Reza Malekzadeh talks about his goals and responsibilities as VP of marketing at Nimbula. Reza recounts his fairly recent challenge of guiding a tech start up out of “stealth mode”. He also talks about some less than obvious reasons why companies are seeking cloud infrastructure even when they want/need to own their servers.
Links referenced in the show:
The music in the show, Have Mercy — Big Walter Horton, was provided by Mevio’s Music Alley.
Transcription
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Reza 00:00:20 So hi, Ryan. My name is Reza Malekzadeh and I’m the vice president of marketing for a company called Nimbula. Nimbula is a startup company based in Silicon Valley and we develop and provide software technology to allow customers to operate their own cloud infrastructure. So they can basically get all the benefits that cloud-type environments bring, but on their own infrastructure in their own data center within their own firewall.
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Ryan 00:00:52 Now you’ve got a really interesting angle here in that, usually, when people talk about the cloud it’s because they don’t want to own their metal, right? So what is the case where someone says, "I want, you know, cloud," whatever that means to them (we can dive into that too), but they insist on owning that infrastructure?
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Reza 00:01:10
Well, I think you raise a good point because, you know, definitely there is a trend and a lot of buzz around not owning anything anymore and just leveraging public cloud infrastructure, whether it’s for compute resources and getting that from actors like Amazon or Rackspace or whether it’s for application resources and getting that from the likes of Salesforce, for example. But there’s still a lot of cases where people cannot just simply move all of their stuff to the cloud. They cannot just put all of their data or all of their compute infrastructure on equipment or infrastructure that belongs to someone else. And those reasons can be both technical and legal/business. You know, whether people have applications that need to run within their own data center because they need to be close to their source data for latency reasons or people have invested a lot of money on existing infrastructure or are bound by security and compliance terms that do not allow them to run things outside of their own infrastructure. There’s still a lot of interest in what we’re calling today the private cloud. And in looking at the public cloud providers, people have found benefits beyond just the fact of not owning your infrastructure. There are far greater benefits, I believe, that those providers have brought to light in terms of efficiency of utilization of that infrastructure, agility that it gives you to develop new projects, new applications, and basically innovate. And those benefits are the things that people are looking for in their own environment and that’s what we would like to help them reach.
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Ryan 00:02:57
Very cool. So it’s interesting to hear you say, you know, the various technical or legal constraints. So not necessarily, like, one of company size, which I think is oftentimes, when people make a strong case against using a cloud thing, a lot of times it’s, “Well, they’re a big company and they either have, you know, some sort of legacy issue keeping them there,” or they say that, “it really isn’t cost effective for them at their scale.” So you have a totally different reason.
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Reza 00:03:21
Yeah. I don’t necessarily think it’s necessarily a size thing, you know. Definitely it’s easier when you’re a small company to start with public cloud because you don’t need to, you know, start a new business and go out and buy a bunch of hardware. But if you look at it a little bit from a different angle, what we have noticed is that it really depends on application type. You know, people are looking and seeing, you know, there’s a class of apps that I’m running that are my core IT functions. These applications don’t necessarily change much; they don’t need to scale up or down a lot. And for these apps, my traditional way of running things in my own data center makes sense. But then there are new generations and new categories of applications that can definitely benefit from a different type of underlying infrastructure. And in some cases I can put those on someone else’s architecture and infrastructure and in some cases I can’t. But I still want to get all of the same benefits in the way I interact with these apps. And these are the newer generations of applications that are much more geared toward being, you know, stateless, towards being scale-out architectures, where you really need to have a very flexible underlying infrastructure if you want to make the most of the app itself.
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Ryan 00:04:39
Yeah. I can see that being, you know, almost like a sore spot that you really help someone. You know, if they’re in a company and they’re saying, “you know, I’d really like all the convenience that, you know, some of these other companies are getting except for, you know, I’ve just got this big whammy that is just a stopping issue.”
