Go To Market Strategy

Most simplest definition of Go-To-Market (GTM) is about co-selling your offerings to/with your partners. It is a marketing function for each Strategic Business unit. 

• Offering - Portfolio Management Process to build new Offerings for Demand.
• Selling - Dedicated Innovation Process to align Offerings with Demand.
• Partners - Partner Management Process to extend geographical coverage and complement Portfolio. 

GTM in Organization: 

GTM Strategy Model:

• Objective:
• Sales enablement for customers
• Advisory positioning
• External branding / Internal Communication
• Partner and Alliances in the market
• Inputs: 
• An opportunity we would like to progress through to customer engagement
• Activities: 
1. Define Market Value proposition 
2. Identify primary target market
3. Review existing market channels 
4. Create detailed channel approach
• Outputs
• Identified market channel(s) and the cost of utilising those channels
• Channels:
  
• Alliance:
• Joint Venture
• Collaborator
• Distributor
• Partners:
• Channel Partners
• Technology Partners
• Product Partners
• Medium:
• Website
• Mobile
• Affiliates 

GTM Strategy 

• Definition 
• Channels a company will use to connect with its customers/business and
• The organizational processes it develops to guide customer interactions from initial contact through fulfillment.
• Marketing Strategy 
• WHO the firm will go after 
• WHAT it will offer them
• HOW the firm will make it happen
• Target: 
• Not mass market
• The direct consumer or the one in authority who makes the buying decision

Area of Operations:

• Market Demand 
• what is driving or inhibiting market demand for technology solutions?
• Customers 
• what are customer needs, especially unmet needs, and what are their key buying factors?
• Competition 
• what competitive set best represents competition and how are they competing?
• Differentiation 
• what differentiators are sustainable & difficult to replicate by competitors?
• Solutions 
• what solutions best meet market demand and customer needs?
• Channels 
• what channel structure & programs enable reaching desired customer segments cost-effectively?

References:

• http://www.slideshare.net/mtarrant/developing-a-goto-market-strategy
• Transforming Your Go-to-Market Strategy: The Three Disciplines of Channel Management (Hardcover) by V. Kasturi Rangan, Marie Bell Source: Harvard Business Press Books 
• http://atos.net/NR/rdonlyres/762AA016-16B0-435B-A940-7169E5E05462/0/goto_marketstrategy.pdf

Automated Development/Test Environment in Cloud

Development Process - Build-Test-Deploy

• Automated Development Process
1. Map/Model Software Process
2. Enable Automation of Software Delivery Process
3. Report and Analyze Process Execution and Workflow

IT Process - IT Resources

• Scalable, Agile and Shared infra
1. Define valuable infra services
2. Plan and Standardize the Cloud Platform
3. Plan and Architect Deployment

Integrate Both

• Integrate Development Process with IT Process.

References:

• 7 Steps to Success with Your Automated Development/Test Cloud

Cloud Migration - Stages and States

Cloud Enablement - Stages
An application passes through three stages to get to cloud.

1. Not in cloud/On premise - Private
2. Cloud Leveraged - Hybrid in cloud
   
3. Cloud Centric - Fully in cloud

Application Readiness - Assessed States 
An Application can be found to be one of following state of Cloud Readiness. 

• Cant be migrated (Transformation/Texing)
• Many times legacy applications are complex and tied to a specific solution that migration is almost impossible.
• Solution: 
• Maintain them as it is as and build a wrapper service around it to be access by rest of system. 
• Needs re-engineering (Incremental/LifeOff)
• Application written in recent technology and software methodologies has higher chance of easy migration into cloud.
• Solution:
• Bottom up approach will assess the application integration and decoupling points and make different component as service.
• Already cloud ready (Ready/Airborn) 
• Many organization has written application already in this fation that they already comply with cloud platform architecture. It is also called Fork Lift apps. 
• Solution: 
• Just port them as it is.

