Solutions Engineering and Technical Marketing Plans

I found this in my "notes" on my iPad, I thought it might be useful to someone, so I present it here mostly un-edited. It's a simple list of the kind of things you should be thinking about when you're creating technical marketing plan for your solution or product :

Solution/Product/Feature Area

Describe the solution or product or feature that this plan covers. If this area has subcomponents list those subcomponents out and mark which one of those subcomponents will also have their own  plan.

Your Stakeholders

Who are they?

What are their concerns?

What does success look like to them?

How will you ensure their happiness?

Intended Audience

List out each audience type, example: field, partner, customer. Are there different deliverables for the different audiences?

Intended  Audience Behavior

For each audience type describe, specifically, what you want their intended action to be. Be specific. For example; "buy more product" is not appropriate. "reduce purchase barriers for the customer by showing the efficiency gains of X" is appropriate.

Value Proposition Demonstration

Elaborate the value proposition to the audience for each of the behaviors you want to drive. Tie the value of the product to the audience behavior. Describe how the solution or product demonstrates that value in such a way that the audience would change their behavior to seek that value. You want to be unique, compelling, differentiated.

"demonstrate the value of solution to a customer by showing the relative performance and storage efficiency gains of a system with and without X" is appropriate.

Technical Action Plan

The detailed technical actions required to set up and demonstrate the value proposition in a manner that it could be shared with the audience. This could be before and after configurations, performance benchmarks, etc. what will the lab look like, is gear available, need to be purchased?

Deliverables

List the deliverables that will tie all of the  above together. What supporting materials do you need? Do you have all of them in place to act as references? 

Field activities and events

Develop a plan for the field activities or events that will allow you to share the deliverables in front of the audiences, drive the solution, product, feature adoption: videos, webinars, conference presentations, user groups, sales support.

Too big to Dell?

The Dell-EMC deal is going to be the biggest the IT industry has ever seen. Five initial thoughts on the combination of the two companies and what we're likely to see as a result: 

1. EMC already has problems with too many product lines that overlap. This merger will make it worse. Expect a bloodbath. 
2. EMC has been trying to get into more compute, one assumes this is because of a recognition of software-defined-everything in the cloud and hybrid cloud. Dell has compute, there's obvious potential there. 
3. Storage margins are not compute margins. Because of this the two companies are structured very differently, EMC is a top-of-market company with best-in-class aspirations on all products. This is to drive high margins. Dell has historically focused on efficiency and made profits off of those efficiencies in low-margin segments. This deal gives Dell a better best-in-class story with higher margins by selling through the EMC brand. This gives EMC products a better down-market product opportunity by selling through the Dell brand without cannibalizing their best-in-class products. 
4. Pathways and relationships mean a lot. EMC might have been struggling some lately, but they are placed very well in large enterprises as the "trusted advisor" vendors want to be. They sell well into the c-level and have better golf course sales than almost any other vendor. Their sales force can pull Dell up into those discussions. 
5. vmware might have a time of reckoning. They have the focus of a company that grew too fast and didn't have any evolutionary pressure for most of its growth, they were alone in the market too long to grow tough. This deal could create much more aggressive board-level influence on vmware's product and design focus, or force them to mature out of a growth mode that pursues acquisitions and new products in a willy-nilly fashion. 

 OK - that's what I have in the fifteen minutes I set aside to write this. Thoughts welcome in the comments. 

 --paul

10 Behaviors for Success in a Product Escalation

If you have been around the IT industry for long, you've been involved in at least one big, gnarly escalation. Whether it's hardware, software, a service or product, something at some point will not go right and you'll be called upon to get things back on track. Following below are 10 behaviors that, when adopted, will make you and your organization look professional and earn trust while you search for resolution to the problem.

1. Confidence

You have to have confidence in yourself and your product. You have an initial budget of only so much trust, you can lose trust before you take a single action by seeming unconfident in your own or your product's capability.

2. Have a Plan

The best plans are simple to understand and communicate, and flexible enough to bend without having to start over. Identify actions, assign people, stay on track.

3. Take it Serious

This might be another workday to you, it could be the career of the people on the other end of the line. Act like it.

4. Enjoy It

You are in this situation because of a skill set or capability that makes you special. This situation requires concentrated competence, you've worked hard to get to this level, enjoy the fact that you get to showcase your skills.

