IT manager world: Cloud Management, a light

Smaller software companies such as the North Sen test are more flexible in the era of cloud computing than traditional large software companies, and quickly implement a comprehensive transition from product and business models to organizational internal management.

In the Research and Development office in Beijing, the North Sen Evaluation Technology Co., Ltd., the lively discussion voice has been continuing. In the wide open office aisle, there is a row of white writing boards. It's written with a black pen for each group's work theme, and the vertical line is made up of squares with yellow sticky notes that mark the content and time of each person's work. Every day from 9 o'clock in the morning to 11, 6 product line personnel to open 15 minutes of standing meeting. Each product line people stand in front of their own whiteboard, on their work the day before the content, the problems encountered in communication. The form of a standing meeting is a practice of agile (Scrum) software development, which can be used to compensate for the lack of accuracy in project estimation in this development model by timely feedback.

Front-end engineers, DevOps ..., if it's in an internet company, it's not uncommon to hear these jobs. But in an enterprise software company, it feels fresh to hear such a job set. Know that in a traditional software organization, development, IT operations, and quality assurance are separate departments, but in a devops position these are integrated.

What is the motivation for North Sen to assess the entire product development model and even the organization structure are adjusted to the Internet model?

Business model "Cloud"

Guiweiguo, the CEO of North Sen, said the background to the company's changes: "The era of cloud computing is fast approaching." We found that in the enterprise software domain, cloud computing can be understood as the application of Internet technology enterprise-class software. We have studied the SaaS (software as service) pattern, especially the Salesforce company's model, and found that these models are worth our reference. ”

A review of the 10-year development history of the North Sen assessment will help us understand better. The North Sen assessment set up in 2002 has positioned itself in the field of talent assessment, which is designed to provide evaluation software for enterprise recruitment. In 2003, the North Sen was measuring only 1 million yuan. At that time, the North Sen assessment will be the evaluation of products sold on CD-ROM, a CD-ROM price of about 100,000 yuan. Such prices have deterred many corporate human resources departments. Beginning in 2006, with the SaaS model brought about by cloud computing, the North Sen test began to use the online leasing model to provide evaluation services for users. But at first, they simply "moved" the software to the Internet, with little technical difficulty. But as the number of users increased, the demand for personalized services also increased. In 2008, the North Sen Test hired a CTO from a traditional software company to try to solve the problem with traditional software companies. The result was six months later, with Guiweiguo's saying: "No".

Traditional enterprise software model is generally, the enterprise one-time purchase software, training and other aspects of the work to the third party consulting company completed. In SaaS mode, the payment mode is changed to monthly, and the software provider should provide training accordingly. The distance between users and software vendors is narrowing. At this point, if the user experience is not good, will immediately leave. In response to this new challenge, the North Sen assessment can only be a comprehensive transformation from product development.

2009, North Sen Assessment please come to Zhangqinghua as CTO. The former Yahoo China Search Auction Division architect, MySpace China Development director of the technical director, the Internet-style product development approach to the enterprise software development process. Agile development and the way the Internet Product Manager works enables users ' feedback and needs to be quickly met and improved at the product level.

2009, the North Sen assessment launched the Talent Management cloud computing platform Italent, can provide recruitment management, succession and development, performance management and other talent management integration solutions, and attract Panasonic, Coca-Cola, Canon, mobile and many other customers. The company's research and development team from less than 20 people in 2008, in 2010 to increase rapidly to more than 80 people, 2011 reached more than 120 people around the scale.

Comparison of traditional software development and Internet software development process

Explore "cloud Management"

In the process of doing enterprise software by internet, Zhangqinghua admits that he and his team have suffered too. For example, in the second half of 2010, a company team developed a system. Considering the characteristics of the Internet product requirements, technical staff in the performance of the design is very good, but after the line has been customer complaints, the original is because of inconsistent data standards, there has been data loss phenomenon, for the entire team spent a day and night to solve the problem. This makes them realize that the pursuit of product performance while not forgetting the consistency and stability of enterprise-class software products, so they set the "online stability greater than all" principle of work.

The overall shift to cloud business has brought about new features in knowledge management. From the second half of 2010 cloud platform services online to March 2012, only the technical team summed up more than 100 laws. Zhangqinghua Introduction, every six months technical team will conduct a rating, in the technical culture, as well as technical specifications, such as the degree of implementation of the dimensions, respectively, from all aspects of the summary of each team's progress. The company has implemented corporate social networking Tita, let colleagues understand each other's work tasks, effectively realize the task collaboration visible, controllable, so that the process of communication and knowledge sharing smoother, in the process, a more encouraging equality, respect, transparency, openness, participation in the Internet culture slowly bred and grow up.

The change of product development mode also causes the change of organizational structure. Agile processes represented by iterative development patterns face problems that demand can change during development, and the response strategy is to provide early feedback to users. The North Sen reference Salesforce Company's model set up two positions for ued (user experience design, UX designs) and CSM (Customer Success Manager, client success manager). It goes without saying that these two positions are designed to better enhance the user experience, the former is in product design, the latter is on the user's service and technical support. As there is no similar position in the country, so the talent gap in these two positions is currently being assessed by North Sen.

After turning to SaaS, the North Sen assessment has now grown to more than 3,000 business users. In fact, the North Sen case is better understood in the context of the development of HR software in the era of cloud computing. In early 2012, SAP acquired HR software company SuccessFactors. 2 months later, Oracle acquired Taleo. "Large enterprise software providers such as Oracle, SAP and IBM are currently in a disadvantageous position to compete with small SaaS companies, which are growing rapidly and increasingly accepted by the market," said analyst Patrick Varavens of JMP Nomura, a securities firm. We increasingly believe that these large companies are looking at acquisitions as a good idea to curb market share loss and preempt dominance in the competitive SaaS market. ”

Obviously, in the era of the network becoming a platform for business transition, in the wave of cloud computing, the enterprise software domain will have a subversive and reshaping process. Smaller software companies such as the North Sen test are more flexible in the era of cloud computing than traditional large software companies, quickly realizing a complete transition from product to business model.