lustratus REPAMA

Posts Tagged ‘Boilerplate evolution’

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

We spend a lot of time at Lustratus looking into the performance of early market companies.  Quite often these companies brief us and tell us how well they’re doing and how well they’re latest re-positioning is being received in the market.  Most of the time I believe them.  And what if I don’t, what can I do to prove/disprove their claims?  As an early market company they’re typically not public and probably don’t have to file detailed financial results.

The answer lies in the footprints they leave in the Internet snow.  That and something that we refer to as the Press Release Boilerplate Evolution.   As you probably know, the boilerplate is the short, reusable text that appears at the end of press releases.  But why is this text that is designed to succinctly describe the company to the press so important?  Because it’s creation is typically one of the most political processes within a marketing organisation.  Everybody has an opinion on the boilerplate text from the CEO down and because it’s tacked on to the end of the press release, everybody who reviews the press release during its creation gets to see it and pass comment.

It therefore changes and develops over time.  Just like the rings of a tree which reveal much about the environment that the tree was growing in at that moment in time, so each press release archived on the vendor’s web site reveals much about the vendor’s view of the then current trading, competitive and market environment.  If you analyse the changes that are made at each stage over time, you can get a view of the vendor’s changing confidence, or lack of confidence in their current strategy.  Some changes obviously reflect a healthy company tuning its strategy and adding more and more supporting information to the boilerplate that simply better describes the growing company.  Other changes can reflect massive changes in strategy that might point toward a much more troubled organisation that is struggling to gain traction in the market.

An example from a current REPAMA project is shown below.  I’ve removed the detail behind the project but what you can see is two organisations (29West and Solace Systems) who have made significant changes to their press release boilerplates over time.  We rank and categorise these changes and “points” are scored for both minor and major changes over each of the following categories:

• Company/Commercial
  • Business model
  • Channel
  • Location/Offices
  • Back story
  • References
• Target
  • Company type
  • Industry
  • Individual
• Features
  • Capability
  • Capacity
• Value and proposition
  • Value derived
  • Proposition

When this is represented graphically you can see the cumulative changes over time.  The steeper the line, the greater and more significant the changes.

As you can see from the diagram above (click to enlarge) Whilst 29West’s boilerplate remained static for a number of years of the early market company’s evolution – suggesting a committed long term focus, in recent quarters the company’s boilerplate has been through a number of rounds of changes.  Most of these changes however were evolutionary, such as removing the overtly technical / product statements from their early years and replacing them with more business value statements as well as adding detail about new product developments and office openings, etc.

However Solace Systems’ boilerplate by contrast has seen a much more volatile evolution.  Quite significant changes in organisational strategy, business model, target customer, pain solved and value proposition have been made over time.  These changes point towards an organisation that struggled for some time to understand where its market was and how best to position itself and its offering.  More worryingly perhaps for Solace Systems is the last 8 quarters chart that shows how stable the organisation’s strategy (such that it is embodied in the boilerplate) has been.

The trend for Solace Systems, especially in recent quarters has been to make significant changes to its boilerplate.  I’m sure Solace would suggest that this now reflects a better understanding of its market and given some of their recent announcements this is likely to be the case.

So as these press releases are thrown on to the wires to end up in publications, web news aggregators or blogs.  The trail they leave helps us understand a lot about what is really going on in an organisation.  I’ll post something on the Boilerplate Delta (how far removed the boilerplate is from the current reverse engineered position) in a future blog.

Danny Goodall