Vendors Must Cater To Developers Or Die

What’s that? You’ve got a kickass, easy-to-use [insert tech product here] that’s going to revolutionize my business totally? You want to schedule a sit-down with a C-level decision-maker, set up a canned demo session with your solutions-engineer/genius for the IT staff, and we’ll be off and running… that is, once we cut a fat check?

Sorry, but that's so 1995.

The new reality: Software is eating the world. As a result, guess who has the power? Software developers. Amazon Web Services is on track to become a $9 billion business, with competitors also racking up big numbers and innovative new players jumping in daily. Do you think that growth is based on slick, scripted demos and “solution” selling?

Nope. Software is eating the world because software is more efficient. We automate things. We take things that used to require hardware, and we make them software, which is much less expensive and easier to customize, manage, and keep current. Every day, expensive hardware appliances get more irrelevant.

Given that, why have centralized, cumbersome procurement processes for technologies that are now as inexpensive as a carton of pencils -- or that have such huge ROIs that they might as well be?

There’s a revolution at hand as businesses realize they function better when they delegate more choices and responsibility throughout the organization, and, more specifically, to developers. Andy Jassy, SVP in charge of AWS, summed it up in a recent Q&A: “Customers are telling us that new ideas are now coming from across the organization and that employees are excited to innovate on behalf of their customers.” Think AWS is an isolated example? Have you heard of DevOps? Sixty-one percent of respondents to the recent InformationWeek DevOps Survey have a timeline to embed these principles in their networks. Most adopters will demand DevOps skills in new hires.

The world of IT procurement is shifting along with these changes, and developers are the new most important constituency.

If your products cost so much at the entry level that they require senior-level signoff (hi, Oracle and VMware), I don’t think you’ll be around in 10 years. But have fun in the meantime.

If you have instead made the intelligent choice to give customers an on-ramp to your products, so that they can get hands-on experience before making the decision to fire a coworker to pay for your offering, good for you. But you can’t stop there.

Developers don’t all work a typical 9-to-5 schedule. Many don’t even like to talk to their mothers on the phone, let alone sit on a conference call with a non-technical salesperson. PowerPoint over WebEx? Forget it.

[Need a more sophisticated API strategy? Read our Age of the API digital issue.]

Developers do like to use resources like Google, Stack Overflow, or Server Fault to identify technologies that solve the problem they’re tackling now. They like to read API documentation online -- without creating an account first. When a signup is required, they like to be up and running in a couple of minutes, with at least a sandbox account. Free is preferable, but it’s OK to require a credit card, and even to charge from the beginning, if the amounts are fairly low -- say, a small test for less than $10, or a midsize trial for less than $25.

When I was looking for a vendor to help with payments, Zuora was the first service I checked out. Unfortunately, there was no self-signup. It also required interaction with sales and a pretty hefty up-front charge. Currently its “free trial” offer says someone will contact me within 24 hours, or I can call sales directly. Bzzz, wrong answer.

I chose Recurly, which allowed me to read API docs and play around with the system at night, when I had time, without a big hassle. Later, we switched to Braintree, which was similarly developer-friendly.

You know all that focus on “the user experience?” You need to concentrate on the developer experience.

How? First, have an API. Post documentation online. Make supporting and updating your API and documentation a priority. Consider public forums and live chat. At the very least, make it easy to submit a question by email, and respond quickly, preferably in fewer than four hours, and certainly in no more than ten.

Second, have self-sign-up, preferably to a live system, and if possible. Don’t require a credit card. Freemium works well if you can swing it. (MapBox is a good example.)

Finally, go where developers go to find out which systems to use. For example, if you provide a telephony API, you should be in this Quora question, this StackOverflow question, and others like them.

If you do that and help companies put new ideas into action quickly, you may just survive into the 2020s.

I've helped InformationWeek overhaul the annual database technology survey to capture the seismic shifts in how we manage and mine data. Please help me map out the brave post-RDBMS world, and while you're at it, enter to win a 16 GB Apple iPad Air. Take the survey now.

Joe Masters Emison oversees the award-winning BuildFax cloud architecture and frequently writes and speaks on cloud topics.