Before doing what I do now I was always in system integrators/consultancies. Now that I'm on the other side of the boardroom table I've seen the whole picture and I have to say - we're playing right into the hands of the resellers, integrators and consultancies. If we're going to do this anyway we may as well be a bit more open about it. Let's go in up front and do it properly in a more formal, planned manner rather than stumbling from one bad decision to the next.
Therefore I have written this open letter to vendors everywhere outlining exactly what they need to do to take us to the cleaners:
Dear Sir/Madam
We're a web enterprise just starting out and we're teetering on the brink of profitability - we have a popular product and the business is expanding at a fearsome rate. We're running around like madmen trying to work out how to get the right balance between scaling our system, shipping more features and protecting our time to market. You've come in to meet us disguised as help - nice touch - and you're trying to work out how you can squeeze the largest possible cross-section of what you sell into our requirements over the longest possible timeline. Using these 3 big phases you can really stretch it out.
Phase 1 - hardware (AKA brute force)
Popular product, lots of customers, increasing load - get some bigger computers, we'll buy those. Next sell us some faster network, we'll need gigabit everywhere, some bigger firewalls and then how about load balancers? Let's go brand crazy and throw together some F5, Netscaler, Cisco and Foundry. Load increasing a bit more? Next size up computers please. Now we're a little scared too (evil hackers!) so let's have some Top Layer, maybe Netscreen and Juniper too. Uh-oh load is up again so more memory, more CPU please. Wait a minute, we're now out of bigger boxes in the x86 space? Can't address any more memory in a single node? I guess we'd better move into something like SPARC, jumping a whole class of computer - ka-ching!
Phase 2 - middleware (AKA short sighted)
OK we're still hitting capacity ceilings but now we worry equally about uptime. How can you help [yourself to our cash] here? The best tactic is going to be some really expensively licensed software that contorts scale and availability from products that just weren't built for it. Ideally we're looking for some second-rate results by forcing artificial distribution using things like GemStone, Tangosol, Veritas, CA, TimesTen. It'll also get us some failover (yay) but without delivering too much more actual availability (boo) since our application is blissfully unaware of the state of it's infrastructure. Tricky but lucrative times.
Phase 3 - consultancy (AKA told-you-so)
Now's the best bit - you get to sell us your most expensive, highest margin product - consultancy [meanwhile in the real world we finally agree on something; we're in a bind we can't buy our way out of]. So what's your advice? Decouple and distribute, scale horizontally, version data and services, isolate features and automate the hell out of the whole thing. Thanks for that (and ka-ching again). The most important thing to remember is not to ever let on that you knew this all along. Oh and if you're clever you can usually also work in some sort of licenses or something in this phase as you never really want to completely wean us off you.
So there you have it, think of this as your 12-step programme compressed into 3 easy stages - just do your bit (turn up with PDF's and nicely ironed shirts) and we'll do ours (make appalling decisions in our early product development) and together we'll milk us dry.
Yours insincerely
N. E. webscale business
Hang on this all sounds pretty sweet, why did I ever leave consultancy? But it's not too late! You don't have to put Capgemini, Dimension Data or Logica's children through college if you don't want to! You just have to think differently now. You're making a product you intend to be successful right? You intend for it to be popular, right? Well decouple, distribute, scale horizontally, version data and services, isolate features and automate the hell out of the whole thing now, today! You will end up doing that (or die trying) anyway, it's just a matter of how much it costs you on the way.
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