News archive

27 Apr 2005
Ferris Research Weblog: Snapshot: Veritas/KVS Enterprise Vault

Ferris Research provides a great summary of the RTM-ed (yesterday) Veritas-KVS Enterprise Vault, including the new core features & benefits in their version 6 release. I've excerpted the main new features breakdown:

Main Features of New Version 6:
· Extended categorization. Allows the categorization taxonomy for messages to be defined dynamically via XML rules. This capability can share a common set of criteria together with archive filtering (see below.) It also establishes an interface to integrate with document and record management systems
· Automated PST discovery (process searches network for PST files, inspects registry entries, identifies owner, schedules migration, monitors and audits the migration)
· Support for additional sources of archived content, including SMTP, Lotus Domino mail, and SharePoint 2003.
· SDK. API access now includes control of storage, search, migration, and other services.
· Hosting. Customers can now use a single copy of the software to support multiple clients. This is useful for service providers and certain large organizations servicing departmental groups.
· Archive filtering. Similar to extended categorization, this allows dynamic inspection of messages applying conditions specified in XML rules
· Veritas NetBackup integration. Historically Vault was disk oriented. Through integration with NetBackup Media Manager, other media are now supported, such as tape, CD, DVD, optical drives.
· Improved administration with centralized policy administration for multiple archiving types (eg, Exchange, SharePoint, files), enhanced system logging features, and a plug in for Microsoft Operations Manager.
· Expanded storage options with support for IBM DR550, and improved EMC2 Centera support for privileged delete and retention classes.

Release Date. V6 launched on April 26, 2004, available in Summer 2005

13 Apr 2005
Evrything you ever wanted to know about how Outlook, CDO, MAPI, and Providers work together -- but were afraid to ask.

Jason Nelson, from the Exchange Sustained Engineering team, has a very comprehensive post on all-things-MAPI. It's a great summary of what is doing the heavy lifting at any point in time within the plumbing & interfaces of Exchange/Outlook operations...

10 Apr 2005
Microsofts NEW provisioning solution for Windows-based Hosting

This is very kewl, and quite overdue; as we execute against software-as-a-service model everyday, MPS will be sure prove it's value in the subscription-services category VERY soon...

26 Mar 2005
:: Under the Buzz

I've been reading Philip Lay at TCG-Advisors for a few years now (subscribe!), and this issue is incredibly useful -- I've excerpted the business case portion, and urge you to read the entire Newsletter as well....

Building a Coherent Business Case to Sell Your "Solution"

Virtually without exception, every enterprise systems or software vendor today is in the grip of a painful transition from a fundamentally product-centric approach to a more 'solution'-focused one. For those many hundreds of companies today that are run by executives whose mental models about how to 'close' enterprise-level sales took shape during the 'open-systems' era (i.e., starting with client server, then initial internet eras), this shift requires more of a transformative change. In short, it implies much more than a simple modification in 'messaging.' Just saying the magic word 'solution' - then bundling up some products and services into a new package does not make it so.

Perhaps the biggest test of companies' new solution focus occurs at the moment when a sales team initiates the 'needs analysis' phase of a dialogue with a new or existing customer. Let's assume that the team hits pay dirt: the prospective buyer agrees that there is a problem, and that in principle the approach the vendor is describing makes sense as a potential solution to all or part of the problem. This is when the time is approaching to start building a real business case to justify the customer's investment.

Unfortunately, this is also where sales teams come up short. By going along with the customer's description of the anticipated benefits that they are comfortable with, sales teams often find their case limited to easy-to-pin-down 'tangible and direct' benefits, such as direct savings in personnel and other operating expenses directly associated with the business problem as it occurs today.

The lack of clarity about which potential benefits customers are willing to consider as 'tangible' or 'direct' or which 'intangible' or 'indirect' benefits they are willing to include in their assessment, often results in a less-than-compelling business case. This in turn reduces the perceived value of the proposed solution, and also weakens the customer's sense of urgency to adopt it. Overall, it will tend to produce one or more of the following outcomes, none of which is positive for either side:

• The price the customer is willing to pay will be (much) lower than it could/should be;
  
• The time required to close the deal is lengthened, sometimes dramatically, for lack of a 'compelling' case;
  
• The chances of closing the deal at all are reduced, or even eliminated.

The truth is that, left to their own devices, the majority of customers will adopt a pragmatic or, more likely, conservative view of the likely benefits to be achieved by implementing a new IT system to replace an existing defective mix of manual and automated procedures. This is especially true of middle managers, because they usually do not see themselves as 'authorized' to take into account positive impacts outside their direct purview. Furthermore, benefits to other operations inside the customer's organization may be dismissed as 'indirect.' Thus, particularly with respect to measurements in financial terms, they will tend to default to a relatively safe prediction focused on 'tangible and direct' benefits - the most conventional being current, identifiable operating expenses that will be 'saved' once the new system is implemented. Typically, any talk by the vendor's sales team or management about such benefits as 'improved customer loyalty' will be dismissed as nice-but-intangible by a skeptical customer, unless a clear logical connection can be made to the new solution.