Roles In Cloud Business: 
Cloud Migration throws challenges for two roles:

• Infrastructure Provider Provides computing, storage and backup management. Their major focus is on:
• Data Security 
• Latency 
• Cloud Implementer Provides design capability and platform to access cloud system infrastructure platform and applications as a service. Their major focus is on:
• Application Availability 
• Integration

Life-cycle for A Cloud Migration Project

Life-cycle for A Cloud Migration Project  
Inception:
Getting on to boardroom for strategizing the cloud enablement.

• Key business requirement assessment 
• Application portfolio classification 
• Risk Assessment and Mitigation plan
  
• Financial Analysis
  

Elaboration:
Plan and design the system for cloud considerations and constraints.

• Cloud Migration Plan and analysis 
• SLA design  and management 
• Re-engineering approach assessment
  

Construction: 
Initiate the application transition into cloud application.

• Enterprise Arch Blueprint 
  
• App development/Testing/Data migration

Transition:
Deploying application into cloud and making it operational in new environment.

• Application deployment 
• IT Governance
  
• Stabilization of system 

Improvement
Go back to drawing board.

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods

Cloud Grid Computing

What is Grid/Cloud Computing?

• Grid Computing = Compute Grids + Data Grids
• Compute Grids: parallelize execution
• Data Grids: parallelize data storage
• Cloud Computing = Grid Computing + Data Center Automation
• Clouds are the new way to deploy and run grid applications

Issues:

• Relational Database vs Map Database - Choose One
• Load Testing - Allow to create, pay for usage
• Batch Processing - Node/Image for large processing
• Data Processing - mapReduce
• Great Paradigm for new startup to save server cost
• RIA
• Client app/Ajax based UI/Browser Plugin
• Course Grained Server Communication
• Can work in offline mode.
• JMX - Does not provide out-of-box, but can be modified to give cloud specific aggregated view
• Java EE can serve both human and nonhuman sensor through specific JCA implementation. 

References: 

• http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/community/bien_qa_2009.html 

Todo: 

• http://java.sun.com/developer/technicalArticles/Interviews/community/williamson_pt1_qa.html
  

Amazon AWS - Database Options

AWS provide all its service through its web service interfaces. What it means that all the

Database Option:
AWS has three mechanism for getting a DB for your application.

• A customer-provided database service running within an Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
• Amazon Web Services own SimpleDB service
• AWS RDS (Rational Data Source)
  

Amazon Machine Image based DB 
In this scheme, customer installs along with other application supporting softwares like app server, etc and manages database server on their own. His responsible remains same as of on premise setup from managing the database application from configuration, to performance tuning, capacity management, version updates, patching, and data backup.

SimpleDB: 
SimpleDB is a simple data storage providing scalable key-value storage. This is very good for large volume of database storage and retrieval, but lack capability of RDBMS style of Data modeling.

RDS Service:
Provides MySQL installed and managed by Amazon with Instance Class of 5 levels.

• Small DB Instance - 1 virtual CPU core and 1.7 Gigabytes of memory
• Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance -  68GB of memory and 8 virtual CPU cores

Cloud Migration Strategies

Cloud Migration Strategy: 

1. Rehost - Deploy App without Change to target - IaaS.
2. Revise - Extend App with exiting code base to target - IaaS/PaaS
1. Replatform
3. Refactor - Modify App with Backward Compatibility to target - PaaS.
4. Rebuild - Develop App with fresh codebase to target -PaaS 
5. Replace - Subtitute App with similar/better functionality to target - SaaS. 

Ref:

• http://www.gartner.com/it/content/1448700/1448713/november_17_5_options_cloud_migration_rwatson.pdf
• http://www.cioupdate.com/trends/article.php/3934061/5-Ways-to-Migrate-Applications-to-the-Cloud.htm
• http://daviding.amplify.com/2011/05/25/migrate-to-cloud-rehost-refactor-revise-rebuild-or-replace/