- Open source version is too good: the open source product is too performant for Hazelcast’s own good. It’s so reliable that an open source user can run mission critical workloads on it with no downtime. Therefore there is no reason to buy Hazelcast Enterprise.
- Major customer churn: the churn is very serious.
- No clear vision: too many people and ideas competing internally, too many leaders working against each other, too much turn over in key leadership positions and too many false dawns on meaningful changes.
- Low Pipeline: it’s nearly impossible to build pipeline at Hazelcast. There’s so little compelling info given internally that it’s hard to make a compelling case externally to prospects about the value it brings. New deal size is about 50k and that keeps the pipeline very low. In order to maintain a healthy pipeline you need a huge number of opportunities, which come infrequently. Most of the pipeline generated here are recycled opportunities from past closed/lost deals. There is a community of open source users who refuse to buy Enterprise Hazelcast and reps tend to reopen recycle these frequently until they finally decide to move to Enterprise. There are a very small handful of accounts or opportunities where you can sell 7 figure deals, large banks only. Too many factors work against building meaningful pipeline.
- No partnership team: there are no significant cloud or service partners to speak of. There’s nothing driving revenue to Hazelcast via any partnership, all the selling is done by Hazelcast alone. Most successful companies have a healthy partner ecosystem that sends some revenue their way, Hazelcast doesn’t.
- No onboarding process: there is no formal onboarding which explains what has worked, what the value of Hazelcast is, how the tech works (in depth), who the customers are, successful use cases, what kind of ROI the product delivers, etc. You learn bits and pieces over time that were better explained during onboarding. Hazelcast has the responsibility to equip you with the info you need to do the job, and instead, they put that responsibility back on you. There are frequent complaints from leadership about how unequipped their teams are but no action taken to help them close the gap.
- Communication is lacking: a lot happens at the leadership level that isn’t disseminated down to the people on the ground. There’s little communication on a team to team basis which makes each team feel like they’re in a silo.
