Archive for the ‘Diann Bilderback’ Category
Wednesday, April 27th, 2011
What to make of the spectacular multi-day cloudburst last week when Amazon’s eastern region and all its Availability Zones went down, hobbling hundreds (thousands?) of cloud-based web sites? It sure got everyone’s attention, didn’t it? From The Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to minions of bloggers, everybody had a comment on the first major stumble in “cloudom.”
We at LaunchPoint and our divisions Ajilitee and Discovery Health Partners live in the cloud. We run our business infrastructure on Google and other service providers, and our client applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and we lived through this first major test of its durability and reliability. We say, “long live the cloud!” Amazon’s cloudburst was a mere spring shower, expected and needed to help cloud flourish.
Our perspective is this: no IT environment has 100% uptime and cloud is no exception. We just need to accept this reality and architect our disaster recovery plans accordingly. The Wall Street Journal (4/22/11) cited Forrester analyst Vanessa Alvarez, who said, “Amazon’s taking the hit today because they’re the poster child, but outages aren’t anything new and unfortunately they’re going to continue to happen. “
Architecting disaster recovery plans for the cloud means leveraging the capabilities of the cloud provider and considering the limitations and possibilities inherent in the platform. Once that’s understood, we can 1) tame our overblown expectations of cloud as IT nirvana ; 2) stop calling “chicken little” and recognize that our fears that the sky is falling are a bit overblown; and 3) realize that we are pioneering a new way to do business and problem-solving challenges as they arise.
Sure, we lost some productivity in the initial hours after the outage began, and one of our applications, the Discovery Dashboard, part of Discovery Health Partners’ healthcare cost containment platform, encountered an IP address hitch that we were able to fix with an adjustment. Our disaster recovery plan performed as planned, however, and we didn’t lose any data or suffer a breach. In the end, the outage was a speed bump, a blip…and a good learning experience.
The noisy aftermath of Amazon’s cloudburst was in fact more like a spring shower, forcing us all to pause and reexamine, considering our learnings. We learned how important it is to understand our host and the capabilities they’ve built into the platform to support high availability. We watch with interest as Amazon learns from this experience and figures out ways to help us, their customer, mitigate risk. Most importantly we gained an appreciation for the potential cloud has to reduce risk further than any other platform, reinforcing our decision to use the cloud to run our business. Where else can you extend your disaster recovery across geographies with a mix of strategies at a cost point that beats all alternatives? Our commitment reaffirmed, we say, “long live the cloud.”
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
On March 21, Ajilitee’s Groupon offer for 50% off a $25,000 consulting engagement ended. It’s been a fascinating three weeks, rich with learnings. At the end of the day, no one accepted our offer of a discounted one-week BI Best Practices Audit or a Cloud Opportunity Map. We knew this was possible, maybe probable. A big-ticket IT consulting offer had never been offered on a daily deals site before, and our approach was a first.
We wanted to know if a popular B2C model bringing together buyers and sellers in a new way could be adapted in a B2B enterprise environment. Can you fit a square peg in a round hole? We extended the deal to three weeks, allowed a year for exercise, and extended a relevant offer on the discount platform that would provide the most mileage for our experiment. Ready, set, go.
It appears the market isn’t quite ready for enterprise deals, which typically require months of decision-making time, executive buy-in and planning. These organizational constraints are a hindrance—our buyers in many cases aren’t empowered to pull the trigger on a big purchase without conferring with others, expenses need to be built into annual budgets, project resource allocations are already committed. It’s too different and it feels risky to be the first.
Our concept struck a chord with the market, though. In the past three weeks, we’ve heard about (and directly from) many deals sites that are springing up at this very moment to provide discounted B2B deals, mainly targeted to the small business market. Just to name some: Bizydeal, Bizdeals, BizGrouper, B2Bucks, GroupPrice, BIZcounts and OfficeArrow.
Will the enterprise buyer get there eventually? Our opinion is yes, and Ajilitee is on record to have broached this notion. It will begin with small businesses, who are more nimble, with less infrastructure and more individual empowerment. And it will probably focus on commodity-type products and services initially before branching out into more complex buys. Over time as the model becomes familiar and ingrained in practice, economics will draw in the enterprise buyer. And perhaps sites like Groupon will find more ways to add flexibility in their platforms to align with typical B2B buying cycles.
As consultants, our job is to keep our heads above the clouds and pay attention to what’s happening in the atmosphere. We were willing to test this out-of the-box strategy designed to help customers help themselves. In the end, no one did help themselves, but we think prospects will value our bold thinking nonetheless.
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011
Day 7. Ajilitee’s Groupon offer completed its official run on the Groupon site yesterday and entered a two-week extension here on the Ajilitee site. Are IT executives agile enough to take advantage of this really good deal? In truth, we really didn’t expect our enterprise buyers to move that deftly—their buying cycles just don’t lend themselves to impulse buys of the Groupon variety. Still we believe there’s something in the B2C model that can work for us B2b buyers and sellers.
