lustratus REPAMA

Archive for the ‘Competitive Intelligence’ Category

I’ve just uploaded the first draft of my latest Cloud Computing REPAMA Segment Analysis Study.

This time I’ve looked at a couple of vendors in the Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management segment (using the Lustratus REPAMA Cloud Computing market taxonomy / segmentation model). Specifically I’ve reverse-engineered the key go-to-market strategies of 3Tera and Appistry. I will add another couple of vendors to the study as time goes on but for the moment I thought these would be two good candidates to start with. They are very different companies with very different product approaches to solving similar, if not quite the same problems. I wanted to spend a little time here highliting some of the interesting findings.

Differentiation

I’ve already blogged on my concern that Cloud Computing vendors/ providers are currently differentiating themselves against previous paradigms as opposed to creating differentiation strategies versus their real competitors – i.e. other cloud computing solutions. So it’s no surprise to see that this trend continues in this study with 3Tera. Looking at where 3Tera fires its competitive differentiation fire power in the UNLIKE element of the positioning statement we can see that the focus is:

traditional dedicated infrastructure

To be honest this is an implied competitor/alternative because whilst 3Tera is very clear on its value proposition and target audience, it doesn’t appear to engage in traditional competitive differentiation. Nowhere does 3Tera clearly define what type of solution they feel they are a better alternative to. There is an obvious implied competitor / alternative which is the traditional ways of doing things. But this is never called out explicitly by 3Tera.

Appistry is clearer on its competitive situation. It believes that its competitive differentiation lies versus:

infrastructure approaches to cloud computing

The implication here is that Appistry focuses on the application and not the infrastructure which they believe yields many benefits.

Existing Applications

One area of strong correlation between the vendors in this study is that they both stress their ability to work with existing applications. This correlation suggests that this is a key customer requirement in this particular market segment. As shown in the chart below:

As you can see from the dashed pink line on the chart above (which represents the market mean – the average marketing strategy for this segment) there is strong support for existing applications in addition to the somewhat obvious “table stakes” feature of automated application deployment and management.

Value Proposition

Another strong area of correlation is in the value proposition. The first chart below shows the raw claims made by each vendor for the value they ascribe to their product offer.

Much of these categories of benefit/value are fairly generic and are all very similar to the the value propositions I would expect to see for a cloud computing product. When these value propositions are interpreted against our MITICOR value proposition classification, we can see a very strong correlation between the products of the different vendors as the chart below shows.

The value proposition for both of these products boils down to operational improvement and cost saving which again is very much as I would expect for a cloud computing technology in this segment.

Positioning Statements

I’m not completely 100% happy with either of these positioning statements as both of these companies appear to aim everywhere and focus nowhere. This lack of focus is important to note in itself as it is common in immature markets, but it does make nailing down a semi-accurate reverse-engineered positioning statement a little tricky. But here they are:

3Tera AppLogic Positioning Statement

FOR organisations looking to deploy successful online services to millions of users WHO are struggling to manage the complexity of the infrastructure required to serve online services to online users OUR AppLogic IS A grid operating system for web applications THAT PROVIDES the ability to assemble existing software into portable applications that run on any grid and scale from a fraction of a server to hundreds of servers with a single command UNLIKE traditional dedicated infrastructure OUR PRODUCT makes it extremely easy to deploy scalable web applications without dedicated IT resources and personnel

Appistry CloudIQ Platform Positioning Statement

FOR enterprises seeking to take advantage of cloud computing WHO need to migrate existing applications to the cloud and virtualized environments OUR CloudIQ Platform IS A Cloud application platform THAT PROVIDES enterprises with the ability to move multiple existing applications to the cloud and manage them across multiple cloud environments UNLIKE infrastructure-focussed approaches to cloud computing OUR PRODUCT allows existing applications to be packaged and deployed to a cloud without re-architecture

Both statements are weak in the target customer and their respective pain, need or desire reflecting the lack of clarity in their outbound marketing.

Slides

I’ve placed a slide deck which expands upon this research on Slideshare.net and this is embedded below. If you’d like more information on this study or a copy of the slides, please contact me. Details of  how to interpret REPAMA studies can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here.

Danny Goodall

I’ve been a bit busy recently and so instead of finishing off the complex REPAMA SAS into the “Cloud Computing / Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management” study, I decided to produce a rough draft of the much simpler REPAMA into Force.com’s go-to-market strategy instead.

