Is this the future?

[David Penny]

Just logged into the Telerik website and see EVERYTHING has changed. It's a little concerning. No mention of DevCraft, Web UI or anything else. Only building mobile apps.

I'm worried that this new direction might mean less resource going into the older Web Ajax developments, which are not even mentioned anywhere from the home page at all.

Should I be looking elsewhere for this technology now?

David Penny

P.S. Performance of the new site is extremely slow.

[Michael Mankus]

I agree. This is concerned and jarring to my organization as well. I agree that the performance is slow. The site is also more confusing and difficult to navigate.

[Ivan]

Greetings David, Michael, 

First and foremost thank you for your timely and honest feedback. Our new website concludes a massive 6-month effort to unify all our web properties. In terms of scale and complexity this project surpasses everything we have ever done. We tried to do our diligence and validated with customers everything from messaging, information architecture, to design. But obviously you got confused and concerned so there is room for further improvement. And we will do that now that you have both raised a red flag.

Here are some more specific comments to your questions and concerns:

1. Everything has changed – you are right. We have combined 8 different, disconnected web-sites into one (Telerik, KendoUI, Icenium, TeamPulse, TestStudio, Fiddler, Everlive, Eqatec). We have unified product resources, support systems, account management, billing, etc. and fused them into one singe Telerik website. The ultimate goal was to make customer experience better and to enable people to grasp at a glance everything that we have to offer. The fragmentation of products, sites and systems has been creating a massive challenge for customers and it was high time that we address it.
2. We have rebranded – another issue that we addressed with the re-launch is unifying product names, families and brands. This is again aimed at clearly putting Telerik as the top brand, as at present many customers don’t even know that products like “Eqatec” or “Icenium” are actually Telerik products. Now those are re-branded to “Telerik Analytics” and “Telerik AppBuilder” respectively. Everything is “Telerik XXXX”.
3. DevCraft – is top and center (actually top-left ?) on the trials and purchase pages. We debated a lot whether to put it in the top menu (we have created 21 variations of the Product menu) and ultimately decided that it might confuse “new” visitors, who don’t know what that is. Obviously, though, it confused existing customers, which is equally problematic. So we will now discuss how we can effectively bring it back so that you guys can find it more easily.
   
   As for the home page, there is a slide dedicated to DevCraft (slide 4), but it is not ideal. It does not say “DevCraft” in the copy or in the CTA button. We will immediately address that!
   
   Unlike the previous version of www.telerik.com, we now have a DEDICATED page for DevCraft - http://www.telerik.com/devcraft 
   
   But without proper linking from the home page or the Products menu it remains somehow buried?
4. Focus and commitment to AJAX, DevCraft, etc. – although the launch theme for this release is mobile development, which we now support better than ever through Telerik Platform, we are not decreasing our efforts or investments in our core platforms – AJAX, MVC, Kendo UI, etc. In fact our surveys and industry research point that 70% or so of professional developers (our target audience) are doing web development. So we should be crazy to abandon them?
   
   However, with such a dramatic change to our presentation issues can arise. But we will fix them immediately. And thanks to you, we will have less if any people confused down the road.
5. Performance issues – this is strange. You might have experienced a particular window of time when we had some performance issues. But in general the new site is times faster than the old one. Here are some statistics:
   1. We have tested the site with 16,000 parallel requests per second and maintained the load time of 2.5 – 8 second load time, while homepage was at 2.5 seconds load time. For illustration, if we would constantly have such traffic it would translate into 1,382,400,000 requests per day or, for a dramatic effect, –  ~ 41,5 billion requests per month.
   2. We have monitoring services from 3 independent vendors, and 2 sets of heartbeat agents running tests for key workflows all the time.
   3. We flipped the old site to the new one with NO downtime.

We are however, running on entirely new infrastructure. Both the hardware and the software layers are new. Everything is new. And while we have spent months of testing and planning some glitches can occur. The temporary performance issue has been resolved, so you should not experience any issues from now on.

I hope this information provides some clarity. We would like to further understand what you find “confusing” about the new site when you said “The site is also more confusing and difficult to navigate.” Again, we will do our best to address all issues.

Thank you once more for the valuable feedback. Don’t hesitate to contact me at [e-mail]

Regards,
Ivan Osmak
VP Product Development
Telerik

[Michael Mankus]

These changes sound great for you as a company. But as an end user that bought a specific (year-long) product which has now changed without my consent, it is frustrating.

As an end-user, it makes no difference to me how your products are aligned or coupled or branded. I care about transparency, consistency, and receiving the product and services I paid for. I bought your product in November after testing it and evaluating it against other companies offering similar products. I spoke with a Telerik sales agent who in no way mentioned any impending changes to the services. I was interested specifically in the ability to track user usage down to the state and city level as well as the ability to track feature usage within the my applications. I needed to track 3 applications so we bought three standard licenses for one year each at a cost of approximately $1000.

I’ve just been told via the support ticket system that Telerik no longer offers state and city level tracking of users. In addition, I’ve lost all feature tracking information. And, it seems that the feature tracking system is actually not working at all, since I can’t seem to get any data into that portion of the analytics.

This is an unacceptable business practice. I paid for a product and you have taken away features which were vital in my decision to purchase said product. Change is one thing – but you’ve taken away features I use and more importantly, need.

In addition, your pricing model has changed in such a way where instead of needing to have purchased 3 standard licenses (as I did to support 3 applications), a single professional license will now cover an unlimited number of applications. Once again, I support this change for you as a company, but as an end-user it is frustrating. Only 60 days after spending $1000, I see now that I can pay $600 for the same exact services under the current pricing. I find this unacceptable. Especially since I voiced my dissatisfaction which the existing pricing to the Telerik sales agent in November and no mention of impending changes was indicated.

[Gabe Sumner]

Hey Michael,

I know Eigil (VP, Telerik Analytics) has already been in touch with you.   It sounds like some of our messaging was unclear and I apologize for that.  There are a lot of moving pieces lately and we're doing our best swat down issues as they're discovered.  I appreciate you helping us.  We're planning a follow-up blog post to help address these topics.

In the meantime, thanks for your feedback and your understanding.

Gabe Sumner
Product Marketing Manager
Telerik Platform

[Michael Mankus]

Gabe,

I did speak with Eigil and we were able to work through some issues. It looks as if the state and city data will be available in the coming months. While I'm disappointed in the disruption of the service, it's good to know that it is coming back. I was also contacted by Richard Flamsholt regarding bugs he found on your end regarding the feature tracking which will be resolved tomorrow (Wednesday). Regarding pricing, Eigil agreed that the new pricing page was not clear and indicated that it may undergo some changes. We both attributed that lack of clarity to my misinterpretation of your new pricing structure.

I look forward to the blog post which will hopefully contain more information on these topics. In fairness to Telerik, I understand the pains and struggles that are associated with this type of major transition. But in the future it's important that more information is provided to your customers so that we can better transition.