted for large companies to walk away from, and too large for IBM to ignore as it expands into cloud and social software. BMC and Lotus Notes are important lessons for investors, CEOs, strategists and anyone tempted to write off the old guard, at least in the near-term. Theres a rhythm to when and how quickly technologies are replaced and its driven by three factors: product cycle, adoption time and entrenchment.

Product Cycle: The longer it takes for a company or industry to release the next version that is significantly different, the more staying power the technology will have. Product cycles in PC operating systems are a great example. Windows XP was current for more than six years, and Oracle releases a new database every four years or so. All of those technologies endure in business today.

Adoption Time: If something takes a long time to deploy or adopt, it usually takes a long time to replace. SAP is notoriously long to implement, which means it takes companies an agonizingly long time to replace the software with cloud-based alternatives, no matter how superior they may be.

Entrenchment: The large insurance company stuck with the mainframe that I mentioned earlier is the perfect example of entrenchment. Those mainframes are so complex and pervasive throughout the company, theyre difficult and sometimes impossible to abandon. Its not just the old guard that is entrenched, however. Salesforce.com is relatively quick to deploy, but businesses quickly integrate it deeply in the sales process and with various applications many built on the Force.com platform, making Salesforce.com much stickier than many people originally thought it would be.

Cloud computing, the industry Ive worked in for the past decade, is another cautionary example. Its common in my industry to predict the death of legacy on-premises technologies such as Oracle and SAP. This is overly simplistic thinking, the result of people who try to fit a complex world into a convenient narrative. The cloud is undoubtedly marching toward pervasiveness in all layers of the IT stack. It will take longer than people think, however, and the old guard wont die. In reality, theyll gradually become less relevant, until some day, in some blog post, people will be surprised by how much legacy software remains in the world even though the new guard has long surpassed it.

At Okta, weve learned this lesson from our customers, many of which are larger enterprises experimenting with the cloud but that have legacy software that wont disappear overnight. The software is too entrenched in the system, as it typically takes months and often years of accumulated consulting, training and implementation hours to install.

Eventually, the cloud will be home to all of the innovation and profit, but it wont be the whole pie. Investors looking to place bets on where technology is headed (and when) and vendors plotting strategy shouldnt get caught up in the hype. The SAPs and Oracles of the world will linger and limp along.

They wont go gently no matter how hard we might try.

Todd McKinnon is CEO of Okta, an enterprise-grade identity management service that addresses the challenges of a cloud, mobile and interconnected business world. You can follow him on Twitter at @ToddMcKinnon.

Do a Google search for “BYOD” and you might be surprised. Over the past year, it seems like every technology company has launched a new solution for BYOD or repositioned existing products to capitalize on the Bring Your Own Device trend. In fact, half of the 2012 Forbes Fast Tech 25 list has done just that. But the market opportunity for BYOD isn’t only for the up-and-comers, it’s potentially big business. Every one of the world’s top 15 technology companies in the 2012 Forbes Global 2000 list stands to gain from BYOD.

First-generation BYOD solutions have focused squarely on the risks this new tech trend poses to enterprise security. But for BOYD to be here for the long term, effective solutions will be those that protect company data and networks while not compromising consumers’ privacy and the superior usability of advanced smartphones and tablets. Sounds simple, but first-gen solutions are far from this sweet spot.

Gartner recently called BYOD the most radical shift in enterprise client computing since the introduction of the PC. With BYOD, an employee can use his personal smartphone or tablet to access work email, applications and data, rather than using a corporate-issued mobile device. From the consumer’s perspective, he benefits from getting to use his device of choice, as well as the convenience of carrying one device for both work and personal use.

But to the IT manager, this can open up significant risks. That’s why many tech companies are focused on helping IT managers deal with the security and management challenges that come with allowing corporate access from mobile devices they don’t own. The paradigm of first-gen BYOD solutions is one in which, in exchange for choice and convenience, the employee must accept that his personal device will now be controlled, at least to some degree, by his employer.

Look at this message presented to employees during installation of typical Enterprise Mobile Device Management (EMDM) software used for BYOD management:

“Installing this profile will allow the administrator to remotely manage your iPhone. The administrator may collect personal data, lists of apps, add/remove accounts and restrictions, and remotely erase data on your iPhone.”

Consumers are waking up to what this means for their own personal privacy. A Harris Interactive survey sponsored by Fiberlink of nearly 2,500 US workers found that nearly 80% of employees are concerned about employers viewing private information on their personal devices, such as their location, websites they visited or applications they downloaded.

