devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: small and medium enterprises

  • What Customers Need From Sales and Marketing

    What Customers Need From Sales and Marketing

    There are plenty of historical examples of good solutions being buried by inadequate or outright wrong sales and marketing tactics. As an analyst, I often talk to the marketing, marcom or AR/PR department of a company and think they could do their solution more justice. Normally, it is little things; sometimes, not so much.

    But there is one industry-wide thing that I would like to see changed because it impacts all of us and is endemic.

    We don’t want to hear about your five biggest customers. We’re thrilled that you sold into several Fortune 100s. But you spent those five slides of your presentation basically saying the exact same thing five times: “We sold into a Fortune 100!” (or 500, whatever). You lost the opportunity to expand the message to “… and we support all organizations.” The idea that supporting a company with a run rate larger than most nations is in any way relevant to supporting small-to-medium-sized enterprises is mistaken. Talking about an example of a large customer helps us to understand scalability and support levels. Then, we want to know how that works for the rest of the market because most organizations are not Fortune 500s, by definition.

    Tell us how the product is used in organizations closer to our size. Instead of five slides about massive multinationals, include the best two that showcase the product and its benefits. Then, use those other three slides to talk about the wider market. People expect that large enterprises like the Fortune 500 pay more in raw dollars and get more support in raw hours. They want to understand how that relates to an organization their size. Because if you don’t work at an F500, information about F500s has limited usefulness.

    I recently had a presentation with a vendor; I love the technology, have been following them for years and use their solutions in a small business (not the reason for the presentation, but an expression of my belief that they offer a good solution). And their presentation was all about how well they serve large organizations. Thing is, they do a great job of serving small organizations, too, but unless you were an analyst like me, you would not have known that from the presentation. I get a lot of briefings, so while this one spurred me to write this blog, they are not the only ones, by far.

    So do us a favor: Give us presentations that are relevant to the entire market, not the subset someone told you is “most important.” It is, indeed, impressive if the solution can scale to multinationals and it is relevant. Just don’t obsess about it; we need to know if it supports our architecture, tooling, etc.

    We’re here rocking it every day, you should bring the broadest focus you have to let us know if you can be part of the solution moving forward. If you don’t, well, we might just think our business isn’t all that important to you. And we’re pretty sure most vendors don’t want that.

  • SMBs Struggle with Digital Transformation

    SMBs Struggle with Digital Transformation

    It’s a cliché, but it’s as true now as ever: The only constant in business is change. Digital transformation efforts are as essential for small and mid-sized businesses as they are for large enterprises—and SMBs are engaged in their transformative efforts for largely the same reasons as large enterprises: to engage more effectively with customers, streamline business processes and improve productivity.

    What is surprising, however, is many of the challenges small and mid-sized businesses face when it comes to their digital transformation efforts are also similar to those of larger companies.

    According to Insight 2020 Technology Report: IT Trends for Midmarket and Small Business, a survey-based report from IT services provider Insight, even as 95% of IT professionals who work at SMBs have implemented, or plan to implement within the next year, digital transformation initiatives, 49% said integrating new technology with legacy systems is very challenging to extremely challenging.

    Understandably, when survey respondents cited their top challenges when deploying the best available technology 52% said information security concerns, while 46% pointed to their ability to find the tools that best fit with their existing technology. Surprisingly, all three of those concerns surpassed budget constraints in importance.

    Respondents also cited cloud computing as the most important technology when it comes to the growth of their organization. Next up were data analytics, artificial intelligence and IoT.

    Fifty-six percent of small and mid-sized businesses said comparing cloud costs to current costs is their biggest barrier to cloud migration. That was followed by security requirements (50%). When it comes specifically to cloud, 65% of respondents said security and compliance are their primary challenges.

    The survey also highlighted that small and mid-sized businesses may need to focus on improving how they engage with IT services providers. The survey found 41% of respondents said they use from six to 10 IT vendors, with another 24% saying they use more than 10—not all is rosy in these relationships. Many respondents cited hurdles when it came to working with their service providers, and they rated the following as “very” to “extremely” challenging when working with their vendors:

    • Customizing solutions to business needs and objectives (44%).
    • Coordinating internal and external resources on complex IT projects (43%).
    • Vendors cater more to larger enterprises (43%).
    • Asset managing and juggling licenses from multiple providers (40%).
    • Vendors do not understand small business needs (40%).

