What can digital bill boards teach us about IT Operations Management?

/ / Enterprise Design Considerations, vDM30in30 / Leave a Reply

Digital bill boards are all the rage, state highway administrations and ad agencies have them all across the world. We see them telling us about the latest amber alert, or selling us cologne. We also see them with the blue screen of death or a boot error. Can these monstrosities at the bridge of the the digital and actual highways actually teach us anything about IT operations?

The answer may surprise you, or maybe not since I am writing a blog post about it. They can teach us a lot more than you think actually.

You see these billboards are revenue generating machines, literally. Much like IT is in general but these are way less subtle. Down time is reflected directly back as lost revenue. Billboards sell ad time much like tv or radio sells commercial air time, with customers buying leases of weeks or months at a time. For the state highway boards the issue is less of revenue and more of public safety, with outages potentially causing drivers to get into accidents, or miss detours.

The displays of the permanent digital road signs and billboards, are managed by the highway or ad agency that owns them. These can be centrally managed from an ops center where new messages can be pushed out and up-time tracked. SLAs are measured, and for the digital bill boards SLOs are also tracked in conjunction with the customer who is advertising to ensure the campaigns are successful.

Guess what this isn’t a huge jump from how IT is being transformed to better track IT expenses and map them to business needs. Business units are bringing SLOs to IT departments and counting on them to meet them along with the SLAs. If internal IT can’t meet those goals than business goes elsewhere. Smart IT leadership are mixing their capabilities with those of public cloud providers to ensure they are providing the best possible solutions for their customers.

There are plenty of tools out there to help you to begin to understand your IT costs and track SLA’s. VMware vRealize Business and vRealize Operations are two, EMC has ViPR SRM and SMARTS, Apptio has their TBM suite, and these are just to name a few that I am familiar (and no longer associated) with.


None of this has anything to do with when these boards are hacked though. Phew sometimes these are hilarious. I am not sure I can get into security again in this post, VDM30in30 may be killing my willingness to argue for security first architectures.  

Social Selling Should be the Only Selling Method

/ / IT Sales, vDM30in30 / Leave a Reply

Courtesy of Evan Kirstel

Social selling is the concept that sales teams engage with their customers before they begin to proposition them for the PO. Seems pretty normal right? Sadly no, so many times sales teams push accounts to get to the close, the old school mentality of ABC’s (Always Be Closing) have impacted organizations in a lot of ways.

Today information is too widely available for sales organizations to believe that customer aren’t already making decisions before they get in the door. Engagement needs to happen early and often. I have seen this go down two ways, the uber connected customer and the out of touch customer.

With the uber connected customer, they are on every social network, involved in industry events and shows, and read blogs and white papers. They typically are looking to have questions answered in short sentences, and even shorter turn-arounds. These customers like to be a part of the product cycle, to understand road maps and corporate positions. They also like to hear stories of solution successes at organizations like theirs, and more likely than not will reach out to them if they can.

The out of touch customers are the polar opposite in only their community involvement. They still read the white papers, still want to hear about road maps. But it’s more about what have you done for them lately, and how can you help their organization.

Social selling is the art of looking at customers as though they are partners and people, not targets to be taken down. Jill Rowley is one of the premier advocates and sales training resources for social selling. I encourage you to follow her on twitter and read her blog here.

This is something that I have been saying for awhile now to sales teams I work with. You have to engage across the corporate stack if you want to be successful. The infrastruture teams don’t have the same influence they once did, and the application owners and C suite want to be a part of the conversation. Not just because they are decision makers but because they have a stake if the deal goes badly, so they want to be informed. If you are doing your due diligence you are finding who the right champions in your accounts are across these different teams and levels in the account.

It’s less about convincing and more about showing value. Don’t be the door to door vacuum cleaner salesman when you are in there forcing your way to different parts of the house. Instead focus on what value your solution brings, and focus on it being a solution to a problem. If they don’t have the problem your product solves today than stay engaged but move on to the next account to show them value.

If you partner with your customer you can make a successful partnership and each deal will further strengthen that partnership. Customers will see the value in working with you as you educated them about what’s coming next, honestly present your view of the industry, and help to succeed together.

I don’t claim to be the best sales person out there, but I see it as the way forward. We can’t show up and throw up to customers, we need to make sure we are engaging early and often across whatever channels they are paying attention to and making it a mutually beneficial partnership.
Is this how you would like to see sales teams evolve?

Bowling Alleys Don’t Make Good Clouds

/ / Cloud Architecture, Enterprise Design Considerations, vDM30in30 / Leave a Reply

It’s not always either or, to often we present IT choices as though they were strictly black and white. Here’s why I think that is, because there are those in the industry that have only worked on the vendor side. This presents such a slanted view of the world. The one thing I have learned from the vendor side is vendors listen to industry analysts to figure out where disruption will come from and they try to skate to the puck. As I have said many times this doesn’t always match up with the maturity of their customer bases. The thing is we are trying to position cloud native apps as bowling alleys and not as buffets. At a bowling alley you are assigned a lane, given specific shoes, and told to pick from one of the various heavy balls. That’s pretty restrictive, when in reality cloud native apps are much more like walking down a Vegas buffet line. You can find just about everything on that table, none of it may be as good as you could get in each cuisines niche restaurant but it’s all serviceable. Cloud native apps are about mixing capabilities and leveraging existing external services to accomplish complex tasks.

This means that some of your services may be sitting in different clouds than your application code. If you are architecting right it’s about multiple clouds coming together from a cost competitive scenario as well as a vendor lock-in avoidance perspective. But it can also mean that hybridity of service applications could be necessary which may even include on-prem.

I was talking to Tyler Britten about this whole P2\P3 delineations and he pointed out that I may have been looking at it wrong. I had drank the kool-aid and wasn’t seeing the grey area.

The reality is the inter-dependencies of an application have to be managed when the application is grown at scale. For most traditional infrastructures this meant scaling each dependency as necessary like a multi-tiered architecture what we have called Platform 2. As we look past those traditional applications and onto the Cloud Native Apps with their micro-service builds we realize that the services come as containers themselves. I know I was disappointed too. It’s that the segmentation of monolith applications are just broken out to be 12 Factor consumable. This stinks but like a child finding out about mythological beings not being real I had to press on. So if I am just looking at containers am I understanding that they are isolated delivery modules better suited for mass distribution of an application. Maybe I was wrong about everything. As Tyler explained if we look at containers the distributed application dependencies aren’t always in other containers nor are they built as part of the container itself. Apparently containers can also be a hybrid app isolation, where large scale Oracle RAC could be the DB backend for a handful of containers deployed and managed via Chef, Puppet, Salt or Ansible.

It was like that weird commercial on TV where the people have their mine blown and purple smoke pours out. Because doesn’t the mixing of monolith and micro make strange bed-fellows or at the very least circus side show freaks. No it turns out that it actually makes a lot of sense. Next time I go to the bowling alley I am going to ask for bowling flip-flops and use a duck-pin puck instead of a ball. You can’t tell me how to do this Mr. Bowling Alley Operator, after all what are you going to do spray me with the shoe disinfectant?