While no one would deny the need to ensure enterprise security in the BYOD era, it must not come at the expense of employee privacy. Otherwise, IT managers may find employees rejecting IT control or BYOD altogether. Tech companies can address both needs by making employee privacy part of their BYOD value propositions not (just) on principle, but because it makes business sense.

Most of the Forbes top 15 tech companies–Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google, Hon Hai Precision (Foxconn), Dell, Qualcomm and Panasonic–derive significant revenue from mobile device consumers, either directly or indirectly. If BYOD begins with a consumer purchasing a smartphone or tablet that also can be used for work, it seems the first objective is to create a mobile device that the consumer wants to buy, and secondly, that the both the consumer and his employer trust for work use.

That’s why many players in the mobile industry are looking at how to make the next generation of mass-market devices “Enterprise Ready” from the start. An approach gaining momentum among mobile device manufacturers and network operators is to create a dual-identity (aka dual-persona) smartphone that runs two distinct operating systems – one is the consumer’s personal phone, and the other is his work phone. Along with players such as VMware, we at Red Bend Software are developing this type of solution that uses virtualization technology to separate the operating systems. The benefit of this approach is that the work phone is isolated from the personal phone, ensuring enterprise security, but more importantly from a privacy standpoint, the IT manager has no visibility into or control of the personal phone.

Today’s consumers are choosing smartphones based on operating system, 4G capability and application availability. In the new era of BYOD, it won’t take long before “privacy assurance” makes the list of buying criteria. Such features must include:

• Applying policies only when the mobile device is used for work purposes, without imposing restrictions on the employee’s personal mobile user experience.
• Preventing IT managers from knowing websites visited or applications accessed when using the device for personal purposes.
• Safeguarding an employee’s personal content such as photos and files from being wiped from the device in the event it’s lost.

In BYOD 2.0, recognizing the value of protecting consumer privacy while also serving the enterprise need for security and control will be a win-win-win for tech companies and their two customers–the enterprise and the consumer. Let’s not forget that BYOD is just one aspect of the overall trend towards the Consumerization of IT. As employee’s gain more power over technology choices used in the enterprise, even B-to-B tech companies will have to take the needs of their customer’s customer employees more seriously. Ultimately, consumers make the first buying decision when it comes to BYOD–their next smartphone and tablet.

Lori Sylvia is EVP of Marketing for Red Bend Software.

The release also said AHSAA Executive Director Steve Savarese has issued a penalty to the program, although it did not specify what it was. Rodgers also stated the school plans to follow the appeals process.

Ron Ingram, AHSAA director of communications, said the appeals process will first go to a district board.

Enterprise is in District 2, which board includes Straughn’s Trent Taylor, Charles Henderson’s Dyneshia Jones, Andalusia’s Richard Robertson, Dale County Schools’ Lamar Brooks and Elba’s Rick Rainer. Rainer served as a principal and coach in the Enterprise school system for several years.

If the district rules against Savarese’s decision, or both parties are not satisfied with the district board’s ruling, the AHSAA Central Board will hear the final appeal. The next Central Board meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, and an appeal could be heard that quickly, Ingram said.

After its April meeting, the Central Board will not meet again until July. A special called meeting in between the two regularly scheduled meetings could occur if Enterprise High officials request one, Ingram added.

The violation is the first test of the AHSAA’s new “illegal recruiting” rule established two years ago, Ingram said.

If Enterprise is assessed the full penalty, the boys basketball program will be placed “on restrictive probation” and be penalized with a monetary fine, according to AHSAA bylaws. If a coach is involved in the violation, he or she will not be allowed to coach at any AHSAA school for one year.

If any high school official offer any monetary or materials enticement, the school could be suspended from AHSAA play.

The rule against illegal recruiting prohibits anyone connected to a high school from contacting a prospective student and his/her parents or guardians about transferring for the chief purpose of participating in that school’s athletics program.

Ingram would not comment on specifics of the investigation since it was still ongoing.

Phone calls for further comments from EHS boys basketball coach Kenny Hill, Enterprise City Schools’ Superintendent Aaron Milner and Rodgers were not returned.

The following is the statement Rodgers released through athletics director Kevin Collins:

“On April 4, 2013, Enterprise High School self-reported a violation of Alabama High School Athletic Association rules pertaining to illegal recruitment of a student not in our school zone. A punitive ruling was handed down from the Executive Director of the AHSAA pertaining to our boys’ basketball program.

We have cooperated fully with the association to resolve this matter. Enterprise High School is committed to the spirit of fair play and prides itself in adhering to a high standard of sportsmanship by our players and coaches.

Pending a completion of the appeal process, Enterprise High School will have no further comment until that time.

