Xaprb

I’ll be helping Morgan Tocker deliver the second half of his training course for MySQL Developers/DBAs in New York City in a few days (more Percona training). It was a snap decision at the last minute, but I’m hoping I’ll still get to meet some folks there. If we’ve corresponded over email or blog comments and you would like to get together, ping me in the comments here!

If you’re in the New York City area and you use MySQL, you should consider attending this course, too. Morgan knows his stuff and has written a good curriculum. Attendees give his courses excellent feedback, and the price is very reasonable. Oh, and I’ll be there too, did I mention that? You can pick my brain, no extra charge. Bring organic free-trade chocolate to assist with extra-tough questions.

Last week I attended the Enterprise LAMP Summit and Camp in Nashville, Tennessee. I enjoyed the event and met or reconnected with a lot of great people. I was glad to be able to spend time with some folks from the Postgres community. My own sessions focused on MySQL.

During the Summit I tried to help people understand how to think about performance, and made the case that the Percona versions of the MySQL server are not only the highest-performance available, but uniquely provide the instrumentation necessary to follow a disciplined performance optimization process such as Method R or Goal-Driven Performance Optimization.

At the Camp the next day, there were several sessions on MySQL. My talk was later in the day, so I elected to skip slides and design a talk by taking questions from the audience, then answering them. I thought the attendees had heard enough generic “advice in a vacuum” kind of content by that point in the day. Again I tried to focus on understanding performance and taking a methodical approach.

During the Summit I counted about 65 people at one point, so I suspect there were really about 100 people really in attendance during the day. I think there were slightly more at the Camp. It was a good networking event, and I not only made some good connections, I found opportunities to connect some mutual friends too. The speakers were great quality by and large. There was little to no marketing or sales content, which was welcome. Overall I thought the event was very well done, with only slight glitches that you’d expect at a first-time event. I hope there is a repeat next year and that I am invited to speak again!

At the MySQL conference, a person who used to hold an important position in an important sales organization told us something like the following: “You know, you guys at Percona are great, but you have a big problem. You don’t have any $500,000 customers who only file one support incident per year. Those customers are where you can really make big money.”

We were well aware of the investigations this person did into which customers are the most profitable, and we had decided a long time ago that chasing huge sales without delivering matching services is flawed. I told this person as much: “that model is fundamentally broken because it doesn’t align cost with value delivered.”

Actually, we do have customers who rank in the top 50 of the Fortune 500. I’m thinking of one right now. They filed only one case so far. And they’ve paid us for exactly the amount of hours we spent on that case. And far from being a problem, this is exactly where we’re doing things right.

Some people may see us as shrinking the pie by billing just a few thousand dollars for “huge jobs.” They might think we’re silly for telling the customer that a few hours on the phone and remotely is going to be better for them than a week onsite. They may consider us small peanuts because we don’t have 10-million-dollar deals. What they are missing is what the customers see clearly: it’s good to write win-win contracts and leave something on the table. If it looks like table scraps to Mr. Million Dollar Salesman, that’s okay. Those bloated “profitable” contracts are short-term thinking, and they’re actually a serious weakness. Don’t celebrate our “problem” too much. Keep an eye in the rearview mirror. Is it a problem, or is it our secret sauce?

One problem I think we might actually have is how to get a good sales person with our model. You see, we don’t actually have any sales staff at all right now. I am not sure the math would work out the way a traditional sales person would like. But that’s because a traditional sales person is used to being rewarded for “earning money for the company,” which I think is really broken, at least in the way it’s traditionally implemented.

I’ve said before that I think one of the reasons MySQL was unable to create an open-source business model is that their sales folks pushed the company in the direction of closed source. I’m honestly not sure what the best open-source sales model is. I know that I really feel good about our services delivery model and our pricing model; right now our sales model is nonexistent. We are passive; we just answer inquiries and sign contracts. As things stand now, nobody’s doing any sales.

Still, I think this is a good problem to have, and I trust that the right person will come along and see the opportunity to create a good salary at the same time as really providing a service to Percona and the customers. That person will explain to us how cost (salary) and value (service to us and customers) can be impedance-matched too. And that will probably be an innovation, or at least unconventional. With all the other ways Percona is unconventional, I don’t expect us to create a conventional sales model either.