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
Visualising competitive market intelligence – some early output from REPAMATron
As I mentioned in a previous post I’m in the process of automating REPAMA – our competitive marketing intelligence methodology. It’s quite a task and I’ve not been able to focus as much time on the project as I would have liked, but it’s coming along.
REPAMA visualises competitive intelligence. I created the REPAMA methodology to allow me to understand infrastructure software vendors’ marketing strategies and to allow me to compare one vendor’s strategy with another. REPAMATron is the project that is automating the manual REPAMA methodology. It’s going to take a number months to work through all of the algorithms to ensure that they are true to the manual REPAMA methodology. But I thought I’d share… Continue reading
Appistry 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
Value Proposition Categories – MITICOR
I’ve been working on a way of categorising value propositions for some time. I’ve arrived at something I refer to as MITICOR which I believe represents the atomic value proposition elements.
By this I mean that all business to business value propositions can be broken down into these 7 base elements. I’m sure I will refine this over time but for our purposes these elements allow us to analyse and categorise the different value propositions that vendors use in their go-to-market efforts.
So what do these categories refer to?

Market
Elements categorised as “Market” include value propositions that relate to the organisation’s market or competitive situation, new product or service introduction as well as the organisation’s marketing efforts… Continue reading
A Refreshing call with GigaSpaces
Steve and I had an interesting and refreshingly different c
all this morning with GigaSpaces.
They had reached out to us to make sure we knew all about them so that they could be fully represented in each of the categories in our cloud computing market landscape / segmentation / taxonomy where they have a solution.
And after the call I can see that instead of just being in
- Cloud Software / Compute
They also have a valid claim to
- Cloud Software / Data
and may be even
- Cloud Software / Cloud Management ( /Application Services Management )
This raised a bit of a dilemma for me. I certainly want to represent vendors and providers accurately in the segmentation model… Continue reading
An Interesting Piece on Value Propositions from ITSMA
Whilst carrying out some research recently I realised that I need to arrive at a more granular categorisation of the types or categories of value propositions that vendors use.
And in attempting to do that I stumbled across an interesting read on the ITSMA site entitled Why You Need Three Different Types of Value Propositions. I hadn’t heard of ITSMA before but it appears that they focus on helping high-tech organisations to market solutions and services. I’ll certainly track them from here on in because I felt that I could have written the blog entry myself as it matches my own personal experience very accurately.
The three types of value proposition that the author refers to are in… Continue reading
Running 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
What do you do?
It’s an easy question isn’t it? But its one that in my experience is so often misinterpreted or wrongly answered by high-tech software vendors through their web sites, marketing materials and meetings with prospects.
When a prospect poses that question of a software vendor, what are they looking to understand? The answer is that they actually want to know what you can do for them. They want to quickly envisage what will be left behind after they have bought software from you.
So an answer like:
“ACME provides KJ8 compliant infrastructure that is compatible with the latest WP* series of standards”
…does not really answer the question “What does ACME Corp do?”.
Consider the situation when a… Continue reading

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.