Star Wars and vendor-supported community support. Not so different after all.
In the original Star Wars movie, Obi Wan, aka “Ben,” Kenobi described the force as something that surrounds us and binds us all together. Those who believe in the Force can use its power to do things that some might consider impossible. The key to its power is belief in it.
Today’s IT environment appears to have a new force behind it and that’s the force created by vendor-driven communities. Like the Star Wars Force, communities require belief in it to harness its power. Those that do will be able to drive more value from their technology purchases than those that choose not to leverage it.
In actuality, the use of communities to drive extra IT value isn’t all that new. When I was a UNIX developer, I used to subscribe to various news groups where I could leverage the knowledge of others when I got stuck with a problem. The Linux community had a number of regional geek gatherings where people would sit and discuss the finer points of managing Web servers and other exciting topics. However, these were created by the masses for the masses. They were unstructured and really grew because of word of mouth. The only vendor-supported community that’s been around for a number of years that I can think of is F5’s DevCentral community, which allows its customers to do really cool, custom things with its iRules scripting language. The company has had phenomenal growth over the past five years and much of it is because of the community.
Over the past year or so, I’ve seen a rise in vendor support forums, including the announcement late last week of the Infblox “bloxHub” (infoblox.com/community). This is just the most recent example but there are now communities that cut across almost every technology segment and it appears more and more vendors are willing to put up the resources to facilitate and foster the growth of the community. I think this is critical to the long-term success of the vendor and its customers to get full value from the products.
The reason I like the concept and feel that communities have Force-like power is that the “collective” will always, always know more than any individual or even the vendor itself. Trying to configure something but you’re stuck? Odds are that someone out there using this product has had that problem as well. All you need to do is find said person. Post a message to the community site and see what comes back. The bigger the community, the faster your problem gets solved.
Trying to understand the impact of something new, say IPv6? Go out and scour the community site and where others have had success or, maybe more importantly, where the “gotchas” are in the deployment so as to be able to avoid them when you deploy it.
How about just perusing the site to get some ideas to find new ways to use the product? I’ve talked to many people who have had a number of “a-ha!” moments when simply browsing through a community site to see how others are leveraging a product. No matter how well you know a product, it’s unlikely you could possibly understand every use case for any product, so let the community be your guide.
Over the next couple of years, I’m expecting to see the number of vendor-supported communities skyrocket. IT complexity is certainly on the rise and it’s important that the vendors give its customers all the resources they can to help with success and long-term value, and supporting a community is one of the best resources.