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Reza 00:04:55
And it’s a big move, actually. We believe that this is a move from an IT-centric world to a developer-friendly world. And what I mean by that is we’re moving away from these apps that don’t move much and where an IT person could just manage them in a very monolithic way to a world where people interact with their applications, the developers want to have self-service access to the infrastructure, they want to be able to iterate (you know, this notion of develop/ship-develop/ship). And this type of agility can only be obtained if you provide the developer with a lot of self-service and flexibility and not force the developer to always go through a central admin or ticketing system. And that’s what we feel, you know, companies are going to be wanting more and more.
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Ryan 00:05:44
Cool. That almost alludes to if you say you get rid of, you know, some of the IT staff, is it that you have to have the problem very generically solved or is it that you solve it very specifically but only for specific cases?
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Reza 00:06:02
No, I think, you know, first of all I want to be clear that I don’t believe that we need to get rid of the IT people. I actually think that, you know, the goal is not to say, “Let’s just go and fire the IT people and the world will be a better place.” What I want is to make sure that each person can operate at their level and do what they’re supposed to do and enable the others without having to always be in the way. So, you know, in our environment, IT still creates user credentials, it still creates the identity and permissions, but within that realm of that identity and permission, the developer can self-serve resources without having to open a ticket so that IT assigns resources to the developer on a one-by-one basis. So the customization and control that is important to enterprise customers is still there except you’re now enabling the developer within that set of rules and policies to self-serve as much as possible.
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Ryan 00:07:02
Cool. Yeah, no, it makes perfect sense, right? A lot of times automation isn’t about eliminating jobs, but it’s just eliminating some of the mundane tasks, right? Like, some of the things that can kind of -- they can go away and they’re probably not the problems that people enjoy solving anyway, right?
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Reza 00:07:14
Exactly. Yeah, I don’t think any IT person loves getting a ticket that says, “Please open this firewall port for me,” and then they have to go and do some manual change and then update the ticket system, etc… You know, if the developer has the rights to operate a certain amount of workloads within a certain network setting they should be able to, you know, operate their own network switches without having to go back through IT.
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RP: Cool. So this is getting ready to launch soon, right?
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Reza 00:07:40
Actually we just launched a new version of the product very recently, so a couple of weeks ago. So this is still fresh out. And, you know, it was a pretty nice development cycle that we had as an organization because we’re now a little bit under three years old and have been going through the normal cycle of, you know, creating technology, building prototypes, beta, coming out with a first version, and then shipping an update to that first version. So that’s where we stand in the cycle now.
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RP: Gotcha. So you say about three years of product development is how…
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RM: Yeah. The company’s about three years old now.
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RP: Okay. Cool. And you’ve been there how long?
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RM: I’ve been there for a little over a year and a half.
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RP: Okay. Cool. So let’s talk a little bit more specifically about what are you doing there? So VP of Marketing for a tech company like this. What is that? Like, what do you focus on?
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Reza 00:08:37
So I’m a lot of things because we’re a startup. So I would qualify, you know, this is VP of Marketing for a startup company meaning that when I joined the company I was pretty much the first non-engineer in the organization. And the company had been developing great technology, had raised the first round of funding on the value of that technology. But I think that, you know, between just, you know, having technology and being able to actually build somewhat of a brand for the organization, an identity for the organization, a message, and a product, that’s where, hopefully, you know, marketing and business people can bring some value to the adventure. So my focus had been, in the very early days, in terms of actually branding the company and taking it out of stealth mode because the company had been operating fairly secretly, launching the company with, you know, the messaging and positioning associated with the technology that we were developing, and then from there work with a team towards the path of getting the product out the door. And along the way, you know, the marketing people will aim to bring more and more customer and outside interactions so that the product actually can be enhanced with features and things that the customers are actually wanting to pay for. So then you get into a very subtle massaging between kind of the vision that the company has and the technology that it has and some of the customer feedback. You know, of course, you don’t want to just take customer feedback, but you don’t want to also just operate out of an RND function and not take anything external into the equation. So that’s kind of, you know, in a nutshell, what I think the marketing people bring to the table at this stage of a company.
