Awaiting Funding

The last month was a bit tedious but I was earlier invited to propose a book outline that covers all of my exploits and learning while assisting clients in their realization of application performance management. This blog will cover those developments leading to the publication of the book and the feedback on the book once it gets released to the public at large. I am optimistic that this will happen, even as a small issue of funding remains in limbo.

I have been at this crossroads a few times before. While IT organizations, in general, would benefit from a thorough discussion of this topic, product management is not fully on board. A good part of this is because the techniques are largely vendor-neutral. This is important because the marketplace has matured and only a few players remain. Of those players, only one is in growth mode and continuing investment. It is believed, by some, that releasing these best practices and understanding of the marketplace will give these ailing competitors a second chance. My view is that by educating our potential customers, and helping them utilize their existing investments (even with competing tools) that we will increase their pace of adoption and they will naturally choose to partner with the stronger player. Fortunately, sales already knows that this approach will accelerate adoption, and thus license revenue. Getting these techniques in book form simply scales the number of interactions we can support. Who will win out?

The book will be based on my library of presentations and discussion papers which, to date, has been limited to client engagements and internal training. Public notice of this body of work is limited to a single event, in November 2007, where a reporter wrote an unauthorized story about a presentation by one of my clients where they discussed how they had establish a Performance Center of Excellence and was practicing true, proactive management of their application lifecycle. That's a lot of buzz words but given that it was done largely with their own staff, and had already demonstrated value, it came as a bit of a shock, compared to the much longer periods that such IT initiatives need in order to show some success. There were some services, of course. I led that initiative and a number of other similar programs, in what we call the "Mentoring Model". I've seen things...

Anyway, this single event launch a number of sales initiatives, based on the concept of quickly building client teams and following our APM Best Practices, to dramatically increase the pace of adoption of APM Tools, and the value realized when employing these tools. This resulted in a remarkable quantity of deals, each in excess of $10M in new product revenue. None of these deals had services attached to them, which is both annoying (I'm in professional services) and illuminating. We will still do some services with these clients but it will be of very high value and limited duration. Not at all like the large staffing and long duration of traditional IT initiatives.

What is this APM marketplace? Why does it warrent such investment? What kind of value does it return? How do you get started? What are these APM best practices? How do you build your own team? These are all topics which the book will present and discuss. It is a topic that I believe the world needs to know about. But I am largely constrained by the proprietary and confidential nature of my work - so my employers' commissioning of this book is an essential piece of the puzzle.

Historically, in my career in the commercial software business, I have been at this precipice three times already, in having a large body of internal-only materials, and a marketplace starving for guidance, direction and illumination. Is this fourth time the charm? One of my mentors had suggested, a few years back, that no one can fail when they listen to the customer and find a way to give them what they need. I've got it all together this time. I've kept the faith. But I really need to see it happen... once!

Now if I can only get the funding to bring it to light.