For today’s discussion I want to focus on our customers and how their needs reshaped the Engineering organization at Webtrends. Many of the innovations we have pushed out have direct customer feedback at the core of the effort. We have strived to “bring the customer directly into Engineering” so that we are designing our solutions with direct feedback from those who will leverage them. A fallacy around technical teams is that they wish to be shielded from the market – this is of course complete nonsense with the reality that engineers crave real world examples and the more we can bring our customers into the process of developing our solutions the more value our solutions will deliver to our customers.

But this simple goal – customer centricity – it is not simple in execution. Much has been written on the challenge with a seminal work being the Innovators Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. We must balance our customer’s immediate needs with their declared and anticipated future needs. And the speed of change is only increasing thus the speed of our change in our customer’s business is increase. We need to be able to receive feedback and adjust to it at an ever increasing frequency. Listening to our customers is critical, but even more critical is responding to our customers in a timeframe that is relevant to them.

As I looked at this challenge eighteen months ago I realized that for us to respond to our customer’s feedback in a timely manner we needed to change a number of core business processes at Webtrends. Prior to focusing on implementing customer feedback mechanisms and processes (which we have now built directly into our products), we focused our ability to respond to the feedback.

Let me explain – looking at it from the customer’s perspective: how do I influence a 12-15 month development cycle? I will have to time my input for the first few months of the vendor’s development effort and then I hope that my requirements remain consistent for the next 9-12 months. Not a very likely scenario with today’s pace of evolutionary and revolutionary change. Once viewed from the customer standpoint it is pretty clear that we needed to change the way we developed our products before we could truly increase our customer intimacy and centricity.

In waterfall, work is done in phases and comes together in the end. In agile, work is also done in phases, but work is released at each stage.

Starting in summer of 2008 we set out to transform the Webtrends Engineering organization to a truly agile organization. This was not an easy process – nor was it painless for our customers. But it was critical for Webtrends and we are now seeing the benefits of this transformation. By releasing every 3-4 months we have dramatically shortened the timeframe between feedback and delivery. We now respond to our customers needs in a timeframe that is still highly relevant to their business. Looking again from the customer’s perspective, I don’t think I would choose a vendor who isn’t as agile as my business…

Having access to one’s own data seems a pretty simple concept.

Yet many companies, who are entrusted with their customer’s data, make it challenging for their customers to actually get their data in a reliable and usable manner.

Some of the reasons cited are technical such as architectural limitations or lack of sufficient infrastructure that inhibits a vendor’s ability to provide access to the data. As the head of engineering at Webtrends I can tell you that architecture matters in SaaS; while the customer can’t see it and doesn’t have to manage the infrastructure, the architecture directly influences their interactions with the whole solution. (This will be a topic for another post.)

Other reasons are less technical and more related to long standing biases found in traditional vendor-client relationships, fear of customer defection, cost concerns, and loss of control of how a customer interacts with the vendor. While these reasons may have had some basis in the past, they are no longer valid in today’s world of rapid innovation, transparency and open collaboration.

When we set about defining what “unfettered access” to the data truly meant we first looked at it through our customer’s eyes. Having had the opportunity to work with many of our customers (Engineering at Webtrends is open and customer facing) I saw that while our customers relied upon and leveraged our rich and deep applications, they would also benefit from direct access to their data. As our industry and our customers use of web analytics matures (see our DM3 model) innovation occurs through-out the ecosystem: in Webtrends development, in Webtrends services, in our partners and in our customers. By providing full access to the data we fully enable this innovation and we expect to learn as much from our partners and customers as they gain value from this open access.

We also heard that multiple forms of access, security models and data formats were requirements, not options. With this, we then set about reviewing our operations, infrastructure, licensing, architecture and services to drive product and organizational change to ensure we are empowered to deliver a full and complete solution.

Our customers helped us define the full set of requirements and reinforced three key capabilities:

1. Provide our customers open and clear access to their data when and how they want it. No intermediary, no request and forward approach, no unnecessary provisioning requirements. In a word: Open.
2. Provide multiple data access options. This boiled down to three options: Web Services, SQL based access, and Bulk data transfer. We started down this path as far back as 2005 when we released the web analytic industry’s first ODBC driver. We continue to execute against this capability with Webtrends open exchange and our recently released REST based web services and Data Capture for delivery of large data sets that can be scheduled and automated for integration into other operational systems.
3. Provide scalable, robust data delivery infrastructure to ensure the timely delivery of data. This reinforces Webtrends reputation in providing the most efficient and reliable SaaS solution in the industry (remember, architecture does matter in SaaS). Our customers said they didn’t want to be nickel and dimed and we answered by making all Webtrends Open Exchange services available in secure transmission formats at no charge.

Finally, we looked at how to bring these solutions to our customers. We have re-invested in our partners with a renewed partner program that embraces our partners as an extension of our company and our customers’ innovation capabilities; we’ve invested in “Developer Days” and we created the Webtrends Developer network and opened it up to anyone who wishes to leverage Webtrends power in their solutions – customer, prospect, partner, even traditional competitors. We are pleased with the momentum since its launch and expect that the Developer Network will continue expanding as we connect with our customers and partners and they with each other in leveraging and innovating with Webtrends.

Unfettered data access means freedom to access your data when you want to and through a means that makes sense to your business. We are honored to be entrusted with our customer’s data and we are very pleased to be able to provide a secure, reliable means for them to come and get it.