5. Stay on Message and Remain Polite

You are here to help, you know how to fix the problem, the product will work or we will figure out a workaround. Keep reminding people of that. It seems that someone always wants to derail the situation and start assigning blame, staying on message keeps them at bay. Being polite while you do it keeps it professional.

6. Identify and Question Assumptions

Just because there are a lot of people involved doesn't mean all of the issues have been covered. Stop, review how the situation occurred, what's taken place since it started and then request and evaluate the data. 

7. Be Fact Based

When you remove the assumptions, move forward with facts. Test theories within your plan that are based on facts and that will generate new factual evidence. 

8. Set Priorities and Focus

You are trying to determine the first order effect that is causing the issue, the way to do that is through elimination. Attack the most likely issue first, even when it isn't the primary cause you eliminate a second order effect and reduce the list of possibilities.

9. Define the End Point Goal

What does success in this scenario look like? What is the desired outcome? It's surprising how often this is left defined as "better". This should be a hard metric like  "X things per second",  "Y milliseconds per operation", etc... You have to know what success look like.

10. Keep Track of What, How and Why

Most people will take notes, but not good ones. Take detailed notes, remember to add why actions were taken to avoid falling into the trap of repeating bad logic if something fails.

In addition to these 10 behaviors is the critical need to stick with it. Don't fall into the trap of shortcuts or desperate actions. Nothing will lose trust faster than long shot ideas. Once the issue is resolved, make sure you communicate why it occurred, how it was resolved, and how to avoid it in the future.

Hyperconverged or ready-to-wear?

The tangent

There is a little used term that I love, "bespoke". It isn't something you would use everyday and very few people would ever use it in a year or possibly their whole lives. It refers to hand tailored suits, hand made shoes, really expensive shotguns - costly and exclusive items. But it means even more than "handmade".  It is the utmost in custom, where every single item in a design is measured, discussed and "spoken for": "bespoke". I don't actually have anything that qualifies as "bespoke", but I love the concept. 

Here's the deal: We have a legacy of bespoke systems in the Information Technology industry. 

I was once an IT architect and spent huge sums of money creating bespoke systems.  Every element of application and systems hardware and software was measured and discussed and "spoken for". We gathered our experts and solved problems uniquely. I lived a trait common among engineers where we optimize, overbuild, and make highly modified solutions specifically fit to the problem being solved. This is expensive to build and hard to manage.

For a contrast, look down at the  clothes you're wearing right now. You aren't wearing anything bespoke, there's very little chance you're even wearing anything that was even tailored at the cuff or hem. Even if you are wearing expensive clothes I bet they aren't bespoke. If this was a time before the 1800s, every item you have on would have been made by hand, down to the fabric and thread. While the finery of the rich was drastically different than the rags of the poor, it was all handmade for an individual.

Back then this wasn't bespoke so much as it was the only way to solve the problem of clothing.  You needed clothes, somebody had to make them specifically for you. 

how an industry can change your daily existence

This ended in the 1800s. In 1813 Francis Lowell created the power loom. Creating fabric on a hand loom is tedious and slow, the power loom could replace dozens of workers and output material far faster with less labor. The power loom was set to change an industry but the industry didn't know it needed a change, taking over a decade before it reached large scale use and replaced hand loomed fabric. Even then, the power loom solved the problem of creating fabrics more effectively but ready-to-wear clothing didn't really catch on until the invention and adoption of two other important technologies, the sewing machine and the graded paper pattern. The sewing machine provided speed of construction but even it wasn't enough to shift to mass produced clothes. 

The graded paper pattern was the final ingredient. It was smallest of the three in terms of leaps in technology. It wasn't some new machine. It was the embodiment of an idea. That idea was a way to create consistently sized clothes that matched each other and didn't require an expert to design and build each piece. The pattern - how to cut and where to sew pieces of fabric - made quality clothing achievable by a factory trained worker, no tailor needed. 

The combination of those three items enabled a full paradigm shift from handmade to a mass produced garment industry.