Whilst the segment analysis study only covers Force.com at the moment, I will add additional vendors/providers into the study over the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions who I should compare to/with Force.com, let me know.

I’m quite pleased with the result. Not because of any specific talent on my part but rather as I’ve already said here, Force.com’s marketing is a case study in how to take a new, disruptive technology to market. They understand their audience, they know what problems they solve and they know why they’re better/different. They communicate in clear language and they repeat their positioning strategy again and again and again consistently in all of their out-bound marketing communications. They’ve had successes and they’ve been able to document this and use it as proof of the claims they make. It’s been a joy to reverse-engineer it. That’s not to say that I think it’s perfect – they do tend to mix their audience and messages (audience strata mismatch) but it is very good indeed.

As I’m working through the cloud computing market and helping some vendors with their go-to-market strategies I’ve decided to share this and some  future studies on here because as I said in my ironic blog mission statement all those months ago, I want to highlight best practice in marketing communications and product marketing through this blog. So I thought it would be useful to share what value propositions and messages a market leader is using to address their prospects.

Anyway, below is the positioning statement that I’ve reverse engineered for Force.com’s proposition to end-user organisations. (I don’t plan to tackle the ISV or SI propositions yet)

It’s a little woolly and raw at the moment but even in that state it’s clear that Force.com knows its market, its competition and its USPs. The REPAMA SAS containing just Force.com at the moment can be found online at  Slideshare.net and is embedded below.

If you’d like a copy of the slides let me know. For details of how to interpret the results of the REPAMA study please review the Lustratus REPAMA Guide.

Danny Goodall

OK so having arrived at the first cut of a segmentation model for the Cloud Computing market, I am now embarking on a series of Reverse Engineered Positioning and Messaging Analysis (REPAMA) studies.

The problem I now face though as I start tp look in detail at various cloud vendors’ marketing propositions is that their products, capabilities and value propositions all appear to blur into one.

I guess this is a symptom of the early market nature of Cloud Computing. I would expect that as the market develops, real prospects will make real decisions based upon their real needs, and real differences will be stressed and perceived between the products and services of different vendors/service providers.

But right now the general approach I see is that no matter which product or service of a particular vendor I’m looking at, the proposition to the prospect typically boils down to.

Cloud Computing is good

…and this fits for any product in the portfolio. I see…

Cloud Computing does this, Cloud Computing enables that,Cloud Computing reduces this and Cloud Computing increases that.

Fine. But there are a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, and somewhat obviously, if all vendors/service providers simply evangelise the category like this instead of focussing on what they specifically can do, there is zero differentiation. And with zero differentiation the business typically goes the way of ‘market leader’ or at least the vendor/provider with the greatest market reach.

Secondly, if I were a prospect and all I hear about is the generic capabilities and benefits of the cloud, how do I know what each of the different products in your portfolio could do for me? It might be good to talk to me in terms of what the individual products do, how they are each different from/superior to competitors’ products or alternative approaches, what tangible things each product changes for me and what I would be left with AFTER I’ve bought each product from you.

I should stress that there is another category of proposition developing in my analysis which says cloud is good BUT there are lots of problems and potential problems to address first.

This is an obvious proposition and one that vendors/providers in new paradigms like cloud quickly rally around. It goes something like this…

Cloud will do lots of great things for your organisation but you have to make sure you do it right or all sorts of bad things could happen…

The problem with this proposition is that there is an obvious implication.

…and if you don’t solve these things, you’ll lose your job.

This negative connotation and association with the potential failures of cloud initiatives are perhaps not the best way to attempt to mobilise prospects. Having said that, as the movement toward the cloud builds pace it will likely be this “proceed with caution” proposition that gains traction. As cloud becomes a given, so it will be the vendors/providers that can prove that they can quickly address the deficiencies inherent with current cloud strategies and mitigate the risks involved that will rise to the top.

Anyway these are some of my early findings that I thought I would share.

I’ve decided to first look at the Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management category from the segmentation model. And I’ve decided to take a look at Appistry first – mainly because its a category that I’ve had direct experience of but also because in a market as broad and as complex as this one, well, you have to start somewhere.

I’ll keep you posted as I move forward.

Danny Goodall

Attempting to classify and compare the various vendors in the various technical segments of the cloud computing market is tough.

And if I’m honest I’m struggling with the shear volume of vendors that apparently have cloud propositions. I find it amazing that so many vendors/service providers have apparently architected and built specific solutions for this space.

