Don’t put Serendipity Into Your Business Plan
If your business plan has a section entitled Repeatable Serendipity then think again.
I was talking with an ex-colleague recently who was describing her frustration at her current company’s difficulties in closing new business. They are a small company in a fast-moving high-tech market and they are struggling to get traction outside of one or two key customers.
I went through my mental check-list of ‘have you tried x’ with her. The conversation went something like this.
I asked where the company’s focus was. I like focus you see – focus brings results and/or aids decision making. But she smiled and told me that they really had focused their efforts on a vertical market.
I asked her if they had… Continue reading
WSO2 – Fits in between Talend and FuseSource…
…for the amount of jargon contained in it’s marketing copy.
In a previous post I mentioned that I would follow-up to with a calculation for how much jargon WSO2 uses in its ESB marketing when compared to Talend and FuseSource. I’ve now calculated the Arcanicity Index score for WSO2′s ESB marketing copy; and whilst not quite being the answer to life, the universe and everything, it’s not far off – see below.
The Arcanicity Index looks to measure how much jargon a text contains and by extension how much specialist knowledge a reader would need to posses in order to understand it. I’d previously scored both Talend and FuseSource which had shown that Talend’s marketing copy was much less arcane… Continue reading
WSO2, or rather one of its competitors, has thrown its hat into the ring
As mentioned before I’m pulling together a short list of ESB vendors that will feature in a REPAMA competitive marketing intelligence study. I’ve added, or rather I should say that one of WSO2′s competitors has added WSO2 to the short list.
I’m using this study to road-test Project REPAMATron – an automated system that infers a vendors’s marketing strategy from their marketing materials. I’ve decided to add WSO2 into the mix for a number of reasons. The main reason being that I spoke to a representative of one of the other ESB vendors on my long list who asked me “Are you going to be looking at WSO2?”. Which was good enough for me. If that vendor was… Continue reading
Taking an automated look at marketing the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)
As you’ll have read elsewhere in these pages I’ve decided to test REPAMATron – my automated marketing analysis software, by pointing it at the way ESB vendors take their products to market.
As I’ve mentioned before, REPAMATron is a project that looks to automate the REPAMA methodology for analysing and visualising vendors’ go-to-market strategies from the language they use to address their prospects. I’ve chosen the ESB space to test the software because it’s a market I know well and therefore I should be able to decide if the software is making the right sort of inferences behind the language it will be analysing.
At the moment the software is way off alpha release and needs lots of testing… Continue reading
Reverse Engineering Force.com’s Approach to the Cloud Computing Market
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… Continue reading
Pure Play Application Services Management in Cloud Computing?
So Steve and I had a briefing call with Kaavo yesterday who have some interesting technology. And it set me thinking about whether there is a market for pure play application services management in the cloud.
Kaavo automates the job of application configuration and management in the cloud. The product – imod, is rules and workflow-based and manages the life-cycle of application provisioning, including deploying and configuring the software components or services required to create the environment in which applications execute.
I hope I’m not dumbing it down too much to say that I think of it as a data centre automation tool that understands how to manage virtual IaaS instead of physical infrastructure. Kaavo’s CEO and founder… Continue reading
A Market Landscape/Taxonomy/Segmentation Model for Cloud Computing
I’ve completed the first draft of the cloud computing segmentation model upon which we will build our REPAMA studies.
As I’ve mentioned before along my journey to arrive at this model, I’ve found the cloud computing market to have quickly become crowded and confused. This is largely due to the ease at which “traditional” vendors have re-repositioned themselves to catch the cloud computing wave.
The other issue of course is that over time cloud computing will cease to be a new paradigm and will quickly become the way consumers and businesses avail themselves of computing services. So what I’m seeing here is a market in transition where just about every category in traditional software sales will have an… Continue reading
Cloud Computing Market Segmentation – What is the role of the Channel? – Part 4
Continuing my quest to segment the cloud computing market, I’m now looking at the role a channel might play in cloud computing…
…and I’m struggling a little to map the traditional channel role onto cloud. But here are my current thoughts.
There are some obvious areas in the cloud taxonomy/segmentation that look like a good old fashioned software sales model. So first let’s start with my draft / work in progress taxonomy/segmentation to help anchor the discussions in something solid. BTW draft/work in progress means that it will change.
Cloud Software
So the Cloud Software segment looks like a traditional software business. Using Brad Buck’s definition for this segment:
Cloud Software is off-the-shelf software that can be used to… Continue reading
Cloud Computing Taxonomy – A Nice Definition With a Little Structure too – Part 3
As mentioned earlier in these pages I’m documenting my quest to arrive at a market segmentation model of the cloud computing market. This will allow me to perform a series of REPAMA competitive marketing studies into various vendors in the cloud computing space. I’m uncovering more and more interesting research as I go and one such piece is described below.
The smart people at NIST (The US Governmental agency responsible for something or other – standards I think) have released some interesting work on cloud computing. Aimed at reaching a common set of definitions around cloud computing and its use cases, but recognising that these will change over time, their work can be found here.
I’ve reproduced some sections… Continue reading
Updated Lustratus REPAMA Guide
Just a quick note to say that I’ve updated the Lustratus REPAMA Guide to version 1.1. I’ve added three more studies that have been part of our analysis for some time but hadn’t quite found their way into the guide.
These are:
- Depositioning focus
- Differentiation strategy
- Perceived threat
All of these studies are concerned with interpreting how the vendors under scrutiny approach competitive differentiation in one way or another and are now explained in the guide.
The Lustratus REPAMA guide is available for download, and for the first time in HTML format. Click here for more information.
Related posts that you might also be interested in...
- Follow-up to Using Wordles for Competitive Intelligence
- Using Word Clouds (Wordles) for Competitive Intelligence
- Don’t put Serendipity Into Your Business Plan
- Corporate DNA @ Progress Software – Redux
- Heroku Versus AppEngine and Amazon EC2 – Where Does it fit in?
- …We didn’t have an ice cream…
- On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
Recent Comments
August 26, 2012 (10:28) On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA It’s always nice to get feedback Jeff and thank you for your kind words. I know 29West and the ...
August 24, 2012 (6:07) On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA Thanks for the interesting and considered feedback. Big Data is definitely a trend, but it does a...
May 30, 2012 (8:40) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances I realize I'm responding to an inactive 2yro post, but perhaps some other wayward information goo...
May 12, 2011 (12:01) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? Hmm. I really do like the name Sarah but what about my ego? If I were to call the index 'GoodRead...
May 12, 2011 (11:36) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? I suggest calling it the GoodRead Index. Maybe it's over-reaching a bit, but you'll just have to ...
October 14, 2010 (4:19) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. I hope you could tell that I was being more than a little flippant here Jacques. Perhaps I should...
October 13, 2010 (1:56) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. Allow me to disagrre. At a customer, we have used Datapower for years to process XML (BTW, it is ...
June 7, 2010 (4:38) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Pete, Thanks for your comments, and those of your colleague. I think Danny has answered the 'mar...
June 4, 2010 (4:03) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hi, I'd very much like to develop a point made in the report where it is asserted that software ...
May 6, 2010 (12:35) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Thanks for your comment Blake. This is a marketing-focused blog that looks at different vendors' ...