I love how in life seemingly individual events inter-relate. Some might call it synchronicity but I tend to just think of them as data points, and I’ve made a habit of quietly collecting data points. Someone is nice to waiting staff when they don’t need to be; data point. Someone tells me what they consider a white lie; data point. I hear an unusual fact; data point. Maybe I’m weird but when I form an opinion, it is based on lots of discrete data points and is, as readers of my posts here will know, very much my opinion. I prefer to live this way rather than being fed opinions, or borrowing them from others. Alas, I’ve had several data points this last week in relation to innovation versus stability, and they’re highly relevant to Simwood and our customers.
As is usual, one of our so-called competitors responded to our blogs in their newsletter and tried to make a case for innovation being bad. They said they don’t focus on shiny features nobody wants but [once every ten years or so] do something [others would consider insignificant] that their [long-suffering] customers have asked for. Yes, the delusion and usual vacuous virtue-signalling wound me up and I wrote a blog about it, because it came in close proximity to another data point – a respected competitor selling SBCs. You can read it here if interested.
At the time, I couldn’t see how innovation could possibly be bad. We strive to bring continual new features to our customers to keep your business as close to the leading edge as you choose to be. It is why every disruptive startup that has become a high value exit was a Simwood customer – they got it, they embraced it. What is not to love? What kind of cretin would argue otherwise?
Then I had another data point; a post on LinkedIn. In it someone who has done $100m+ in enterprise deals told a story of a startup pitching with “We’re disrupting the industry!” to a Fortune 500 CTO whose eyes glazed over as a $4m deal died. Whether true or not is irrelevant – he’d heard it five times that week and didn’t want to buy disruption. The poster explained why:
Your “innovation” is their “risk”
Your “disruption” is their “danger”
Your “revolution” is their “rebellion”
He described three types of enterprise buyers, the largest group (80%), crave stability above all, need proof not promises and buy from safety signals. There are exceptions, and we’ve been privileged to meet them (the other Simon W – hat tip to you Sir) but in the majority of cases, pitching innovation to the Fortune 500 is going to lead to an immune response: “I don’t want to be the first penguin in the water”.
They don’t want transformation, they want risk reduction. They don’t want revolution, they want results. They don’t want a promise of the future, they want proof of the present. We all need to translate innovation into insurance.
Pretty obvious when you think about it and it underpins the old adage “you won’t get fired for buying Cisco/IBM/<insert generational stalwart>”, but it was so impactful for me as a data point that I shared it on our internal Slack for our team and it has bounced round my head since.
A few weeks prior, I’d recorded a podcast interview with the Carrier Community, you can hear the results for yourself here. In there I extol Simwood’s virtues as having a unique architecture that is 10-15 years ahead of peers. They’re messing with virtualising SBCs while we ditched virtualisation in favour of containerisation in 2015, to give one example.
Now if you put those three data points together, you get the realisation I’m about to share. You may think it is obvious, and well done you if so – took me thirty years to realise it so I’m quite pleased.
Simwood trades on honesty and technical leadership and it has served us well. We have amazing customers who get what we’re about and can leverage it. But what about those we don’t have? Have we scared them off with “innovation” or as many will say – is it just me!
Implicit in our technical leadership is stability but that isn’t obvious. What I presented about at conferences back in the mid 2010s as our ground-breaking new architecture – putting BGP in containers so they could be first class citizens, anycasted across a global network, with firewall rules pushed out to the edge of the network – was innovation but, ten years later, is a proven rock-solid platform. I would argue our infrastructure is superior to any peer who is stringing together SBCs and then terrified to touch them in case they break, and reporting outages because two had different manually applied configurations. The same “competitor” who criticised innovation has also tried to spin not applying security patches for years (a legal requirement in UK legislation, incidentally) as a virtue. That isn’t innovation, but it sure as hell isn’t stability either.
The reality is our platform changes every single day. Yes, we have the audacity to push innovation out continually. After development and testing, changes are continually pushed out around the network. This CI/CD – continuous integration, continuous delivery – approach works for us, just as it does for much of Silicon Valley. When did you ever hear of Google being taken down for the weekend for an “upgrade”? When you plan and expect failure, have hundreds of every key component in your stack, distributed geographically, it is easy to apply a change to 1%, 2%, 10% – to roll it out around the network. Our architecture enables that. Contrast it with mapping a customer to a single SBC in a single site which needs a software update which’ll impact their service. Which would you consider more stable?
The proof is in the pudding. The “competitor” criticising innovation has what seem like weekly outages. Their network appears to be of a quality of a school project; with too much concentrated into single machines, dubious design choices and geographic distribution. By contrast we have hundreds of containers (thousands across function areas), which are being upgraded all the time and cannot be different due to human error, so we really don’t care and nobody notices if one or two fail. As a result, our last actual “outage” was 2018 which I consider to be pretty stable! We’ve also had a dual fibre break which no-one other than our engineers noticed too.
Oh and we have a 100% uptime SLA with a 25x SLG, which pays out in the first minute of an outage. Others spin, we’ve literally put money where our mouths are.
While I’ve had an epiphany here, it only really affects how we communicate and present ourselves. The fact is, with Simwood, you can have innovation AND stability. We just need to be better at telling you about the stability side of things because in this market, if you want low risk, safety and proven track record – that is Simwood. You get the cool stuff for free if you want it.
