What should Mail for businesses do?

Today email is like the blood that runs through the veins of a business. Businesses use it for communicating with customers and collaborating with employees. It is used for various reasons like sending an invoice, sending a generated price quote, scheduling a meeting, replying to technical queries, sending out bulk mailers about special offers, and lots of other tasks that help generate revenue.

If the number of emails sent for, say, replying to technical queries increases, it becomes hard to track it in a usual mail box. So the need for Support Management Software arises. Likewise the need for scheduling multi-user meetings and keeping oneself more organized, resulted in full fledged calendering software.

At a smaller scale email is actually good enough. Keeping your email unread is a basic way to remind yourself of a pending task.

Now when the number of interactions increase, that signals there is more customers and employees which signals more revenue for the business, which means there is a need for some special software. This software could be specialized software like CRM, Support Software or even better a mail suite that helps you get the job done right from within your mail client. For example, a reminder for contacting a client after two weeks, could be an email turning to unread state at the specified date and time and coming right on top based on a reminder you set for the last email with the client!

I would call these mailing solutions as "smart mail suites" as they give some sort of modelling (some additional capabilities) for a normal mail box.Now for every million dollar business, there will be tens of $100K businesses. These $100K businesses, I will call micro-businesses. For these micro businesses, smart mail suites are good enough. They can't afford to pay for integration of specialized software. They also find it an overkill to jump between interfaces to use these specialized software too.

Everyone needs an integrated view of their business communication. That usually needs a  million dollar software integration project to make happen in a big business. Why create the problem in the first place for a micro business, if you can provide those essentials in a "smart mail suite" ?

We could go one step further and tweak this use case for mail for micro businesses, mail for SMBs and more.


I will close with one additional point. Your hosted mail solution should obviously be miles ahead of hotmail.com of 1990s?

IT Team Job at stake?

If your IT Team has been caught napping when the virtualization, cloud and now SaaS wave is sweeping, I would say its your fault. Sorry for being harsh.

The main value I see about the cloud is accessibility of data. Virtualization and public clouds are an enabler for SaaS. You now have more ways to access it as your data has left the "sacred corporate premises". 

Previously IT Team would harp about security and prevent any form of access from outside. However that stiffled innovation and productivity of the employees.

If you had ensured your business critical functions (applications) were made more accessible, maybe with lesser rules, using other technologies,  the up take of SaaS could have slowed down. This could have given the IT Team more headaches. But headaches create work :-)

Steve Jobs: Learnings

Lots of praise has been showered about, how Steve Jobs was great in building insanely cool products like the iPad, iPhone and iPod.

However there may have been a greater strategy there. He may have had a vision of accessibility of data for consumers. It was about data all the way.

At many popular points of human interaction like listening to music, the way we work, entertainment, he dropped gems on the way. Gems like iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, iTunes.

He has then set up Apple to continue making data accessible via iCloud. To complete his actual vision?

Steve Jobs : Rest in peace.

What is DevOps - a short note

DevOps is heard quite often now. I will try to give my perspective.

Application management teams are normally the bridge between development and operations. To help the technology stack developed by the development team to be utilized to its optimum extent in production, there must be collaboration. This is facilitated by development team using APIs and instrumenting the applications with application specific metrics that relate closely with the actual functioning of the hosted application.

For example, just saying CPU Utilization is high does not mean much in an application context. However telling there is a surge in number of purchases via the shopping cart right now and that is causing abnormally high utilization, means a lot. This "application specific input" means a lot for operations. Getting this kind of collaboration going is DevOps for me :-)

An IT Management product could help the development team integrate these business metrics in to the same Operations Dashboards that your NOC will use. The development team would ideally use programming languages like Java, .Net, Python etc. or protocols like JMX, WMI and SNMP to communicate with the management tool.

Identifying new Products in the SaaS Model

In the on-premise world, first came point products. This had success as a specific problem was solved very well. Lower price points. Tactical sale (eg. sell to engineer vs sell to CIO). Less noise in the GUI.

Then came integrated suites and bloatware :-)

In the On-Demand world, follow the same strategy. Do point products first. But do it on a platform that can bring all of it together in to one GUI, in future. Or follow the less is more strategy.

Partner engagement from a non-financial standpoint

Managing the partner channel is hard, especially if you are a technology company. The time needed and the slow pace to build lasting relationships need special focus and is normally not your strong point.

When signing up partners, first thing to realize is you are not signing up just the CEO of the company. You are expecting his sales to chime-in for you. So help her. That means, signing up a partner is just the first step. Make sure you help train her team and provide all support they need to keep them productive.
You got to even ensure high mind share within their sales team about your company.
That could of course mean anything from cheap tactics to well meaning and useful things like sending brochures about product, news updates, conduct regular trainings and provide outstanding support.

Outstanding support!