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RP: That always strikes me as interesting how companies find that balance between sort of the founder’s vision and then kind of what market forces are asking for.
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Reza 00:10:38
Yeah. It’s always a delicate balance. I don’t think you ever feel comfortable that you’ve found the perfect answer but, you know, customer feedback, in time, tells you. You know, just as an anecdote, for example, we had embarked primarily targeting enterprise customers at Nimbula and developed the feature set for version 1.0 primarily discussing with enterprise customers and looking at enterprise needs. But through the cycle of our product being made available for evaluation and download off our Website, we actually started getting more and more interest from service providers. And while they adhered to 80% of what was in the product, they had specific requirements for a couple of other and different features. So then we brought those features in this new iteration of the product that we just shipped a couple of weeks ago. So, you know, you’re never sure at what point you’ve found a perfect balance, but I think you have to be extremely pragmatic and reactive to market demands because as a small company, you can’t really afford to just sit down and wait for things to happen.
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RP: That makes me feel better about my assumptions of this being an enterprise-centric tool as well then. It seems like that is kind of what it sounds like, right?
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Reza 00:11:52
Yes, it is. And because a lot of companies, you know, were looking at something like an Amazon and saying, “Hey, you know what? I want some of that magic in my own data center.” But then, what we found is service providers are actually now looking at these changes that folks like Amazon are forcing on the market and their customers are asking them to provide them with cloud services, provide them with more self-service environments. And so these service providers are interested in finding technology like ours to build their services offering on top of.
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Ryan 00:12:26
That’s cool. Yeah, I mean, I can’t underscore that enough. I’ve heard that from so many people that, you know, even when you make pretty solid assumptions based off of a lot of data, you never know what’s going to happen when you actually hit the market and what kind of users you end up attracting and what they actually want from you.
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RM: Exactly. You have to be super-humble and pragmatic about it.
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Ryan 00:12:48
Very cool. So what’s it like? I assume that you have some more non-engineers in the company by now because you being there for about a year and a half. But in those early days, I feel like while there are, you know, plenty of developers that tend to, you know, respect marketing, I think that stereotypically there’s a lot of friction there, right? Like, “If I build this good enough, we don’t really need you.” Like, what was your experience like, kind of in those early days?
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Reza 00:13:17
You know, I think through several startups, my experience has been that there is, as you say, some level of tension. But at the same time, you know, I’ve found that the entrepreneurial culture in Silicon Valley is such that the developers and technologists who go off and start companies are fairly realistic about the fact that you are going to need business people, at some point, to help take it to market and to help, you know, evangelize what you’re bringing to the table; especially if it’s a new piece of technology. They also help you, you know, stay grounded to technology at some point. I’m a big believer that, you know, you could have the most beautiful slides in the world. If your product is not rock solid, it’s not going to work. And so there’s also a limit to how much marketing can do without proper support for engineering. So it’s kind of a love-hate relationship but, in general, my experiences have been really positive and I’ve felt comfortable working with engineers because I think that, you know, when they have the true passion for the product and you help bring external views to validate or, you know, bring new ideas from outside, they tend to react positively because, at the end of the day, they’re also proud to see their piece of technology being actually used by someone.
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Ryan 00:14:31
That’s good. That’s a relief to hear. Yeah, I mean that’s, oftentimes, can be the difference between a fairly successful open-source project or an actual product, right? Like, you need to make a product and you need to have people that can think about, you know, how do you guide this ship, you know, what do they want to pay for, how do you solve specific needs of people and not just something that is technically interesting to you to solve?
