Posts Tagged ‘soa’

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 made sure that the debate was about standards – JMS in this case.  My ex-colleague Dave Chappell was talking to developers all over the world and writing books that led the debate on JMS and other standards.  We de-positioned the competition as being complex and proprietary and we enjoyed great success. Obviously the competition reacted by introducing their own JMS-based products, a move which we expected but by then Sonic had introduced the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and had moved the debate on to standards that enabled a service oriented architecture (SOA).

All the while I was creating marketing programs that stressed Sonic’s commitment to standards and, by implication, I was de-positioning other vendors’ technologies as being the Devil’s spawn due to their reliance on proprietary features. “How,” we asked “would organisations ensure interoperability between their, and their trading partners’ infrastructures if they didn’t conform to the emerging standards?”

Sonic enjoyed great early market success with this strategy as did the other vendors in the JMS and related markets such as Fiorano, Cape Clear, PolarLake, et al.  These vendors punched above their weight and went into battle and won against some of the industry’s heavyweights.  All of this was made possible by their commitment to standards.  These companies existed because a) standards made it easier for them to build software and b) customers wanted to move away from vendors’ costly and proprietary solutions and ran with open arms to this new breed of standards-based middleware.

For a while the old school vendors held out.  Claiming that their incredibly feature-rich offerings justified their proprietary methods and high price tags because they could do more “stuff”.  But the slow move towards standards gathered pace and eventually turned into an avalanche as, helped by maturing software standards, first the least established proprietary vendors and then latterly the market leading EAI vendors validated the market by introducing their own standards-based products.  Sonic had won the battle.

But then the problems became obvious.  When your product is based around freely available specifications and built with the help of common libraries that are available to others, how can you differentiate when your competitors are using the same specifications and standards?  If the software must conform to these standards, differentiation, at least at the product level, becomes a challenge.

Obviously not all animals are equal so some degree of difference exist between standards-based products.  During customer evaluations these come to the surface.  In fact in the sales situation where prospects can be engaged in detailed discussions about a technology and the company that is behind it, it’s actually not too difficult to draw distinctions between different approaches.  But within the marketing organisation, where we’re tasked with creating a credible, unique space in our prospects’ minds by placing 130 words on a web site, how can you do this?

It’s not easy and there are no hard and fast rules or guarantees but I’ll take look at some of the techniques that can be used to achieve this in upcoming blogs.

Danny Goodall.

At the risk of sounding like I’m repeating myself, once again I’ve just got off the phone from a friend and ex-colleague. This is a different friend and a different conversation to my last blog entry, and this time he was looking to do me a favour rather than picking my brains for free.  Which was nice.

Anyway, after a while we got on to the subject of how sales of his organisation’s SOA, ESB and BPM offerings were going.  A mixed bag was his response.  “Where it’s good it’s very good and where it’s tough it’s very tough” was his view.

My mate is in sales looking after a geographic and industry-focused region for a large integration/SOA infrastructure software vendor.  One issue he has is how to take his products to market in a specific industry sector.  In this case energy and utilities.  His concern is differentiation.  As he put it to me “How do you compete when all of the other vendors can do what you can do?”.

It’s a good question and one that I touched on briefly in these hallowed pages earlier in the year.  It’s a phenomenon that I refer to as “standards-based marketing” – a tongue-in-cheek description of what happens to an organisation’s marketing efforts when they are taking technology to market that is driven and governed by technical standards.  Effectively as the market matures, so all vendors in the segment meet the standards which in turn means they can all do broadly the same things which makes being unique, from a marketing perspective, very difficult.

Or put another way, Goodall’s third law of competitive marketing states that:

“As the impact of software standards bodies in a market segment increases, the probability of nil vendor-to-vendor differentiation approaches one”

…or

“I’ve got generate leads and my marketing campaigns look like they could’ve been written about my competitors.”

Actually there is no Goodall’s third (or first or second for that matter) law of competitive marketing.  But it did make me think that I should spend some time in these pages addressing this area.  So over the next several blog postings I’m going to focus on some of the differentiation tactics I’ve seen and used to create that illusion of differentiation when in reality your competitors are in fact your evil identical twin.

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