Packaging Matters: What ClickStarts and ClickStacks Mean for CloudBees Partners

Reduce your mean time-to-smiles

It’s not the holiday season yet, but we’re all familiar with opening presents. My children eagerly anticipate ripping open gift wrapping and getting their finger-twiddling hands on the newest Harry Potter wand or Wii Game, hoping with wide-eyes that what’s under that wrapper isn’t a sweater or book. (Gasp! “Was I a bad boy, Santa?”)

As a parent, I’m also too familiar with the pain of prying open molded plastic and twisty-ties to get to that very toy. I cut my fingers, I use my teeth as pliers and then scissor my way to liberating these gifts from their boxes, knowing that I’d better have a screwdriver and batteries ready to bring them to life. Then there’s the act of deciphering instructions, the setup and putting the video game to use or clicking together Lego pieces to take that toy to its usable state and make it fun. I can hear the sound of my kids proverbial foot-tapping, arms crossed, or more likely steady, impatient refrain of “is it ready yet, Dad?!”

As adults, we’re no better. Unfortunately, we’re a short-term, instant gratification culture of consumerism. We’re impatient if our newest iPhone app takes more than 10 seconds to download or 2 seconds to boot. If our single-origin, lactose-free cappuccinos aren’t pressed and whisked to perfection by the barista we expect to recognize our face, name and how we like our drink, our blood begins to boil, we sigh audibly and we start taking it out on smart phone browser buttons and screens.

Sacha has blogged about what extensibility of the CloudBees platform means and how we’ve redefined the cloud platform, and how ClickStarts and ClickStacks advance that aim. Let me tell you briefly how it helps our partners and with their own goals.

What if…?

If the process of getting an app up and running as a developer is as mind-numbingly tedious as opening that holiday gift – setting up a Jenkins build, a repo, a database and getting that app up and running on the cloud – we are here to help. Just think if you could have that holiday toy, bright and shiny, out of its box, ready to be played with, assembled with battery power and in the hands of our kids, with a click! What if your customer could walk in and grab that pre-made non-fat latte and get their caffeine boost and morning started happily, with a click?!

What it means for you

If you’re a partner of CloudBees, whether an ISV that sells packaged software or a hosted, integrated service or verified solution on CloudBees, this means something important to you. What it does today, is enable you as a partner to i) integrate easily, and at the appropriate depth; ii) invest more based on business value; iii) reduce effort across multiple PaaS offerings, and iv) customize offerings around SI/consultant/design firm practices and investments.

How you and your customers benefit

By packaging your software or service into a ClickStart or building a plug-in as a ClickStack, you gain exposure in our marketplace and listing of ClickStarts and ClickStacks – more eyeballs. If you’re New Relic and want to add your solution to a pre-built ClickStack or you’re LifeRay and want to help get users on your portal/CMS software as a ClickStart without a lot of configuration and deployment headache, this is for you. We present your ClickStart or ClickStack in a friendly, accessible way to users, right in the toolbar of our console – Grand Central. Be a great destination on that big board, so users know how to hop on board and get going more quickly to that place they want to visit – your solution, running and usable.

Where we can go together

You can imagine where this could go, as business partners. We had some folks from a large systems integrator come by our booth at JavaOne and tell us that if we could present a private-labeled directory of ClickStarts for their knowledge workers or their corporate training attendees, it would help them immensely. And imagine the second and third order things we could tackle together, like helping users rate and rank your solution; crowd-source some best-practices on how to configure and deploy, how to manage these templates, maybe patch and update. There are plenty of places we intend to go with you. We want our users to be on the fast path to enjoying our solutions together, as much as our children anticipate and find joy in their holiday presents and we do with our own morning cup of java.

Click*

Here’s to making your life and our joint customers’ lives easier with ClickStarts/Stacks!

-- Andrew Lee
Vice President, Business Development
CloudBees
cloudbees.com

Andrew has over 15 years of experience in business development and strategic alliances within the software infrastructure sector. Prior to CloudBees, he was a principal with Battery Ventures, focusing on the enterprise software and infrastructure sector, including PaaS. Prior to Battery Ventures, he directed corporate development at VMware, leading many of their acquisitions and strategic venture investments.