“I don’t care about the tech – what I really want to hear is how this product fits in our processes and helps our people get more done.”
That was the message my co-founder and I heard from an executive at a major bank last week. For us, it was both a deja vu and a major relief because we’d just presented at the Cablelabs Summer Showcase about the importance of aligning people, process and technology together. The executive was pleased about how RackN had achieved that balance.
It wasn’t always that way: focusing on usability and simplicity first over features is scary.
One of the most humbling startup lessons is that making great technology is not about the technology. Showing a 10x (or 100x!) improvement in provisioning speed misses the real problem for IT operators. Happily, we had some great early users who got excited about the vision for simple tooling that we built around Digital Rebar Provision v3. Equally important was a deeply experienced team who insisted in building great tests, docs and support tooling from day 0.
We are thrilled to watch as new users are able to learn, adopt and grow their use of our open technology with minimal help from RackN. Even without the 10x performance components RackN has added, they have been able to achieve significant time and automation improvements in their existing operational processes. That means simpler processes, less IT complexity and more time for solving important problems.
The bank executive wanted the people and process benefits: our job with technology was to enable that first and then get out of the way. It’s a much harder job than “make it faster” but, ultimately, much more rewarding.
If you’re interested in seeing how we’ve found that balance for bare metal automation, please check out our self-service trial at https://portal.RackN.io or contact us directly at info@rackn.com.
