lustratus REPAMA

Posts Tagged ‘Competitive Intelligence’

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

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.

As the saying goes, if it looks like a fish, smells like a fish and tastes like a fish then the chances are that it is a fish.  Likewise by any measure the products in the recent REPAMA study into the ESB market segment certainly appear to be ESBs but why then is none of the vendors content with describing their products simply as an “ESB”.

As the REPAMA Marketing Element Distribution (MED) chart below shows, the ESB vendors in the study (Microsoft ESB Guidance 1.0, Oracle Service Bus, Progress Sonic ESB, TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus) used the following adjectives, qualifiers, modifiers and euphemisms to describe the offer category of their “ESB”.

• A loosely-coupled messaging environment
• A comprehensive Enterprise Service Bus offering
• Architectural guidance, patterns and practices
• Messaging-based Enterprise Service Bus
• Enterprise-class SOA Enterprise Service Bus
• High performance, scalable SOA integration backbone
• Lightweight Enterprise Service Bus
• Mediation Layer
• Enterprise Service Bus

Words are wonderful things and marketing organisations as experienced as these wouldn’t use words without a reason.  As mentioned previously in this blog entry, when a category becomes as ultra-competitive as the ESB space, vendors will attempt to segment and re-segment the market on their terms and the product category is the first place they start.

As a result, there is a raft of valuable competitive intelligence in this simple list of words above (visualised by wordle.net).  Why is each vendor modifying the product category in this way?  Answer that question and you’ll gain an insight into the particular position within the ESB segment that each vendor is trying to own.

Danny Goodall.

The Primary Competitor or Alternative

I’ve been looking at the positioning statement In this series of blogs.  This entry will focus on the UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] element.

So just to recap here we’re constructing a natural language statement that captures a number of key strategic marketing positioning elements.  This particular element in the positioning statement above is where the ideal customer’s alternative to our product is defined.

First let’s see this element in the context of the complete positioning statement.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

Whilst this sounds straightforward – “It’s just the number one competitor, right?”, it actually requires a fair bit of thought, analysis, and planning.  This element effectively recognises that the ideal client has a choice as to how they will go about solving their problem.  The primary alternative from the ideal client’s perspective is captured in this element.

In my experience this element is nearly always paired with the OUR PRODUCT element that follows it in the positioning statement.  The combination allows the UNLIKE element to define the primary alternative or competitor and the following OUR PRODUCT element outlines the Unique Selling Proposition benefits that differentiates “our product” versus the primary alternative.

For example:

UNLIKE alternative approaches to managing risk OUR PRODUCT not only manages risk but also reduces your corporate governance budget by up to 15%.

This example assumes that the ideal client believes that they have a number of “alternative approaches to managing risk” we then go on to differentiate ourselves versus these alternative approaches.

I have seen and used many different approaches for this element and it is critical to understand who or what we need to be “better than”, or at least “different from” to convince the prospect to put their business with us.  The key question to ask here is:

What does my ideal client perceive as their primary alternative (to my product) to solve their pain, need or desire?

This is key question.  Many mistakes that I see in competitive marketing start by getting the perspective wrong here.  It is critical to think from the prospect’s perspective and not from one’s own organisation’s perspective.  Many marketing organisations typically think:

• “who do we compete with here?”
• “who has the largest market share?”
• “who has a product that is most similar to ours?”
• “who do the analysts think we compete with?”

Each of these approaches is internally-focussed and whilst answering them will certainly help with competitive marketing, the answer might not be that important to the ideal client.

Approaches that I’ve used or seen for this element include:

• A key competitor
• A key competitive product
• A number of key competitors (it’s better to have a single defined alternative)
• A key category of competitor
• Other vendors’ approach in the same market category
• An alternative approach to solving the problem
• Inaction – i.e. doing nothing

Examples

• UNLIKE ACME Corp…. (key competitor)
• UNLIKE ACMEProTurbo… (key competitive product)
• UNLIKE ACME Corp and XYZ Inc…. (multiple key competitors)
• UNLIKE relational database vendors…. (a key category of competitor)
• UNLIKE other cloud computing vendors…. (other vendors’ approach in the same market category)
• UNLIKE using spreadsheets to manage data…. (an alternative approach)
• UNLIKE outsourcing your data management needs…. (an alternative approach)
• UNLIKE managing information manually as you’ve always done…. (inaction – doing nothing)

Real world example

(This section for those interested in the SOA and ESB market only…)  In this series I’ve used an example positioning statement from Microsoft’s go to market strategy for their ESB product.  Here I’ve used our REPAMA methodology to reverse-engineer the positioning statement for Microsoft’s ESB Guidance product from their outbound marketing communications, Microsoft apparently perceives the primary alternative to be:

UNLIKE traditional ESBs…

So Microsoft is using the “other vendors’ approach in the same market category” strategy listed above.  This suggests that Microsoft believes that their prospect’s primary alternative lies with other ESBs and also that there is something about Microsoft’s approach to the ESB category that sets it apart from “traditional” ESBs.

