Tag Archives: ethics

If all I hear are benefits, either you aren’t thinking or you are in sales

I just read

http://scn.sap.com/community/cloud/blog/2014/08/04/moving-to-the-cloud–what-the-hell-is-cloud-computing by @Kunal_Pandya

It’s a good piece about the benefits of cloud. And it does a great job of explaining some terminology. However, I came across one bit that I just couldn’t let go.

“What % of your customers are on the latest version of your software?”. 

If the answer is less than 100%, it is not multi-tenant.

Four times a year SuccessFactors would answer less than 100%. Why? Because some companies have paid to be upgraded slightly later than others so as to ensure that if they are any issues, they are less likely to see them.

Also within SuccessFactors customers, many would not be using the latest tools. Why? Because they have opted not to run those areas, as change management is costly and they don’t see the need, yet. Are they running the latest version – arguably yes and no, they have access to it, but certainly they are multi-tenant within the data centre.

Within the HANA Cloud Platform, one has the option to run an application/database without downtime for 6 months – it will continue to run on the version of the software that was released at the time the application was started. However, the platform is updated every 2 weeks. Bounce your application and it will pick up the newest runtime. Clearly not every customer is using the latest version of the solution. Is the solution multi-tenant? This is perhaps a harder one to answer as even within the same data centre there are different versions. However, all these versions are running within containers that are provided by the same software. So perhaps it is multi-tenant? I’d suggest that it is, but it fails the 100% on one version test.

My points here are 1) it is dangerous to make sweeping generalisations and 2) that whilst there are large benefits to moving to multi-tenant solutions, there is also a real business demand expressed in $$$ to ensure stability of solution, which is a real risk of a “true” multi-tenant solution.

The diagrams of Sven in SaaS and PaaS: a symbiotic relationship delivering enterprise value do well to show the immense value of cloud solutions over traditional onPremise model but don’t hide the downsides either.

I think it’s worth while to show two sides of an argument. When trying to convince someone to buy an apple rather than an orange, point out that the orange is juicier, but perhaps the apple has less risk of spilling juice down your shirt front when biting in to it.

I think it is imperative that if we are to be trusted as advisers to those that claim that they don’t understand #cloud (and probably those that do too) we should probably discuss the downsides too.

Perhaps that’s bad practise in sales, to point out the bad sides of your product? Perhaps why sales people are consistently rated untrustworthy? Me I’d rather not have someone accuse me of being in sales. 😉

Reader’s Digest Poll – Trusted People 2014

Gallop Poll – Honesty/Ethics in Professions

 

On being a dodgy international business empire

Recently I got an email from a company that I hadn’t heard of with an invoice for a month of electronic fax services that I had supposedly signed up for.

Now normally these sort of emails go directly to my spam folder and never see the light of day. But this one rang a bell and also they claimed to have my credit card details and were going to debit automatically!

You see, I had signed up for a service similar to the one mentioned (the ability to send faxes via email) but I certainly hadn’t agreed on any sort of monthly service fee. What I had signed up for was a pay-per-use fax service. If I needed to send a fax, I sent an email, and the cost of sending the fax would be debited from my credit card. But that wasn’t this company, or the service I was being billed for.

A trawl through the unread emails in my inbox found another email from the company now trying to bill me. It seems that they had purchased the small Australian company that I had previously made an agreement with, and had “upgraded” my account to one with a monthly service fee.

So unilaterally they had changed the terms and conditions of my agreement, and only given me notice of this through an email (that very much looked like spam marketing.) It seems that they also had sent another email which came from the company I had an agreement with, but had spoofed the from address – so I had assumed it was spam.

The biggest problem – the company I had originally had an agreement with had passed on my credit card details to this mega-corporation ( just type email fax into your favourite search engine, they’ll be at the top – and probably own the other top ten results too, it seems they are pretty much cornering this business.) So now they had my credit card details and were going to bill me.

Fortunately for me, the credit card I had used for the original service has been cancelled for some time – somewhere along the line, its details were stolen and it was used fraudulently which HSBC thankfully informed me about and I cancelled the card.

So I’m now having a nice email exchange with mega-corp asking them kindly to stop invoicing me for services I did not sign up for and have no intention of paying for. Also asking them to immediately and retrospectively cancel any service that they believe I have signed up for. Whilst they keep asking me for new credit card details (like that’s ever going to happen!) I’ve read on other forums that they can get pretty nasty about this, bringing in debt collectors and the like whilst not cancelling the service and invoicing more and more. So we’ll see what happens.

This said, the nice lady I spoke to when I phoned their customer service department was quite helpful in apparently arranging cancellation of my account. We’ll see how this pans out.

This raises for me some concerns. How is it that a company can be purchased and the new owner is able to make unilateral changes to existing contracts? Surely that is illegal? If not – it should be!

How can an email sent from a different domain than the purported sender (in this case an email from support@faxmate.com.au was sent from cpro30.com) 1) not automatically be assumed to be spam marketing/phishing 2) allow or justify unilateral contract modification.

Should it be legal that a company that purchases another automatically has access to all the purchased company’s records including customer credit card details? I guess to a certain extent that this has to be the case, but in the case where an Australian company is purchased by an international shouldn’t there be some protection about our personal details suddenly being transferred overseas?

I’m glad my credit card was already cancelled, but I’m sure there are many others out there right now in Australia who are trying to figure out whether or not to just pay a few dollars or fight this seriously dodgy business process.