A New Product in a Week – Day Five

As the referee blows his whistle calling an end of normal time, we prepare for the game to enter weekend extra time. (read more about the challenge here).

Leon M (Commercial Lead & Project Co-Conspirator)
Coffee time! Adam and the team are still “heads down”. But I hear excited murmurings about an impending demo… In the meantime I continue working on the website. Pricing page complete. Menus updated.

I’m sensing a disturbance in the force with this change to the menu though. This is making me itch. Might need to get onto the TunedIn guys about coming up with a new service just so they line up with our products, lol.

Better news on the front page though. Fits like a glove.

People think marketing’s about strategy, consumer psychology and clever copy-writing. In reality it’s more about nudging images around on webpages and posters and stuff until they look right 😉

Just spoke to some more IAM Cloud partners about the product. Great to hear insight on how they currently handle migrations to OneDrive. Definitely think we’ve got an opportunity to create a best-in-class product to handle this right now. For partners it’s all about speed, simplicity and cost. Customers need the confidence that it’s easy and low risk. We need to make this a real no-brainer. If we can get the product right, my hope is we could make a big difference to our Partner community. If we can remove practically all the barriers our Partners face in helping get their customers in the Microsoft Cloud, we’ve done our job.

I start putting together some messaging we can use for Partners and thinking about ways we can engage them around this. At last count we had around 250 registered partners and 2-3 new partners signing up each week. So we’re not exactly Microsoft, but for a company that doesn’t have a dedicated partner management team trying to optimize the way we work with our channel is no longer a simple task. Maybe we need a dedicated partner management team. Anyone with experience of Microsoft tech and channel management fancy a job? Haha, I’m actually serious. Anyway for the launch of Cloud Winch, maybe a partner webinar is a good way forward. I’ll think on it.

In the meantime, I get sidetracked into finishing up our new shiny documentation for IDx, and push it live. IDx is the identity platform that the rest of our other technology orbits. In fact, Cloud Winch leverages IDx to take the strain out of handling users for the OneDrive migration. It’s super powerful.

Short history of IAM Cloud:
IAM Cloud was one of the first companies and products to the IDaaS (cloud identity) scene. The initial build of IAM Cloud wasn’t long after the launch of Okta – who in fairness we only discovered a few years later having already done the hard work of getting to the idea by ourselves. Today Okta are generally considered to be IDaaS market leaders along with Microsoft themselves. A few years back, it became clear we didn’t have the fire power to take on Okta or the growing list of companies joining the IDaaS scene. Especially since most of them, like Okta, were VC backed. As proud bootstrappers, we couldn’t compete with toe-to-toe. So we took a different route. Our thinking went something like this:

We’re selling our identity system to customers because identity systems are useful for them. Why can’t our identity system be useful for us too?

So we kind of turned the identity technology in on itself and started using it to help us solve different problems… These included migrations of various types (including this Cloud Winch product), drive mapping, password management, and a few things that haven’t come to light yet.

Each challenge we solved with our identity system forced its evolution – we’ve had to keep making it better, adding new capabilities, making it more flexible. Suddenly, about a year ago, it dawned on us that we’d gone full circle and have ended up with a kick-ass identity platform. Different to Okta, Azure AD and OneLogin – in fact in some ways complimentary to them – IDx is our “new” identity integration offering. Read all about it. 

Adam C (Architect & Project Lead):
Quick catch-up?

Leon M:
Yep.