Comment by ukigumo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ukigumo | Hacker News Reader

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Ok. The reason I was asking is that it depends on what scratch you will itching (eh, I'm funny).

Generally speaking, think of it this way: I can buy from multiple vendors, some of which show up in some magic quadrant report which my CTO reads. Why would I pick your product instead?

The usual good reasons are that you can provide me with professional services to do the integration, educate users, participate in project delivery, etc, but essentially that you are able to somehow remove some degree of risk for me and the company. You will most likely need to show some evidence of compliance to best practices for security, data privacy and segregation.... well depends on what you product does and what company you are selling to, for sure, but think of the PCI and Data Protection Act's guidelines at a bare minimum even if not directly applicable.

Specifically around support, I will want to know what are your SLAs including MTTR, MTBF and availability to begin with, and then I expect you to sell me 2 or 3 support coverage contracts (bronze, silver, gold) and offer me a possibility to design my own (platinum) if I need better. See Google's GCE page for instance: https://cloud.google.com/support/

Hope this helps you somewhat, but without knowing more it will be hard for me to get into any more detail.

Jumping in here since you seem to have some experience in this: what about on-premise installation? I understand that's often a differentiator for enterprise but how do those work? Is it just distributed as a VM image? Who is responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of that VM?

Depends how you set it up.

(I'll caveat below by saying that when I talk about 'enterprise', we're talking about >500 employees and hundreds of millions in revenue annually.)

In many cases, they'll have their environment set up with standard *nix and Windows SOEs. You'll work with their admins to configure your software, and you'll direct them how to integrate it into their environment (DNS, etc). You'll need to think about backups, security, access management, and how all of this will integrate with their existing requirements.

Support arrangements differ, for example if you have an SQL DB underneath your software they might want it on their standard image, in which case you'll have to deploy and configure your software accordingly. Typically, they'll be responsible for the maintenance of the platforms, and you'll be the support for the software. No enterprise will simply deploy a VM image you hand to them (unless you're Oracle or MS).

You'll also have to provide other support materials, so their helpdesk can support their end-users.

As others have mentioned, you'll be agreeing to SLAs with them (eg a Priority 1 incident will need immediate phone support, P2 incidents need acknowledgement within 24 hours, and so on). You'll be issuing a yearly invoice most likely.

You'll have to agree to their standard IT services contract, and because you're a small vendor you probably won't get much say in the way of changes. Depending on how large your contract is (north of ~$50-100k perhaps?), you'll need to make sure you can comply with any of their insurance requirements (things like public liability, etc). You might also have to demonstrate financial stability, both historically, and into the future (with a business strategy, plans, etc)

TLDR: Enterprise companies can seem super hardcore about this if you're used to dealing with small shops.

Very interesting, thanks! The VM notion came from the way github distributes their enterprise offering--you're saying most large companies wouldn't like that?

What if the DB tier isn't standard SQL? Will that be a barrier? (I assume the receiving IT dept doesn't get involved until very late in/after the sales process, but presumably they could still put a wrench in things if they find the deployment too complex.)

Thank you, this helps enormously.

It's this sort of stuff I'm talking about: I've never even heard of an SLA or a support coverage contract (and apparently there are tiers of support?); things that enterprise users want and expect, but that aren't well-known to the common hacker.

Hasn't patio11 mentioned SLAs in the context of enterprise customers somewhat frequently? I'm not trying to be rude or anything I just thought that was pretty standard stuff.

Edit to add: even just googling patio11 SLA will give you links to some posts you'd probably find quite useful if you'd like more after reading the comments here!

I'm not a religious patio11 reader (as of yet), so I haven't come across much of it.

Good to know he's written more about it.

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