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Reza 00:14:56
Yes. Yeah. The technical interesting to solve is a great driver, but then there are other components and they can be, you know, hardcore features that customers need as well as, you know, adopting your business model to a certain way that people will actually want to do business with you. You know, that’s also something that you have to keep in mind. And when I went through the cycle in the very early days of VMware, you know, our first product was a workstation product, it was priced at $300 a license, it was geared towards, you know, online sales with a credit card, which was actually pretty new back in 1999 when we did it. But then as we came out with server products, which were geared towards the data center, we also had to adapt our business model and go a little bit more of a classic direct and indirect sales model with channeled partners, with sales reps because people were not willing to, you know, just put a credit card online and start buying thousands of dollars of licenses for, you know, data center server products.
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RP: There’s no Field of Dreams aspect to it, huh?
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RM: No, absolutely not.
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Ryan 00:16:03
So you had mentioned that, basically, you were just seeing that what? Inquiries that were coming to you were not enterprise? I’m curious about that part too. Like, how did you get that data? Was that just you noticed, like, you know, what was the e-mail address that was coming your way or did you do more like focus groups to see who cared or how did you get that information?
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Reza 00:16:24
Well we, you know, despite being a very classic enterprise software company, you know, we’re leveraging a lot of the I would call more modern marketing tools available out there. And so we have, you know, built a system where we make it extremely easy for people to evaluate our product through a self-service process on our Website. And, you know, we put them through some level of registration, we have some marketing tracking software that we use to help understand, you know, who’s visiting the Website, when did they download, what are they communicating with you, or what type of resources are they accessing. So that allows us to see interest levels in the product and engage with people to understand where they’re coming from, what their use cases might be, what type of help they might need from us. So, actually, you know, there’s a bunch of new tools and some of which are cloud-based that we’re using to help us do all of this. And that way we could see, oh, you know, we have now an increase in number of requests or downloads from people who are service providers. And we could engage with them and start talking and asking, you know, what their interest level was and things like that.
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Ryan 00:17:32
So you actually didn’t have to worry so much about getting people. I mean, there’s actually plenty of people that are interested. You just had to find the patterns. You had plenty of data sources, right?
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Reza 00:17:42
Yeah. I mean, you know, people don’t just magically find you, you know. We put a lot of effort in our communication, our outbound communication messaging and marketing so we’ve really engaged a lot with influencers (press, analysts, bloggers) to, you know, share our vision, share our message. And we’ve had a really good pickup rate. And we’ve seen, you know, that this helps our brand be known in this space and have traffic come to our Website and people interact with our Website and download our software. We’ve also done a bunch of marketing campaigns with some of our Ecosystem partners (people who have integrated their technology on top of ours to our API) and we’ve been able to do, you know, joint Webcasts and joint events with them to also get another source of leads. So we kind of use a variety of classic marketing methods to attract traffic and then we try to analyze and engage with that traffic.
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Ryan 00:18:43
Cool. It seems like oftentimes you hear people talk about, like, if the product was pivoting based off of users, it seems like more often than not, those stories are, you know, like, end-user focused -- you know, like Twitter. Basically like that. Like, it’s a free app that people played with and then enough people were just passively curious enough to play with it and they kind of molded it into their own thing. I feel like I don’t here that story as much with real products, right? Like, the kind of thing where people buy things. So it’s interesting. I guess it just changes the way that I look at it too, right? Like, it seems like, for the most part, a lot of that due diligence, I assume the onus is more on the company building a product to do that in some sort of way other than just kind of, you know, feeling it as they go along.
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Reza 00:19:31
Yeah. As a company providing a product, you’re fairly different from a Twitter providing more of a service because people can, you know, engage with Twitter, use it any way they want, and start doing things without any sort of real commitment or any sort of real need to be behind the covers or behind that technology. When you’re selling software, you are providing a product with an end-to-end experience. So you can try to make it open and extensible which is what we’ve done by providing a very open API on top of our product and people will be able to, you know, wrap their own UI if they want to or connect different types of technologies to ours. But, fundamentally, what we’re shipping in the layer of software is not something that they can change. So clearly, you know, we’re more in this mode of we design a product, we develop it, we ship it, then we take feedback, and we go through iteration and design and ship a new version. So the company is actually, you know, focused on the development and the feature set and bringing that to market.
