lustratus REPAMA

I have decided that the time is now right to take a detailed look at the marketing strategies and tactics adopted by the various vendors in the different market segments that make up the cloud computing market. This means that we’ll be carrying out a series of REPAMA Segment Analysis Studies to nail down how some of the vendors are taking their products to market. We’ve already looked at high-performance messaging, ESBs, BPM, Mainframe SOA and SOA adoption generally so now it’s the turn of cloud computing.

Lustratus has helped a number of cloud vendors with their go-to-market strategies and tactics over the last couple of years and one thing has been clear.  It has been a classic early market in that the protagonists were “selling” a technical proposition to technologists and not a great deal of actual business was being conducted. The market hadn’t fully formed and “sales” were not being made in a traditional way.

By that I mean that sales were being “bought” by vendors looking to gain early market share and the justification for most of these early market customer projects was typically R&D. But now the market seems to have found a bit of structure and organisations are starting to look seriously at cloud computing as a way of delivering on business imperatives, so now I feel the time is right to look at how vendors are lining up to address the market.  What are their value propositions, how are they positioned, why do they think they are unique and what features do they lead with?

All good questions, but where to start?

There are many different categories of offers and propositions all falling broadly under the banner of cloud computing and hundreds of different vendors that have aligned themselves with cloud computing.  Some of these vendors are using cloud as a cynical proposition slip-streaming exercise which I can’t blame them for:

Cloud is hot so let’s ensure we appear to have a proposition for cloud.

I would, and  indeed have done the same myself, but for the purposes of my analysis I’ll have to sort the wheat from the chaff. So first I need to do some preparatory work on proposition segmentation and the market taxonomy. In upcoming blogs I’ll share my thoughts on how that is shaping up and I’ll also start to share some of the early REPAMA findings as I go.

Danny Goodall

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