lustratus REPAMA

Posts Tagged ‘steve craggs’

As is customary at this time of year, my Lustratus Research colleague Steve Craggs has launched his 2010 predictions for the infrastructure software market.

At this time of year many people make predictions for what the year to come will hold, only for them to be long forgotten by the time next year’s predictions come round. Uniquely then perhaps amongst other crystal ball gazers, Steve first grades himself on the predictions he made last year.

So take a look at the Lustratus 2010 infrastructure software market predictions to see how he did.

Danny Goodall

My Lustratus Research colleague Steve Craggs has taken a step back from the hype surrounding Cloud Computing and has defined it for the layman.

Steve’s premise was that the Cloud Computing hype had reached fever pitch and that some of the claimed benefits had become pretty difficult to believe. He wanted to strip it down to the basics, define it and look dispassionately at the likely benefits and the trade-offs involved. Steve has also put some of the vendors and service providers in the space into the right context based on the Lustratus REPAMA Market Landscape / Taxonomy / Segmentation model.

The document is embedded below and can be downloaded from Scridb or the Lustratus web store.

Danny Goodall

My Lustratus Research colleague Steve Craggs ponders cloud lock-in…

…and asks the questions whether it is necessarily a bad thing here.

My Lustratus colleague Steve Craggs has been blogging about his concerns over patent cases for a long time.

Here he is looking at a case going through the East Texas District Court that could have a significant impact on the adoption of cloud computing. I just hope Steve doesn’t get stopped for speeding in East Texas any time soon.

Danny Goodall

So, as I mentioned in my previous blog that Lustratus has been looking at companies in the High Performance Messaging (middleware) space recently.  A couple of ex-colleagues from Sonic (Dave Clare and Annalisa Sarasini) have both found themselves in this space, with Solace Systems and 29West respectively.  My colleague Steve Craggs is looking to produce a paper on the space so we arranged a couple of briefings.

Steve and I have both served our message oriented apprenticeship.  Steve ran IBM’s MQSeries division for many years and I was part of the team at Sonic Software that brought SonicMQ to market and then launched the ESB category. So we both understand the manic vendor space race for continually lowering latency in message delivery.  For years the delays in message transmission to reception have been falling mainly as factor of incremental improvement in software techniques, network improvements and ever increasing hardware processing speeds.

However now, Solace Systems together with other vendors such as Tervela and Celoxica are using dedicated hardware platforms to handle message delivery.  They promise dramatic increases in the number of messages per second that can be handled and an equally dramatic reduction in message delivery latency.

Comparing Solace Systems’ and 29West marketing approaches is an interesting exercise.  For organisations that appear to address the same basic pains, they take a very different approach to marketing their respective offerings.

Solace System’s proposition, it appears,is aimed at financial institutions, information providers and communication services providers.  Their dedicated hardware solutions for message and content routing appear to have a broad appeal outside of the obvious market of financial services.  Contrast this to 29West and you see a company that has a razor sharp understanding of it’s target market and target prospect – financial institutions who see the opportunity created by reducing the delay in exchanging market data and trading information between computer systems.

So 29West is focused on it’s target market but does it risk being an 8 fingered glove company?  How big is the market opportunity provided by this very narrow niche?  The good news for 29West is that the market for low-latency, high performance middleware within financial services is quite a broad narrow niche – if you see what I mean.  But it does mean that 29West’s growth is certainly limited by their incredible focus.

A greater concern for 29West is that, perhaps in recognition of fact that their market opportunity is limited, they appear to be taking off those 8 fingered gloves and are attempting to reach outside of financial services and into the realm of generic application to application messaging.  The issue will then become one of differentiation from the many long standing products that already exist in that space who are now seeing messaging as an enable to SOA with all the additional expected capabilities that that might imply.  Achieving this is not an easy, inexpensive or quick thing to do.  Still, the company is run by good people (ex-Talarian/ex-TIBCO) so we’ll watch with interest.

So Solace Systems comes off best in the marketing strategy comparison then?  Well – maybe.  They do suffer from another early market trait – that of evangelism over proof.  It appears that they’re doing a lot of evangelism about the way that they enable exciting new ways for organisations to manage content in their network.  And whilst this evangelism in itself is not a sin (I’ve done it myself countless times and it’s an essential part of the early market marketing mix), they don’t appear to supply many references to back up their claims.

They do describe their very interesting relationship with TIBCO, who have bundled/white-labelled Solace’s technology to help the ancient Rendezvous limp through another couple of years of maintenance revenue. But other than that I can see little evidence of the claims they make.

As I said above, Steve is going to take a little look at the technological and product strategies of the two companies in an upcoming paper so we’ll track them from here on in and see what develops.

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