    The survey did find that 64% of respondents believe their IT program is very flexible at adapting to organizational changes and growth, while 57% of respondents believe their IT program is well-equipped to implement new technologies.

    These challenges echo the challenges faced by large enterprises, such as those we covered in our post, Legacy Systems Prove to be Digital Transformation Headwind. And, of course, large enterprises have challenges with budget, security and talent constraints.

    The research was conducted online by M/A/R/C Research among 408 IT decision-makers at small and mid-sized organizations with 10 to 1,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada. The Data was collect from Aug. 29 through Sept. 6, 2019.

    — George V. Hulme

  • SMEs Can Benefit from DevOps, Too

    SMEs Can Benefit from DevOps, Too

    The DevOps approach has several clear-cut benefits with the value centered in several key business areas: improved market agility, increased quality and revised culture of cooperation and effectiveness in staff operations. By promoting and implementing a DevOps culture in your SME’s business, Dev and Ops teams align much closer together and can better share in-between knowledge. This lets you create products more fluidly and increase deployment rates. The time for evaluating the business idea, development, testing and moving the finished product into the operations department is reduced dramatically. Quality margins improve, and this feeds back into the ability of your teams to continually fine-tune the products you offer.

    Businesses see a point in adopting DevOps only if it is directly contributing to the company’s increased effectiveness, productivity and, of course, profitability. The only way that it is possible for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) is when their IT and DevOps teams are working in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs. And only a successful and timely DevOps adoption inside your organization will help your company beat competitors and stay afloat as the development across the industry speeds up.

    In the last years, we’ve seen a tremendous application delivery shift in businesses. We’ve moved away from the old ways of having large-scale system implementations based on one single project and its continued maintenance. SMEs now perceive application delivery as a continuous evolution. DevOps plays a leading role, as this software engineering trend ensures that such a major shift is possible. It brings all of the different parts of the enterprise together: business, development and operations teams collaborate on a different, more in-depth level with a goal of automating processes. This helps eliminate the usual constraints and takes the time-to-market issues off the table.

    In the latest ECS-Digital research on adopting DevOps in businesses, 57 percent of SMEs have partially implemented DevOps practices in their daily routine. The key benefit of DevOps for them is improved inter-departmental collaboration. But for the 43 percent that haven’t yet adopted DevOps, the collaboration issues are among the last priorities on the list.

    Step-by-Step Guide to a High-Level DevOps Life Cycle

    According to IBM Cloud Director, the end goal of a relevant DevOps practice is to cut the development time and improve enterprise’s efficiency. A growing business has to start from the “business needs” of the company and go down the road to make it come to life. The goal of adopting DevOps in your company is to push your business needs into production at a quicker pace more reliably. The goal in any DevOps practice is to cut the time and increase the efficiency of processes. You need to move from the “business need” to the “it’s live!” stage.

    Business Needs are a DevOps Priority

    But does your business have to get involved? Of course, your SME leadership focuses on the “business needs” of your company. But when we look at organizations that have implemented proper DevOps practices, the internal structure of the company shifts to focus on delivering great business results across the whole life cycle of your product/services offering.

    DevOps also ensures that employees have the ability to correct their work direction during the whole lifetime of a project. Things and goals tend to change, competitors may roll out some features that may make some of your project’s parts trivial, and all of this makes the need to adjust your project accordingly. This is easily done when your business need is close to both the Development and Operations teams that are able to steer and drive this alignment of goals.

    Have a look at the infographic below that clearly shows how a DevOps delivery cycle looks like:

    The Clash Inside Organizations

    Measuring the impact of DevOps on the things that matter to business is vital. Most SMEs are experimenting with DevOps, and there are some within the company who want to prevent DevOps adoption. The culture within enterprises is shifting too drastically and dramatically, although the effects are mostly positive.

    Such a shift is impacting all operations, with software development impacted the most. SMEs have it easier to change and adapt compared to larger businesses, and this lets them move the workplace culture a step ahead of their larger counterparts.

    If we look at business, operations and developer teams from a historical point of view, it was never a goal to establish inter-connection between them. The teams started cooperating only when it was absolutely necessary to get the other team’s input. SMEs are still faced with such a separation, as most responsibilities are set in stone for each team and the individual employee. All business units are used to working in their closed-in niche, and there is a lack of will to leave the comfort zone and act outside the predefined roles. Such actions in the past could have been viewed negatively.

