Here at ENKI, we keep up a dialog with our customers about what we can do to make them more successful.  From the time we founded ENKI, we have envisioned providing IT operations services to customers who didn't want to build their own operations department.  Over time, we have added capabilities and products, such as our Computing Utility, to achieve this goal.

This evening, I was having dinner with a principal from one of my consulting customers, a Web 2.0 startup.  He told me about his critical dissatisfaction with his current hosting vendor.  His analysis was that they just want to lease him hardware, and that they can't support that mysterious interface between his web application and the hardware and operating system they're selling him, leaving him to develop IT operations skills in-house.  He wants his company's IT operations to just work, so he can concentrate on making his business succeed and prepare for his go-live event.  His CEO is putting pressure on him to solve the problem, fast.

Sure, he knows someone who used to set up data centers for banks, and he could call this guy and get a data center built for his company.  But the cost, delays, and hassle seem overwhelming to him.  But he'd do it if he had to.  Or, he could continue to lease machines from a hosting company, and hire an administrator to configure the hardware and networking to support his application - which could include clustering and other configurations that the hosting vendor might not support.  But in any case, he would be responsible for designing and supporting the infrastructure, which he finds costly and difficult since his expertise is in creating software applications.

Over the course of the dinner, I heard more and more about what he really wanted from his hosting vendor:

1. Computing delivered as a utility, on a pay-for-what-you-use basis, so that he doesn't have to invest in capital equipment or excess capacity.
2. A predictable sales model and pricing so he knows what he'll be paying as he grows and he can trust his vendor to be a partner.
3. Ability to rapidly scale up hardware resources in his data center, such as if his company has a successful launch.
4. High reliability of the hosting service.  This could include rapid failover, data backup, and more.
5. No restrictions on how his software is written, so that he can simply deploy it into the data center.
6. Adequate support to ensure that any problems he has are addressed quickly, whether they are handled by the vendor or his staff.
7. Deep technical knowledge regarding IT operations from his operations vendor, so that he can get any assistance he needs to quickly roll out his application.
8. Infrastructure technology that allows easy management, scaling, failover, and provisioning of his computing infrastructure and applications. 
9. A sincere desire on the part of the vendor to partner with him for his success, with the flexibility to match his particular needs
10. Any and all services from the vendor so that he'll never need to build an IT operations capability himself, nor seek funding to pay for it.

I've started calling this set of offerings outsourced Operations as a Service, or OaaS - sort of a counterpart to SaaS, software as a service.  I've modified ENKI's website to communicate this value proposition.  I'd be interested and grateful to hear from you about what you think are the essential elements of an OaaS strategy that would meet your company's needs.

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