Fig. 1: Fixing Broken Processes: Building a Business Case

One simple device that I have used to help clarify the dialogue with customers - in particular, to draw attention to what should be considered 'tangible' as opposed to 'intangible' benefits, as well as 'direct' vs. 'indirect' ones - is the 2 x 2 matrix in Figure 1 above, which for illustration purposes cites the example of a 'broken' customer support process.

While quadrant 1 alludes to the most obvious 'savings' that customers may readily accept to be the basis of their justification, quadrants 2 (tangible but indirect), 3 (direct but intangible), and 4 (intangible and indirect) relate to the areas of much larger benefit that are usually excluded from a business case that the vendor is aware of during the sales cycle. In other words, the customer may or may not be using these criteria to gauge the attractiveness and urgency of the investment, but the vendor will almost certainly remain ignorant of them unless they actively use this line of 'investigation.' For a number of reasons - ranging from lack of trust about how the information might be used against them to lack of confidence in being able to actually realize the benefits - even those customers who are well aware of one or more of these potential benefits will be reluctant to bring them to the vendor's notice without the information being 'teased' out of them. To achieve this, it is not necessary for the vendor team to be devious or manipulative, but to refuse to accept just the tangible/direct benefits as the only important ones.

In the example above, it is not vital that the sales team be experts in the customer's specific situation. However, at the very least, they should be expert enough to know the benefits for each quadrant that are generally achievable by companies in the specific industry segment. Thus, in this case, the team should be armed with industry figures relating support call resolution to increased maintenance renewals. They should also have sufficient process-awareness to know how to connect onetime support call resolution to other parts of the customer relationship management process, including details about how much other functions as well as management will benefit. Finally, they should be able to use this matrix to ask probing questions about the connection between the importance of faster call resolution in driving customer references leading to increased sales from existing and new customers. While it is not usually feasible to put precise numbers on any of these other three classifications of benefit, customers will usually be willing to attribute financially related values to them if the sales team probes with sufficient diligence and patience.

In the end, a business case is not to my mind the same thing as a financial case; the former provides evidence of how the proposed system will materially improve the customer's business, generally in more than one dimension; the latter is a component of the business case that provides corroborative evidence of what this looks like in financial terms. Thus, for example, the effects of improved customer loyalty may be felt in an 'intangible' way, such as by allowing the company to achieve a level of excellence and well-being with its customers so that much less executive time needs to be spent doing damage control with unhappy customers. If sales teams - supported patiently by sales managers and executives - are willing to conduct a dialogue using this type of approach, there is no doubt that they can achieve dramatically improved results."

Great stuff!

25 Mar 2005
Redmond | News: Startup Offers Clustered Exchange Server With Managed Maintenance

Seeing as it's Friday, and the end of a long week, I'm gonna do a little tootin' of my own horn -- Azaleos emerged this week from 11 months of being "cloaked", during which time we engineered an amazing offering that furthers Exchange Server 2003 existing innovations...and things are really starting to take off! It's been 10 years since I was part of the leadership team of a start-up, and given our pedigree (and the fact we're mostly ex-softie's), the culture has really got critical mass & momentum...

"Azaleos Corp. calls its new OneServer an "e-mail appliance." The idea is to provide customers with a highly-available turnkey server "appliance" that sits behind the customer's firewall. Azaleos then sells the customer a "subscription" -- a multi-year contract -- to provide patch testing and management, real-time monitoring and administration.

"The Azaleos messaging solution appliance is a true enterprise-class appliance integrating hardware, software and managed subscription services into an integrated, scalable solution, according to a company statement."

Stay Tuned!

24 Mar 2005
The Synthesist - software_platforms

As another big fan of Clayton Christensen, David Stutz did an excellent job of distilling Clayton's views on "the conservation of attractive profits", as cross-referenced by Ray Ozzie's observations on software-integration & interoperability.

It's from 2004, but Davids views on WinFS are interesting: "Microsoft's heavily touted WinFS storage subsystem, should it ever see the light of day, represents an interesting new platform, one that is could be extremely useful and therefore support a large ecosystem. In the absence of commodity (replaceable) implementations, however, its schema-based extensibility will fail to become universal in the same way that Microsoft component models have failed to become drivers of commodity value. Microsoft is very unlikely to seek to erode their margins by what people in Redmond sometimes refer to as "premature standardization." Because of this, although I agree with many of Ray's observations, I disagree with his predicted outcome. Rather than becoming the basis for a powerful network driven by the commodity exchange of schematized XML data, WinFS is more likely to be just one more in a string of proprietary Microsoft extensibility mechanisms."

Subscribed...

09 Mar 2005
Meet the Exchange UE (User Education) team!

Welcome to the blogsphere, UE-Team...their focus on making the Exchange TechCenter a VERY useful resource is a great objective...