Glenn Weinstein
Last week's much-discussed Amazon Web Services (AWS) outage reignited simplistic debate about whether public cloud computing was "ready" for widespread use. The usual naysayers jumped like bullies on a perceived sign of weakness from the leading infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, who happens to also be the leading example of the innovation made possible by this new model. Shamefully, some alleged advocates of cloud computing for the enterprise joined the fray with it's-time-to-panic soundbites like, "if you put all of your eggs in one basket, you put yourself at risk," in directing blame to Amazon's customers for their own troubles.
This kind of "I told you so" finger-wagging is ill-timed, particularly with regard to the AWS incident's implications for the enterprise, for several reasons:
Read more...
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The power of habits - Blogging for Computerworld
Glenn Weinstein
I supposed it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. -- Abraham Maslow, The Psychology of Science
Is your IT shop full of hammer-wielders?
The long-term economic inevitability of public cloud computing can't be denied, yet many IT departments act as if the cloud isn't quite "ready." Much of this uncertainty is mob-based; you sound smart if you shift into passive voice and declare "there are still questions about the [security/scalability/maturity] of public cloud offerings." I pressed a job applicant this week, who made such a declaration, to offer concrete examples of such questions from his personal experience. No matter how I asked, he answered some form of, "everyone else thinks it's not ready, so I guess I think it's not ready."
This form of confirmation bias - "we can't use a cloud offering because we don't do things that way" - comes from ingrained habits. I'll admit that I still tend to power through any Salesforce.com data loading exercise using their official data loader tool alongside Excel, even as colleagues have pointed out the merits of more sophisticated solutions. I keep doing it "my way" because I'm familiar with it. Still, I acknowledge that's not the smartest or most efficient approach for a large-scale project. When it comes to data loading, I'm a hammer-wielder.
Read more...
Is your IT shop full of hammer-wielders?
The long-term economic inevitability of public cloud computing can't be denied, yet many IT departments act as if the cloud isn't quite "ready." Much of this uncertainty is mob-based; you sound smart if you shift into passive voice and declare "there are still questions about the [security/scalability/maturity] of public cloud offerings." I pressed a job applicant this week, who made such a declaration, to offer concrete examples of such questions from his personal experience. No matter how I asked, he answered some form of, "everyone else thinks it's not ready, so I guess I think it's not ready."
This form of confirmation bias - "we can't use a cloud offering because we don't do things that way" - comes from ingrained habits. I'll admit that I still tend to power through any Salesforce.com data loading exercise using their official data loader tool alongside Excel, even as colleagues have pointed out the merits of more sophisticated solutions. I keep doing it "my way" because I'm familiar with it. Still, I acknowledge that's not the smartest or most efficient approach for a large-scale project. When it comes to data loading, I'm a hammer-wielder.
Read more...
Tuesday, April 19, 2011
Our New Crowd in the Cloud Gives Back - A CloudSpokes Update
Narinder Singh
This past Valentines Day, Appirio launched CloudSpokes, a new cloud-focused crowdsourcing community that matches companies who need cloud development work with developers.
This past Valentines Day, Appirio launched CloudSpokes, a new cloud-focused crowdsourcing community that matches companies who need cloud development work with developers.Overall, the community was received with great interest and excitement, but as expected, many people said they wanted to see results and how things progressed. It was widely recognized that creating a marketplace where businesses can tap into skills and pay for results, while developers cultivate their talents and compete for cash and recognition, is a win-win - but marketplaces take time, resources and even some good fortune to really take off.
Although it’s only been a few short weeks, we’re happy to report this burgeoning cloud developer community has started to gain momentum and is already producing some real results. These results can be (and have been) for sponsoring companies - ISVs or enterprises - and the community at large.
One of the most important parts of CloudSpokes is to provide real world examples of how the cloud is changing development practices. For the first time in history, a developer can work on any problem in the world from anywhere - all they need is an Internet connection if they’re using a public cloud platform. To promote the power in that and to show early output of the community, we’re donating back a few of the developments from a number of CloudSpokes contests that have already been completed.
