Truth Denied?
Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery – or something like that. Anyway I’m sure Blake Dournaee of Intel will forgive me for borrowing the title for this blog…
…from his own “Truth Denied” blog entry on his Truth in SOA blog. Follow the link and you’ll see that Blake is a little aggrieved at a previous blog entry of mine where I suggested that Intel was using spin when describing something as both an appliance and software.
Now I’m also a little aggrieved because in his post Blake seems to suggest that he attempted to wield the sword of truth by posting a clarifying comment on this site but, he claims that his comment… Continue reading
PIPESCOM – Because the world needs yet another acronym…
I just can’t help myself. No seriously, I have no choice here but to introduce yet another acronym but at least this one doesn’t have three letters. So how did PIPESCOM come about and what does it mean?
Our REPAMA methodology compares and contrasts different vendors’ marketing approaches by reverse-engineering their positioning and messaging strategies. To facilitate easy comparison between vendors we must be able to categorise the way they approach different elements of their marketing strategy. And with that categorisation I’m afraid, comes acronyms.
To categorise how a vendor creates its value propositions we introduced MITICOR that denotes that a value proposition typically claims to deliver benefits that broadly fall within the following areas – Market, Income, Time,… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, marketing, research | 
commercial, Danny Goodall, ease of use, features, igidbu, interfaces, management, MITICOR, operational, packaging, PIPESCOM, process, REPAMA, speed | 
Leave a commentFour Words
I was having a drink the other day with an old friend and potential future client.
We were discussing the competitive situation in the market in which his company competes. He knows that I’ve carried out some marketing positioning work for some of his competitors and so we got on to the subject of an industry event that he attended recently.
He told me that both he and one of his competitors (who I’ve carried out some positioning work for) gave a presentation at the event. Whilst he didn’t find his competitor’s presentation very credible (no surprise there), he did say that he was frustrated that in speaking to a couple of potential customers in the audience after the event,… Continue reading
Positioning, depositioning and the UK General Election
I watched the 2nd televised leaders’ debate the other evening and was struck by the maturity of some of the competitive marketing campaigns conducted by the UK’s political parties.
(Please get through this rather turgid and wordy description of the state of current political debate in the UK – there is a marketing-related point to this.)
Here’s the long-hand description of the most significant ideological and tactical difference between the two main parties contesting the UK general election.
To those readers who are not familiar with the subtleties of UK politics we have an incumbent government formed by the Labour party. The majority opposition is formed by the Conservative party with the minority opposition coming from the Liberal Democrats. There… Continue reading
A Comment on 10 Defining Points for Cloud Computing
I was reading Robin Bloor’s blog entry from earlier in the year recently where he makes some interesting points. But I’m not sure that I agree with all of them…
Robin attempts to identify some of the defining characteristics of cloud computing but I get the feeling that he is starting from a slightly cynical stand point. And whilst I agree that vendor and service provider marketing tactics have created a great deal of hype, I feel others must also share some of the blame for the confusion in the space.
Anyway, his 10 Defining Points for Cloud Computing blog entry is here. I tried to post a comment but as it appears that it’s still… Continue reading
Cloud Computing Explained – Without the Hype
My Lustratus Research colleague Steve Craggs has taken a step back from the hype surrounding Cloud Computing and has defined it for the layman.
Steve’s premise was that the Cloud Computing hype had reached fever pitch and that some of the claimed benefits had become pretty difficult to believe. He wanted to strip it down to the basics, define it and look dispassionately at the likely benefits and the trade-offs involved. Steve has also put some of the vendors and service providers in the space into the right context based on the Lustratus REPAMA Market Landscape / Taxonomy / Segmentation model.
The document is embedded below and can be downloaded from Scridb or the Lustratus web… Continue reading
A Lustratus REPAMA Guide to the Positioning Statement
I’ve just uploaded a document to Scridb which is based on a series of blog entries from the REPAMA blog.
In this series of 8 blog postings I described the format of the positioning statement that we use to help our clients capture their company or product strategy. I’ve finally got around to committing the description of the 7 elements…
- target customer/ideal client
- main pain/need or desire
- product name
- product category
- main reason to buy
- primary competitor or alternative
- the unique selling proposition – USP
…to ‘paper’. The document is embedded below and can be found on scribd.com.
[scribd id=23826456 key=key-15yeyrl8slzgx9uzm65p width=620]
Enjoy!
Danny Goodall
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Posted in All Blog Categories, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing | alternative, competition, competitor, customer pain, ideal customer, main benefit, pain, positioning, positioning statement, primary alternative, primary reason to buy, product category, product name, unique sales proposition, usp | Leave a commentProgress Software to Restructure Again – Changing Corporate DNA
I see that Progress Software is in the midst of another restructuring and that to achieve this it will shed 12%-14% of the workforce.
This article details the problem and describes how “One Progress”, an alignment of the different divisions under the same banner, is the plan to turn the company around. I for one really hope that Progress can find some upward momentum. I worked for Progress for many years and still have some close friends at the company and its demise and inability to capitalise on the excellent technology it produces frustrated me then and it saddens me now.
President and Chief Executive Rick Reidy is tasked with a tough mission. To turn around a company whose main… Continue reading
Appistry and 3Tera Under the REPAMA Microscope
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… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, marketing, positioning | 3Tera AppLogic, Appistry, applications services management, cloudiq, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, positioning, positioning statement, REPAMA, segment analysis study, value proposition | Leave a commentValue Proposition Categories – MITICOR
I’ve been working on a way of categorising value propositions for some time. I’ve arrived at something I refer to as MITICOR which I believe represents the atomic value proposition elements.
By this I mean that all business to business value propositions can be broken down into these 7 base elements. I’m sure I will refine this over time but for our purposes these elements allow us to analyse and categorise the different value propositions that vendors use in their go-to-market efforts.
So what do these categories refer to?
Market
Elements categorised as “Market” include value propositions that relate to the organisation’s market or competitive situation, new product or service introduction as well as the organisation’s marketing efforts… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, marketing, Marketing Strategy | benefit, cost, decision making unit, dmu, income, institutional, market, MITICOR, operational, REPAMA, risk, time, value proposition | 3 Comments
- On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
- The marketing strategies of open source versus closed source ESBs
- Part 2 – First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- WSO2 – Fits in between Talend and FuseSource…
- WSO2, or rather one of its competitors, has thrown its hat into the ring
- Wordcount.org – it counts words…
Recent Comments
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' ...
May 5, 2010 (1:23) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hello There - It seems that this is a very provocative report, especially with respect to the sta...
April 14, 2010 (2:57) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Nice Technology Related Blog. Will visit again.
October 16, 2009 (5:56) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Very interesting point of discussion. I would be very interested to hear your results.