SONM: With an optimized roadmap all the way to the moon and beyond
The new roadmap lets us understand how well the team works and how strategic partnerships with Storj, Selectel and maybe NEM will serve customers and investors, while the team is building the supercomputer to disrupt the cloud.
While Gartner had to raise their predictions on the Cloud Computing market to 411bln US$ by 2020, we are going to evaluate how the latest news from the SONM team and their newly announced partners could affect the markets in the upcoming months.
New roadmap? Does it means delays?! WTF SCAM team!!11
SONM silently released an updated version of their roadmap. This was highly anticipated as the first “technical roadmap” released for their ICO in June, only covered random functionality and was not sliced towards customer needs. To get a better understanding of what happened during the last weeks and why this update is an optimization, let’s take a closer look on how innovative products should be built nowadays (in a nutshell).
Story-mapping or “Slice a product with value for the customer”
First of all it is important to understand the needed use cases, which typically evolve from earlier phases (i.e. Emphazising for (extreme) personas, prototyping and validating i.e. during (multiple) “Product Design Sprints”). The use cases should be described i.e. as a value stream map — likely enriched with a general customer journey along the touching points with the product and the organization.
As the SONM team follows a customer centric approach (see below for information about partnership with Selectel) and prioritizes those cases (typically by business value), we could be sure that they have chosen the best ones while keeping their flexibility to adapt new technologies.
We can observe this great behavior on the talks with the guys from NEM and the corresponding feedback from SONM’s CTO, Igor Lebedev.
This should be considered an ultra-strong signal as the guys are not limiting themselves to the initially described scenario if there is room for optimization. This is a slightly different approach than starting the journey on a six-year-roadmap as we have seen in different projects.
SONM is releasing towards a MVP
The so called “minimum viable product” contains that much functionality that it can be used by the customers while the team receives enough feedback to further optimize and enrich the product during the upcoming iterations until the first commercial version will hit the streets (and the Ethereum live net) in Q3 2018. And taking a glimpse at the newly provided component overview — this will blow your socks off:
Strong partnerships across all channels
Late September — right after my last article on SONM — the team announced a partnership with heavy impact. Ever heard of Selectel? This is a leading IaaS provider in Russia, located in St. Petersburg. This is a real use case and Selectel is going to use the SONM network right after the release of the commercial version in Q3 2018.
I was lucky enough to have a decent chat with their CEO, Oleg Igorevich Lyubimov, in which he describes to vision of using the SONM network.
Beside the cooperation with Selectel, which serves first of all as a great source for use cases and therefore user stories, the step offers a first glimpse at monetarization and future sales opportunities. Selectel as any other customer has to buy $SNM to be able to rent the computation power on the marketplace. And as they are offering IaaS and are in demand of HDD space, it is more than great to see these brief lines in the optimized roadmap:
I am currently providing some TB to the Storj project. I can tell you this is more than a powerful connection. As a so called farmer I can choose to use the SONM client in order to provide not only HDD resources and as a customer I have to choose wether I just rent a Storj plan on their website or I am going to use a marketplace where I can find all of my needed resources using $SNM. I guess you have a brief imagination of what the majorities of those decisions will look like and as an investor I am in eager anticipation. Please do not forget the upcoming voting power for token holders within the DAO and the corresponding cut on transaction fees. This passive income could serve your retirement.
Marketing and PR enhances their activities
The SONM marketing and PR are obviously becoming more and more active as the team announced the upcoming conferences. The IoT Security Summit in New York already took place.
Despite that, we had the opportunity to meet SONMs newest Content Manager, Vitaliy Fedosov, during the latest Q&A video session — you should take a look as there were many great questions answered (mostly from a technical point of view). As the team takes feedback serious and the community also wants specialists from the marketing department on stage, we should expect an even more PR-oriented version next time.
Overall we should expect new spikes price-wise after the 2x-fork took place on November, 16th and further climbing towards the end of November because of the participation on conferences and the upcoming monthly update. December should be more or less bearish, while the upcoming release of the MVP (Dec-Jan) should push the price further. From a long-term investors perspective, I hope for all of you that your $SNM bags are already fully packed as the second wave of weak hands got mostly shaken out during the Bitcoin Gold bloodbath.
Let’s enjoy the upcoming ride!
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Always do your own research and proper due-diligence before investing!
The author works as a Senior Consultant in the Agile Business Transformation team of Cassini Consulting and is not connected to SONM despite being an investor.
The certified ScrumMaster and Product Owner primarily advises on all things agile and the digital transformation. Amongst other things, he is an Agile Coach who uses his knowledge and skills for companies of various sizes and industries. The author is primarily engaged in scaling agile in areas in and outside of software development and disruptive cross-sectional technologies such as blockchain and smart contracts. In his spare time, he runs a performance marketing company and invests in startups and companies around the globe.
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