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Tag: Partnership

  • Multi-tenancy in platforms

    Multi-tenancy in platforms

    If you’ve built a monolithic enterprise product, it is not sensible to convert it to multi-tenancy. You can sell a managed service provider (MSP), but you’re not going to get to software as a service (SaaS). Often no one wants to discuss reasoning at all, because the need to convert…

  • Why is open source content rare?

    Why is open source content rare?

    Open source community incentives are biased to prefer developers over content creators. Open source communities are particularly prone to this failure mode. After all, the developers in the community are all doing their work for valid reasons, so why wouldn’t content creators join them? Hot take: the incentives are different. Open source…

  • How to manage a Proof of Concept

    How to manage a Proof of Concept

    POCs as a concept are a response to customers getting oversold. As a vendor we’d rather skip the whole thing and trust our sales team to scope properly. As a customer we’d rather not spend time testing instead of doing. Sometimes they have to be done though, and it’s best…

  • Licensing thoughts, round two

    Licensing thoughts, round two

    License Models Suck got a lot of interesting conversations started (and there’s a roundup page), time to revisit from the customer’s perspective. Let’s also be clear, this is enterprise sales with account reps and engineers: self-service models are for another day. As a vendor, the options I describe seem clearly…

  • Engines and fuel – who writes quality content?

    Engines and fuel – who writes quality content?

    In software, everyone wants to build engines, and no one wants to make fuel. A platform for executing content has high potential leverage and lots of vendors make those. The expected community of fuel makers rarely materializes. Content for software engines breaks down along two axes: simplicity versus complexity and…

  • Dev and Test with Customer Data Samples

    Dev and Test with Customer Data Samples

    The short answer is don’t do it. Accepting customer data samples will only lead to sorrow. REDUCE THE DATA At first, you may look at a big data problem as a Volume or Velocity issue, but those are scaling issues that are easily dealt with later. Variety is the hardest…

  • It’s not a platform without partners

    It’s not a platform without partners

    What are the major decisions that a platform needs to make in order to balance incentivizing development vs. maintaining quality and control over their 3rd party app marketplace? Let’s look at this on three scales, in which the right answer for a given team is somewhere between two unrealistic and…

  • Where’s the Product in AI?

    Where’s the Product in AI?

    AI & ML products are harder than they look AI tech is obviously overhyped, and conflating with ideas from science fiction and religion. I prefer using terms like Machine Intelligence and Cognitive Computing, just to avoid the noise. But if we strip away the most unrealistic stuff, there’s some interesting…

  • Splunk Apps and Add-ons

    Splunk Apps and Add-ons

    Note, this is old stuff now… but legacy lives on even when new solutions become available. What are Splunk Apps and Add-ons? What’s the difference? If you’re still confused… it’s not just you. The confusion roots back to fundamental disagreements on approach that are encoded into every product the company…

  • Windex: Find Splunk apps that have index time operations

    If a Splunk app has index-time operations, it has to be installed on the first heavy forwarder or indexer to perform those operations on the data that’s coming in. If it doesn’t have those operations, then it only needs to be installed on the search head to perform its search…