Get yourself a Customer Advisory Board or two…

Last night I got back from our third Quest Database Management Customer Advisory Board. I can’t stress strongly enough how valuable these advisory boards can be. Our previous CABs had a heavy focus on Microsoft SQL Server, whereas this time around we aimed for the DBA Manager level with cross-platform responsibilities. This blog you are reading, as well as our community initiatives in general, are a direct result of our previous Customer Advisory Board meetings. In those we heard loud and clear the refrain of ‘help us get more value out of your tools; educate us on them; unlock functionality we don’t know about already; help us learn new platforms; help us interact with our people in the community.’ We’re pretty proud of what we’ve achieved there, but we know we have a long way to go. With this board we showed some of what we have planned over the next year with our educational and community initiatives, and the response was good, as well as giving us some ideas of how to make them better. There’s a real need for a one-stop shop portal for all our initiatives; right now we are a little dispersed, and this causes you some pain. We’ll be addressing that soon.
Also, we were very excited to hear that our customers want a way to get intelligence out of the data that our tools generate and store in repositories. We have some technology at Quest, which should allow us to deliver a proof of concept to our board within a week or so. We’ll have them test it, develop use cases, and hopefully validate the approach. If that works out, then from the CAB to delivering a solution to a considerable pain point will be extremely fast. And, if the feedback comes back negatively, that they wouldn’t use the solution, then we’ll have saved ourselves a whole host of time and effort.
That’s the power of a CAB right there.