Based on the location of your partner, you need to be accessible to them, when ever or using whatever medium. That means, be accessible via phone, email, chat or in-person. A single point of contact is invaluable.
Markets are complex. Some things work well in some markets and some things don't. However make sure the best practices of one market gets shared to other markets seamlessly via your partner portal. That brings us to the topic of communication.

Your partner portal must rock!

The partner portal should share news about the product obviously, but more importantly about product sales triggers (eg. government legislation like Italian Privacy Regulation) in your other partner countries and be the single source of the truth for your partners.

BMC acquires Cordiant for End user Experience Management

BMC acquires Cordiant for ~ $125 million for their End user Experience Management capabilities.

http://www.bmc.com/news/press-releases/2011/BMC-Software-Acquires-Coradiant-Inc.html

What is Cloud Computing ?

Cloud computing is all about the maturity to allow your core data to leave the immediate boundaries of where the data is generated and consumed. Its about the data. Its about the processing environment. Cloud computing is not just SaaS or Amazon or about Azure etc. Those are the ways to implement it.

@NY and SFO for the ManageEngine User Conference

I have got the opportunity to present the ManageEngine Product Roadmap, at the ManageEngine User Conference.

NewYork
March 22-23, 2011
The Park Central Hotel,
870 Seventh Avenue at 57th Street,
New York, NY 10019,
www.parkcentralny.com


San Francisco:
March 29-30, 2011

The Marriott Courtyard – Downtown,
299 Second Street,
San Francisco, CA 94105,
415.947.0700,
www.courtyardsanfrancisco.com


Check out the user conference website for details.

How To Kill Innovation, SVPG Blog, Six Sigma?

A few years back, I had the opportunity to be in one of the workshops conducted by Marty. Here is a good write up about how Six Sigma could stifle innovation. Especially in IT Companies.

Last week I ran into two different software technology companies (neither in Silicon Valley) that had just recently brought in Six Sigma consultants. This caught me by surprise because it¹s been a very long time since I heard of a technology company even considering this. I'm hoping this was an anomaly, but in the spirit of "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," I thought it's important to discuss quality-centric methodologies like Six Sigma.
In the manufacturing world especially, if your company is struggling with quality or cost issues, then Six Sigma can be very appropriate. It is based on a set of quality management techniques and practices that can significantly reduce costs and defect rates.
Unfortunately, many of those that advocate Six Sigma believe that the principles should be applied throughout the organization, for virtually any business process. But what can be good for removing defects in a manufacturing process can completely destroy the product discovery process and software development.
Please know that I am dead serious when I say this: for companies that depend on innovation, these well-intentioned but misguided people can destroy your company.
In our industry, we live and die by our ability to innovate. Yes, quality is important, but it's only interesting to even discuss quality if you've come up with a product people want.
Do you remember the old Motorola, the company that used to be "driven by a passion to invent?" How about 3M, the company that was based on encouraging initiative and innovation among its employees? And GE, the company that really did used to "bring big ideas to life." And Sun, at one point they were incredibly creative and relevant. Same with Intuit, a company that was founded on a commitment to delight customers.
What all these companies have in common is that they all used to be widely admired, consistent technology innovators. Until Six Sigma took over. Then their innovation virtually disappeared. It all became minor incremental refinements, and in our business, that'll only take you so far.
Now of course the intent of Six Sigma was never to kill or stifle innovation, but the unintended negative consequences to an organization of trying to apply Six Sigma dogma beyond the processes it is appropriate for are so profoundly damaging that they dwarf the benefits, especially over time. Yes, you can save some costs in the short-run, but you'll soon start to see the consequences in the top-line as significant new product introductions slow to a crawl, and customer reactions to your products disappoint.
Visit a technology product team in a Six Sigma company and you'll find people that have had the creativity and initiative drained right out of them. It's all about avoiding the bureaucracy and the pain associated with any deviation. And it's no surprise that they've had a hard time retaining the creative people ­ the ones they need to invent their future successful products.
For tech companies, it's just not about eliminating defects and inefficiencies. It's about discovering and delivering products and services that customers love. Don't fall into the trap of confusing building the product right, with building the right product.
If your goal is to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, then maybe Six Sigma is for you, but if your goal is to create winning products, you need to optimize your organization instead around product discovery and encouraging just the sort of creativity and initiative that enables people to think and act differently.
It's not just Six Sigma consultants that can try to apply their techniques to areas that don't make any sense. I¹ve also seen some overzealous Scrum advocates try to apply the process to areas that it wasn't designed for and make a mess out of things as well. But honestly I¹ve never seen damage to a company's ability to innovate as deep and lasting as what has happened to companies that try to implement Six Sigma from the top down.
So if you find one of these Six Sigma guys wandering the halls of your tech company, grab them by their black belt and toss them back where they came from.

http://www.svpg.com/how-to-kill-innovation/