So being clear about the primary alternative or competitor is important as is thinking from the prospect’s perspective and not from the organisation’s.  That is the UNLIKE element covered and in the final blog entry in this series I’ll be looking at the “OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition] element.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW
It should be borne in mind that Lustratus’ focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we’re dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

Whilst I couldn’t find any reference to restrictions on the use of the Spot The Difference caption used in this blog entry, I wanted to ensure I provided a link back to its original location.

Despite being available in “beta” form to REPAMA users for some time, I finally got round to packaging up a publicly downloadable version of the Lustratus REPAMA Guide. This can be downloaded from Lustratus.com for no charge.

I should say a big thank you to clients, colleagues and everyone else who has provided feedback on the guide, which studies should be included and how they should be presented.

So “Thank you”!

And for those looking to understand the product marketing and go-to-market strategies of TIBCO’s competitors in the High Performance Messaging space – specifically  Solace Systems’ Content Router, 29West’s LBM and IBM’s WebSphere MQ LLM – I’ve also put the High Performance Messaging REPAMA Segment Analysis Study in the store.  I’ll be adding the individual reports on each of the vendors in the coming days

Danny Goodall

Welcome to the Lustratus REPAMA blog from Lustratus Research.  I’ve never been a fan of mission statements for the sake of mission statements.  I guess that is because most that I read are painted in the blandest shade of beige or taste of vanilla.  This tends to make them less of an “inspiring,  rallying-call” type of mission statement and more of “a collection of boring indisputable facts that we think the CEO won’t fire us for putting down on paper” type of mission statement.

Mission?

That said, I think it’s worth setting out a plan for the type of material that we’ll be covering in this blog in future editions. So here goes.  I want to write about the efficaciousness or otherwise of the strategies and tactics that vendors in certain market segments use to reach their audience.  I’d like to compare and contrast the marketing efforts of certain vendors and even rank them.  I’d like to give awards for good as well as bad marketing and I’d like to start a discussion about best practices in B2B infrastructure software marketing.  I want to look at the tactical side of marketing such as press and analyst management and lead generation as well as the strategic side.  We’ll be looking to use our REPAMA methodology (more of that below) to infer actual vendor positions against the claims they make.

REPAMA?

Well REPAMA was created by a desire to get competitive intelligence on early market software companies.  I realised that analysts didn’t or weren’t able to track early market vendors which made creating competitive strategies very difficult.  Even in mature markets, it was tough to really understand the detail of how certain vendors were taking specific products to market.  So I set about designing some exercises that would allow me to infer key strategic marketing strategies from the way these companies address their market.  Since then we’ve expanded on these exercises to produce a methodology that allows us to build comprehensive comparisons of vendors’ positioning and messaging by reverse engineering their marketing strategy from the way they approach the market.

Hence REPAMA is our Reverse Engineered Positioning and Messaging Analysis methodology.

Who is we?

Well “we” is Lustratus.  I formed Lustratus with Steve Craggs and Ronan Bradley a couple of years ago as a marketing consultancy and market analysis organisation.  We’re very focused on a small number of infrastructure software segments and we help vendors to better understand the market landscape in which they compete and ultimately to clearly communicate why they believe their technology will be of benefit to their prospects.

Me?

Well I’m Danny Goodall but I’m sure that Steve and Ronan will also contribute to this blog.  For the first 10 years of my career I was a techie but moved into marketing when I realised that the company cars were much better.  I’ve worked for many vendors in field marketing, product marketing, product management and VP Marketing positions and for the last 4 years I’ve been consulting to many others helping them to set or correct corporate marketing strategies or to improve the effectiveness of their tactical field marketing programs.

You probably ought to know that I’m also a massive fan of Southampton Football Club.

Danny Goodall