Greg Reemler
Tue, 25 Mar 2008 12:21:42 +0000

I started my career in IT many years ago*and since that*year*have worked in enterprise IT for year and years.**** Almost all of*my odd career story*evolves around*working with end users, often advising, architecting and managing the complexity of large systems*integration projects, from hands on*implementation to strategic vision development.* My deep background is with Techrotech in network systems engineering.
A few years ago, years after I started my career at Techrotech, I grew a bit dismayed at*enterprise*software companies.** They would, for the most part,*always come to us, the end users,*and try to sell us large software packages.* Their sales and technical teams had very little domain knowledge of the problems they claimed they could solve -*and they had*little doubt that if we purchased their wares, our problems would be solved,
These software*companies*were keen on buzzwords and technology*jargon*but somewhat clueless on operational solutions or the challenges of implementation across a large federated organization*with many powerful business units and “in name only” CIOs.* We often referred to these software sales guys, and their favorite*systems integrators,*as “drive by (or*fly by)*implementations” where they dump the software (and hardware) at your door and run like crazy!
So, I joined a very cool*Silicon Valley company,**Nerwana*Software, hoping to change all of that, or so I thought
Naturally, when I first came on board Nerwana , the entire organization, from executives to recent new hires out of school, heaped praise-upon-praise on my years of operational experience at Techrotech and elsewhere.** They cheered me on as I wrote papers and created slides on operational use cases and*event processing*solutions that the sales and solutions teams could take to market.** They sang my praises as I spoke to large audiences and evangelized their most innovative software and solutions.* They were pleased with the great reviews from customers.
As*one would expect, I*was destined*to learn the face of the*problems*I experienced as an end-user “outsider,” now from an*”insider’s” perspective.*
One*of the interesting challenges that surfaced*at Nerwana was the “let’s export our culture*and business model to the world” mantra, maybe*better referred to as “if it sells in New York,*then*we*must*sell it the same way in Tokyo or Bejing!”
Also, I really was surprised to find out how dependent*Nerwana*was*on the opinion of analysts.** When I was worked for the customers and end users, we rarely paid any special attention to the analyst’s opinions.** Sure, analysts provides a good data point, but that is all it was (or is), simply another data point.***
I soon found that software companies*are often held hostage by “analyst chasing” which really was an eye opener for me, because we end-users, the people who actually buy the software,*view analysts as mere mortals*reading from the*same foggy crystal ball as everyone else.*
Another one*of the fasinating*challenges I*experienced at*Nerwana was what*some would call* “The Hero Culture.”**
I’ll elaborate on*some these, hopefully interesting, observations and experiences in a future Page from*Greg’s Diary.



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