1/ When delivering software to enterprises, you usually must also provide support for all software used under the covers. Example: if you depend on Redis, you or SOMEONE need to support Redis. Makes sense, right? If your dependency causes YOU to go down, you need support.
2/ This seems obvious, but has surprising implications. One, you can’t shrug when a customer asks where to get that support. Either you provide it or you suggest someone because your own sales deal isn’t closing until they figure this out.
3/ It’s a double edged sword: if you suggest someone and that someone does a poor job, it’s going to reflect poorly on your software cause your software is still down. You need to find good, high quality partners. And you’re trusting them. Scary.
4/ Or you’re providing support and you need to build a team with expertise on that product. And it’s not just surface level expertise, the failure scenarios where support is involved are usually MESSY. This needs to be an “A” team.
5/ Another issue is that support companies and startups are relatively discouraged vs software companies. So there are usually very few companies that can provide enterprise level support for software. This kind of forces in house expertise. 😔
6/ Finding support partners, maintaining that partnership, building materials to train/educate, AND having some in house expertise is all very time consuming and not easy. That’s why for example we only currently will sell Vault Ent backed by Consul.
7/ We want to support more of the storage backends. They probably work fine in most scenarios with enterprise, but we can’t because of actual physical support. 🧐
8/ A much harder challenge is finding support partners and expertise for new (less than 2 years old) but very popular software. The tech might be phenomenal but enterprises still need a support option.
9/ We need more support companies.
10/ This thread is not motivated by anything in particular, just part of a broad series of “Tidbits of serving the enterprise”
