- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

Relationships of all kinds can be messy. Even with the best intentions, many times relationships fall apart because of missed expectations. This is true in personal relationships and it definitely applies to relationships between companies. Missed expectations occur many times due to a failure to manage expectations on both sides. For example, a potential partner may have certain revenue expectations out of a relationship, but the other company, may not be able to execute to those expectations. Sometimes they happen due to a not having a clear definition of success. For example, is success getting an agreement in place or is it creating a win-win where both companies make significant revenue with the relationship. These can be interrelated too, where there are reasonable long-term goals for success, but these get clouded by what Jack Welch in “Winning” calls “deal heat”. This is where the goal becomes getting the deal done, not creating a long term winning strategy.

This is why I tell prospective partners that it is just as important for us to get to a “no” answer quickly as it is to get a deal in place. I would rather stop an engagement early before any real damage is done than to have to terminate an agreement with disgruntled people on both sides. We are usually very good at coming up with all the reasons why we should have a partner relationship: unlimited revenue, big channel, great technology, etc. But we tend to forget all the reasons why we shouldn’t engage. This is why it’s so important to be earnest and forthright. It’s important to understand your own limitations as well as the prospective partners before moving ahead. For example, is there executive sponsorship in both companies? Are there proper resources such as product management, marketing, field, developers to do integrations assigned? Is there a go-to-market plan? Is there a cultural fit? Can a small company deal with the larger company? If those things aren’t in place, then how will revenue happen? I’ve seen relationships fail with everyone in place except a field engagement model and it turned out the sales people could not get along culturally – actually it turned out to be a compensation issue.

This is why I consider integrity the most important trait in business. Not only is it the right thing morally, but it’s the right thing for business. With integrity you can honestly assess with the prospective partner whether the relationship will really work. With integrity, comes predictability that your organization will deliver what they claim. And so, with integrity comes the opportunity get to a no answer more quickly than beating around bushes or glossing over limitations in your organization and thus wasting time and resources of both companies that could be spent pursuing real opportunities. At the end of the day getting to “no”, in this small world, may mean getting to a bigger “yes” with the same company or people from that company at a later time because they respect you and know that you won’t waste their time.

It has been awhile since I blogged and a lot has happened since. I’d like to say thanks for all my father, Oluf, did for me in giving me an example of a person with integrity in every aspect of his life. And being a great human being all around. He passed away May 12th, 2008. RIP

- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

The music ecosystem and commonality with the software industry.

I'm not really a Ray Bradbury fan, I got this title from a Weather Report album, which was no doubt inspired by the Walt Whitman poem. Weather Report was instrumental in the transition from traditional jazz to jazz fusion.  Joe Zawinul (keyboards) and Wayne Shorter (sax) were on a couple of Miles Davis' fusion albums and then broke away, forming the new group called Weather Report.

My favorite album of theirs is "Heavy Weather", which included one of the best bassists of all time, Jaco Pastorius (RIP). A real work of genius on that album is "The Juggler", which has my very favorite song ending - a single forlorn bass note giving an ironic twist to a complex song. Jaco later connected with Pat Metheny and you can still hear Jaco's influence in Metheny's later albums with Mark Egan on bass.

It's fascinating to trace these influences and their branches into other genres of music. At each juncture, a musician influenced another musician by participating in the creation of new music, but their influence continued well after they moved on.

Before open source, the ISV world was Borg-like, “resistance is futile. We had no choice but to absorb, regurgitate and attempt influence through traditional marketing, creating countless standards committees, and raiding each other's staff. Software is now growing up. Adding open source to the ecosystem creates the opportunity for collaboration between developers regardless of corporate affiliation. The resulting innovations can then be incorporated and used in powerful, sometimes unanticipated ways. Each participant in the process is affected.

I believe it is mandatory that anyone who calls themselves a "professional" developer must be able to show examples of open source contributions - and the companies they work for should encourage this participation. These contributions become the incubator of innovations that will later find their ways into commercial applications that will help change the world.

