Zen 2.0

Recently I have been traveling around to talk to our customers. I wanted to find out from them how they are using our products and what else they would like to see.

Some common themes:

• Give me performance, performance, performance. How many messages/sec you can parse is important, but how fast you can give me my report results is even MORE important.
• Don’t add anything extra that will slow down the reports or searches. When I troubleshoot, I need the report or search results in seconds, not minutes, not hours, and definitely NOT days like some products.
• Give me quick access (quick links) to reports from the dashboard. I don’t want to navigate a tree to find the report I use all the time.
• Integrate w/ my enterprise infrastructure. Integrate w/ my ticketing system, w/ my authentication system, w/ my ESM system.
• Don’t give me 10 different ways of doing things. Give me 1 way, the fast way, and make it consistent across the board.
• Give me the enterprise features. Give me true failover capability. Give me virtualization capability.

I guess some of these interesting observations tells me that users don’t generally have time to play w/ the flashy features. Instead, they want the fastest way to get to the most relevant and accurate data. They use that data to solve whatever problem at hand and move on. This is especially true when it comes to operations people who’s day to day tasks are to solve problems and fight immediate fires.

The old saying is also true: 80% of the users use 20% of the features, but a different 20% for every users.