Pay-as-you-go Computing

It's exciting to see as both vendors and customers become more evolved with this IT business, that the nature of our transactions change. The recent buzz about the expected explosive growth in Cloud computing has not-surprisingly coincided with continued IT cost reduction pressures. Some is certainly due to the current global economic crisis, but the trend has been in play for a long time. What has gone from an exercise in procuring something cool and breakthrough, has become buying something basic and vital, like milk. I've taken a stab at capturing some key aspects of this evolution to cloud computing.

What I'm seeing as especially significant is how we as infrastructure technology providers are going to have to package our solutions in a more pay-as-you-go fashion. Very much like how we all buy our power at home - it sounds like a no-brainer, but let's say you make your living selling network hardware. How does that work? And as the customer, what do you expect this utilization-based arrangement to look like? Or maybe the real takeaway is that you don't want the arrangement at all. You want email, a way to track your sales pipeline, and a means to do book-keeping, and don't want to have to staff experts to determine if the best way to do this requires Fibre Channel, Ethernet, FCoE, CEE, or M-O-U-S-E.

The New Multi-Tier Support Model

First of all, I want to give credit where it's due. Intuit redeemed themselves and found our lost TurboTax Online 2007 return. I didn't think it was really deleted or inaccessible. Even though their support person did.

The real story is their breakthrough Customer Support model. It leverages a typically un-tapped resource: the spousal network. After being told 'Sorry' by the Support rep, I shared my frustration with my wife, who works at Intuit, and 24 hours later the problem is solved. Why waste expensive call-center resources when you can just have a spouse help solve customer problems? It worked for Intuit, and it can for you, too.

Step 1. Operationalize the new support model, see diagram.

Step 2. Require your employees to marry your customers. May require some convincing, and depending on company size, polygamy, but you can achieve anything with the right attitude.