On 24/11/2009, at 9:46 PM, Matt Hamilton wrote:
On 24 Nov 2009, at 04:36, Dylan Jay wrote:
... Acquia have shown up on a few 'Magic Quadrant' type lists from
Analysts. Not Drupal, but Acquia. Now Plone is not listed there at
all as it is just an Open Source 'project' and not a 'vendor' in
the traditional analyst sense. That said I think that is an
advantage ;) but I'm sure potential buyeers might not.
Someone recently pointed out that the role of most Gartner-type
analysts is not to comment on the suitablity of the CMS to your
particular organisation, but to just comment on whether the vendor
is going to be around next year or not. Hence why 'Plone' is not
on those lists as it is not a 'vendor', but it does make me think
we do lose out a bit on mindshare as a result.
Let me give you a concrete example why this is a worry. Recently a
state government main portal here was implemented using drupal even
though there was some large sites already implemented in that
government with Plone. Inside information said one of the main
reasons was one of the big 5 analyst companies recommended Drupal
(I think it might have been PWC).
Seems crazy but it makes sense when you understand how government
(and any large organisation works):
From the managers point of view, if the technology fails you can
blame the vender but if the vender fails you can't blame anyone but
yourself for not picking a better vender... unless an analyst firms
makes the recommendation and then you can blame the analysts. Like
all other forms of business, procurement is about shifting risk. A
managers career can be over if they take the blame for bad decision
but they just are just doing their job if they make the "right"
decision. This is why they pick the "safe" decision not the "best"
decision. This is the essence of why no one got fired for picking
IBM.
You could ask why not let the integrator take responsibility? Two
reasons
1) integrators tend to be small so a manager can be blamed for
picking someone "obviously" not up to the task.
2) If there is no obvious integrator to pick (2-3 in their local
area) then the manager has to then choose and therefore made a
decision which they can get blamed for if it all goes wrong. A lot
of times they will also select the "technology" first and
integrator 2nd (or better yet have the integrator recommended to
them) and they don't even think about the possibility of an
integrator being able to take responsibility.
If they look in the yellow pages under Plone they don't get
Pretaweb, they get nothing. If they look for sharepoint, they get
microsoft and microsoft will happily take them out to a game of
golf that the manager will conveniently win, do the sale and then
recommend an integrator. Everyone happy (except the end users and
the shareholders for shelling out $$$).
So what managers really want is a organistion to blame that no one
can blame them for choosing since its the "obvious" choice or
recommended choice.
All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about
recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that
most commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the
Plone community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite
fit with it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS
is different and often doesn't fit the existing model that customers
might be used to.
Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal
easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end
up with a 'Plone Acquia'.
Well Acquia are doing a lot of things now and have seriously split
their focus but when it started it had a very simple idea. They
were going to be a support company and no integration. That means
companies that were risk adverse can take a contact out with them
and feel comfortable. They is only one Acquia so it's the "obvious"
choice.
With Plone the is no obvious choice. In fact its more than that,
there almost was an obvious choice by default: Plone Solutions, but
they saw this as being a potential problem for the community as a
whole and to avoid confusion rebranded to Jarn. So as a community I
think we are quite against the general notion of an 'obvious
choice'. Or rather against the notion of
Well Acquia and Plone Solutions aren't the same thing. Plone solutions
was a integrator that competed with other integrators. Acquia is a
support company. It's much more like redhat.
*one* obvious choice for *everything*. I know that there are
specific companies in the Plone community that I would say are the
obvious choice (in my mind) for specific sectors or types of work.
But they have got there by proving themselves in that kind of work,
and not because they are the project's founder.
When I said "obvious choice" I was really meaning someone to demo
plone and someone to sue, not so much someone to do the integration
work. I think managers are used to evaluating many companies are their
service ability, but I don't think they are used to dealing with
multiple companies to evaluate a single product and for support. See
their confusion?
I get the feeling Acquia helps other integrators get more work rather
than compete for teh same work.
On 24/11/2009, at 1:25 AM, Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] wrote:
Thanks for the valuable write-up. Following up on Matt's point,
why couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor
rated by the analysts? Let them analyze the staying power of the
Foundation, the project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of
Plone that we're not capitalizing on enough.
