However, I saw it then and I see it now, regardless of whose tools are being used or how good they are, many customers are still frustrated that end-to-end the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) is still like an assault course, and very difficult for organisations to traverse. Communication barriers between roles throughout the lifecycle are still an issue today despite many ISVs looking to ease this pain.
So what? Well, I am very excited by CohesiveFT’s Elastic Server because I can see it changing the way organisations tackle the traditional challenges of the SDLC. Fitting in alongside many other ALM tools working within existing processes, Elastic Server will deliver significant speed, quality, and cost benefits across all roles throughout the SDLC, acting as the glue in the hand-offs between functions. And - add to this many positive Elastic Server by-products: better reuse of code components and patterns, reduction of operational risk, improved knowledge retention, higher staff morale, etc, etc
BTW you can start using Elastic Server today and unlike it’s imitators it’s free!
More details will come in future postings on SDLC (or drop me an email if you can’t wait), but today I want to focus on added value for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs).
For ISVs there’s a Double Win
ISVs come in all shapes and sizes, and all can benefit from Elastic Sever. I think the 'wins' are not just in Product Delivery and Data Centre Operations but also in the "sales cycle". ISVs can transform their whole pre-sales solution validation or Proof of Concept process, accelerating their sales success.
Wider, Shorter, Larger and more efficient!
That’s the sort of sales pipeline I like. Elastic Server allows you to widen your pipeline funnel, shorten your sales cycle and close more deals.Your pipeline can go
ELASTIC SEVER increases awareness, and makes solutions intuitive
For ISVs there’s a Double Win
ISVs come in all shapes and sizes, and all can benefit from Elastic Sever. I think the 'wins' are not just in Product Delivery and Data Centre Operations but also in the "sales cycle". ISVs can transform their whole pre-sales solution validation or Proof of Concept process, accelerating their sales success.
Wider, Shorter, Larger and more efficient!
That’s the sort of sales pipeline I like. Elastic Server allows you to widen your pipeline funnel, shorten your sales cycle and close more deals.Your pipeline can go
ELASTIC SEVER increases awareness, and makes solutions intuitive Ideally, enterprises customers would come to you after they know how to make best use of your product. But enterprise solutions have many capabilities, resulting in many use cases. Showing off all the relevant capabilities on offer to the appropriate people, can be a real challenge. Elastic Server makes it easy to create your own ”component portals”, each displaying representative use cases; use cases the customer can assemble and deploy at the click of a button.
Elastic Server allows you to easily create, save and make available (through your own micro portals) tailored instances of your solution. These are saved as templates and reused to create Elastic Sever versions of your solution whenever they are required. These Elastic Servers are custom application stacks, built from your solutions components, virtualization-ready, which means: ready to download or deploy to a cloud. So you can make as many instances as you need tailored or not, available on demand.
Your templates can be vanilla, or industry solution specific, or tailored to individual prospects. They can be easily reused, displayed, demoed and evaluated. Within your portals you can easily add your own branding, diagrams, and notes, effectively ‘white-labelling’ them, making your tailored micro portal more relevant to your prospect, more accessible and easier to follow.
Take a look at our example industry portal Universal Bank.
Of course you also have the option to make your portals public through the CohesiveFT Community site, sharing your solutions with our community (see the Mule Source case study below)
Struggling with lengthy Proof Of Concepts?
From my Borland days I recall often just doing a POC required long procurement cycles and getting executive sign-off. If your POCs need several days or weeks of your prospect’s architect, developer and data centre resources with a dedicated machine, then getting budget approval for a POC can be just as difficult as getting approval for a $50k, or $500k purchase.
With Elastic Server and clouds such as Amazon EC2 or Flexiscale you can shrink this whole process to just one day, and no machine resources are required! So your sponsor doesn’t need to go to the board or investment committee before they get a chance to prove the value of your solution. You can remove key barriers so your sales force can kick-off more POCs, faster.
A typical scenario of days or weeks to set up an enterprise POC, and having limited resource available can result in delays. In these situations it is easy for everything and everyone, to lose momentum. Imagine instead your pre-sales team selecting a template system that matches the prospects needs, then spending minutes personalising it for them, so within hours of agreeing to the POC you can email your prospect a link where they will find their trial system running. How impressive is that? Ease of implementation - score 100%. Efficiency: score 100%. However busy your sales force gets, your POC capacity can keep up. Your competition won't stand a chance ;-)
And if your prospects want to run the POC in-house on their machines then you have the option to rebuild to any major virtualisation format from your Elastic Server templates.
You also get more successful POCs and increased conversion rates.
OK – so you’re up and running quickly. Now let's make it business-relevant quickly, your prospects can have their very own private tailored POC micro portal. This lets the combined evaluation team collaborate, share, discuss, plan and improve. Everything the evaluation team needs to be successful is there: easy access to the tailored system, links and information e.g., evaluation criteria and score card, evaluation guides, FAQs, contact info, etc. all in one easy to access place. Blogging issues, solutions, ideas, feedback - the whole combined team can contribute and share. And for once your Account Managers are intimately involved at all key stages, monitoring activity and progress through to successful conclusion.
Check out the Mule Case Study. Our friends at MuleSource have built a public Elastic Sever Portal to show off their ESB solutions and allow prospects to test them in a real life environment.
You can access their portal at http://es.cohesiveft.com/site/mulesource, or follow links from the CohesiveFT.com community or the MuleForge.org sites.
The Mule Elastic Server gives you everything you need to test the Mule ESB and you’re offered additional components that you can test with it. From within their Elastic Server portal you can read about Mule ESB, download any additional capabilities you want to test, select the version you wish to try out, and also add components you might want to try out working with Mule ESB, such as RabbitMQ’s AMQP implementation. This is an example of a public version of an ISV portal, creating special tailored POC micro portals that are specific and private to just one customer are just a few additional steps beyond this.
Here we are hosting MuleSource’s portal but hosting the portals within your own website is an option.
If you want to find out more please go ahead and try it out at www.elasticserver.com, remember it’s free to use, or email me at chris.purrington-at-cohesiveft.com
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