Thursday, September 27, 2012

Five tips for selling cloud

I listen to a lot of cloud companies trying to pitch their products, enough that I can tell when someone is pulling my leg, or trying to steer me away from asking certain questions. Enough already. CIO's it is time to unite and stand up to this FUD...

If you are selling cloud, whether it's IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS, here are my 5 tips to help.

1. Cost is not why I'm going cloud
Cloud can cost less, but it can also cost more depending on what exactly your solution offers and what else I may need to buy to give me the same functionality. Office365 may cost me less than on site software, but it depends on what license I go with, how good my Enterprise Agreement was.

Frankly saving money is great and if there is a big cost savings, cool, but I tend to think of this as VoIP (voice over IP) years ago. When VoIP first came out and everyone was paying a lot of money for long distance, cost savings was a big deal. Today though long distance costs are so low trying to sell me on cost is a difficult pitch.

2. Performance
Cloud performance is tricky. I mean one of the ideas of the cloud is that it runs over the internet, which cloud vendors have no control over anyway. I suppose a big ISP could argue that if all of your sites and home users are on their network which also houses the cloud data center then their performance could be guaranteed. Most cloud vendors can't guarantee end to end performance, and trying to sell me on "transaction performance" is going to lead me to believe you are stupid, or you think I am stupid. Neither is going to help your case.

Now if the solution is entirely based in your cloud environment and very little user interaction is required, maybe this works. Big data analysis, gene sequencing, complicated simulations etc, may be some examples of where performance matters, but for me entering data into a spreadsheet, the performance issue is almost always going to be internet related which cloud vendors can't guarantee.

3. Speed of innovation
One of the main reasons I want to go to the cloud is faster innovation. Since vendors only need to test in their environment, versus every possible combination on companies, they can dedicate more time to new features.

To show me this, you should be able to show regular release schedules and what features are in each one. I understand that not all features are created equal. Quoting me a number of features, is going to make me suspicious without some context. I don't consider changing the columns on a report to be a new feature, or changing the background color.Show me real, new, useful features or I'm going to think you are pulling a fast one.

4. Stop spreading FUD
Many companies, who don't yet have a cloud offering are going to try and confuse people with FUD, Fear Uncertainty and Doubt. They will talk about security breaches or reliability and try to convince them that cloud isn't ready. Sadly at least once a month we get another big story about a cloud outage or security breach so there is no lack of examples.

The reality though is cloud is no more likely to go down than an onsite solution. The big difference is you hear about it a lot more. No one would ever publish an article about a 1000 person company losing email service for 4 hours, but when that happens to Google or Yahoo it's front page news.

Same thing with security. I'm pretty sure a company like Google can hire some pretty darn good security administrators and can afford any solution they want, most companies can't. The downside is Google also gets attacked a lot more than a smaller company. They are a bigger target.

My advice, use reality and facts to educate me. Trying to scare me into not using cloud is just going to make me think you are hiding something.

5. Don't try to sell me 99.999% uptime.
Let's be honest, most people will not be able to tell the difference between a service that is 99.999% available and one that is 99.9% available. One is less than six minutes of downtime a year and the other is slightly under nine hours, which sounds like a big difference, but almost any outage is really going to take longer than 5 minutes to fix. Rebooting a system, which is what most IT people do as a first step can take that long.

I think of this as phone call quality. That used to be a big deal with PBX vendors, and sometimes they will still talk about that, but in the real world, we are all used to cell phone quality, which isn't very good.

While we are being honest, the bigger concern with cloud is the internet connectivity which is going to be the problem more often than not. WAN circuits, DNS servers etc are all lumped under "third party services" which you as a cloud vendor can't guarantee anyway.

Make sure you can explain why your service is available enough but don't make that be your main selling point. I expect it to be in a multiple redundant data center with redundancy and controls in place to avoid as much human error as possible.

Summary: If you really have a cloud product, sell me on the features that really can help me. Don't try to scare me or BS me. Many of us have been working in IT a long time and have really good detection mechanisms. Plus with social media, you might get away with it once or twice but eventually, and usually real soon, people will catch on.

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