Coté Memo #047: Selling a "platform" is one of the more difficult tech marketing tasks you'll ever do

Oct 01, 2014

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Tech & Work World

Quick Hits

eBay Inc. to Separate eBay and PayPal into Independent Publicly Traded Companies in 2015 - eBay and PayPal - Our Path Forward - well, that was fun while it lasted.
Yow!

Once PayPal is separated, what's the investment thesis for holding the legacy garage sale business? $EBAY
— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) September 30, 2014

Scores HipsterOps bingo!

Words missing from the Oracle PaaS keynote: agile, continuous delivery, microservices, scalability, polyglot, open source, community #oow14
— James Watters (@wattersjames) September 29, 2014

These Pivotal people are up to something. They have a lot of pieces. Need some crazy visions. Cream on top.

One of the creators of OpenStack, @jmckenty , has just joined Pivotal to work on Cloud Foundry.
— Jack Clark (@mappingbabel) September 30, 2014

The Quartz Way (2) - More in the evolving nature of "media" and who's got the story.
Ten Startups to Watch in Austin and San Antonio - hey, who don't like Austin?

Press releases should just be renamed "Inter-office memo"
— Chris Dancy (@ServiceSphere) September 30, 2014

NFV and all that - honestly, I don't really know what NFV is, but from what I can tell it's virtualization applied to telco gear. That's a huge market which explains why people are going nuts for it. Expect to see it mentioned a lot.
Amazon Partner Network for the enterprise is maturing - a 451 Research report for you.
"At Oracle, silver medal is first loser."" - They're nice people there in Redwood City, really. "You're talking about what..." am I right?

Rants galore

i literally have a list of entire industries to burn and i don't even have the time to do it help.
— Shanley (@shanley) September 30, 2014

There's few people who speak their mind more openly and helpfully than @shanley. At least there's someone throwing bombs.

I've enjoyed her weekly (daily?) rants on the OpenStack community of late.

Selling a "platform" is one of the more difficult tech marketing tasks you'll ever do

I was discussing platform marketing recently in email. Here's an except.

I think the market challenge [in selling a platform or "all inclusive middleware"] is forcing yourself to take on the perceptive of a blind man describing an elephant. You want so badly to be the man with two eyes describing everything; you want to go all Plato. That doesn't work well early on, it's too much for "the market" to consume, and they move on to simpler pitches.

Something like Apcera gets attention because it has fame behind it and they categorize themselves as a "PaaS," a well know category (on the other hand, "PaaS" is a very confusing term once you look at more closely!). They enter into the conversation with these two things and then can helpfully deflect to being "policy driven" (a "fabric"), which a difficult concept to understand.

Sidebar: do you remember when Microsoft and VMware were going on and on about "fabrics" about 3-4 years ago? There was even vFabric! I never really understood what they meant (from their slides, not having dug into it) and I suspect the market didn't either.

You use a good word below [in the email I'm responding to]: "orchestration." And taking on that servicing the blind man and his elephant mentality, that might be a good way to describe these new types of platforms and middleware: we orchestrate the execution of enterprise applications. The thing to do is to pretty much stop there and just go out with that message. Describe what the problem is, what "orchestration" means, and then slowly trickle in your actual technology and how you're different.

What's frustrating to me is the conversation around things like Mesosphere and CoreOS. Both seem cool, but there's very little talk about the business use of those technologies. Are we just talking about running "stateless" web and mobile apps (read: NOT enterprise software), or something else?

To go even more abstract, one of the problems I see in the developer world at the moment is that there's very little "business analyst" think: that role that used to sit between the customer and the developers that understood the processes and needs of business and could tell the developers what that meant for code.

I don't expect developers to map out business processes, but I think most platforms out there do. Developers need help understanding those processes. And once developers understand that their job (largely) is to write the code (or build the system) to automate and "computerize" those business processes, I think platforms slot in well. Instead, the developer world is so focused on consumer tech that the idea of a complex decision tree of events, workflows, etc. always seems foggy and foreign.

Thus, I think many "enterprise" platforms get a frustrating reception in the wilds of the web. If you remember the old Crossing the Chasm advice, the first thing you need to 5-10 good reference customers who can explain to their peers what the problem is and how it gets solved. Early on, selling the technology for the technology sake is difficult. This is also why so many "platforms" seemingly start as open source: they build up momentum and "reference customers" by giving themselves away for free for awhile.

Fun & IRL

Today's inside jokes entry: "crazy visions! Cream on top! WOOOO!"