But between you and me, I’m not sure that every vendor/service provider now positioned in the cloud computing market has been beavering away producing a specialised solution. Some I’m sure have done that but others have just changed a name or added an adjective or modifier to a product name.

But one thing is for sure, they’ve all changed their marketing!

As I’ve blogged before, the press release boilerplate (“the about…” text that appears at the end of a press release as guidance for editors) is an invaluable tool for marketing analysts such as myself. As evidence, it is the equivalent of the smoking gun or the size 11 muddy footprints left on the dining room carpet in a detective novel.

As vendors evolve so their boilerplate changes. If a vendor started with a good strategy that only needed minor tweaks over time to turn them into a very successful business, so the press release boilerplate is only tweaked in a minor way over time.  But when a vendor is forced to significantly change course due to a lack of traction or success during their history, the changes are faithfully recorded in the evolution of their bolierplate text.

So when the name Cordys popped up in Google this morning associated with cloud computing I took a double-take. I knew Cordys as an early ESB turned BPM/Orchestration vendor, formed by Jan Baan. I obviously missed their re-positioning so I wanted to do a little digging to find out how they made the leap from one to the other. So I fired up my press release, article and archive research tool and this is what I saw.

On January 12th 2009 Cordys was a business process specialist who apparently hadn’t heard of cloud or “as a service” which was faithfully reflected in its boilerplate.

Business process management specialists form strategic alliance – Cordys and Inex establish Cordys BPMS Centre of Excellence in the UK

About Cordys – 12th January 2009

Cordys is a global provider of software for business process innovation. The industry-leading Cordys Business Operations Platform (BOP) consists of a complete suite for next generation Business Process Management (BPMS), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and an open, integrated set of tools and technologies including Composite Application Framework (CAF), Master Data Management (MDM) and a SOA Grid. The Cordys platform empowers customers to dramatically improve the speed of change, fundamentally altering the way they innovate their Business Operations to achieve a true customer-centric philosophy. Global 2000 companies worldwide have selected Cordys to achieve business performance improvements such as increased productivity, reduced time to market, higher security and faster response to ever-changing market demands. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Cordys is a global company with offices in the USA, the UK, Germany, China, India and Israel.

But 8 days later that was all changed and the new positioning was reflected in its  boilerplate.

Cordys award winning Process Factory now available as community platform free of charge Web-based application development and BPM accessible to the Open Community.

About Cordys – January 20th 2009

Cordys is a global provider of software for business process innovation and Enterprise Cloud Orchestration. The industry-leading Cordys Business Operations Platform (BOP) consists of a complete suite for next generation Business Process Management (BPM), Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and innovative SaaS Deployment Frameworks (SDF), delivering a complete Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. It includes an open, integrated set of tools & technologies including Composite Application Framework (CAF), Master Data Management (MDM) and a SOA Grid. The Cordys platform and its cutting-edge Cloud technology empowers customers to dramatically improve the speed of change, fundamentally altering the way they innovate their Business Operations to achieve a true customer-centric philosophy. Global 2000 companies worldwide have selected Cordys to achieve business performance improvements such as increased productivity, reduced time to market, higher security and faster response to ever-changing market demands. Headquartered in the Netherlands, Cordys is a global company with offices in the USA, the UK, Germany, China, India and Israel.

Now I don’t want to seem to be picking on Cordys unduly as there are many other examples of companies that have re-positioned to catch this wave. I’ve advocated, supervised or instigated similar populist strategies myself in the past and doubtless will do again in the future. Yes, I’m sure that with a provenance as good as Cordys/Baan this must have been part of a much wider initiative involving new product development and long-term strategies. Yes, I know that SOA/Orchestration does have an obvious if somewhat tangential connection to the cloud paradigm. But there was no apparent evolution to cloud, no obvious chain of functionality that led them to become a cloud service provider which makes me a little suspicious.

The issue however is that because it is this easy to become a cloud computing vendor/service provider the market has quickly become incredibly crowded. Until the cloud market starts to take some tangible form that is based on customer need/demand and not just vendor whim and spin, then it is going to make selecting and choosing a cloud or *aaS offer very difficult for legitimate prospects.

So I’ll add Cordys into the ever-growing list of cloud computing vendors and file them under platform services/integration. And when I get round to tackling that section of the REPAMA study, we’ll see how Cordys’ offer stacks up.

Danny  Goodall