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Ryan 00:20:37
It’s interesting because I think when you say that, you know, the needs that sort of govern someone needing this kind of solution, it seems like my gut would say it’s kind of a niche app. But then when you say, “Well, you know, the real key to finding the market with this thing is making it very extensible.” So that seems interesting that those are kind of at odds with each other, right?
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Reza 00:21:03
Well, yes and no because I think kind of what we’re selling here is infrastructure software. And when you’re designing your infrastructure and your back-end services you can’t really just rely on one vendor to offer you a complete end-to-end solution. First of all, people don’t want that necessarily. And second of all, you know, I’m a believer that you cannot do everything well; you cannot spread yourself too thin. So we do the infrastructure layer, we believe, very well. But where people are going to need, for example, to have a very fancy billing piece of software so they can do internal chargeback of resources, for example, that’s not our core competency. So we’ve partnered with a company who does that for a living and who can then plug their software to ours through our API to get the metering data from us and then be able to produce a nice bill. And at the end of the day, the customer gets a complete solution, but relying on two vendors.
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RP: Well, and that’s where that whole, you know, you get to keep a little bit of focus, right, at that point.
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Reza 00:22:06
Yeah. Actually, you know, it’s one of the biggest difficulties, I think, for a startup is to keep the focus. It’s very easy to be, you know, attracted by a new, shiny object. You’re always approached by a lot of opportunities, but at the end of the day you have to look at what resources you have and what makes sense for your business. And that’s actually not an easy task for a small company because it’s very easy to be seduced by other opportunities.
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Ryan 00:22:36
It does seem like with startups you have to really switch gears from blue skies to practical almost like a hairpin turn, right? Because, at first, you have to think, like, when you’re just brainstorming the idea, think of all the options that you can go down, but then immediately you have to say, “All right, but seriously.” You know, what the cliché is, you know, “We can do anything; we just can’t do everything.”
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RM: Yes.
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Ryan 00:22:59
Like, it’s hard. It’s -- that does seem like the thing a lot of people focus on. And really not just startups but projects in general. I mean, you’re really just talking about scope creep there.
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Reza 00:23:08
Yes. Scope creep. Kind of the I call it the syndrome of the next shiny object. So you have to be able to focus. You also have to learn to say no and that’s not an easy one. But you have to learn to quickly identify whether something is a true opportunity or not and if it’s not, say no and then move on.
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Ryan 00:23:28
That’s been an interesting thing that I’ve heard with the sort of a new era school of thought where it was, you know, put the designers a little bit more forefront on the product than maybe I think a lot of companies did in the past. And the idea was, you know, for the most part, designers love to say no more than anybody else.
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RM: Yes. Actually, I mean, I read a recent post around that as well. Basically, you know, how startups need to hire designers as cofounders almost.
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RP: I could definitely rally behind that.
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RM: Yeah. It was very interesting. I think it was very true because first user experience is so critical.
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Ryan 00:24:02
Yeah. I think that that’s one of the more obvious things that everyone’s like, “Yeah, I get that user experience is kind of the new feature now, but I really like the idea of the, you know, what is the discipline that tends to want to limit features? As opposed to, you know, just be seduced by the problem solving of some new thing. Like, some new puzzle to conquer.”
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RM: Exactly. Yeah.
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RP: So you just recently did a new launch, right? So what did that entail?
