Friday August 08, 2008

I've been in the Washington D.C. area the past few days extolling the virtues of GlassFish to the America's sales force. The good news is that the GlassFish session, an 8:00am affair, was packed. I must say that I was pretty darn surprised. Sales reps have *dozens* of products they can focus on, yet GlassFish drove a full house (60-70). Here's why:

• Customer pain.  These days we often hear the phrase "pain at the pump" to describe how we feel about rising fuel prices. It's no different for how customers feel about how much they are paying for license fees at a time when the economy is in question. Now is not the time to raise prices, it's time to be more responsive to customer pain.
  
• MySQL synergy. The business momentum behind the MySQL acquisition (inside and outside of Sun) is quite amazing. When you have a database, something needs to CRUD the data (I didn't know CRUD could be a verb either). When you have an application server, data needs to go somewhere. GlassFish and MySQL provide quite the one-two punch, without hitting below the financial belt.
• Open Source - as in Freedom. Not just financial freedom, but the elimination of vendor lock-in. Customers feel beholden to closed-source products.  Customers do not feel beholden to open source communities. Buy only when you need to. Eliminate vendor lock-in. Sales now realizes that open source is a facilitator, not a competitor, because customers still want 24x7 support to reduce risk and downtime.
  
• Transparency - Transparency facilitates trust. The GlassFish community is about as transparent as I've seen a community be. Sales enters an environment where a we have already established some level of trust and credibility. Their role is to extend that trust into a win-win business relationship.