Positioning WSO2 for Quicker Uptake

Jonathan MarshVP Strategy

WSO2

What to expect

• Cohesive summary of interlocking changes and why we made them

• How we position these changes (and you can too)• Impacts on partners of these changes• Plenty of Q&A

Cloud WUMUnified

subscription model

Price revisions

Positioning Cloud

• Cloud is attractive to many customers– Lower entry point for low volume, low complexity scenarios

– Lower costs of management, infrastructure, maintenance

– Scalability built-in

– Fine-grained “pay as you go”

• Please promote where it’s appropriate!– Commissions will apply (figuring out how best to do this now)

– Use free trials – 2 week period is extensible

Cloud “side effects”

• WSO2 Cloud needs to be a first-class citizen– Cannot take weeks to test and deploy new OS features– Cannot allow a release that isn’t stable enough to use on WSO2

Cloud

• Reorganize engineering for cloud-first development– Continuous improvements (updates) into cloud– Systematic deployment (all updates, in order) to simplify testing– Periodically cut an OS release– Implies “Updates as a Service” -> WSO2 Update

WSO2 Update & WSO2 Update Manager

Old

Patches and service packs

Free non-prod use

Licensed for production use only by subscribers

Available on request (after relevant issue was found) through private support account

Installed piecemeal – difficult QA problem

New

Updates

Free non-prod use

Licensed for production use only by subscribers

Continuously and publicly available through WUM, requiring free registration

Installed in sequence for higher reliability

WUM “side effects”

• Update distribution no longer private (remove first line of defense)• Embedded license (new first line of defense)• Removed separate license in Subscription agreement, now we “activate”

production features of WSO2 Update License by defining “SUBSCRIBED PRODUCTS”

• Which in turn illustrated a misalignment between “supported instances” and “licensed instances”– Need to record all instances receiving Updates in the subscription to provide

clear license chain– Revealed we were not clear about support on some instances, i.e pre-prod– To assist tracking, we assigned a (low) price to formerly free instances (profiles,

pre-prod, passive)

Positioning WSO2 Updates

• Preventative maintenance through continual access to updates

• Use WUM to download the product in the first place– Avoid issues during eval that are already fixed

• No change in ability to use for free:– Track OS releases

– But you also can use WSO2 Updates during development to see if a future OS release will solve an issue

Subscription & license

• WSO2 Subscription– WSO2 Update license– Prod Support– (optional) Dev Support– (optional) Managed Cloud support

• Implies a need to align license term and support term• Subscription term starts when your support account opens (no matter what

kind of support you need)– Add your pre-prod environments early in the cycle to get support - in some

cases from day one– You can top up your subscription when you need more support with fees

prorated to the term

Unified Support Subscription

• A-la-carte support model (Dev, Prod) was breaking down at scale:– Separate support accounts hard to manage and lost context– High sales cost and customer annoyance with random Dev Support

expiration dates unsynchronized with production support subscription– Customer annoyance with expiring unused hours– Complex rollover rules– Subject to abuse – hard to distinguish between a “Query” on a

production system and a Dev Support request.– Reality is that Dev-type questions are always needed, even on stable

prod systems– Increasing maturity of margin analysis revealed the scale of “abuse”

Unified Support

• One support account for all issues – production incidents, dev support queries, managed cloud hosting matters.

• “Side effects”:– Define a base one year support subscription term

• All Dev Support aligns with that subscription term• All Prod Support aligns with that subscription term• Tradeoff: eliminate overlapping terms but use more proration

– Provide some level of Dev Support throughout the subscription lifetime• Built-in, based on spend• Retain the ability to increase the limit for a fee

– Losing much of our independent Dev Support revenue• Offsets our price increase

Proration example

Included Dev Support

Dev environment

Staging environment

Prod environment

Included Dev Support

Dev environment

Staging environment

Development Support top up

Included Dev Support

Prod environment

12

Subscription Start Date Renewal Date

Prod expansion

Partner implications

• Dev Support is scoped to a project:

– Questions on products in use in that customer/subscription

– Questions on products under eval or development for that project

• Not to be shared across accounts, or distinct projects within an account

• If you need support across projects it’s ok to buy a Dev Support only subscription for general use

– Even easier now with 10 hour incremental annual packages

• If you need to realign the subscription term with budget cycles we can do that (hopefully on a one-time basis)

Subscription side effect on partners

License is between WSO2 and Subscriber – how does a third party fit in?

• Scenario 1: Partner does services, facilitates subscription through direct contract between WSO2 and Customer

• Scenario 2: Partner includes subscription in a service offering (e.g. a managed project). Subscription is between Partner and WSO2, customer isn’t a party to the license but just consumes the managed services (as a black box.)

• Scenario 3: Partner and Customer sign agreement – need to special case this with WSO2 to grant license to Customer. Come talk to us!

Positioning pricing

New customers• Prod instances

– includes passive (warm)– profiles at modest cost

• Pre-prod instances @ 25% of normal fees

• Additional dev support available in fine-grained packages (10 hours)

Transitioning customers• Service improvements

– Included Dev Support– 24x7 SLA on pre-prod shared

environments

• Some grandfathering is possible– Show benefits of moving to new

model/support structure– Where this represents a hardship, willing

to negotiate a price between current spend + inflation + exchange and new retail price

• Worst case: maintain old structure for stubborn customers

Q&A

Thank You!