Marketing Memos

For varied and unrelated reasons, I have been involved with many firms either in the collaboration field (VA Software cum CollabNet, Open-Xchange, Novell and their GroupWise offering) or for whom collaboration is an essential part of the product (Mobile Compete). This accumulated history led to me being the Collaboration Solutions judge for this year’s CODiE award.

When it comes to collaboration most vendors don’t get it.

Collaboration is not about technology, it is about people. Specifically it is about people sharing information in a manner that achieves one of several possible goals:

1. Reduce miscommunication
2. Ensure the appropriate information is available for making good decisions
3. Reduce the time to acquire that important information

So, the “it” that vendors don’t “get” is the multipart question of collaboration, those parts being:

• Who needs to collaborate
• What kind of information do they need to share
• How do they prefer to share it

Let’s take Mobile Complete as the first example. Their DeviceAnywhere product allows mobile application developers to remotely use real handsets to test their applications. Mobile Compete added several collaboration tools within their service. Answering the questions above:

• Who: Mobile application developers, Q&A and tech support teams.
• What: How a mobile application is behaving on a specific handset with a specific carrier.
• How: Either in real-time (while everyone is connected to the Internet) or asynchronously using replays of a session with a handset.

In their approach, Mobile Complete (without knowing it) answered these basic questions and provides very specific tools for their target market. From my discussions with Mobile Complete customers, the solutions are wildly successful.

Open-Xchange was a more generic, info-work type of collaboration suite (email, document management, calendars, project task lists, list management, etc.). What they did better than everyone else was integrating and linking (how) the data from these various information types (what) so that anyone using Open-Xchange could very easily hunt or search for important data (how).

This is a wide open opportunity in many software markets today. Collaboration if the very essence of any organization bigger than one person. People need to work with (collaborate) with other people. Looked at in a perverse light, CRM is one big collaboration suite dedicated to a specific set of users (sales , marketing, etc.).

If you are looking to differentiate in your markets/segments, ask yourself these three questions and see if there is a recurring need for your end-users to collaborate using the data you manipulate. If so, and if your competitors are not offering collaboration features, you may have a decisive wedge.

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You have to give Larry Ellison credit. When he makes up his mind to do something, he’ll take on the biggest and the baddest in order to win. He faced down the Federal government when he acquired most of the competitors in the ERP market in one massive gulp.

And he swallowed them with very little apparent corporate indigestion.

Now Larry has set his sight on the king of SaaS and arguably of CRM, pointing both barrels on SalesForce.com. Given my first encounter with SalesForce tech support this morning, I find myself on the verge of urging Ellison on.

Aside from being a hosted offering based upon the bones of Seibel CRM, there is little newsworthy about the product itself except for the integration of some social media flavored features. For example, any object in the data (a contact’s name for example) can have a “sticky note” slapped on it, and anyone with access to the data can add to the note and monitor the resulting conversation.

I have not seen this in action, and cannot comment on the viability, but it and the way the release was promoted show a few realities and long-term trends about technology marketing.

Consumer to enterprise: The roles of consumers and enterprise technology consumers is now reversed, with the consumer market leading in innovation. Smart enterprise technology vendors will spend more time paying attention to the Darwinistic nature of the World Weird Web and exploit resulting mutations that have applicability inside of corporations. Getting employees talking to one another about specific issues is on the top of that “social networking” list, and thus the “sticky note’ concept appears to be a good idea.

Enterprises are communities: Any organization, including enterprises, are by nature social entities — groups of people voluntarily banded together to achieve a common objective … namely earning a paycheck. Online social networking will become a larger part of what enterprise IT will enable because there are real, tangible benefits to getting employees working together in ad hoc ways. FedEx’s Fred Smith has long said this.

Blogers are buzz: The most note worthy marketing aspect of Oracle’s announcement is that they fed the news to bloggers before anyone else. We know from various studies that peer-level news is considered more reliable and valuable by the receiver. Oracle fed bloggers the details about the product first … and under embargo … to assure that buzz about the launch would occur on day one. Buzz marketing is now the lead, with analysts and trade press being left behind. Learn to leverage it.

SaaS is Enterprise: Amazon, Google and SalesForce ironically have proven that the cloud is more than “good enough” for enterprise use. For non-process and non-transaction applications, more and more enterprises will adopt services as opposed to software. For marketing people this complicates the product mixture, almost ensuring that you will have to consider a services model as part of your product mix.

Larry remains dangerous: Oracle has the market might, cash, and smarts to change the rules of most any game. Ellison has always been a dangerous competitor, and his rather ruthless nature is only getting uglier. If you are anywhere close to his core markets, keep looking over your shoulder and keep innovating to stay ahead. Short of the ever-more-likely anti-trust intervention, Oracle will grow to be the new Microsoft.

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