We’ve recently gone through some exercises here at Veeam as we prepare for 2010. Of course we’re working on our sales goals and marketing plans, but we’re also talking about our product set for 2010. One of the most often questions I get asked by our sales teams at quarterly business reviews (QBR’s) is what is our roadmap and can they share it with customers and partners? This is always a tricky question since if we give too much away we risk our competitors finding out and getting to market first with certain functionality. If we don’t say anything it makes us appear like we don’t know what we’re doing or where we’re going.
Since we’re getting ready for our 2010 kickoff meetings we’ve had a lot of discussion about roadmaps and the Veeam philosophy on sharing product directions, specifically around Veeam Backup & Replication. We need to give something to our sales teams to share with partners and customers but at the same time we need to protect our intellectual property (IP) and also be able to react to an ever changing market.
We’ve also watched as other vendors and competitors have talked about their roadmaps and plans for the future and then continually missed their release dates or promised feature sets. Does this mean they’re lying to their customers? I would tend to say no because at some point they truly believe they’re going to make their release dates but then something happens and they miss it. Customers and partners are now left waiting and wondering when the next version will be coming out…the more times this happens the more and more customers will no longer trust you and start looking at other solutions.
Time, Features and Quality
These are the words our development lives by. Anytime someone asks for more features, it takes more time. Want it faster? Then features will get dropped. Of course development could achieve both but then they end up delivering a poor quality product because there wasn’t enough time to test all the new features (see the relationships here). Some might say just throw more developers at it but then of course there’s the saying: “9 women can’t make a baby in a month”.
The other issue of locking in feature sets too far in advance is what if there’s a great new feature that comes along that more and more customers are asking for and you promise to deliver? Do you ditch your previous plans and deliver the new feature? Do you wait until you deliver what you originally promised and then add the new feature? In either case, someone is going to get called a liar and that’s not good for customer and partner relationships.
It’s the History, not the Future
One of the things I learned early on in the software industry is “sell what you have”. If we don’t have features X, Y and Z today but we do have features A, B, and C then that’s what we’re selling. If I try and sell you X, Y and Z and promise you that we’ll have them at a specific time in the future, I’ve most likely just lied to you. But there is a fine line…if I know development has features X, Y, and Z “feature complete” and we’re now going through testing I’ll let you know. I still won’t tell you exactly when except for maybe something like Q1 or beginning of Q3. Again, I don’t want to lie to you, something may come up in testing that delays the product, something significant enough that it would put the quality at risk and we won’t knowingly release poor quality products to the market.
Rather than trying to sell the future, why not take a look at the history? The truth is, history tells more about a company than any roadmap promise of the future. History is verifiable, history is real. Roadmaps are the future, the future may change, history doesn’t. If a vendor is trying to sell you on the future and not on today, what does that say about the quality of the products or feature set they have today? Are they lying to you?
I’m very excited for the upcoming release of Veeam Monitor 4.5 with Veeam Business View integration. While we released Veeam Business View a few months ago, we are now getting our products aligned with how it works and how it enables you to start taking a “business view” of your virtual infrastructure rather that just an “infrastructure view”. Monitor 4.5 will show the Business View tree from within it’s interface, making it very easy to set alerts, create reports and in general just see how things are performing based on the business category or group. This includes even setting alerts by service level agreement (SLA) or by application. Virtual Machines are not limited to 1 dimension, they can be in multiple categories/groups. The video below (featuring the voice of yours truly) goes into more detail of what’s coming up and shows the power of Veeam Business View along with Veeam Monitor 4.5.
On YouTube:
The best part in my opinion? Veeam Business View is free and Veeam Monitor has a free edition. You’ll get all this capability without spending a penny! Of course there are some limitations on Veeam Monitor Free Edition, here’s a summary:
real-time monitoring only (24 hours of history)
real-time reporting only (24 hours of history in report)
10 alarms
no alarm modeling
no VM/ESX/VC drill-down (process monitoring/management)
no access to datastore load monitoring (other datastore graphs are available)
Veeam Monitor 4.5 should be available in early Q4, sign up here to be notified.
While I generally reserve this blog for all things Veeam related, I saw something today that I just had to write about. There’s a software solution called HyperIP from NetEx that makes vMotion of VM’s possible over WAN connections. “Too good to be true” you say? Well, I’ve seen it and we’ve also done testing ourselves and with some of our partners and not only is vMotion possible, but if you’re using Veeam Backup & Replication you can get a significant performance increase in copying data over slow or high-latency connections. If you’re considering “the cloud” you really should check out HyperIP combined with Veeam Backup & Replication.
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