February 2nd, 2010
Most inane customer service #fail ever
I’d like to submit my experience today with cable provider ntl:TeleWest (part of the Virgin Media group) for entry into the all-time customer service Hall of Infamy. It really takes the biscuit as a lesson in how to rile your loyal customers and ensure their undying enmity. I won’t mark it down as an #epic #fail just yet, because it hasn’t been one of those painfully long drawn-out episodes (though that could still happen, of course). But in my view it certainly qualifies as one of the most inane examples from a broadband service provider of how not to treat customers.
First a prolog to set the scene. I phoned customer service to pay my monthly bill this morning, forgetting that the time was just before 9am. Yes, I know on the bill it says that “Staff are available to take your call between the hours of 8.00am to 6.00pm Monday to Friday.” But the bill stationery was printed a couple of years ago and for the past year, the customer service hours have been 9.00am to 5.00pm, as the recorded message reminded me when I got through (it’s not the first time I’ve done this). So I called back a few minutes later after 9am, got through to an agent and settled the account with my payment card. It wasn’t overdue and there were no problems on the account. In fact, the bill confirmed that I’d successfully moved onto the new call and broadband tariff that I’d ordered in January.
So this afternoon, I got on a call at 5pm my time (9am Pacific) to get an update from the product team at Intacct on their latest release, and shortly after we got talking, I noticed that my Internet connection had gone down. It doesn’t often happen, but in my experience any faults are quickly resolved so I wasn’t panicked. One of the reasons I pay extra (I’ve always rather smugly told people) for the ntl:Telewest business service is to make sure I’m not left for days on end if there’s fault. So I phoned up the fault line, quickly got through to a human being, and reported the problem.
My jaw hit the floor when the techician at the other end of the line explained what had caused my outage: “the Remedy profile is showing the subscriber as ceased/disconnected.” The only way to resolve the problem, he went on, was to call customer service. Whose hours (as you may recall) are 9.00am to 5.00pm.
Yes, ntl:TeleWest customer services terminated my broadband service moments after closing down their call center for the night, leaving me with no way to challenge and resolve the issue for 8, no wait, SIXTEEN hours (time that, for someone doing a lot of business both in the US and in Europe, is crucial). How inane is that?
I’m posting this from a local Starbucks, using my BTOpenZone account (which I suppose BT, in its smug way, would say is an example of a lost subscriber ‘coming back to BT’). I’m still fuming. I don’t need this unwanted extra hassle just now. I’ve paid a premium rate to secure a better level of service and I’ve been Read the rest of this entry »
January 29th, 2010
Mimecast's $21m shows strength of SaaS in Europe
This week’s news of a £13 million ($21m) funding round for UK-based email management provider Mimecast gives further confirmation of the vibrancy of the SaaS landscape in Europe, in terms of both market opportunity and the strength of indigenous players. I’ve written several times in the past about the lack of visibility for European SaaS vendors, while taking the opportunity to highlight notable companies such as Netviewer, NTRglobal, e-conomic and others. One frequently recurring feature is a track record of organic growth ahead of significant venture funding — in Mimecast’s case, its growth to date, garnering a 2,500-strong customer base, has been achieved with minimal seed funding. Now Index Ventures, one of Europe’s leading technology VCs, has contributed what’s being classed as a Series B round to fund expansion of Mimecast’s business in north America, where it already has 300 customers.
The news comes at the beginning of a week that will see the formal creation of EuroCloud, the new industry body representing SaaS and cloud vendors across Europe, at its inaugural European board meeting in Paris on Friday. I’m posting this from Paris, getting ready to represent EuroCloud UK and to meet the chairs of up to 15 other European countries from Sweden to Portugal and Germany to Ireland. With a membership of several hundred European vendors already, the EuroCloud project promises to dissolve the cloak of invisibility that SaaS and cloud players in Europe have found so hard to break through in the past.
That can only be good for adoption, which just like the vendors themselves, is not getting the visibility it deserves. When I spoke to Peter Bauer, Mimecast’s CEO, on Monday, he said something that intrigued me: Read the rest of this entry »
January 20th, 2010
Why Microsoft and Intuit need each other's clouds
Today’s announcement that Microsoft and Intuit are to marry up their cloud platforms with a software development kit makes perfect sense to me. Some of my ZDNet colleagues have been less impressed — Dennis Howlett calls it more PaaS to put in your aaS environment while Mary Jo Foley says it’s to shore up Redmond’s small-business cloud play. I don’t argue with either of those viewpoints (TechMeme has more) but I think there’s a lot more to it. To understand why, we need to delve under the covers of a cloud platform.
Last year, I started a long-term project to develop a framework for evaluating cloud platforms (disclosure: Intuit funded some of the initial work, which was published as an analyst report in October, Redefining software platforms, but it’s progressed independently since then). It’s timely today to discuss some of the core principles and what they tell us about the marriage brokered between Windows Azure and the Intuit Partner Platform.
Cloud platforms share many of the ingredients of conventional software platforms, but they add several crucial new ingredients. One thing that hasn’t changed is the need to build momentum among developers and customers for the platform. Intuit and Microsoft have plenty of both, which guarantees attention for what they’ve announced today. But the tie-up between these two giants is important too for the light it shines on the special characteristics of cloud platforms and how they change the game in so many ways for ISVs, developers and platform vendors. Read the rest of this entry »
January 15th, 2010
Why freemium is bad for business
I’ve never been comfortable with free products for business use, even though it’s difficult to avoid using them if you’re a small or one-person business (web analytics, for example, has been all but wiped out as a low-end paid service by Google’s free offering). As a long-term observer of the scene, my worry is that the track record over the past decade isn’t encouraging; many more free services have failed or faded away than have continued successfully. That’s why my New Year advice to SaaS and cloud vendors was to concentrate on “sound business revenues, earned in exchange for delivering real business value.” So yesterday I was pleased to read Lincoln Murphy’s newly published white paper, The Reality of Freemium in SaaS, which lays bare many of the drawbacks of the model for providers.
The trouble is, many SaaS vendors will still be tempted into loss-making freemium plays of the kind Murphy warns about because there seems to be so much demand they can tap. That’s why I want to devote this blog post to examining why businesses should spurn free online services. Dear Mr/Ms Customer, it is not in your interest to be lured into using free for your business, and here are four good reasons why not:
It means vendors don’t invest in proper access controls. Most low-end free services target individuals (’consumers’) and so they’re built around giving access to a single user. If you’re a business, you’ll probably want more than one user to have access to the same account, but that sort of access control infrastructure is expensive to set up and manage, so free services won’t support it. That’s fine if you can start off free and then migrate to a paid version when you need more access control, but many freemium vendors don’t offer that option.
Here’s what I discovered this week when I wanted Read the rest of this entry »
January 14th, 2010
When will the crowd turn against private cloud?
Following on from yesterday’s Forecasting Fisticuffs webcast (recording here) with fellow Enterprise Irregular bloggers Vinnie Mirchandani and Dennis Howlett alongside Appirio’s Narinder Singh, I tweeted a provocative prediction for 2010 that “Private clouds will be discredited by year end”. There followed a flurry of counter-tweets, most notably a challenge from Cloudscaling CEO Randy Bias to put my money where my mouth is.
That required a bit more clarity about what we’d actually be betting on, and the continuing conversation quickly showed up the constraints of Twitter’s 140-character limit. I resolved to dive into some of the underlying concepts in a blog post here today.
First of all, ‘discredited’. As I elaborated to SearchCloudComputing’s Carl Brooks, that means “No one likes using the phrase any more” — I was aiming to capture something halfway between the repulsion and embarassment people used to feel about, respectively, application service providers and intranets. People will still be using private clouds, but I believe they’ll feel increasingly ashamed or nervous of admitting it in public, except to fellow-users. The rest of the world will have moved on. I’m inclined to agree with Phil Morris that my timing was probably over-ambitious. Year-end 2011 or mid-2012 would have been a lot safer but hey, I wanted to be provocative. And I truly believe sentiment will have started shifting before the year is out.
Now let’s turn to ‘private’ and ‘cloud’. My definition of private is simple: not public. Randy Bias offered a list of defining features: “unshared, single tenant, self-service compute, storage, and network infrastructure.” He then went on to mention three varieties of private cloud: “virtual, external, or internal,” which is when I started to realize Read the rest of this entry »
January 5th, 2010
People-centric IT for a new decade
Continuing my review of emerging trends that are going to be big in 2010, here’s one that I suspect will be a defining theme for IT throughout the coming decade. In one of my favorite postings of 2009 back in September, I called this trend The democratization of IT. Developing those thoughts over the past few days on my ebizQ blog, I picked the term People-Oriented Architecture, which of course is a play on a more familiar technology term:
“I’ve used the term people-oriented architecture to make a deliberate contrast with our experience of service-oriented architecture in the past decade. Unlike SOA — which too often sought to remake the way that computers talk to one another without any reference to or consideration of user needs and business results — people-oriented architectures have to be developed collaboratively and iteratively with users and business owners, giving them as much freedom and autonomy as possible to control and manage information and processes to achieve the results they want. It’s an acknowledgement that people are both the commanding providers and the ultimate end consumers of any of the services in a computing architecture.”