There are many places where narrow technical advances can make it even more productive to use cloud platforms for a large variety of developers and CloudSpokes has already generated a few examples:
- A Force.com component that makes it easier to build Force.com apps for Facebook, which has since been donated to the Force.com toolkit for Facebook
- A Firefox extension, “The Force.com Utility Belt” to aid developers
- An OmniAuth extension that lets Heroku connect to Force.com via Oauth, which has been donated to the Heroku tookit for Force.com
This is just the beginning. There are a lot more contests coming down the pike that will produce even more useful tools for open source initiatives that further cloud development. This includes a Force.com Geo Location Toolkit (which lets developers manage location and map information through force.com) and an iPhone app that lets administrator manage their users while on the go.
In addition to these projects, we’ll also team up with cloud providers to sponsor more contests so their own development community can build add-ons that make platforms more useful for everyone. Twilio is the first of those and is running a contest promoting developers integrating their voice or SMS API into physical devices (think robots!).
We’re seeing progress on a daily basis (more on that soon), but the team is always looking for feedback about how CloudSpokes can make you a believer in the power of crowdsourced cloud development!
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Laying down my principles: The 2 commandments of cloud religion - Blogging for ComputerWorld
Glenn Weinstein
Five years ago, it was unclear to many that what was then known as "on-demand" -- subsequently "software as a service" and eventually "cloud computing" -- would turn out to be as revolutionary a trend in big-company IT as client-server was 15 years earlier.
I made a career bet that "on-demand" would take off, and it was a good one. Today, I talk a lot about delivering business value, innovation, expertise and all that good stuff. But business strategy and success are based on a handful of simple principles I sometimes call "religion." And in this cloud religion, all business decisions, investments and customer advice stem from two simple foundational principles -- two commandments, if you will...
Read more...
I made a career bet that "on-demand" would take off, and it was a good one. Today, I talk a lot about delivering business value, innovation, expertise and all that good stuff. But business strategy and success are based on a handful of simple principles I sometimes call "religion." And in this cloud religion, all business decisions, investments and customer advice stem from two simple foundational principles -- two commandments, if you will...
Read more...
Monday, April 11, 2011
Appirio Acquires VMG, Directing Attention to the People Part of Cloud Adoption
By Chris Barbin
Today I’m pleased to announce another acquisition (yes, our third in two months) to further Appirio’s mission of accelerating enterprise adoption of the cloud. We are acquiring VMG, a specialist in structured, cloud-focused training and learning programs that increase user adoption and customer satisfaction.
The technology industry is plagued with stories about companies spending thousands to millions of dollars on a new piece of technology, only to leave users on their own to figure out those new systems and processes. It’s been a consistent problem in the on-premise world, and can be just as big of an issue for SaaS customers and vendors, where applications are upgraded every few months (not every few years) and where the cost to switch providers is so much lower.
VMG has been a partner of Appirio’s for the last two years. They’ve helped build out our Google Apps and Salesforce CRM training programs and have engaged with us in some of our top customer accounts. During that time we came to admire the quality of the people and their philosophy around training that put the users and their experience at the center, not the technology.
As part of Appirio, the VMG team won’t be holed away in a siloed learning or training organization. Instead, their talents will be dispersed throughout our sales, delivery and solution architect teams to ensure user adoption and customer satisfaction are embedded in everything we do. As enterprise cloud projects become more involved and complex, this holistic approach will be one of the ways cloud service brokerages like Appirio differentiate themselves from the traditional service providers of the past.
Similar to the recent TRE3 Group and Infowelders acquisitions, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you personally to Glenn Oclassen, Jr., the former CEO of VMG who joins Appirio as our VP of Cloud Adoption. Glenn has more than 12 years of experience helping companies like Autodesk and salesforce.com build, organize and scale their channel and learning functions and we’re very excited to have him and the rest of VMG join our team.
Q: VMG stands for Velocity Made Good. What’s the story behind the name and the company?
Velocity Made Good is a sailing term that measures your true pace towards your goal, factoring in speed, direction and other conditions that inform the best course for advancement. When we founded VMG we wanted to describe the nature of charting a smart course to achieve the ultimate goal - in this case, delivering demonstrable value. Customers simply don’t gain value from what they don’t use. If SaaS companies want to maintain, renew and grow their customer subscriptions, and if their partners want to maintain a trusted relationship with clients, there needs to be a big focus on user adoption, customer success and showing tangible value. This is something we talk a lot about in our SaaS Adoption Manifesto.
Q: The VMG team is passionate about helping customers successfully use new technologies. Where did that passion originate?
