Making Cloud Formations different by combining products and services to drive data delivery excellence (DDE).
Hi, I'm Paul and I write blogs to help process the thoughts in my head... :-)
AKA, the musings (post series link) of a slightly grumpy, battle hardened data engineer, technology strategist and enterprise architect.
Context
In the data industry, there are typically two types of companies that offer solutions to customers: independent software vendors (ISVs) and system integrators (SIs). If you aren't familiar with these abbreviations, ISVs are companies that develop and sell software products, such as ready made data platforms, monitoring tools and other supporting 360 wrappers. SIs are companies that provide professional services, such as consulting, implementation/engineering, or maybe training, to help customers deliver data solutions effectively. Both types of companies have their advantages and disadvantages but they also face some common challenges. For example:
Competition: our industry is highly competitive, with new business and technologies emerging/evolving constantly. Meaning both types have to constantly innovate and differentiate themselves from their rivals. A very pertinent point for this blog in particular!
Expectations: customers often have high expectations and demands from data solutions, such as performance, scalability, security and rapid delivery. Just to name a few. In this case, dealing with both the software demands and service wrappers becomes a challenge. If done badly or in isolation, customers can be left with high delivery entry points or a lot of up front technical investment before value and insights from the data is realised.
Complexity: cloud native data solutions can quickly become very complex, requiring a lot of technical expertise and resources to design, develop, deploy, and maintain outputs. Here suppliers have to deal with the technical and operational challenges either through product abstraction, intensive training or offsetting costs of resources by using near-shore/off-shore delivery centres. Meaning platform ownership can also become a factor if internal teams aren't skilled enough to deal with the technical challenges.
These challenges are not easy to overcome and can require a lot of investment and effort from both ISVs and SIs. However, we see a way to overcome these challenges by combining the strengths of both products and services.
For now, in the context of this blog, I would like to introduce what we are calling our Cloud Shift Toolkit. Subtlety alluded to by the feature image of this blog, I hope!
Cloud Formations is/will be a company that offers both products and services to deliver data excellence for our customers. We will not become (yet another) system integrator, with our toolkit we will be both an ISV and SI (using the legacy terms for these offerings). This means we can provide customers with the best of both worlds. The innovation and quality of products to access data, as well as the expertise and flexibility of professional services to assist with strategy, culture, adoption, engineering and training. Our new training catalogue has just gone live, by the way. Check it out here.
Please follow along with this blog series. There is a lot more to come.
Many thanks for reading.
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