Another way of looking at this is to agree with blogging colleague and SOA maven Joe McKendrick that SOA is moving into a low-key “roll-up-your-sleeves-and-make-the-stuff-work stage”, while the business and user context comes to the fore. As an ebizQ reader commented, calling it people-oriented architecture is to use same technology jargon that has kept IT apart from the users, who just want to get on with it and don’t care what it’s called.
Of course it’s been the Web that has been instrumental in putting computing power in the hands of users in a way that lets them get a job done without having to become computing experts. Many of the trends I write about, including cloud computing, software-as-a-service and enterprise 2.0, are at the forefront of bringing the same access to computing power into the enterprise environment. This is a highly disruptive process on all fronts, but I think the biggest pressure points surround Read the rest of this entry »
December 31st, 2009
Tips from 2009 for a prosperous 2010
A recurring theme ever since I started writing this blog (and indeed before) has been my concern to see more robust business models adopted by SaaS and cloud players. The second most-trafficked posting here in 2009 (and the most liked by those expressing a preference) was What have we done?, which appeared in February at the nadir of economic pessimism. In the ensuing months, optimism has made a comeback, and with it I’ve noticed a renewed enthusiasm for the revenue-lite business models I rued in that post. At a time when traditionally we wish each other prosperity in the New Year to come, it seems appropriate to review the arguments on both sides of the free-versus-paid debate. Is it better to use viral marketing to reach the largest possible user base in the belief that revenues will surely follow, or should entrepreneurs and start-ups rely on predictable customer revenue streams right from the outset?
I know that many VCs still favor the approach espoused by the likes of Twitter and Facebook, which uses venture funding to grow a dominant user base before worrying about revenues. Personally, I see some big flaws in this model:
- It’s difficult enough to pull off in the consumer market, much tougher still in the business market, even if you’re targetting the volume small business market or professional individuals.
- If people are going to point to Facebook’s growing revenues as proof that the model works, I’d urge them to look under the covers at where exactly these revenues have been coming from.
- It looks a bit too much like pyramid-scheme economics to me. There are a handful of well-publicized success stories, and hundreds of forgotten or unheard-of failures. That’s fine for the VCs who back the winners, but it’s tough on the entrepreneurs and angels who lose out.
My preference, often expressed throughout the year, is for sound business revenues, earned in exchange for delivering real business value. I think this is especially true for providers that target the small-to-mid-sized business market, since these in the main are organizations that themselves earn their revenues by producing real goods and services of value and selling them to customers. This is a sound, stable, reliable source of revenues that’s relatively recession-proof if you spread your footprint wide enough. Selling concrete, measurable services plays well with larger enterprises, too, but it takes longer and costs more to close each deal, so you need to be careful you’re not spending more on customer acquisition than you’ll earn back once they finally sign up.
Giving away some services for free still has a role as part of a marketing strategy to help get your company in front of prospects for your paid services — popularly known as ‘freemium’. But it must be carefully costed, monitored and managed — for more on this, see How to make freemium pay and What your bank can teach you about freemium. Too many start-ups are masquerading as would-be Facebooks or YouTubes — persuaded that they’re ramping up user numbers in readiness for Read the rest of this entry »
December 28th, 2009
Cloud delusions at the turn of the decade
Continuing my series of posts about the big themes on this blog over the past year, I now turn to the topic of cloud computing. My views on how to implement cloud and SaaS have hardened considerably over the course of 2009. Halfway through the year, I took a conscious decision to promote multi-tenancy as the only acceptable architecture for cloud and SaaS infrastructures. You might expect that from someone who makes a living consulting for multi-tenant vendors. But I’ve deliberately chosen a hardline and controversial stance, intended as a counterpoint to the many siren voices that argue for a more hybrid approach.
I still see migration to the cloud as a journey, but I’m concerned that too many people, especially with the advent of platforms like Windows Azure, have decided they can achieve all the benefits by going just some of the distance. This is a risky self-delusion, and the more people fool themselves this way, the more the cloud model will be discredited, not because of inherent weaknesses, but through implicit association with the disasters and disappointments these half-hearted implementations will bring in their wake. There are several different cloud delusions to beware of.