I’m proud to say that BMC’s permissive licensing is a potent enabler of rapid development and innovation in the systems management space. Permissive licensing incents developers to build on the baseline code provided and build commercial innovation. And I believe that as such developments become visible to the community there will be natural pressure to encourage contributions back to the community. A good name is still important in the industry. In addition to this, market demand has created the opportunity for enthusiastic partnerships in the new ecosystem to help fill existing and future software needs. This can be in the area of platforms, specialized applications, and variations of current applications. Just look at all the custom applications developers have done on the Remedy Action Request System. It's important to have the infrastructure for the market to express their needs and to have those needs met with either commercial or open source software - and they are not mutually exclusive.

We have all this with developer.bmc.com. Take a look.  Participate.   Give feedback. Check out the new podcast with whurley and me talking more about BMC Developer Network.

- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

I ran into Kash Noorani an Architect of our Dashboards and we got talking about ecosystem - since I describe my job as building the inbound ecosystem. We were discussing the importance of having developers build integrations and innovations on our platforms such as CMDB, AR, and, of course our dashboards. He pointed me to the funny yet scary "Developers,   developers, developers" rant by Steve Ballmer. It brings a realization that what makes a vibrant and lasting ecosystem for a software platform is the developer community. They are the source of innovation that extends the platform solution into new technology areas. An example of this is Aeroprise, and BMC development partner that extends our Remedy applications into mobile devices. They also can extend solutions into vertical markets such as TuringSMI and the Telco/eTOM solutions they provide. And, of course, these developers help grow the market, thus the pie for all of us while providing greater value to our mutual customers. The integrations and extensions aren't limited to commercial ISV software, but include "toolkit" source and binaries that help customers perform a specific task, and also open source software. There is no reason that a complete solution for a customer cannot or would not include all such components, in fact, a credible ecosystem strategy must include all of them.

Such a strategy requires an infrastructure that narrows the distance between the platform provider and the developer community to the point where there is near seamless interaction with all elements of the ecosystem - joining customers, developers, and the solution provider into one dynamic bazaar. I think this is where ISV's can learn a lot from the open source community...

- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

Lots of response to my RSS views even now and impact of standardization and componentization on mature markets.

My blog entry on RSS spurred seemed to spur some interest - it even led to an article in SearchDataCenter. I should put a plug for Cote from Red Monk since he and I have discussed RSS a bit and he's on top of standardization and process. It's interesting to me how standards arise in industries: 1) by way of industry groups vying thru mutual interest/benefit for standards, and 2) by de facto demand by the user community. I think RSS is a combination of the two. But I don't think anyone anticipated all the potential end uses of RSS when it was originally defined. I enjoy seeing the chaos of innovation around technologies beyond intended purposes. RSS is one of those where we'll see uses that extend into areas such as Systems Management, Customer Support, and beyond. We starting to see hints of such innovation around virtual environments - specifically VMware.

As VMware has become more and more prevalent as a platform, the platform itself is becoming less interesting - it's there and it works - while the applications (usage of the platform) are becoming more interesting. VMware is at an interesting inflection point where they have been the focus for enablement of their platform and have provided interesting applications to migrate, consolidate, and manage the environment - and the focus (and rightly so) has been on the ecosystem around enabling the platform. And while the platform is currently dominant, it's key to have the platform specific applications that fully leverage it's capabilities. Easy examples are VMware appliances that provide specific capabilities - I mentioned the Media server in a prior blog - other examples, include demo platforms, system management appliances, and even application servers where you want instant portability. I'm curious how many third parties are making significant revenue providing such specific applications? One I know of is   Surgient which provides "virtual lab management" software on "standard" virtual infrastructure (ie, VMware). From my experience, most of the current uses of VMware are around proprietary customer applications and migrating these applications from physical to the virtual environment. And that's not a bad use, just doesn't create a long term and dynamic ecosystem. For BMC, we already provide specific management functionality for VMware, and we're seeing use/revenue for these products (monitoring, performance management, and capacity planning), but almost exclusively in the context of the migrated legacy apps. I'm not saying the VMware specific applications are not there, I just have not heard of a lot of revenue being generated in that domain yet. Am I wrong?

