by Bill Cushard (@BillCush), ServiceRocket Training Team
I saw an interesting piece on Business Insider, The 15 Most Massively Popular Websites You've Never Heard Of. While I had heard of a few of the websites on this list, it is true I had not heard of most of them. For example, I had not heard of Wikia and Manta.com web, but each gets more monthly unique visitors to their web sites than Apple and AT&T, respectively. After reading this article, I started thinking about NGINX, an open-source web application accelerator that is helping many of the world’s busiest web sites deliver content faster than ever.
That’s right.
NGINX (@NGINX) is the world’s second most popular web server, and you have never heard of it. Although you may not have heard of it, almost forty percent of the busiest one thousand websites in the world use it for load balancing, proxying, caching and delivering static content. In fact, companies like DropBox, Disqus, Netflix, Wordpress.com, to name only a few, are using NGINX to deliver web content to their visitors and customers. I know what you’re thinking, “Sure. These companies use a web server technology I have never heard of, they are early adopters. I cannot afford to be an early adopter.”
This is a good point. Not all organizations should be or needs to be an early adopter. But consider this, nearly eighteen percent of of the busiest one million web sites use NGINX. In other words, NGINX is poised to cross the chasm.
Crossing the Chasm
On Tuesday, February 25 NGINX hosted it’s first user event. The agenda at the conference included an update about the future of NGINX from it’s author, Igor Sysoev, a lightening round of use cases from companies that are NGINX, and a half-day training session. This training course is designed for people new to NGINX seeking to learn how to install and configure it.
Among the many things companies can do to help customers move along the technology adoption lifecycle, software training is one of them. And as a training guy, I want to point out the significance of recognizing the need to reach the early and late majority in a different way than to reach innovators and early adopters.
We know intuitively that innovators and early adopters like to tinker with new technology. And with a product like NGINX, many innovators learned to set it up on their own personal websites and blogs. In other words, they learned on their own. However, people in the early and late majority are less likely to be this ambitious, if for no other reason than they choose to spend their free time doing other things. These are the people who take training to learn a new technology. And if you want to cross the chasm, you need to get to the early and late majority. Software training services is an important way to do that.
NGINX recognizes this and has decided to make enterprise software training a fundamental part of their plan.
