Mike Wyatt's Weblog

Partner Enablement and Professional Services Delivery

I have the honor and privilege of leading a unique group of highly talented and motivated individuals. Our group is called the Architecture and Enablement Services team which exists within the Software Sales Practice within the company. The genesis for this group originated in 2004 after Sun bought Waveset Technologies, my previous employer.

At Waveset we had a core professional services team and we partnered with systems integrators to scale our delivery capabilities. This not only allowed us to minimize head count growth as a start-up but enabled us to get traction with large systems integrators despite the fact we were a post bubble start-up company.

After the acquisition of Waveset by Sun in December of 2003, we expected to build out a professional services team internally as well as continue to leverage partners to scale delivery. The Identity Management practice was created to sell Sun's Identity Management portfolio of products include Identity Manager, Access Manager, and Directory Server. We built a team of Software Sales Specialists and Presales Systems Engineers to sell the products. We also created a group that was unique in the industry - a Deployment and Enablement Services Group. We needed to scale the professional services expertise without adding a significant number of new staff. This created an interesting challenge to scale the business and an opportunity to innovate on new business processes.

During FY05, we built an operating model that enabled Sun to scale Identity Management service delivery almost solely through leveraging partner delivery capabilities and without hiring additional internal staff. Instead of tying up our senior technical staff on a single project for months at a time, we built a joint delivery model and quality assurance framework to provide oversight of multiple projects with a single technical resource. We also found that we needed to provide presales deployment services input to during the product sales cycle. Finally, since we were building a partner leveraged delivery model, we needed to provide true deep partner enablement. We built a dedicated team to provide infrastructure and content to our internal delivery staff and to our partner community.

Thankfully, the leadership team allowed us to build out a model that would scale. Though not perfect, this model allowed our team to innovate and develop a strong sales and delivery ecosystem with our partner community while delivering successful identity management solutions to our customers.

Posted at 03:22PM Dec 14, 2006 by Michael Wyatt in Business Leadership  | 

Lessons from leading an acquisition effort

I've had the privilege of leading an acquisition effort that started about 1 year ago. The acquisition was completed in on Oct 13th. Since that time I've been the business leader in charge of running the acquired entity in addition to my day job running Sun's Architecture and Enablement services team for the Software Practice.

One of the lessons that is continually reinforced is the need for clear, concise, and consistent communication to various internal and external stakeholders. Much of my time is spent educating and informing internal groups about the objectives of the acquisition and the status on the integration. When you live something like an acquisition effort for a period of months, things are are seemingly obvious to you are definitely not obvious to other stakeholders, many of which will see things through a very different lens than your own.

In order to ensure that the key members of the integration effort including members of the acquired entity leadership team as well as leaders from the acquiring company are all singing from the same song sheet. The amount of investment to initial craft the key messages pales in comparison to the effort to overcome miscommunications.

Posted at 11:42PM Nov 13, 2006 by Michael Wyatt in Business Leadership  |