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Reza 00:24:29
Well, that entailed, you know, a few things. You know, as a company, it was important for us to get a new version out to, first of all, respond to the demand we had from customers around these new features. But then as a small company it’s also critical to keep demonstrating your ability to iterate at a fast pace and, you know, release software on a, you know, regular, constant basis. So it is very critical for us to get a new product out the door. And what we would like to do when we do that is, you know, first of all, clearly be able to address our current customers and go back to them, share the new version with them, make sure that they have a good experience through the upgrade process and through their use of it. But then we also want to, you know, share the improvements and advances we’ve made in our innovation with the influencers in this community. So we spend a lot of time with press and analysts to bring them up to speed on what we did, why we did it, why it matters, and then, you know, who’s going to benefit from it. And then we just make the software generally available.
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Ryan 00:25:40
That’s good to hear. I think it seems like, you know, conventional wisdom out on the street is maybe that, you know, talking to press isn’t as important as it once was. You know, the way that all the different avenues of media kind of are circulating around. So you’re saying, as far as you’re concerned, that’s still a very important thing to do with a new product launch.
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Reza 00:25:59
I personally am a big believer, actually, in the influencer community. I think that, you know, I can see clear, you know, value in spending that time versus, for example, online advertising for a company like ours. You know, I think a lot of customers are still in the early stages of adopting cloud-style technologies, you know. Despite the hype and buzz, this is not a mature market. And so people who are willing to actually spend time with vendors, understand differences, and then, you know, share their view on the market or what’s going on or their pieces of technology are today, I believe, being listened to by the customer community; so it’s always good. And the other thing is good for me is that, you know, clearly these guys are also talking with other people and so they also bring a different perspective that I can take as feedback and, you know, help guide us from that perspective. So, overall, for me it’s a very valuable exercise. You know, I don’t think anyone’s a perfect fit for every/anyone else, but I think that this type of communication helps both sides.
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Ryan 00:27:05
You mentioned both that media outlets are influencers. I guess that’s where I see that divide coming from is people saying maybe that’s not always the case. But I guess, you know, potentially, with your target audience that that would be the case and people just need to figure out who is the influencer that can actually help, you know, guide their own potential customers.
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Reza 00:27:26
Yes. Yeah, I think that, you know, there’s no perfect blanket solution for everyone, but I think that you have to be -- you know, as a marketing team here, part of our role is to understand who are the real influencers in our community, who are the people we should interact with and, you know, share our vision and our progress with. And that’s definitely something that we put high on our priority list.
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RP: Wait. This is the Internet. I thought we were supposed to talk in absolutes and hyperbole. You mean that “it depends” can be an answer?
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RM: Absolutely. Yeah.
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Ryan 00:27:55
Absolutely. That’s good. That’s great to hear because it does seem like, a lot of times, you hear sort of similar things over and over again and I think the masses kind of easily believe that there are certain right answers. And yeah, I’m a big proponent of saying, “You need to understand the context.” And if certain answers seem incredibly obvious to you that means maybe there’s probably big things that you’re not thinking about.
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Reza 00:28:21
I agreed. Yeah. I don’t think there’s a perfect solution for everything and, you know, just one path to every problem or every source of information, for example. So you have to adapt.
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RP: So this is interesting. What -- someone’s heard this, they’re interested to find out more. Where is the best place for them to go to follow up?
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Reza 00:28:40
So I would encourage them to visit our Website at Nimbula.com. And we have pretty much all of our technical information, product information. We even have a bunch of videos showing the product and how to use it. So we’ve tried to actually provide as much information up front as possible so that, you know, people can self-service. We’re a big believer in self-service as you can tell by now.
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Ryan 00:29:02
Yeah. No, that’s great. And that’s exactly what I look for when I’m getting ready to buy something myself. I feel like if they play a little too close to the vest there I start getting nervous.
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RM: Yeah, I know. We try to make everything available for folks.
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RP: And it’s good on both sides because it’s just less hand-holding for you at that point, right?
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RM: Yes. Absolutely.
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RP: Awesome. Well, thanks again for taking the time. I’ve enjoyed this.
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RM: Thank you very much, Ryan. I appreciate it.