    While most businesses that want to implement DevOps have employees who want the business to prosper, it can be difficult to force people to act outside their duties. However, to reach the end goals of any business—namely, ensuring fast and quality product delivery—and solve issues on the go, people must interconnect their duties and reach outside their business unit. With proper DevOps application, such collaboration can be smooth and result in the improvement of cross-functions.

    DevOps Represents Change in Internal Business Structures

    Many SMEs are faced with internal structural issues that limit the company’s prospects: Engineers are not willing to be on-call, the Ops team has a negative attitude toward those who write code and executives are slow to embrace automation. Organizations must overcome the culture war to be able to approach the agility and productivity gained by a DevOps model. The faster they can get there, the faster these organizations can take the competitive edge away from traditional enterprises.

    DevOps culture looks very different from organization to organization. However, regardless of the business implementing a DevOps approach, the potential benefits are the same. From faster deployments to increased efficiency and cultural changes toward experimentation and away from rigid planning, a DevOps culture has the ability to transform an organization completely. Wholeheartedly adopting a DevOps culture has real implications on how well a business is positioned to take on the market. With many industries facing uncertainty and a host of upstarts disrupting the status quo, shifting to a DevOps culture can be an important weapon in repositioning your business.

    Empathy is the Core of DevOps Adoption

    One of the foundational ideas behind DevOps is mutual empathy. Having empathy from operations toward developers and vice versa, as well as empathy in other business-related and non-technical company units, remains vital. It’s not about patting your colleague on a shoulder. We are talking about the moral mandate of a developer who just creates their part of the software and doesn’t care about how it can be deployed in production. The goal is to push employees to think outside of their small task, and to take into account the outcome of their work: Is the developed app secure? How hard is it to deploy it? Is it easy to keep it running? etc. If those questions are not accounted for, the developer’s colleagues on the Ops side will pay the price if something goes wrong past the release.

    By ensuring that the SME has empathy for each other at its core, businesses will deliver better products/services. And doing just that is what DevOps aims to bring to companies. Until this idea is ingrained, DevOps will face a cultural war of sorts.

    Your Most Valuable DevOps Resource

    By considering to adopt the DevOps approach to running your SME, you can better rethink the ways your organization operates—how it deploys its teams across the enterprise and how often it addresses structural problems that appear over time. Now you can lay out a new foundation for your SME based on the culture of cooperation and experimentation. With proper guidance in the application of DevOps culture, you can address the waste of time, human resources and money in your business.

    Becoming a DevOps organization is no easy task and taking up on such a challenge requires faith that changing the existing processes will bring its benefits. Reworking and optimizing organizations is the new norm, regardless of their size, industry, and goals. The faith in DevOps culture is driven by the firm and quantifiable statistics, but the intangible benefits to corporate culture are just as compelling. Many businesses are looking at implementing DevOps, and even more, SMEs are in the active process of its application. When your company is delivering quality ahead of time, there is a strong chance your competitors will be left behind as you are getting the bigger piece of the pie.

    Key Takeaways

    • To stay current, businesses need to adapt to an ever-changing environment, respond to competitors and stay on top of the innovation cycle, increasing customer value via responsiveness to change.
    • Increased service quality depends on both the availability of the service and being able to restore the service to an error-free state. Thanks to fast feedback loops and high release velocity, service breakdowns can be removed much more quickly than in the past.
    • DevOps are built on the sound principle of waste reduction such wait times and process overhead due to continuous improvement. This helps to improve agility and has a positive impact on costs.
    • Fostering continuous learning and improving culture through efficient principles is what DevOps is all about. In a fast-paced, unpredictable environment, non-stop improvement is paramount for sustaining your competitive advantage. It is also important for attracting exceptional talent and keeping employee satisfaction at a high level.

    About the Author / Stephan Pushkarev

    Stepan Pushkarev is the Head of DevOps Practice at Squadex.com and CTO at Hydrosphere.io. Co-founded and managed engineering teams for eCommerce, IoT and Ad-tech companies. He is responsible for the full products stack: math models, infrastructure & operations, enterprise applications as well as recruiting, establishing engineering culture and delivery processes. Stepan combines strong technical and managerial skills, and entrepreneurial spirit. Connect with him on LinkedIn.