Moving Professional Services Into the Open - the Eucalyptus Experiment

I predict 2013 will be known for many things with regards to Eucalyptus as a company, but perhaps nothing will be more important to me personally than the decision alluded to in the title of this post. This year, Eucalyptus Professional Services is going open. All the way open.

There are a number of reasons we are making this shift, but the most important one is culture. If we truly are an open source company, does it make sense for us to develop closed-source intellectual property, tightly control access to that information, and use it primarily as a way to drive direct business unit revenue?

   

A case of identity confusion?

There are certainly other very successful open-source software companies that do just that. In the end, we decided that if we were going to be an open-source company, we were going to go all-in, and that will from here on include the way we build and manage our Professional Services (PS) business. 2013 will be the year of the Eucalyptus PS Experiment, where we challenge conventional wisdom about the value and place of professional services in a software company like Eucalyptus. We are looking forward to both the opportunities and challenges this will provide.

What does this mean from a practical standpoint? A lot is getting ready to change in the realm of Education, Consulting, and Certification.

Education Services

• All courseware, including Cloud Foundations and the Design, Build, and Manage course, will be released under the same Creative Commons license as our online documentation, and will be available via the same repository in GitHub. This will include an unrestricted PDF copy of the course materials, as well as source file access to all supporting PowerPoint and book source files. The books are sourced using DITA/XML, so we will also generate them in additional formats (.rtf, maybe even .docx) so that interested community members can make edits and improvements and submit them back to the respective projects more easily. Look for future posts on how to get involved in this exciting open source education project.
• Any entity that wishes to use any of these materials to deliver courses in whole or in part using Eucalyptus software is welcome to do so. We will no longer run a formal authorized training partner program. If you would like to advertise that you offer Eucalyptus training using these materials, we will be happy to place a link on our Web site to help you advertise. We will suggest, but have no way to require, that any teacher attain a minimum Eucalyptus certification based on the content that they teach.
• Individuals who would like to go through the lab exercises in these materials will be given the ability to rent remote cloud-ready hardware or access to a pre-configured cloud at very reasonable rates. Look for another blog post on this topic in the next couple of days.

Consulting

• The focus of PS Consulting will move away from intellectual property development and towards broad consulting partner and customer enablement. We will publish all generic materials associated with customer engagements (i.e., those that don't expose sensitive customer information) so that any customer or prospective consultant will be able to follow the same procedures Eucalyptus consultants follow in the field when delivering a Eucalyptus engagement.
• We will continue to maintain an authorized consulting partner program. The focus of this program will be on those partners who wish to be involved in large, complex cloud deployments that may require long-term arrangements, up to and including full-blown managed services.

Certification

• We are removing the authorized course requirement prior to taking a Eucalyptus certification exam.
• We are taking the opportunity provided by our recent EUCA3 launch delay to refactor the test items for what is perhaps the craziest thing a certification vendor has ever done--we will be publishing 100% of all possible certification items and making them available to the general public as study tools prior to taking an exam. Crazy, you say? (No, wait, that was me...) Worthless paper certification, you say? We are confident our certification will become one of the most sought-after, highly-valued credentials in cloud computing, and that this move will actually *enhance* the value of the certification. Look for more information about this in a future blog post.
• The EUCA3 test will still be delivered remotely, over the Internet, and be open book with a copy of the appropriate Design, Build, and Manage course materials available during the exam. The only restriction will be that you will not be able to print up a copy of the actual exam questions and use them during the exam. 

Danger - Curves Ahead!

There are some obvious apparent risks in these moves. How will we deal with the commoditization and potential cannibalization of our own PS business? How will we help mitigate customers having bad training or consulting experiences due to unqualified instructors or consultants? How will our certification be worth anything if all the questions are published ahead of time?

These and other questions are fair game for future blog posts. We have a detailed plan on each of these fronts, but we would love to hear your thoughts, concerns, and cheering as well. We're going open, and in a big way. That means there are no off-limits questions, so ask away!

jason.eden@eucalyptus.com

(All images in this blog are my own pathetic attempts. No rights reserved.)