progress software

The marketing strategies of open source versus closed source ESBs

I’m continuing my series of blog entries where I am sharing some early results from REPAMATron – my automated competitive marketing intelligence gathering tool. In this entry I’m looking at the difference in marketing strategy between open source and closed source enterprise service buses (EBSs).

REPAMATron automates my REPAMA competitive marketing intelligence methodology and is currently in Alpha. I’m using the ESB market, a market I know well, to help to tune the algorithms at the heart of REPAMATron.

In my previous entry I looked at 3 Enterprise Service Bus vendors’ marketing strategies (WSO2, Talend and FuseSource) and compared them to the computed market mean. I’ve now added another 6 ESB vendors to the study from the long list… Continue reading

Part 2 – First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market

In the previous post I shared some of the early results from REPAMATron – the technology I’ve developed that automates the process of gathering competitive marketing intelligence.

The previous post described what REPAMA and REPAMATron are all about so if you’ve landed here and have no idea what this is, then I’d recommend that you read the first post in this series. Having taken a look at how a section of the Enterprise Service Bus market (WSO2, FuseSource and Talend) communicates benefits or value propositions, I’m now going to share the research into the product features that each vendor communicates most prominently. To allow a comparison to be made between the vendors and to the market mean… Continue reading

First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market

If you’ve been following this blog you’ll know that I analyse the marketing tactics and strategies of high-tech vendors – mainly in the infrastructure software space. It’s…

…an emotional day for me as I share the first output from my automated competitive marketing intelligence gathering system – REPAMATron. Well perhaps it’s not that emotional, but it certainly represents a significant milestone in a project that has been in development in my ‘spare time’ for a little while now. Below you’ll find my first tentative steps at automated analysis of the Enterprise Service Bus market.

REPAMA is a research methodology that allows me to categorise and compare the marketing strategies of high-tech vendors inferred from the language they use to… Continue reading

Talend acquires Sopera – Does the World Need “Suck-it-and-see” Global Middleware?

I had a chat with an ex-colleague yesterday who told me that Talend had acquired Germany-based open source SOA platform ‘vendor’ Sopera.

This move came on the back of the news that the company had completed a $34M round of funding and Talend seems to be aiming very high with it’s combined proposition. In the accompanying press release, which is refreshingly bullish and direct, the company is aiming at vendors such as TIBCO, Software AG and Progress Software; describing those vendors’ solutions as ‘proprietary’.

Whilst it will be very interesting to see how Talend embeds the acquired technology into its own offering, it will be even more interesting to see how Talend will massage it’s go-to-market model in the… Continue reading

Progress Software to Restructure Again – Changing Corporate DNA

DNAI 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

Standards-based marketing – the homogeneous effect of software standards – Part 2

sonic software logo

A History Lesson

Continuing on from this blog entry, I’ve decided to create another mini series of blogs, this time looking at the difficulty of differentiation in markets where software standards have created homogeneity amongst the offerings of the protagonists.

So first a little bit of a history lesson…

I surfed the wave of middleware resurgence in the early stages of the new millennium and had great success marketing various technologies. Initially, working with some of the best people in the industry, I introduced SonicMQ to the world while at Sonic Software (now Progress Software).  This was a market proposition that was heavily based on standards. Well at least we… Continue reading

An ESB is an ESB is an ESB – n’est pas?

Fish HeadAs 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”.

Running the REPAMA rule over mainframe SOA

Old mainframeI’ve just finished the REPAMA Segment Analysis Study and Marketing Efficacy Assessment on High Performance Middleware.  It’s just going through our buddy checking process at the moment so now I can get on with the next project.  We’re about to start looking at vendors of integration and SOA solutions on the mainframe with the REPAMA methodology.

It’s really interesting (well if you’re a marketing analyst) when you start a new project.  You have to leave a lot of your preconceptions behind.  If you’re reverse engineering the marketing strategy from a vendor’s go to market material, it’s quite wrong to form firm opinions about the results before you even start the analysis.

I mean, if I were… Continue reading


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  • Gravatar icon of Danny Goodall Danny Goodall
    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...
  • Gravatar icon of Sarah Bourne Sarah Bourne
    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 ...
  • Gravatar icon of Danny Goodall Danny Goodall
    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...
  • Gravatar icon of Jacques Talbot Jacques Talbot
    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 ...
  • Gravatar icon of Steve Craggs Steve Craggs
    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...
  • Gravatar icon of Pete Logan Pete Logan
    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 ...
  • Gravatar icon of Danny Goodall Danny Goodall
    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' ...
  • Gravatar icon of Blake Dournaee Blake Dournaee
    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...
  • Gravatar icon of SaaS SaaS
    April 14, 2010 (2:57)
    The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Nice Technology Related Blog. Will visit again.
  • Gravatar icon of Zaki Usman Zaki Usman
    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.