Groupon apparently does, too, according to a recent Media Buying Online interview during which Groupon confirmed its interest in B2B potential for their platform. Click here for the full story.
Among the most interesting conversations we’ve had since our offer launched was a chat with Gary Slack of Slack and Co., a prominent national B2B marketing specialist headquartered in Chicago. The same week our offer rolled out, Gary announced BizyDeal, a new B2B portal that will focus on connecting B2B buyers and sellers, specifically in the small business sector. “We definitely see the same potential you see,” said Gary. “To be successful with a b-to-b deal site, you need to understand enterprise sellers, small-business buyers, distribution channels, procurement processes and channel-conflict issues.”
Spot on, Gary! We’re making our short list of learnings to share with everyone, and they include your qualifiers. They also include the thought that adoption has to occur in baby steps. Like eBay Business, which Gary’s team helped launch, it started first with individual consumers, migrated to small businesses and eventually won over enterprise buyers.
Any thoughts out there on how (or whether) B2B can leverage the deal of the day/week model? Is small business the obvious first target? Can enterprise buyers get around their organizational restraints to join the fun?
Monday, March 7th, 2011
It’s been one week since we launched Ajilitee’s Groupon Stores offer for a 50% off consulting engagement, a $25,000 value for $12,500. It turns out it’s the largest deal ever offered on Groupon. No buyers yet, but our intrigue with the possibility of adapting this B2C channel to a B2B buying cycle is shared by industry commentators, including cio.com and others.
To make this work, both sellers and buyers have to modify the way they interact. Sellers like us figure out how to be flexible when there is an opportunity. In our case, we extended the offer beyond Groupon Stores’s 7-day limit with an extension on our website to 21 days. Impulse buys are not common business practice, after all. We encouraged people to call us first because such discussions are always part of our sales cycle. And we’re allowing people a full year to exercise their purchase so it can be integrated into a work plan.
Now, are our buyers ready to think out of the box in order to take advantage of a really good deal? Hmm…a buying cycle that typically takes many months and involves group decision making and might involve a procurement department? Challenges are everywhere— especially for IT buyers bound by these processes. Business buyers with urgent needs figure out how to get things done, with or without IT.
“The readiness is all,” said The Bard (otherwise known as William Shakespeare). Social media buying is still in its earliest stages, dominated by consumer buying. We believe it’s only a matter of time before businesses will buy through these channels. After all, everyone wants a good deal, especially when they address burning corporate imperatives (like business intelligence and cloud computing). Stay tuned for more updates on this intriguing offer.
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011
That’s the question Ajilitee is asking in an unusual Deal of the Day running right now on Groupon through its Groupon Stores. You know Groupon, where you can find deeply discounted deals of the day in your home town on “things to do, eat, see and buy.” The one recently featured on the cover of Forbes Magazine as the fastest growing company ever? The company that just turned down Google’s acquisition offer of $6 billion? Yes, that Groupon, the company that connects sellers and buyers in a fresh new B2C channel and taps into our bargain-hunting culture. The question is: will it work for B2B?
We decided to find out by testing an offer on Groupon Stores, which is a new self-service platform for B2C businesses in which a business can construct an offer and use Groupon’s platform to market it to a wide audience. Can a B2B business adapt a B2C channel to move its products and services, especially when those products and services are complex like consulting services? What will those Marketing people dream up next?
We acknowledge this is an unusual go-to-market strategy for IT consulting services. In fact, to our knowledge, we’re the first enterprise consulting firm to try it. Yet, we’re intrigued by the way companies like Groupon and Living Social are changing the buy-sell model at the consumer level and can’t help wondering how (or when) this model could be viable for B2B. At Ajilitee, innovation is part of our mission, and as marketers, our job is to respond to trends and changing behaviors in new ways to see what’s possible. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
So here we have it, now running at Groupon Stores near you: Ajilitee is sponsoring two offers for 50%-off consulting engagements. These are very good deals, actually, for half off a week-long $25,000 engagement with two master-level consultants. The first is a Cloud Opportunity Map, which helps an organization identify the right area to pilot a cloud application. The second is a BI Best Practices Audit, which lets you analyze your BI operation against best practices. You don’t have to pull the trigger on the buy until you talk to us to be sure it’s what you want, and you have a whole year to exercise it once you do. Good value, minimal risk, big savings. Check out our merchant page at Groupon here, and more details are also available on our own website at www.ajilitee.com/groupon (no longer accessible).
So what do you think? Is it wishful thinking to believe consumer behaviors are valid in a B2B environment? Can B2B buyers and sellers wrap their heads around a Groupon Stores selling professional services, big-ticket hardware, or other complex B2B products? Let us hear from you…and stay tuned for updates on Ajilitee’s little experiment.
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Category Agile Business, Blog, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Diann Bilderback | Tags: $12, 500 deal, Ajilitee, business intelligence, cloud computing, Groupon,
