We’ve updated our sales process to automatically create AWS ACE opportunities — a system that allows us to seamlessly collaborate with AWS sales representatives on opsZero’s opportunities.

This integration means we can now work directly with AWS account managers from the very beginning to identify the best solutions for your needs. It also enables us to bring in AWS Solutions Engineers early in the process to address technical challenges more efficiently.

While this change happens mostly behind the scenes, it significantly enhances our ability to problem-solve and deliver better outcomes for our customers during the sales process.

We now have a variety of AWS offerings on the AWS APN Marketplace and have made it easy to add new offerings. These offerings allow us to get in front of AWS account managers with our products and services so they can recommend us to their customers.

opsZero now has a full CI/CD setup for all our products and services. These are setup on Django for the API and Docusaurus for the frontend with Cloudflare Pages for hosting. Previously we only had CI/CD setup for some of our applications which made consistency of releases a bit problematic.

It is ironic we know that a DevOps company didn't have a full CI/CD setup for our apps. However, I don't think CI/CD is necessary to get things going and we can make a lot of progress without it. We needed to prove our products had value first before we invested time into setting up the CI/CD pipelines and other tooling.

Now that we have a standardized process in place we can focus on releasing our products more frequently and with more confidence.

opsZero is getting a large refresh across both opsZero as well as on our various brands. As we stated before we are splitting apart our business to have their own identities. As part of this we decided to structure a common design across all our businesses. This allows us to create new businesses in the future with a common templates. While this work is ongoing we are quite excited to announce it now as a significant portion of the sites have been updated to use these new templates.

opsZero will release products and grow our business through mutually beneficial partnerships. Our business is Cloud Infrastructure and our long term plan is to become a Platform for Cloud + AI. However, each vertical has domain specific knowledge we lack and do not have a large team while limits our reach.

Partnerships​

When I look at opsZero's failures it has been largely around going into new verticals alone. If opsZero goes at a vertical alone we had to figure out the market, the marketing, and sales. It creates the onus on us to deliver and sell and learn a new industry. Even if we move horizontally within an industry we will still need to context switch as we sell from startups to governments to healthcare. This prevents us from focusing on a single vertical making our growth feel haphazard and lacking focus. We need teams single threaded focused on each vertical.

Traditionally, a company that wants to grow its business either hires people with expertise to build that business or buys a business that has those relationships. The problem with that is it becomes a capital expenditure where a failure means a total loss, partnerships allow us to make entering new verticals an operational expenditure. This reduces the cost of launching and testing something new and attacking it with people who are already knowledgeable.

Our goal long term with opsZero is to build a bazaar style platform servicing the needs of multiple verticals cobuilt with partners. We will become a distribution focused company with the current services becoming another “partner” within the ecosystem. Our buckets are Cloud and AI. All our products and services should live within these two buckets. And each service we release should have a partner who is responsible for servicing it.

This changes the organizational structure of the company to be like a startup studio or incubator. While we should sell a cohesive whole to our customers, behind the scenes it can be our partners who service the end result for a particular vertical while we complement them with our value add.

Solutions​

Our release methodology will change to the following:

• Figure out the service we want to create for a vertical.
• Find partners who could be good fits for coselling that product. Figure out ways we can partner with them.
• Cobranded and create a joint venture and cosell with partner. Focus on distribution and support the partner with data and sales resources.
• Continuously work with partner to more effectively reach customers and service the work for the customers.

The things we can do with a partner are three fold:

• Comarketing such as content, webinar, videos or other.
• Build new products that combines our strengths.
• Emails or other joint collaboration.
• Products

For the last decade opsZero has been a service’s first business. We built up a repository of deep knowledge about the Cloud and AI and accumulated various partnerships to boot. However, the problem is what does opsZero do becomes harder to explain. We do so many different things as a services company that it is becoming impossible to explain to customers what we do concisely.

So to both simplify the business and to make it easier to explain to potential customers our value we are breaking apart opsZero into various parts:

• Kubespot
• DiscountCloud
• DBAZero
• OMYAC
• PolicyCop
• deepfacts.ai

Yes, we are splitting opsZero into five specialized businesses.

Second, we are turning these businesses into product first businesses. This allows us to build out our offerings in scalable ways with focused leadership on each product and a set of KPIs that allow each business to scale independently.

At this point we have leadership for each of these subbusinesses including Sohan for Kubespot, Lokesh for DBAZero, Swarup for DiscountCloud, and Vamsi for deepfacts.ai. We are excited to see how we can scale each of these businesses.

So what does this mean for opsZero?

opsZero is becoming a company focused on bringing cloud native software to market. While we are starting with the five new products our long term goal is to bring additional products to market.

All websites are now standardized on Docusaurus. This allows us to more easily manage and maintain our ventures. With the usage of Docusaurus we can now easily share code and content between ventures and allow for a more consistent go to market across all ventures.

While Docusarus doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of other frameworks like NextJS, etc. it is a framework that does get out of the way. opsZero site has been migrated from WordPress to now being hosted on Cloudflare Workers using Docusaurus. Docusarus can be used to make any pages not just documentation sites. Further, it is opinionated in the way it is structured which is what we like, a standardized way of organizing content across all the new ventures we are looking to launch such as DiscountCloud.io

We now have a Google Analytics integration to allow us to track website visitors for our ventures using the Deming Control Chart methodology. While this is not exactly an exciting feature, it is our first integration point for monitoring and track venture metrics.

We now have a lead list filtering feature to allow us to cosell with AWS. This lead list filtering now allows us to find opportunities across the AWS ecosystem for startups and SLED for us to perform outreach.

We are excited to announce that we are now closely working with Vanta. As a partner of Vanta, we are able to offer our customers a streamlined experience for managing their security and compliance needs. We are able to provide our customers with a comprehensive solution that includes security monitoring, compliance management, and risk assessment.

As part of this partnerships:

• We are now reselling Vanta as an MSP.
• We have a close relationship with Vanta's sales team.
• We are building custom integrations with Vanta to streamline any issues.

With this we are combining the sales processes of MakeProspect with the compliance remediation of PolicyCop.