Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited.
As I mentioned in my last blog entry I’ve had a minor disagreement with Blake Dournaee of Intel over…
…whether spin was used in the naming of the product category in which the folks at Intel have placed their SOA security/acceleration technology. You can read about our failure to find common ground as well as our apparent inability to handle each other’s blog comments correctly here. But whilst I was writing that blog I thought I’d dwell a little and idly speculate at what might lie behind Intel’s naming strategy. And before I do so I have to declare an interest. I am a big fan of the marketing techniques that Intel has used here. It’s a smart… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product category, product name, SOA and Integration | 
appliance, competition, depositioning, intel, positioning, soa, soa expressway, software appliance | 
2 CommentsFour 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 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 commentAppistry 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 commentCompetitive Differentiation in Cloud Computing – “The horse-less carriage and typing pools”
I had a meeting with a prospective client earlier in the week and we were chatting about how differentiation and positioning in Cloud Computing has to mature.
The contention was that cloud computing vendors and service providers today are too inwardly-focussed and that they should look at the external market to determine their competitive marketing strategies. Cloud Computing differentiation bears all the hallmarks of early market strategy and is very limited. It got me thinking. Imagine if competitive differentiation was carried out in other walks of life the way it is currently carried out by most Cloud Computing vendors and service providers.
Imagine if Porsche for example had spent 7 years perfecting its new sports car, a car that was… Continue reading
Cloud Computing REPAMA – Taxonomy and the Role of Professional Services – Part 2
I’m continuing the REPAMA Segment Analysis Study into the Cloud Computing market attempting to arrive at a solid market segmentation and two things have become very clear.
Firstly, every vendor with a remotely related proposition appears to have added the word “cloud” to their product name, presumably in an attempt to bask in the reflected glory that cloud computing provides, perhaps in an effort to appease their investors. This means that there are a large number of vendors claiming to be part of specific segments that may or may not have legitimate claims. This makes the process I’m going through confusing and messy. And if I, as a marketing analyst am having problems, I wonder what sort of success a… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, cloud computing, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, marketing, Marketing Strategy, product category, product marketing, segmentation, taxonomy | brad buck, channel, cloud computing, competition, Danny Goodall, early market, Lustratus, marketing strategy, opencrowd, peter laird, positioning, product marketing, professional services, proposition segmentation, REPAMA, segmentation, Strategic Marketing, taxonomy, tendril inc. | Leave a commentRunning the REPAMA rule over…Cloud Computing
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… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, cloud computing, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning | application virtualization, cloud computing, competition, Danny Goodall, Lustratus, market taxonomy, marketing strategy, positioning, proposition segmentation, REPAMA, value proposition | Leave a commentStandards-based marketing – an antidote “Be holier than thou” Part 6
So closing out this series of posts looking at differentiation in markets where technical standards have caused little technical difference between products, I’m going to look at standards bodies and technical education as a technique to create differentiation.
Preach the gospel – Educate
The first point to make is that in my experience products that have developed through the process of ratification of technical standards, first find an audience amongst the technical community. This means that there is an opportunity, albeit with a finite window of opportunity, to become the first vendor to provide education together with access to evaluation software for these early technical evaluators.
I’ve had first hand experience of this early stage marketing exercise. We… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product marketing | competition, competitive, Danny Goodall, Lustratus, marketing, marketing strategy, messaging, positioning, product marketing, REPAMA, standards, standards bodies | Leave a commentStandards-based marketing – an antidote “Partner” Part 5
I’m carrying on this series of posts on how vendors can differentiate themselves in the market when technical standards have had the effect of removing significant functional difference between competitive products.
This time I’m going to look at partnering to create differentiation in your offer. Whilst the product proposition will remain materially similar to that of the standards-driven competition, a proposition carved from the synergies of the product and a strategic partner can be beneficial.
Partnering – Other complimentary vendors
As I suggested in this post, broadening the product portfolio is one way to create differentiation. Whilst this can be done through internal product development, it is also possible to broaden the product proposition through strategic partnerships.… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, go-to-market, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product marketing | competition, competitive, Danny Goodall, Lustratus, marketing, messaging, Partner, Partnering, positioning, product marketing, REPAMA, standards, Strategic Marketing | 1 Comment
- 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.