Amateur cloud. The year’s third most highly trafficked post on this blog was The cloud, no place for amateurs. It picked out two examples of established, reputable computing companies that had let down customers who were depending on them for computer operations — in one case the victim was a single large airline, in the other it was a large number of mobile phone subscribers. Many reputable providers (and their customers) believe that enterprise size and computing experience are in themselves guarantees of the reliability of any cloud services they operate, whether for enterprise or consumers. This is a gross self-delusion. My follow-up post gave advice on How to avoid the amateur cloud.
Firewall jealousy. A related delusion is to put more trust in your own organization’s security measures than in those of a cloud provider’s — even if the cloud provider employs many more security staff in round-the-clock shifts, has significantly more security expertise and operates much better processes based on the highest level of best practice. This ‘not my firewalls’ mentality — a variation on ‘not invented here’ — is especially egregious if your Read the rest of this entry »
December 21st, 2009
Spare me your cloud security diatribes
If I read one more article about what MIT Technology Review in its January lead story is calling “the security problem inherent in the size and structure of clouds,” then I swear I am going to burst a blood vessel. This article is a classic of the genre, beginning with an absurd screed about “computer security researchers” who “posited … kinds of attacks” that “might … work in clouds when different virtual machines run on the same server.” A second team tried this out on Amazon and “succeeded in placing malicious virtual machines on the same servers as targets 40 percent of the time, all for a few dollars.” They didn’t actually steal any data, mind you. But the writer seems to believe we should all be very scared, because “the researchers said that such theft was theoretically possible.” Oh my goodness, how awful!
From this malevolently auspicious beginning, the writer then goes on to catalog the usual tirade of Reasons Why The Cloud Cannot Be Trusted. These include such revelations as the finding that “cloud services … are not without risk” and that “any breakdowns or hacks could prove devastating to many.” You don’t say?
I’m wondering when researchers at MIT are going to turn their attentions to the security problems inherent in the size and structure of buildings and cities?
It’s not widely known that, by studying architectural blueprints and familiarizing themselves with routine security processes typically followed by businesses, hackers could break into your offices and access highly sensitive data. Indeed, say researchers, it’s theoretically possible to download the entire contents of a corporate database onto Read the rest of this entry »
December 18th, 2009
The battle for your email in 2009
In my next few posts over the coming holiday period, I’m going to highlight some of the big themes that have been running through this blog over the past year, as well as flag up some important emerging trends that are going to be big in 2010. There are several stories I didn’t get the chance to write up, too, and I’m hoping to mention some of those in the course of the next few weeks.
Looking back, it’s obvious that one titanic struggle has loomed large over the SaaS and cloud landscape: the battle for your email. The year’s most highly trafficked blog post here was the story in March, Microsoft pumps cloud, trumps Google with GSK, when Microsoft Online Services revealed a 100,000-seat deployment by pharmaceuticals giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) of its hosted Exchange, Sharepoint and LiveMeeting service. Of course, any headline that mentions both Microsoft and Google is always going to attract a lot of traffic, but the icing on the cake here was some rombustious comments by Ron Markezich, corporate VP of Microsoft Online Services, about Google’s enterprise credentials, dismissing Google Apps as “a consumer service that’s not enterprise-ready.”
There’s no doubt that Google desperately wants to be taken seriously as an enterprise-class provider. The Google Enterprise team, whose product portfolio includes Google Apps and extends across the search appliance and a couple of other offerings, spare no expense to get the word out about their corporate wins. I was astonished a few months back to have a courier hand-deliver a press release the day Google announced a 35,000-seat roll-out of Google Apps at business services conglomerate Rentokil Initial. The box also contained a white mouse made out of candy, which, since it was lying on its side (see pic), I assumed was deliberately designed to represent a dead mouse (Rentokil is best known for pest control). My tweeted reaction inadvertently pushed the boundaries of good taste, incorrectly describing it as a “candied dead mouse,” which would have been totally gross.
Yet there’s still a question mark over whether Google is spending as much on actual investment in beefing up its Google Apps infrastructure as it is on promoting news of its customer wins. I know Google can point to its huge, seemingly infallible search and ad serving leviathans as living evidence of its planetary-scale infrastructure capabilities (in stark contrast to Microsoft’s recent 45-minute outage of its Bing search engine). But in a mirror-image of Microsoft’s Bing problems, Google is Read the rest of this entry »
Phil Wainewright is a commentator and strategist on emerging software industry trends. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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