Matt Rodgers

Principal

Enterprise High School

Selling enterprise software is completely different than selling digital ads. Unlike digital advertising, the primary goal in enterprise software is to get someone else to sell your product. Sounds
crazy, doesnt it? Not at all — a direct sales force is the most expensive channel to take a product to market.

To sell enterprise software, sales employees are trained to sell
through channels. They do everything possible to enable the channel. First, they set rules for who can sell what to whom — such as by vertical, company size of buyer, geographic region, or by
product. Then, enterprise sales managers assemble pricing rules to ensure their pricing integrity is protected and that all channels have a level playing field. After that, they do everything possible
to grow and support that channel.

In digital advertising, we have it backwards. A lot of publishers are so fearful of selling through channels, they overprotect their direct sales channel.
Most publishers do everything possible to disable their channels. They react and create long lists of blocked advertisers (because their sales team is calling on them directly), and they
strip away the ability to use their name and brand and any data about their users. Most do very little, or nothing at all, to support their channels.

Its no wonder the overall system is
broken — few people are working together, and most are working at cross-purposes with one another.

This is precisely why I started theRubiconProject. I saw an opportunity to bring
enterprise software-like selling methodologies to digital advertising and support that with a platform to make the selling and buying process more efficient.

Theres a lot we can learn
from the enterprise software industry. And I believe the ad sales team of the future will look very much like an enterprise software sales team.

The goal will be to sell more through channels,
and to leverage a direct sales team to sell the very high-end, customized deals. To do this, sales organizations will need to employ proper sales-channel management programs, establish trust-based
relationships with those channels that are transparent or semi-transparent both ways and based around a core set of selling rules, and then do everything possible to enable and support those
channels.

This opportunity exists today. There are more than 600 potential channels in the market — DSPs, ad networks and agency trading desks.

Another great opportunity within
digital advertising involves those segments of the industry that contain characteristics of expiring inventory markets such as travel. For example, much of todays inventory in
travel is sold through channels (digital sites, travel agents, partners, etc.). There is an independent trading platform supporting it (SABRE Systems) that enforces pricing rules, and that an entire
ecosystem has grown up around.

I believe the digital ad market has the opportunity to leverage the best of both worlds — sales channel management discipline from enterprise software and
electronic trading from travel.

The combination of these two capabilities will solve the biggest problem in digital advertising today — making it easier for millions of advertisers around the
globe to buy. If we can solve that, this market will undoubtedly skyrocket quickly.

If youre looking for some provocative reading that helps reinforce what Im talking about, read
this Qamp;A with Martin van der Meij, head of commercial development at Telegraaf Media Group.

De Telegraaf, a Dutch daily morning newspaper, has been using RTB to buy and sell its ad inventory since 2009. As an early adopter in the real-time space, De Telegraaf has set the
example for European publishers to follow. De Telegraaf has its own bidder and uses Rubicon Project as a supply-side platform to integrate with all the demand-side platforms and agency
trading desks.

I agree with Martin, who basically believes that you must treat direct and indirect sales as one channel — and balance the incentives and
measurements for both — and you have to carefully calibrate the cost of sales and revenue when youre analyzing your direct and indirect selling efforts.

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Enterprise architecture (EA) is one of the fastest growing career fields today, with organizations of all types seeking qualified individuals at all levels to fill architecture-related jobs. However, being a relatively new field, it can be hard for employers to find recent college graduates who possess an understanding of EA fundamentals.

Ryan Kroekel, a sophomore at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) recently landed an internship with a high profile company with the help of skills and knowledge he gained through a class taught by Brian Cameron, executive director of the college’s Center for Enterprise Architecture.

Kroekel will be interning this summer for John Cooney, CTO of Fidelity Information Services, at the company’s branch in Malvern, Pa. During his interview with Cooney, Kroekel said, the executive was astounded by his grasp of the fundamentals of enterprise architecture. Kroekel learned those concepts and practices by taking the first undergraduate EA course offered by the College of IST in the Fall 2012 semester. ”(Cooney) was completely floored that I knew anything about (EA),” Kroekel said.

The Center for EA, which launched in January 2011, seeks to gather intellectual resources across Penn State to address research concerns and questions that span the design, functioning and governance of contemporary, information-driven enterprises. EA applies architecture principles related to the “orderly arrangement of parts” to analyze the components, structure and connectivity of business architecture, data architecture, application architecture, technology architecture and security architecture, and identify their relationships to each other and to the strategy of the organization.

