Klir Technologies Weblog

Services in 30 Minutes or Less

Everywhere you look today...cover of CRN, VARBusiness, The Channel Insider or your distributors’ newsletter, resellers are seeing the same statement… “start growing service revenues or your long-term margins will be too small to grow a sustainable business”.  And yet, making the transition from product reseller to developing recurring service revenues is a daunting challenge with real hurdles.

From resellers who wanted to make this transition into recurring service revenues, we heard several key ideas which have helped us direct our product development:

1. The upfront investments of time and money to get started can’t be high.

2. Ease of deployment and ease of use are paramount.

3. The value proposition has to be easily understood by our sales team and our customers.

4. I need to be the trusted advisor to my customers.  Deliver a product that pulls me closer to my customers and makes me indispensable.

With all of the above in mind, we launched Klir Technologies for Resellers. In developing our service we held the key ideas above as requirements for our success in the channel. Resellers can now download, install, configure, and produce end user IT data around which services can be offered within 30 minutes with little to no training. Here is what we deliver today:

1. Low investment. Klir has delivered a completely FREE version of our service which the reseller can download and try out, train on, and install into their end customer environments without paying a penny. That’s a low investment.

2. Ease of use. Klir’s interface for resellers and customers is completely “webified”, which means there are no command line interfaces or scripts to write (i.e. it doesn’t take a $250/hr consultant to drive value out of the system). We deliver the service through the web, so if you can “point and click”, you can build reports, alerts and value for your customers. In addition, Klir and our community have created hundreds of stock reports which are available to you the moment you install Klir.

3. Simple Value Prop. Download to data within 30 minutes, for free, providing real-time IT data through which the reseller and the end user can both make better IT investment decisions. You can even get this information remotely..

4. Trusted Advisor Status. Often MSP offerings are delivered by a NOC outside of the US or in another state. This ends up leaving the reseller out of the value equation. Our intent with Klir Technologies for Resellers is to make the reseller the trusted advisor who uses the Klir service for the operations and data collection. The reseller is still required for successful deployment, tuning, and interpretation/consulting around the data.

We listened closely to our reseller partners and have created a software service which allows for download to services within 30 minutes. For free.

I look forward to your questions and feedback.

partners@klir.com

Release 101 for SaaS and Web 2.0

Helping investors and customers understand and appreciate the value of rapidly evolving best practices is a critical step for the SaaS solutions provider. Traditional software development and delivery processes are proven and accepted, and customers accustomed to the on-premise software licensing paradigm encounter new operational imperatives when considering an on-demand solution for the first time. Understanding the implications of a rapid development and release model is a common impediment to SaaS adoption. Annual release cycles conform to the norm and confer a sense of low risk and stability, while the concept of quarterly or monthly release cycles represents a foundational change. Today we’ll discuss the operational implications of the rapid release cycle and the advantages and challenges for customers and providers.

The Long Cut to the Long Tail

The SaaS model neither infers nor permits an erosion of the basic software development planning and management principles or practices that have evolved to assure quality. The best SaaS companies develop software and manage release using the same basic guidelines employed by models that are more traditional. In practice, the software development model is irrelevant, as long as the principles of requirements analysis, specification, software architecture, implementation, test, and documentation are managed to a quality result. Building software is not an artistic endeavor; it is an exercise in process, measurement, delivery, and execution. Each iterative software release must deliver value to secure customer confidence and acceptance of the rapid release model, and the time-honored axiom of “Do the right things right” is foundational to the quality of any SaaS product.

Better for Who?

A frequent release environment presents challenges for the SaaS provider. Traditional lines of responsibility and demarcation are blurred inside a SaaS company, where software and its supporting infrastructure are inseparable, and where customer adoption is immediate and ubiquitous. These conditions require unprecedented alignment between Engineering and Operations teams and compel an absolute commitment to balancing quality, usability, and time to market objectives. A true multi-tenant SaaS solution provider has the ability to deliver universal functionality to every user at next log-in, a powerful position. Once you pull the release lever, no customer action is required to take advantage of your new functionality. Since late adoption is not an option for the SaaS customer, it is the responsibility of the provider to understand and address implications for the user community before delivery. When considering the value of a conceptual feature or usability change, ask “What does the customer do with what she has today, will she still be able to do it tomorrow, and does she need what I plan to give her next?” Changes delivered to customers must be additive; SaaS providers who constantly release improvements which are perceived as remediative by users risk the introduction of legitimate concerns about the maturity of their product and its associated product releases processes.

Collaborative Agility

The rapid release schedule compresses the training and information dissemination cycle for customers and users, so it is important that front-end functionality be presented in an intuitive and understandable fashion. One common objection to releasing “too often” is the challenge of addressing user confusion arising from changes to existing product functions and capabilities, which have been integrated into core customer business processes. This objection should be taken seriously, as it often points to ineffective product management, where the customer position is inadequately represented in the analysis and planning process, or to insufficient and ineffective marketing communication programs. Both of these problems are easily solved through awareness, acceptance, and process improvements. At Klir, we carefully evaluate the implications of any considered functional change by assessing the historical usage of our community, and integrate this process into our formal requirements process. For example, we recently eliminated a subset of KPI report templates and ongoing support for Internet Explorer 5.0 only after we validated their usage within our community over the preceding 12 months and were satisfied that we would not impact a single user. In a multi-tenant environment, complete satisfaction is not always possible, but as a goal, it represents an appropriate starting point.

Always Open

Back-end releases are governed by the same considerations, and must be carefully planned and managed within defined service windows and within established SLA parameters. Frequent data center upgrades, which are visible to the user community, introduce a sense of insufficient planning, sub-optimal system architecture, or a reactive provider culture. Each back-end update introduces the risk of a deleterious impact on uptime and reliability, and unintended customer awareness of otherwise routine system administration has beleaguered many early stage SaaS companies. Top providers set themselves apart through a focus on operational excellence, a strategy that pays dividends in the mid- and long term.

Over the past few years, the maturation of open source software, the emergence of on-demand and self-service solutions, and the value shift to information access and analysis has created unprecedented demand for solutions delivered using the SaaS model. To take advantage of these efficiencies and turn them into opportunities, a degree of market evolution is required. Market concerns related to a rapid release cycle are best assuaged through performance. A SaaS release strategy that provides consistent improvements to the product without negatively impacting customer business processes or end user familiarity is the key to long term success. By doing the right things right, a top SaaS provider will enable customers to achieve continuous business process improvement from a rapid release cycle, creating evangelical users and real value.