I'm not sure that would work since they probably have no economic
model with analysing something that doesn't make money.
Another alternative is that we could perhaps create a federation of
Plone integrators purely for auditing/analysts purposes. If you
took all the reasonable sized integration companies and analysed
them as a whole you would come out with something that looked like
a large multinational company with a pretty big turnover.
Or better yet in the proprietary world you have value added
reseller networks attached to companies like microsoft or Avaya and
I'm sure the analysts have models for valuing those. Plone
commercially is essentially a VARs network without the corporation
running it in the middle. Unfortunately that would miss the huge
amount of value produced by internal integrators such as weblion
etc but it would be a start.
We need to be careful here as we have already tried this to some
degree: ZEA Partners. It is a 'federation of Plone integrators'. The
big issue though that was found with ZEA was things like
ah. I didn't mean with regard to bidding for work. I meant we all
supply out financial details to an auditor so that we can get an
aggregated figure of how much revenue plone makes globally. Question
is, if we release a press release saying the plone integrator network
makes 50M a year or whatever the figure is, then will anyone pay
attention?
Then again, how fo VAR networks do it in the commercial world? Does
each VAR who wants the work pitch independantly to the client?
They compete against each other and bid for work independently like we
all do. I think in some instances the product company might recommend
an integrator but I'm not sure how they choose which one.
Another alternative to to try to educate analysts that software is
no longer about products. Software is now a service. What this
means is that you ask for a solution and will get consultants and
integrators that will produce solutions from the best technology
for the job and often from many technologies. The myth of "off the
shelf" systems is just that, a myth. SAP isn't off the shelf and
neither is any CMS. Then at least managers would look for large
integrators that are suable instead of large product companies.
Unfortunately that's completely the other direction on how Plone is
currently marketed. It's a product and we're producing feature
comparisons as to why Plone is a better product than other CMSes.
Plus educating the market is a lot harder than changing ourselves.
I think that this is the best, albeit harder approach, but I think
the WCM market is heading that way anyways. From following the
tweets coming out of the JBoye09 conference it seems like many
analysts do understand this, and with the likes of SaaS and hosted
solutions I think they
SaaS really isn't such a good analogy. SaaS is much more like a
product than the plone ecosystem is. SaaS normally is a single company
which can be valued by auditors, selected by managers exactly in the
same way sharepoint or any vendor back product.
A better analogy is graphic design, PR, plumbing, IT management...
Anything that involves people not a product.
are moving that direction anyways.
I think the panel discussion at Gilbane should do quite a bit to
highlight this hopefully to those that attend.
Sorry there's no easy answers. but I'm going to have a discussion
with people I know in the big 5 and find out more about what we can
do?
Well actually that is another approach... partnering with one of the
big 5 or similar. Many years ago I had a meeting at Delliote with
someone about Netsight being the implementer of something they were
working on. Alas it didn't come to fruition and interestingly that
person left and is now head of a company specificlly dealing in
Alfresco and RabbitMQ work.
I agree. Anyone with connections to consulting companies, try and find
out how Plone could be made recommendable.
Another idea that I had this morning, which I think could be really
good: an 'Analyst Day' at the Plone Conference. Say we took one
day, maybe a day immediately preceding the conference (when training
is happening in parallel) and invite all the analysts we can find,
and customers etc (basically anyone in a suit ;) ) along to come and
find out about Plone. The day would just have a single track and
would be a mix of 'big picture' roadmap type stuff specifically
tailored to them (ie benefits, not tech details) and some case
studies. There were some fantastic case studies in Budapest, and if
we could ask the presenters to come along a day early and present
their case studies then (with a slight focus towards analysts) then
of course present them again later in the conference proper for the
community (with all the technical guts etc).
What do you think?
I think it's a great idea. Would they come?
There is only one way to find out which is to ask them. Alternatively
perhaps we could do the same thing at a more general CMS conference
that lots of analysts are already at?
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton [email protected]
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop.
Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk +44 (0)117
9090901
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