Key Challenges

The following explains the major strategic risk or the operational challenges that comes as a result from our business & strategy: Internal or external events, changes and trends that threaten the survival of the organization.

Product vs Service Business

Trying to develop, offer, and run thousands of instances of self-service, standardized software products while simultaneously building, maintaining, and running more custom-built solutions (even if they are based on the standard products) presents our main business challenge. This situation creates different business models with very different cost and revenue structures. It also leads to different ways of working and forms of collaboration, to the extent that we need different people (with varied mindsets and motivations) and perhaps even separate teams to handle each type.

Given how VSHN has evolved, we operate in a hybrid mode in most Business Areas, which is often extremely challenging. This is why we have reorganized teams and evolved processes around this challenge repeatedly, always trying to find ways to improve further.

Technology choice & keeping up

VSHN’s core technology: Open Source projects might be discontinued, dysfunctional, no longer a good fit for VSHN or becoming legacy technology.
New and extended standard Cloud Service Provider offerings: Cloud providers might start to offer similar service, quality and expertise, which could make our offerings questionable or obsolete for our customers.

Partner Choice

Software vendors providing core technology to VSHN or Cloud Service Providers might discontinue the product, make huge licensing or pricing adjustments, or change features and limitations that directly affect if and how we can keep using it.

Quality and stability of our service

Major outages of our services: If not handled properly it can make customers question the value we provide to them and the relationship as a whole. Especially when using Cloud Service Providers and Open Source technology, we are at the front with our customers, and even if we didn’t cause the incident, we are the ones responsible for resolving it.
Stability vs Bleeding edge technology: Keeping up with technology and stability doesn’t always go hand-in-hand, finding the right balance is tricky. If not done right, we’re the ones to blame.
Technical debt: Keeping up with technology often leads to an endless backlog of work, we might not be able to keep up. Wrong prioritization might lead to a stand-still or cause operational implications we can’t handle.

VSHNeers, and how we are organized

Downsides of our Work Culture: Our practices, and the way we’re organized, with aspects of leadership in every chair and distributed responsibility, and with no bosses who decide for you, demand a very high degree of self-responsibility and, in general, requires significantly more from every individual in the organization. We think it’s worth it, it’s our way - but we must never stop finding the right people and supporting the people at VSHN.
Needed technology knowledge and experience: Covering all the necessary technical skills 24x7 for a wide range of technologies and Cloud Service Providers can be overwhelming. The more diverse the services and technologies we provide to customers, the more people (or partners) we need, as no one can know and do everything.
VSHNeers as our highest good: VSHNeers are our main and most important good, we don’t hold any patents or strategic business intelligence, licenses, or similar. Loosing or not finding the needed, good VSHNeers can, at least temporarily, seriously affect our ability to provide our services.