Starting in the fall 2013 semester, the College of IST will offer an EA course concentration that consists of 12 credits and is open to all IST and Security and Risk Analysis (SRA) majors. The student will earn a certificate in EA and will develop the skills that are in demand among prospective employers in all sectors. There will be two EA undergraduate courses offered in the fall of 2013, Cameron said.

Ryan’s experience is common for undergraduates that have taken EA courses, Cameron said. No other university in the country is teaching EA at the undergraduate level and interviewers are very surprised to find students that know something about the topic – it provides a definite edge in interviews. I have several other students with similar stories.

In addition to the lessons taught in the classroom, Cameron and Kroekel said, the students in the undergraduate EA class benefitted from working on real corporate projects. That experience, Kroekel said, combined with the theoretical knowledge, gave him a definitive edge while interviewing with Cooney.

“(EA) is such a blossoming field,” Kroekel said. “I knew things that (Cooney) had just learned within the last two years.”

Update: This story has been updated with the correct funding amount. It was $1.8 million, not $18 million.

What do Crossfit and RackWare have in common? They both aim to make their customers flexible and agile and get them running at optimal performance.

RackWare is a cloud startup that has raised $1.8 million in its first round of funding.

RackWare has developed a series of enterprise solutions to bring intelligence and automation to the cloud. The RackWare Management Module (RMM) helps businesses scale across private, public, or hybrid cloud environments, without changing applications.

As businesses migrate their operations to the cloud, there is a greater need for tools to help manage this infrastructure. RackWare launched in September 2012 with its management software that helps IT teams get the highest performing cloud throughout their applications lifecycle. The company touts the mobility and elasticity that RMM brings. The technology makes it easy to scale up or down, depending on demand, as well as disaster recovery.

Todays enterprise IT organizations need solutions that allow them to immediately benefit from deploying applications in the cloud within their current environment, said founder and CEO Sash Sunkara in a statement at the time. With RackWare Management Module, users can take full advantage of the cloud without comprising their current investment in infrastructure and applications. And once RMM is in place, it is easy to expand use of the cloud to increase cost savings to the business through greater availability and flexibility for application developers and users.

Sunkara was one of the cofounders of 3Leaf Systems and served as VP of marketing at QLogics Network Solutions Division. Her cofounder, Todd Matters, worked on networking at Unisys and IBM and founded SilverSteam. They founded RackWare in 2009 and at the time raised a small amount of angel funding. This $1.8 million is part of an intended $2.67 million, according to an SEC filing. The investors are undisclosed, although VentureBeat has reached out to RackWare for comment.

RackWare is based in Santa Clara, California. Read the filing.

Photo Credit: CrossFit Kandahar/Flickr

By Tiernan Ray

Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) are down $1.46, or almost 5%, at $28.82, as the Street contemplates things that seem unthinkable, such as a breakup or a privatization, prompted by last night&’s terrible Q1 PC report, that showed a drop of between 11% and 14% in unit shipments, based on Gartner and IDC data.

But there&’s always another point of view. Raymond James&’s Michael Turits comes to the stock&’s defense, penning a note to clients that reiterates an Outperform rating on the shares and a $34 price target.

Writes Turits, &“While Windows 8 has failed thus far to deflect the downward trajectory of PC shipments, we remain optimistic about the positive impact of a larger number of cheaper touch-based devices over the next year.&”

His firm cut its own PC growth outlook to a decline of 2% for this year from a prior expectation for flat sales, and to a rise of 3% next year, better than the 1% growth they&’d previously been modeling.

Turits cut his estimates to reflect the PC drop, projecting fiscal Q3 (March) revenue of $20.17 billion and EPS of 64 cents versus a prior $20.6 billion and 75 cents. For the full year, he cuts his estimate to $78.48 billion and $2.65 from a prior $78.86 billion and $2.81.

Turits outlines things that could help a back-half-of-the-year PC pickup:

As we wrote in yesterday’s TMTalk, media reports indicate Microsoft and Intel are working to cut the price- gap between touch and non-touch PCs by roughly half ($133-167/unit). We also believe Microsoft is working with supply chain partners to lower touchscreen W8 components costs for the 2013 back-to-school and holiday seasons. Less expensive touch-screen enabled devices should spur demand for W8 devices which can take advantage of its touch-centric functionality. On the enterprise side, our channel conversations indicate a strong pipeline for W7 migrations (Microsoft reported >60% of the commercial base on W7 last quarter) with some limited enterprise W8 deployment.

More to the point, for Turits&’s purposes, he&’s looking at the other businesses aside from Windows, and believes they are holding up well:

We are reducing our F3Q non-GAAP MBD revenue growth to 2% y/y from 4% given persistent PC shipment weakness. Recall transactional revenues are 40% of division revenues and are correlated with PC shipment growth. Our checks, however, noted enterprise spend picking up for Office 2013 upgrades, Exchange upgrades, and Office 365. Lync sales continue to sound strong. With Windows XP end of support coming in April 2014, corporate upgrades to W7 remain strong. While those upgrades are not a Windows revenue event, resellers report strong pull-through of Office upgrades and SharePoint and Lync attach with the OS transition, plus increased attach of annuity contracts. Exchange 2003 Enterprise Edition also reaches end of support in April. As with XP, we believe about one-third of the installed base remains on Exchange 2003. We think upgrades to 2013 are driving annuity agreements around Exchange that were formerly transactional, and are driving migrations to Office 365 as well [...] We are expecting an in-line Server and Tools quarter following conversations with U.S.-based resellers that showed solid sales and strength in products across the server line driven by momentum around Active Directory and Hyper V, and increased capabilities of System Center for heterogeneous environment management [...] Speculation in industry media has included an announcement of the next-generation Xbox on May 21, before the E3 conference if not by year-end. The new Xbox will reportedly use AMD x86 chips to reduce costs and make it easier for developers to write new games. In addition, we think several new features from the console could include cloud-based gaming and increased functionality around non-gaming media entertainment apps. On the Windows Phone front, speculation in industry media suggests Nokia (NOK) is coming out with an additional lighter and thinner Lumia phone for Verizon, the Lumia 928.

• enterprise,
• Lumia,
• PC,
• server,
• smartphone,
• software,
• tablet,
• Windows

When MarkLogic Founder Christopher Lindblad started working on a database for unstructured data in 2001, his efforts were prescient. Since then, the database market has since seen a proliferation of non-relational, or NoSQL, startups to handle the wide variety of data types that new data sources such as web applications and digital documents generate. The space has grown so big, in fact, that it has already started to consolidate. Amid all this, MarkLogic has managed to stand out by generating more revenue than pretty much any other vendor, according to figures Wikibon released in February.

On Wednesday, MarkLogics success was validated again, as the company announced a $25 million round of venture funding, bringing the total it has raised to $71.2 million. Sequoia Capital and Tenaya Capital led the round; CEO Gary Bloom and other MarkLogic executives also contributed.

MarkLogic like to tout the fact that its geared for enterprise use. Features such as high availability, replication, clustering and ACID compliance help differentiate the company from other NoSQL databases, Bloom told me. And although the company is taking in revenue and looks robust enough to go public now, Bloom said he would rather boost revenues to the point that MarkLogic could sustain success after an IPO.

Rather than go after the revenues that open-source NoSQL databases generate, Bloom said he wants to take away database marketshare from legacy companies peddling SQL databases, including IBM, SAP and Blooms previous employer, Oracle. That means MarkLogic salespeople will have to convince slower-to-change enterprises on the reality that relational databases might not be the best choice if they want to take advantage of unstructured data. MarkLogic also will have to put up with fellow NoSQL players that are adding enterprise functions, such as MongoDB,

But if MarkLogics plan turns out to be fruitful, a public offering could come within a year or two, Bloom said.

JACKSON, MI The Enterprise Group of Jackson decided to no longer book special events at Armory Arts Villages Grand Gallery, a management official said Thursday afternoon.

Peter Jobson of Excel Realty in Ohio, which manages the apartment complex, received an email in February from the economic-development agency that it no longer planned to facilitate events at the venue.

We would like to have the events; we are not opposed to them in any way, Jobson said. We have to have (the Enterprise Group) participating in those events also.

Jobson said the only involvement that the company has with Armory Arts Village is the management of the property.

Were not equipped to hold these events, Jobson said. Were really more about the real estate.

The village will still hold events such as monthly open houses for artists.

Armory Arts Village is owned by the Excel Artswalk Limited Dividend Housing Association Limited Partnership, which is registered in Michigan. The Enterprise Group, the countys economic-development agency, owns a very small portion of the village 0.00225 percent and does not have authority over the Grand Gallery, the agencys President and CEO Tim Rogers said.

The discussion on event-hosting at the site began in the fall when a woman, who was in a wheelchair, filed an Americans with Disabilities Act complaint because she could not gain access to the building.

We didnt feel it was appropriate for us to be the target of the complaint because we really didnt have anything to do with it, Jobson said. We dont want to be the target of lawsuits while these events take place.

The two groups were unable to come to an agreement on how the facility would be handled, and events that were booked for the venue for 2013 were canceled. Rogers said Jobson requested responsibilities from the Enterprise Group that the agency could not take on financially.