It took the creation of this  industrial ecosystem to enable ready-to-wear clothes. It was one of the first really large positive impacts of industry in society. We went from owning and wearing few clothes to owning a lot more. The concept of "fashion" was adopted in lower classes of society when it was only a notion for the very rich before. Modes of dress changed. It revolutionized what before was a static way of living for centuries. The realm of hand tailored clothes switched to a privileged and exclusive reality. The masses wore ready-to-wear. The clothes were cheaper, the quality improved, poor people might actually have a change of clothing, things got better.

Blowing stuff up

Jump forward about one hundred years and think about the first computers. They were hand built of expensive materials by highly trained experts to solve very specific problems. (Generally the first problems took the form of either cracking encrypted information or getting better at blowing something up.)The computer was the same as the application at first, it did one thing. General purpose, programmable computers followed. The computer then started solving problems of collating and manipulating data for government census. The next decades saw business buying computers to solve accounting, HR and other needs. We've been through mainframes, minicomputers, engineering workstations, client-server models, virtualization. What we still do a lot of is spoken for components and specifically designed systems and infrastructures. 

But, just like clothes serve similar purposes on every body and an industry was created be to deliver consistency, performance, and better price point: business computing problems aren't that unique. Why do businesses still choose bespoke systems solutions?

You may have responded "cloud" in some way: "we are generic", "the cloud is ready-to-wear", "our industry has moved beyond this". And you would be kind of right, but we've only moved a few applications to the cloud and we are often doing fundamentally new stuff there. We haven't moved away from enterprise compute, networks and SANs. We don't completely trust the cloud with everything and we never will. We are still building highly complex enterprise environments.

What's missing? Where is our power loom and sewing machine and graded patterns? How do we get to a place where we have IT that is ready-to-wear?

We are there. Just like the power loom and sewing machine, the technologies arrived but the industry is taking time to catch up. There was a final missing piece and it showed up a few short years ago.

Bring it on home

Virtualization replaced custom compute hardware with immortal virtual machines. Software defined networking has pulled network smarts down into the systems. We have orchestration, rapid deployment, we can move virtual machines while in production, and we've had all of these things for a while. The last custom and bespoke hardware that required special networks and big budget design and acquisition was storage. Storage needed to live in refrigerator sized cabinets and were separated from the amazing changes happening in compute. Storage is the anchor and SANs are the chain.

To shed this anchor we had to provide resiliency and performance in the same systems that virtualized everything else. Flash was the enabling bit. Instead of hundreds or thousands of drives in storage arrays, you can run enterprise levels of IOPs at even lower latency than spinning media- with just a few SSDs. Smart software that takes advantage of all of this can put you in the the ready-to-wear consumer space for your IT infrastructure. 

Here is the big question though: Now that you have all of this, what have you gained? Why does a shift from bespoke to read-to-wear matter in information technology.

The answer is scale and more specifically web-scale. 

Google, Amazon, Microsoft Azure and a few other companies have applications running at web-scale and infrastructures to support them. That being said: Enterprise applications aren't, in general, web-scale. You don't see distributed computing concepts and technologies in applications that were originally created 20 or more years ago. These apps won't take advantage of MapReduce, Cassandra, Zookeeper and all other components of the modern distributed computing world. Old enterprise applications don't do web-scale. But If you provide a web-scale infrastructure for them to live on, you get Webscale benefits while running your old apps.

Many of the advantages of web-scale aren't in the massive parallelization of jobs running on large data sets. That is the sexy side that makes it into the industry press. The resilient infrastructure underneath it all doesn't get talked about as much but that's the foundation for it all. The ability to add in more compute and storage and to scale horizontally is the other part. What hyper-converged systems like Nutanix has built, is simply provide the last piece of the technology puzzle that makes IT go from bespoke to ready-to-wear. 

Nutanix software presents to hypervisor hosts in a way that allows UVMs to use what appears to be traditional storage. In reality, the storage controller is another VM on the same hypervisor and this controller VM (CVM) interacts with other CVMs on other hosts to provide a web-scale storage infrastructure to all of the UVMs in the hypervisor cluster. You can add nodes as needed and use hypervisor techniques to spread load and move VMs without disruption. Add in some orchestration and you are creating the material, using the patterns and constructing an IT environment like it is an IT factory - not a bespoke tailor shop.

Keep bespoke for insanely expensive clothes, shoes and shotguns. Your IT should be ready-to-wear.