VSHN’s Identity

This page serves as the starting point to understand what VSHN is, why we exist, how we plan to achieve our goals, and what we do and offer to make it happen.

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Why

Our purpose, cause, or belief. WHY do we exist as a company? And WHY should anyone care about our work and offerings? Others might call this our "Vision."

We help the software industry to continually focus on their core business.
— Why VSHN

What this means

We do not attempt to solve every IT problem that organizations might encounter. Instead, we focus on companies that produce and operate their software or need to operate third-party software as part of their core business. We guide them through these processes and take on operational responsibility for the most critical aspects, enabling software companies—and especially their developers—to focus on value creation ("coding").

How

The HOW is how we think we bring our WHY to life and what makes us and our company unique. Others might call this our "Mission."

We are Technology Leaders in bringing New Solutions into Continuous Operations.
— VSHN's How

What this means

VSHN is recognized as a technology leader and pioneer, always open to exploring new methods and challenging the status quo to seek improvements and adopt better practices. Our drive to innovate and refine our methods is why our customers value us.

  • This philosophy influences what we offer our customers, especially in how we handle technical aspects, collaboration, and self-service.

  • It also shapes our approach to our organizational system and personal interactions, ensuring we do not stick to outdated habits.

We continuously explore new technologies and approaches to build sustainable and reliable solutions, balancing the excitement of innovation with the need for continuous, dependable operations. This balance is our niche and our key challenge. We need innovators who push boundaries and pragmatic implementers who uphold our standards of proactive, high-quality, customer-focused service. We must ensure that our innovations do not negatively impact operations while remaining open to new paths and accepting challenging opportunities with our customers and partners.

What

Every VSHNeer should be able to easily describe the products or services VSHN provides or their job function within the organization. The following describes what VSHN offers and how the business within our HOW works.

VSHN is not a single product or business; we have two main Business Areas - End-to-End Solutions (Solutions) and Standard Products (Products). In both areas, the focus is on providing Managed Services - we automate the operation of defined IT services as much as is useful and maintain them continuously, usually for a recurring service fee. Solutions and Products can differ fundamentally in terms of business logic, technology, customer interaction, and the maturity of the product or service offering.

Offering Consulting, Support, and Engineering is a supporting side business of VSHN, enabling the onboarding of new—and the retention of existing—customers to Managed Services.

Solutions

We understand customer needs and deliver complete solutions using standardized components, VSHN products, and third-party services combined with engineering the missing pieces, while providing ongoing managed operations, support, and maintenance.

Our standardized, automated approach enables better service at predictable costs while improving scalability beyond one-time projects. This model allows us to identify and resolve issues across multiple customer setups, benefiting both our clients and our operations.

Example Building Blocks

  • Workshop packages for application deployment review and engineering

  • Subscriptions for continuous support and problem handling for application deployments

  • Complex and customized managed services based on either Kubernetes or virtual machines when requirements can’t be met by our Products

  • Initial instances of a potential new Product service, created for the first few customers

  • Kubernetes clusters and other services offered by cloud providers

  • Various automation frameworks for the above and beyond

Products

Products are standardized IT services with a clear scope and service-level indicators. Standardization means their roadmaps are not defined by a customer but by VSHN. As part of Solutions, we can add customization, add-ons, and "glue" around products to offer tailored solutions to customers' individual needs.

VSHN offers products in two ways: * Fully self-service via the Application Catalog from VSHN, Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) in our marketplace, and APPUiO. * Semi-automated ordering and provisioning, such as with VSHN Managed OpenShift.

Limited Consulting and Custom Engineering

VSHN offers limited consulting and custom engineering that does not serve the purpose of creating a managed service but remains within our field of expertise (the scope of our products and technology stack), for example, during the pre-sales phase of a potential managed service.

We believe managed services are the sustainable way of "you break it you fix it". We partner with customers to collaboratively develop and run services long-term, rather than providing one-time builds and offering on-demand support for setups we don’t own together.

General Business Strategy

What is the common logic behind all that we do?

  • Via marketplaces (partners) and integrations on our platforms (like VSHN Managed OpenShift and APPUiO), customers can self-service our Products, billed as managed services subscriptions. The same service is instantiated many (hundreds to thousands of) times for various customers while being maintained just once — achieving high scalability through automation, standardization, and self-service.

  • Via a personal sales process, we understand the customer’s requirements and business needs and offer customized Solutions. A solution might include VSHN Products that scale as such, and other standardized building blocks that make it more scalable, while acknowledging that the custom part of the solution does not scale well and might require manual effort.

Regardless of how we get new business and how scalable it is, our main revenue comes from recurring service fees, which means that most of our effort (which is sometimes also paid by the customer) goes into maintaining the operation, support and further development of the services.

While offering and providing solutions through a personal sales process and ongoing collaboration involves manual effort, our teams and customer representatives distribute and plan the work together. A customer does not buy a specific engineer’s time directly — no body-leasing.

Business Areas

While we aim to make all aspects of who we are and how we work publicly available through our handbook, business strategy at some point becomes internal and is therefore only available to authenticated VSHNeers.

In the Wiki, you will find descriptions, strategic direction, business model visualizations, profitability numbers, and high-level strategies for each Business Area.

Also, see our Product Portfolio for the products and services resulting from these business areas.

Values, Organization, and Work Culture

As described in our HOW, VSHN is unique in terms of our organizational structure, view of leadership, transparency, responsibility, and business agility — all based on our Values. Start learning more here: