Last day of the year

Today is the last day of 2015. Something weird, that we still celebrate some date in half of the world because some hundred years ago it was decided this way (and could have been decided different)

A fine year has been, I would say, being on holidays.

This 2016 is going to be even better...  For now, we are trying to increase the number of people working on the project. We have offers from partners to participate or increase participation, and we have offers from customers that want to make this better.


I believe we have created something new, that adds value to all elements of the chain. Customers have overcome build vs. buy - and old IT mantra- with a build to buy, powered by open source. Partners have discovered a fine way to learn and get new hires in a market where finding trained cloud professionals is so difficult, and of course we have a new way of interacting and adding value to partners and customers, while enhancing the product.

The question remains: how to make this better?. Continuous improvement is needed, we need to refine, enhance and update the model so more value is given to all parties. Any ideas? We have 365 opportunities, starting tomorrow, to use them.

Meanwhile, rest in peace, Ian. We'll keep working on Open Source.

It's nearly Christmas

So Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Enjoy the holidays if you want and enjoy my good will if you don't, or just don't feel identified with it.

Meanwhile we have advanced a lot. Yesterday we had a review of the things we are doing and it looked quite impresive.

- Rafa showed tier rating. Now you can use tiers (i.e. from 0 to 2 CPU --> x $/month, 2-4, another amount).... and also a new way to tariff: fixed+variable. Easier to say than to do, I should say. This is a great enhancement, as we know can make tariffs that covers a lot of new uses - with the example that now we can use the same schema that Red Hat uses in its subscription model.
- Amaury showed us the new interface to edit rates. You can now add rows in a table instead of having all the options already there. It will become quite important when we increase the number of options allowed.
- Tamara showed us how to put currencies into the rates, and the initial translation of CF4 into Spanish.

On the other hand, we have new offers to collaborate in the project from different companies. Too early to say, but I expect a significant increase of resources with the start of the new year... coming from different companies.

We also have decided to take a try of an open source project to follow our scrum process
https://tree.taiga.io/

We used Trello before and is great, but we were lacking some measurements that would be great to have, let's see how we adapt to the new platform.

Next steps are harder. We have done everything we can without modifying the models, and now we need to change configuration files, models and everything around.
Focus points: assignment of rates to users, resources and groups, and being able to charge at different levels, not only with the data coming from the C&U database. We are also starting to see how we can integrate with external billing systems.

We've had some contacts with opencell, an open source billing company and product, and we need to work hard on that.

Stay close, this is going to evolve quickly.

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