Cross-Functional On-prem Delivery
As software companies make the transition to embrace Modern On-prem, they’ll likely need to involve many different parts of their organization. Each org will have shifting responsibilities in this new world, so we try to cover how the move might impact them.
Engineering
Engineering teams that build software products are core to developing organizational competency when delivering to Modern On-prem environments. Some things that engineering teams will need to do well include:
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Release Management: Enabling dev teams to shift left when it comes to On-Prem development, exposing on-prem installable versions early in the development process.
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Deployment Targets: Architecting applications to run in completely offline environments, including using swappable dependencies.
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Observability: Codifying not just applications metrics but alerts and health checks and making these portable to on-prem environments.
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Cloud Native: Architecting applications to run autonomously in a distributed environment
Product and QA
Product and QA teams need to have fine-grained control over how and when software is delivered to end users, and vendors will need to develop competencies around ensuring that the right thing is shipped to the right users at the right time.
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Release Management: Gating releases out to different classes of users: dev, QA, beta, stable
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Deployment Targets: understanding what environments an application will be deployed to, and ensuring these environments are well tested during QA and product reviews
Sales, PS and Sales Engineering
A vendor’s pre-sales organization is critical to the success of any Modern On-prem initiative. These teams need to be able to deliver high-quality trials and Proof-of-Concept (PoC) projects as quickly as possible. Some of the key capabilities to consider for Sales, Sales Engineering, and Professional Services orgs include:
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Disconnected Troubleshooting: Leverage preflight checks and diagnostic analysis for quickly diagnosing issues, ensuring trials, PoCs, and production installations are smooth and successful.
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Embeddable components: for trials and PoCs, its important to minimize the amount of work an end user needs to do to provision servers, databases, etc. Its critical to ensure pre-sales teams are equipped with a minimal version of the application that has all of its dependencies embedded. For customers without Kubernetes, vendors should also consider embedding a Kubernetes installer with the application for PoCs.
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Licensing: Product assortment and pricing are core to sales strategy. Enforcing this properly involves building proper competencies in customer management and licensing.
TAMs, CSEs and Support Engineers
Technical Account Managers (TAMs), Customer Success Engineers (CSEs), and Support/Reliability Engineers (CREs) are all critical to maintaining a healthy and growing customer base. Some key competencies here include:
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Visibility into installs and customer activity: it’s important for success and support engineers to have visibility into what versions of the software end customers have downloaded, and which are running. For online installs, vendors should leverage tooling to show these teams which installs are live and when they last checked for updates.
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Disconnected Troubleshooting: when things go wrong, the speed with which vendor teams are able to resolve issues is critical to customer happiness and success. Building competencies around troubleshooting and environment analysis can reduce time to resolution by 80-90%.
