How to: Survive a Vendor Roadmap Session in 2018!

I’ve been kicking around in vendor land for some time, I remember when I was first asked to deliver a roadmap session, not because it was a particularly memorable event, rather, because I had no real idea what it was or entailed.

Of course I’d heard of the ‘Roadmap’, like anyone remotely associated with networking today might have heard of ‘SD-WAN’ or ‘GDPR’, however, as anyone mildly technical would testify, knowing a term or an abbreviation alone can get you in hot water and fast! So, I did what most people would have done, reached out to my peer group, laboured over the topic with a few people for as long as I could over a flat-white (they were hip once). The results of my questioning….the answer? It was somewhat vague, a little uninspiring, and most importantly to me at the time, it lacked purpose, like a conference call with seven people.

The following week at a customer site I stood up and presented, first slide in, the NDA, second up new features, third up future products, forth some loose timeframes, fifth, sixth, yawn, you get the idea.

Here I was, prescribing what the future looked like, with a pinch of plagiarism from Moors Law accompanied by bare-metal logo-less photos of chassis technology racked up in a pretend-secret-data-centre probed full of colourful fibre…this was 2011, fast forward seven years and I’m often asked to the deliver the same infamous Roadmap. Apparently this enquire isn’t agnostic to my area of expertise, which happens to be Service Providers, nope, Enterprise Security, MSPs, and retail clients have the same asks, almost bi-quarterly and of all their vendors!

Of course, I’m not questioning the necessity for such sessions, after all this is great opportunity for the vendor to share their vision, thoughts and directions. What I do question and the reason for this loose-calibration-of-words-compiled-into-a-blog-entry is this;

Are these vendor lead sessions still a good use of everyone’s time?

So, if you’re muttering, ‘maybe’ or a straight ‘no’, good news, we agree, and you’re still reading. So how we can collectively make it a better, bi-directional constructive use of everyone’s time?

1. Chances are your employer has made a significant investment with said vendor, when your favourite vendor SE (for augments sake let’s assume this is me) is talking through the shiny new features slide, ask which of those features are applicable to your current install-base, if not immediately available ask when? While you’re at it, ask those difficult questions around the possible impact of said feature(s) on your ageing install-base — it’s in everyone’s interest that expectations are set early, or at the very least considered.
2. If your organisation has done a good job embracing said vendor technology, chances are there are various departments within your organisation that interface with the technology. My roadmap sessions are typically delivered to more than a single department, why not take the opportunity to talk to your colleagues, explore ideas around a new features or a product that might address a current problem or obstacle. For example possibly collapsing some functions or features of different technologies. I’ve witnessed this actually happen, in a previous really good roadmap session, six expensive under-utilised load balances were totally repurposed for another project, all because colleagues had a real chat, at the right time, in the right place! It gives us SEs great purpose in our professional lives when this happens (seriously).
3. Once you get past the excitement of those EoL, EoS, EoP dates why not open up the discussion a little, no one runs a single vendor network strategy, why not talk about furthering your ROI by collaborating cross vendor technology, it shouldn’t be a mystical concept in 2018, north/south-bound interfaces have been open for business for years, cross vendor collaboration can pay dividends. [shameless employer plug] take my employers Sandbox technology and its ability to complement an end point protection solution, we have many working examples of this and the partnerships are only growing. So, at your next session, press your vendor on topics of cross vendor synergies, why can’t your current switching platform shutdown a network port based on verifiable malicious payloads identified by a Sandbox solution?
4. Lastly, there is a very high possibility your vendor account team are spread across similar accounts in the same vertical, why not take the Roadmap session to talk about how the industry is doing, what paradigm shifts are taking place, what’s actually working vs what’s not working. A good old example here is the virtualisation topic, we know the pros and cons of x86 vs ASIC, but are things working out where it most matters, the ‘bottom-line’? Don’t shy away from the bigger picture conversions, this is a great way to gain exposure and experience in areas of the industry you may not interface with ordinarily, the goal here is to pick your vendors brains on topics outside of the traditional bits and bytes.

That’s it! Make those Roadmap sessions less prescriptive, you might even enjoy the next one…

this article/blog was originally posted on LinkedIn