User Feedback is Critical to Doing Better Backups Going Forward; Executive Interview with PHD Virtual CMO Steve Kahan Part III

User input and feedback are the lifeblood of every software product produced as it is invaluable to understanding what features are working well, which ones are not and what new features are needed to ensure the product remains competitive long term. The struggle organizations face is identifying who their current and prospective users are and then getting this type of critical feedback. In this third blog entry in my continuing interview series with PHD Virtual's CMO Steve Kahan, he discusses how PHD cultivates feedback from its user base to help do backups better going forward.

Jerome: How does PHD identify the users that provide input for its future product development?

Steve:    PHD has a number of different ways for users to interact with it.

1. First, PHD has an active 350+ member user group, a technical advisory board and a partner advisory council where we directly get in-depth feedback
2. Second, PHD has a community forum, which has always been a great form of interaction with a lot of our existing customers.
3. Third, we are constantly in touch with prospective customers and partners during sales calls we make every day. This helps us stay in touch with the pulse of users needs in the trenches
4. Fourth, PHD has an online feature request form, which again gives folks the ability to very quickly and easily submit requests that they feel could improve our product.
5. Finally, we stay in close contact with leading analysts, such as DCIG as well as technology partners such as VMware and Citrix in order to make sure we stay ahead of future trends

PHD rigorously follows up with anyone that communicates with us. PHD does not let a question go unanswered, even if someone is just asking for a very basic feature on a feature request form. Our customers tell us stories of working with some vendors where their requests seem to go into a black hole.

Many times I personally reach out to that person, follow up on the questions they had, and even see if PHD can set up an introductory call to just get more information about their environment and their overall needs while making them comfortable with PHD Virtual.

PHD does invite many of these folks to join our user group, which again is something you can also request online. PHD has over 350 members in our user group. These are the group of "insiders" that PHD goes back to whenever it has a new idea it needs to validate, or whenever PHD wants to do some serious, hands-on prototyping.

PHD wants to get those features in front of people so they can play around with it and let us know their feedback way in advance of the release of that feature. These are also the customers who participate in BETA releases of our products.

Jerome: Is there any particular type or classification of customers that you more typically interact with?

Steve:    PHD is focused on end users such as Virtualization Administrators in SMB and departmental enterprise customers. We stay very focused on these market segments. And, that focus is a key to building the right type of product to meet the needs of these organizations.

In the fourth and final part of this interview series, Steve discusses how monitoring the virtualized environment and backup to the cloud are both becoming critical to successfully implementing and monitoring backup processes in a virtualized environment.