Regardless, as the platform matures, there will be extensive opportunities - capacity planning will become more critical for production VMware workloads, power and cooling (which Dave Wagner has written extensively about) will become more critical, and we'll see a chaos of innovation we haven't anticipated.

- By Fred Johannessen, Technology Alliance Program and Market Zone

Customer support needs to get better and we need to admit the reality of instant messaging improves productivity and the quality of experience. IM is integral to the OnDemand world.

In today's on demand world, we can make instant purchases, instant research using search engines, instant access to desktop information using desktop searches, and even run software instantly using Java based software. Pretty much anything I want to do in the electronic world, I can do instantly – until something bad happens… When I experience a software failure, I generally need to go to the vendors support web page and start doing a series of searches through a cumbersome search engine to try to find a solution through a self-service knowledge base. In fact, this process is usually so cumbersome that I just start doing Google searches until I find someone else in the world who has experienced and logged the problem and solution in a forum. Of course, Microsoft has their pop-up dialog when a failure occurs that offers to send information to Microsoft for future help. I've never gotten any decent solution from this. So, generally, I'll end up spending an hour or more going through a debug or recovery process to get my software and/or system back up and running. And it lowers my opinion considerably of the vendor who developed the software because I can't get an instant solution to my problem. I want instant and effective help.

One of the greatest stealth tools in the business is instant messaging (IM). IM is integral to geographically dispersed organizations – it's handy in getting a quick answer to a question while you're on the phone with someone else, coordinating and facilitating online meetings, and keeping in contact with family and co-workers while on the road. Amazingly, the IT industry has not taken a productive stance relative to IM – either IM's are ignored, forbidden, or an IM is chosen that has no connectivity to outside the firewall, which sounds secure, but generally results in noone in the company using it – which is secure, but not productive. Our world has blended the concept of work and personal life where a person can be simulaneously engaged in both from anywhere in the world – home, restaurants, hotels, and (heaven forbid!) the beach.

AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) rolled out two AIM bots called "ShoppingBuddy" and "Moviephone" placed on your AIM buddy list under "AIM Bots". To the consternation of many in the industry, AOL placed these bots without asking the AIM users (AOL forces friends on AIM customers). While I don't like the idea of any software being placed on my system against my choice, the concept of AIM bots is pretty interesting to me from a support perspective. The bot concept is about thinking, for example, I want to go to a movie, then telling someone (a bot) that you want to find a movie and getting assistance in a more human way in finding the movie, time and location. I'm pretty sure that the AIM bots are based on "Smarter Child" which provides a framework for generating conversational rules for finding information. It's a way to interact with a service in a human-like way. In fact, a properly constructed bot would likely pass the Turing test.

Think from a software support perspective:

1. You have a problem with ABC software
2. You click on the IM bot for ABC software (that you opted into when you installed the software)
3. The Bot validates your registration and asks you to describe the problem
4. Simultaneously, the Bot has generated a trouble ticket, alerting customer support (based on your support level), and uploaded configuration data related to ABC software on your system
5. As you go through the questioning process, the Bot realizes that it is not able to solve your problem immediately, so during the questioning process it raises the alert level
6. A human from ABC software takes over the IM session and drills down on the issue and finds a solution
7. The problem fixed, you're happy and running the ABC software, never knowing whether you were messaging with a human or machine.

All that matters is you got help instantly and effectively.

To get to this scenario, we need standards and security. However, much of the technology is in place including IM, support knowledge-bases, and a framework for building human-like conversations. Just seems that support is such a huge part of the End-user Quality of Experience that we need to get better and fast! And we have to admit that IM is integral to doing business in the On Demand world.