We, as individuals and as a team, have always been motivated by the practical application of game-changing technology, and the cloud is certainly that. It changes (and simplifies) everything. In order to embrace a game-changing technology, you have to “get it” and vendors do not always make it easy for users to “get it”. In order to deliver powerful innovation at scale, you have to design and deliver simple and scalable ways for people to not only understand a new technology but also how to apply and embrace it in their personal and professional lives.
Q: At Appirio we often talk about how cloud computing is disrupting the traditional services industry. How is the cloud also disrupting training and change management?
Old school training companies do not fully comprehend the multi-modal approach required to drive user adoption and customer success with cloud technologies. The days of “train up front, hope, then support until next year’s release” are over. Although traditional customer training will certainly remain a critical part of the equation, driving user adoption is a much more multidimensional and dynamic exercise. It requires a true relationship with the customer -- addressing their needs in the moment, anticipating future needs, keeping content current to the latest release, helping them redefine processes as needed, and nurturing emergent best practices. The shift from “training” to “customer success” represents a much more holistic approach to ensure customers derive constant value from their SaaS investment.
Q: You talk a lot about a holistic, unified view of customer success. Tell us a little more about this view, and what kinds of things you see customers do right and wrong here.
First off, the most successful vendors break down the traditional technical and organizational silos for interacting with their partners and customers. Rather than having separate teams for consulting, implementation, training and technical support, we’re seeing a realignment around customer success teams: a more cross-functional approach to providing customers with a consistent and positive experience with every interaction. This is great news for the customer, and it makes sense for the service providers as well. In terms of what we see customers doing right and wrong, the biggest mistake we see is to focus solely on the technology and forget about the user experience. Companies may have a core team actively involved in defining the most elegant customizations and configurations, ideally aligned with their business goals, but if they don’t prepare the other 95% of the company for its arrival, no one is going to take time to figure it out, let alone use it. And since SaaS subscriptions are nowhere near as confining as traditional product licenses, they’re going to blame it on the technology and move on.
Q: You've been an Appirio partner for more than two years. What prompted you to make the jump and join the Appirio team versus remaining an independent company?
I have had the pleasure of working with some of the brightest and most successful people and companies in technology, and have never seen such a powerful collection of practical brilliance, esprit de corps, and passion for excellence as what I see in the Appirio team. I have watched Appirio grow as we have grown, and we have worked with Appirio on more than 20 engagements. Our complementary approaches to business in and of the cloud, and the fact that we both believe that together we are greater than the sum of our parts just made this a no-brainer. The opportunity to work with people we dig, to innovate every day, and to deliver unique value that will help grow the market leader? That was an easy decision.
Q: What are some of the ideas and trends you're excited to bring to Appirio?
There are almost too many to count. The merger of social learning and social CRM is fascinating, as is the transformation of traditional training to customer success, the promise of user-generated, company-curated content in the enterprise, and the power to use tools like Salesforce Chatter to drive user adoption and customer success. The entire way people work has changed -- the future is now about universal access to information and knowledge.
Q: In your words, what do you think this acquisition means to Appirio and our customers?
Appirio’s customers will now have a more diversified capability to meet their enterprise goals for each and every user, for each and every technology which Appirio helps them implement. And successful customers are the defining measure of a successful company. As the cloud grows, as Appirio grows, and ultimately as the world fully embraces all aspects of the cloud, we think we can help make cloud adoption take place faster and be more successful across every enterprise, everywhere. Game on.
The technology industry is plagued with stories about companies spending thousands to millions of dollars on a new piece of technology, only to leave users on their own to figure out those new systems and processes. It’s been a consistent problem in the on-premise world, and can be just as big of an issue for SaaS customers and vendors, where applications are upgraded every few months (not every few years) and where the cost to switch providers is so much lower.
VMG has been a partner of Appirio’s for the last two years. They’ve helped build out our Google Apps and Salesforce CRM training programs and have engaged with us in some of our top customer accounts. During that time we came to admire the quality of the people and their philosophy around training that put the users and their experience at the center, not the technology.
As part of Appirio, the VMG team won’t be holed away in a siloed learning or training organization. Instead, their talents will be dispersed throughout our sales, delivery and solution architect teams to ensure user adoption and customer satisfaction are embedded in everything we do. As enterprise cloud projects become more involved and complex, this holistic approach will be one of the ways cloud service brokerages like Appirio differentiate themselves from the traditional service providers of the past.
