8 Principles to a successful Product Led Growth model

PLG (Product Led Growth) is a recent SaaS trend where user acquisition, product usage & expansion, sales & marketing conversion, and customer retention are all driven by the core product experience. Put simply, you build a good product, make it really easy for users to start using it & discover new features, and lean on your product’s value to keep your customers happy.

Easy, right? –  not really. A successful Product Led Growth model requires product rigor and an organizational mindset around excellence in customer experiences. In this post we look at 8 key principles to a successful PLG model.

Continue reading “8 Principles to a successful Product Led Growth model”

Platform-as-a-Service: 11 tips for API focused Product Managers

My previous posts have focused on developer experiences and APIs. These are a big theme in companies positioning themselves as “platforms as a service” i.e. be a pluggable value generating component within a more broader solution. This post focuses on building APIs and calls out 11 useful tips for building API centric platform products.

Continue reading “Platform-as-a-Service: 11 tips for API focused Product Managers”

Plaid and Visa, PSD2, and the API-first Economy

My last post on Developer Experiences introduced APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) & use cases they enable. Often referred to as the plumbing beneath the modern application development infrastructure, APIs are everywhere. Visa’s controversial $5.3B Plaid acquisition effort and the PSD2 mandate enforced in Europe were just the latest high profile examples that spotlighted this. In this post we dive deeper into an exciting revolution in the Fintech industry and understand the value driven by APIs.

Continue reading “Plaid and Visa, PSD2, and the API-first Economy”

Scaling your small business website? It might be time for a CDN. But wait, what’s a CDN?

We are living the online economy today. Business models that are solely reliant on online revenue, distribution, and awareness are entrenched in our system. This is an irreversible trend, and there is no going back.

As online business owners look to expand their businesses and tackle the challenges related to scale and differentiation, one of the first things they hear is “you should think of leveraging a CDN to help with your website”. In this post I’ll try to bring more clarity to the murky world of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), how they work, and why they are so important for enterprise websites or anyone looking to scale their online business. 

Continue reading “Scaling your small business website? It might be time for a CDN. But wait, what’s a CDN?”

EMC’s Unity Virtual Storage Appliance: A deep dive

EMC announced Unity, its brand new midrange product line at EMC World this week. The Unity evolution story is fascinating and you can read more about it here.

The new product line includes the UnityVSA- a software only subscription based offering that complements the Unity hardware platform. In this post I dive deeper into the benefits provided by this new solution in the exciting software defined world.

Continue reading “EMC’s Unity Virtual Storage Appliance: A deep dive”

Behavioral Economics in Emerging Storage: Taking away the Pain of Paying

Imagine the following very regular situation- after a great Saturday night out at his favorite country bar, Jim decides to call it a night and head back home. He steps out and sees a line of yellow cabs waiting. He ignores them and pulls out the Uber app on your IPhone. The app informs him that surge pricing is at 2x. This means his uber ride will be more expensive than hailing a regular cab. 

Yet Jim ignores both the cost and additional waiting time and sticks to the Uber ride. Seems familiar? Irrational? 

Continue reading “Behavioral Economics in Emerging Storage: Taking away the Pain of Paying”

The Business Benefits of Software Defined Storage

After my last post on VSAs I received a few notes/questions around expanding upon the benefits of VSAs over traditional arrays. I felt it will be beneficial to step back and discuss the big picture benefits of the Software Defined Storage (SDS) space in general. In this post I discuss the key attributes that are making SDS so popular.

Continue reading “The Business Benefits of Software Defined Storage”

What is a Virtual Storage Appliance?

What is a Virtual Storage Appliance?

One of the hottest trends in the storage industry recently has been that of the Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). Depending on who your favorite market research firm is, the CAGR for VSAs is projected to be between 25 to 48% over the next five years. What is a virtual storage appliance? Surely this doesn’t mean that all your data goes virtual too? Where is the data actually stored? In this post I’ll aim to address these questions and simplify this new emerging trend.

Continue reading “What is a Virtual Storage Appliance?”

Demystifying the Hybrid Cloud

Keeping up with technology can be an impossible task. It only feels like a few months ago when we were all still trying to figure out what exactly the cloud was. For those still living under a cloud (for lack of a better word), cloud computing refers to the ability to access you data from anywhere. Your information is stored by cloud providers (such as Amazon and Google) inside their own physical infrastructure instead of on your devices (such as hard disks) as done previously. Cloud host interfaces then allow you to connect any device to their storage and hence provide ubiquitous access.

But just as we were getting comfortable with this, enterprises and startups everywhere have started promoting the hybrid cloud. So what exactly is this hybrid cloud!?

Continue reading “Demystifying the Hybrid Cloud”