WMMM #022 - This week I share a story of doubters, skeptics, myths, hope, faith, and walking the talk.

Jeff Keplar Newsletter June 24, 2023 9 min read

This week I share The ADP Story - Never A Doubt.

The technology supplier was MapR Technologies.

The customer was ADP.

The characters:

Vijay - ADP Vice President of Network Security

Julian - ADP Supply Chain - Procurement

Matt - MapR Account Manager

Tom - MapR Pre-sales Engineering Manager

David - MapR’s attorney

Bruce - MapR’s VP of Global Business Operations

As alluded to in last week’s edition, there is a story behind taking a $60k pipeline entry and closing a $2M new logo. You will hear that story today.

The Landscape

ADP wanted to create a central repository for Network Security. It had a global network of data centers and wanted to capture data and perform real-time analytics to keep its customer data secure from cyber threats.

Unstructured data, real-time analytics, scale, and the ability to use low-cost commodity hardware in a distributed architecture led them to the world of Hadoop. Cloudera was the first mover and market leader, followed by Hortonworks.

ADP’s IT staff had Cloudera and was happy with it but did not have a comparable use case to Network Security’s (NS). NS had tried the Hadoop distribution from Pivotal (through their enterprise storage vendor, EMC) and had experienced multiple issues that became show-stoppers.

NS learned of MapR, a Big Data vendor that was a distant third to Cloudera and Hortonworks, because it had built a proprietary file system to improve many of Hadoop’s shortcomings. Many buyers of Hadoop distributions eliminated MapR from consideration because it was not 100% Open Source. But Vijay understood the technology in the Hadoop ecosystem and appreciated the benefits of MapR’s intellectual property. MapR was an actual software vendor instead of merely offering services and support for Open Source software. And, with a misfire with Pivotal and corporate IT happy with Cloudera, Vijay was exposed politically.

Saying Goodbye to the Baby of the Family

I was given responsibility for the East on August 8th, the first week of MapR’s Q2. I spent most of the next two weeks in New York, meeting with the team and getting the lay of the land. I inherited a sales unit that arguably had the most potential in the Company but was currently the lowest-performing of MapR’s five sales theaters. We had recently suffered three resignations that left me with two open headcount in Toronto and Philly.

Morale was low. Most of the unit felt isolated from MapR’s HQ in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley.

Debbie and I have four children. The baby of that bunch was leaving for college the last week of the month. I flew back home (to Dallas), repacked, and the three of us headed west. Hannah’s University was located in southern CA.

I’d be in California, not New York or anywhere in the East Theater, for the last week of August.

The Devil is Always in the Details

The call came almost immediately after we got settled in LA.

It was Matt. Vijay was waiting on us for pricing for a “paid pilot.” We had delayed our response with Jay’s resignation and getting me up to speed. Vijay was upset with MapR stalling and wanted to air it out with someone.

I told Matt I would take the call and asked him to find time for Vijay and me to speak. I would fall on the sword and take the verbal beating. This would not be my first time with an irate customer and likely not my last. Besides, I wanted to meet Vijay and begin building a relationship.

I took the call two days later from the campus of my daughter’s new home for the next four years. Vijay was pleasant, to begin with, then turned up the heat. I was not offended. He was perfectly justified in feeling the way he did and expressing that to me.

At the right moment, I channeled our discussion to what happens next. We ended the call amicably, with me asking for a chance to deliver on his expectations and receiving his agreement that he would get me the information I would need to do so.

On the call with Vijay, I was able to probe and listen. I learned that ADP had been evaluating MapR for months. With the Pivotal flop, they were behind schedule with Pivotal’s term licenses expiring soon, explaining his urgency. If NS chose anything other than Cloudera this time, they better have a good reason and be sure it will work.

Vijay also told me that ADP wanted MapR to use its License Agreement for the transaction, which he suspected was the culprit for our delay. The request was due to a recent experience with Elastic, a small startup not unlike MapR.

They wanted a 12-month term (not the industry standard 36 months) to reduce their risk and were expecting a discount.

Why?

Well, for starters, they were “ADP.” A new logo with an enterprise brand deserved a discount. Additionally, they always got significant discounts from their vendor partners. Julian was the name Vijay gave me for their lead in Procurement.

The solution they were using today was built using Pivotal and Splunk. As the project matured, they learned how much more data they would accumulate using this new technology. They quickly realized their current approach was cost-prohibitive at scale, driving them to evaluate alternatives.

Recap

To recap, we had:

A new enterprise logo opportunity
A $60k paid pilot, after discount
The order to be written using ADP’s paper
A project that had already failed once
A happy Cloudera customer at ADP Corp IT
A sponsor who “knew the difference” and understood our value prop.

I saw an opportunity to build a significant order. We needed to learn more about the value of this project for ADP to do that. I thought I had a way to get them what they wanted, but I was unlikely to succeed with a $60k transaction.

Post-call Debrief

My adrenaline began to flow.

I got together with Matt and shared my notes from the call. It’s funny. I’m excited as our call begins, and Matt is scared as hell. He expected to hear how angry Vijay was with him and MapR.

Matt cares, and he hustles. He’s a quick learner. I love working with salespeople with these traits. I quickly had him excited as well, and we dug into:

What we know
What we don’t know but would like to
What we might consider.
We landed on learning more about the value to ADP of Vijay’s central repository. Matt discovered that the repository could be used to protect customer data in their global data centers. ADP had 1m customers in 140 countries. I helped Matt quantify a value proposition using a business value exercise I learned at Oracle.

Flash back a couple of weeks.

I had inherited a team “on their heels.” They had just lost their sales manager. The Company expected them to be the best-performing team. They were fifth out of five. Two of their colleagues had left, and two more were halfway out the door when a new guy stepped in to presumably “save the day.” This cat is not from the Big Data world. He is not from the startup world. He’s an ex-Oracle dude, and the MapR execs think his Oracle “pixie dust” will turn the East into the Magic Kingdom.