Similar to the recent TRE3 Group and Infowelders acquisitions, I wanted to take a moment to introduce you personally to Glenn Oclassen, Jr., the former CEO of VMG who joins Appirio as our VP of Cloud Adoption. Glenn has more than 12 years of experience helping companies like Autodesk and salesforce.com build, organize and scale their channel and learning functions and we’re very excited to have him and the rest of VMG join our team.
Q: VMG stands for Velocity Made Good. What’s the story behind the name and the company?
Velocity Made Good is a sailing term that measures your true pace towards your goal, factoring in speed, direction and other conditions that inform the best course for advancement. When we founded VMG we wanted to describe the nature of charting a smart course to achieve the ultimate goal - in this case, delivering demonstrable value. Customers simply don’t gain value from what they don’t use. If SaaS companies want to maintain, renew and grow their customer subscriptions, and if their partners want to maintain a trusted relationship with clients, there needs to be a big focus on user adoption, customer success and showing tangible value. This is something we talk a lot about in our SaaS Adoption Manifesto.
Q: The VMG team is passionate about helping customers successfully use new technologies. Where did that passion originate?
We, as individuals and as a team, have always been motivated by the practical application of game-changing technology, and the cloud is certainly that. It changes (and simplifies) everything. In order to embrace a game-changing technology, you have to “get it” and vendors do not always make it easy for users to “get it”. In order to deliver powerful innovation at scale, you have to design and deliver simple and scalable ways for people to not only understand a new technology but also how to apply and embrace it in their personal and professional lives.
Q: At Appirio we often talk about how cloud computing is disrupting the traditional services industry. How is the cloud also disrupting training and change management?
Old school training companies do not fully comprehend the multi-modal approach required to drive user adoption and customer success with cloud technologies. The days of “train up front, hope, then support until next year’s release” are over. Although traditional customer training will certainly remain a critical part of the equation, driving user adoption is a much more multidimensional and dynamic exercise. It requires a true relationship with the customer -- addressing their needs in the moment, anticipating future needs, keeping content current to the latest release, helping them redefine processes as needed, and nurturing emergent best practices. The shift from “training” to “customer success” represents a much more holistic approach to ensure customers derive constant value from their SaaS investment.
Q: You talk a lot about a holistic, unified view of customer success. Tell us a little more about this view, and what kinds of things you see customers do right and wrong here.
First off, the most successful vendors break down the traditional technical and organizational silos for interacting with their partners and customers. Rather than having separate teams for consulting, implementation, training and technical support, we’re seeing a realignment around customer success teams: a more cross-functional approach to providing customers with a consistent and positive experience with every interaction. This is great news for the customer, and it makes sense for the service providers as well. In terms of what we see customers doing right and wrong, the biggest mistake we see is to focus solely on the technology and forget about the user experience. Companies may have a core team actively involved in defining the most elegant customizations and configurations, ideally aligned with their business goals, but if they don’t prepare the other 95% of the company for its arrival, no one is going to take time to figure it out, let alone use it. And since SaaS subscriptions are nowhere near as confining as traditional product licenses, they’re going to blame it on the technology and move on.
Q: You've been an Appirio partner for more than two years. What prompted you to make the jump and join the Appirio team versus remaining an independent company?
I have had the pleasure of working with some of the brightest and most successful people and companies in technology, and have never seen such a powerful collection of practical brilliance, esprit de corps, and passion for excellence as what I see in the Appirio team. I have watched Appirio grow as we have grown, and we have worked with Appirio on more than 20 engagements. Our complementary approaches to business in and of the cloud, and the fact that we both believe that together we are greater than the sum of our parts just made this a no-brainer. The opportunity to work with people we dig, to innovate every day, and to deliver unique value that will help grow the market leader? That was an easy decision.
Q: What are some of the ideas and trends you're excited to bring to Appirio?
There are almost too many to count. The merger of social learning and social CRM is fascinating, as is the transformation of traditional training to customer success, the promise of user-generated, company-curated content in the enterprise, and the power to use tools like Salesforce Chatter to drive user adoption and customer success. The entire way people work has changed -- the future is now about universal access to information and knowledge.
Q: In your words, what do you think this acquisition means to Appirio and our customers?
Appirio’s customers will now have a more diversified capability to meet their enterprise goals for each and every user, for each and every technology which Appirio helps them implement. And successful customers are the defining measure of a successful company. As the cloud grows, as Appirio grows, and ultimately as the world fully embraces all aspects of the cloud, we think we can help make cloud adoption take place faster and be more successful across every enterprise, everywhere. Game on.
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