Lustratus REPAMA - Strategic Marketing Analysis

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

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 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.

An ESB is an ESB is an ESB - n'est pas?

As 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".

• A loosely-coupled messaging environment
• A comprehensive Enterprise Service Bus offering
• Architectural guidance, patterns and practices
• Messaging-based Enterprise Service Bus
• Enterprise-class SOA Enterprise Service Bus
• High performance, scalable SOA integration backbone
• Lightweight Enterprise Service Bus
• Mediation Layer
• Enterprise Service Bus

Words are wonderful things and marketing organisations as experienced as these wouldn't use words without a reason.  As mentioned previously in this blog entry, when a category becomes as ultra-competitive as the ESB space, vendors will attempt to segment and re-segment the market on their terms and the product category is the first place they start.  

As a result, there is a raft of valuable competitive intelligence in this simple list of words above (visualised by wordle.net).  Why is each vendor modifying the product category in this way?  Answer that question and you'll gain an insight into the particular position within the ESB segment that each vendor is trying to own.

Danny Goodall.

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) REPAMA findings published

Just a A quick note to say that the REPAMA Segment Analysis Study into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) has been published on the Lustratus.com site.  The ESB is a segment that Lustratus knows well as we've carried out strategic marketing work for most of the key protagonists at some point.  That said, there were a number of surprises - chief amongst these was some of the competitive differentiation strategies that we saw as well as the markedly different approach taken by Microsoft.

The study reverse-engineered the go-to-market strategies of the following vendors and products:

• Microsoft ESB Guidance 1.0
• Oracle Service Bus
• Progress Sonic ESB
• TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus

In reaction to client feedback, we've published two sets of reports with this particular study   I've created a summary report that contains a management summary of the state of vendor marketing strategies in the ESB market segment as well as the results of the full-blown REPAMA Segment Analysis Study. 

Danny Goodall.

Part 3 - The "WHO [has this specific pain or problem]" element from the positioning statement

To continue the series of blogs looking at the elements of the positioning statement I'm going to look at the customer pain or problem section. 

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A [product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

In the last blog entry we had started to create the unique position in a prospect's mind where our products and services uniquely sit.  We did this by first identifying the ideal client.  Now we're going to expand on the ideal client segmentation by adding a specific pain, need or desire that the ideal customer can relate to or a situation that they find themselves in.  The "who" element describes the situation, nearly always negative, that the ideal customer finds themselves in and the implication is that we can positively alter the ideal customer's situation.

The following questions often help to narrowing down the "who" element of the positioning statement:

• What is the ideal customer looking to do or achieve that they cannot do without help?
• What must the ideal customer do that they are struggling to do?
• What is the desired state that the ideal customer is looking to achieve?
• What is the problem that the ideal customer is wrestling with?
• What situation (needn't be negative) does the ideal customer find themselves in?
• etc.

Some examples

In a previous blog entry on the positioning statement we looked at an example REPAMA reverse-engineered positioning statement for Microsoft ESB Guidance.  Here, we saw that Microsoft's "who" section was was defined as:

WHO are building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern

For those readers who are not experts in SOA (service-oriented architecture) or the infrastructure software market in general, "SOA" here is an esoteric software architecture model that many organisations believe provides great benefits.  Microsoft, amongst other vendors, claims that its products help its users to implement SOA more effectively. 

Microsoft is effectively saying that it believes that the situation its target customer (Microsoft BizTalk Developers) finds themselves in is that of "building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern".  Interestingly, in our attempt to reverse-engineer Microsoft's positioning statement, we see that Microsoft has not aimed at an overtly negative pain for the ideal customer.  Rather it has chosen to simply focus on a situation the ideal customer finds themselves in.  Other vendors from the ESB REPAMA SAS report show a different approach to the pain.  Oracle with its Oracle Service Bus product chooses to identify the following area of pain in our reverse-engineered positioning statement:

WHO need to enforce quality of service, security and performance policies across an enterprise-wide network of multiple SOA domains

Progress with its Progress Sonic ESB product identifies this need

WHO need to connect many different IT resources using many different technologies in many physically different locations

So whilst Microsoft has chosen to simply state a situation, other vendors have chosen to highlight specific needs or deficiencies.  Remember the positioning statement in its entirety should be used to make the ideal customer feel that you have designed and built the product (or service) specifically for them in response to their specific problems.  Other, more generic examples might include:

• WHO are struggling to implement the latest governmental regulation
• WHO need to remove costs from their IT operations
• WHO fail to bring new products to market ahead of their competition
• WHO are unable to ascertain their risk exposure in a timely manner
• WHO cannot currently meet their corporate governance requirements
• etc.

So that's the main pain, need or desire section, I'll tackle the "OUR [product name] section in a later blog entry.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW It should be borne in mind that Lustratus' focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we're dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

Teaching Oracle to Suck Eggs

Working out the depositioning strategy used by specific vendors is normally complex.  Do they actively look to emphasise their positives over their competitors?  Do they look to highlight their competitors’ perceived negative attributes?  Do they infer who the competition is?  Do they actively name the competitors, or the class of competitor?

Reverse-engineering this information usually involves a great deal of inference and subtle interpretation of the way certain features are spun and certain advantages are claimed.  In some cases I even conclude that the vendor has no specific competitive marketing strategy and that no direct depositioning of the competition occurs.  So it was with some mutual professional respect that I started to review Oracle’s marketing for their ESB product as part of our latest REPAMA Segment Analysis Study (SAS) into the ESB market segment (IBM, Oracle, Software AG, Progress, TIBCO, Microsoft).  I realised that Oracle had already done my job for me. 

An ex-Oracle marketing VP that I used to work with once told me that Larry Ellison’s DNA runs right through Oracle’s marketing organisation.  That is - kill the market leader until Oracle is the market leader then kill #2.  Expanding upon this tactic looks like this:

1. Claim to be #1 and find some measure by which market leadership can legitimately be claimed


2. Identify the nearest competitor


3. Identify the largest delta in functionality (i.e. the greatest gap between the competitor’s weakness and Oracle’s strength)


4. Tell the world why this factor is so important


5. Tell the world why Oracle is better than the competitor in this regard


6. Acquire competitor if the world won’t listen


7. Repeat ad nauseam until Oracle legitimately is the market leading product

As regular readers or anyone who as looked at the REPAMA Guide will know, amongst 25+ other marketing elements Lustratus monitors vendors' depositioning strategies as well as the likely (self-perceived) primary competitor or alternative.  As mentioned above I usually have to work hard to find this information, but take a look at some of the text extracts below that are directly lifted from the Oracle marketing literature.

“Unlike other ESBs...”

“Unlike other vendors that require multiple products to ascertain the health of services...”

“Unlike other vendors’ disjointed SOA and business process management (BPM) products...”

And look at the competitive statements that follow the “Unlike” element of the positioning statement...

"[Oracle] has unparalleled quality of services (QoS) with optimum performance, scalability, reliability and management and a unique combination of integration capabilities, embedded management and integrated governance"

"[Oracle] offers integrated service governance and management capabilities across multiple SOA domains to enable consistent QoS, control and visibility, ensuring reuse across the enterprise wide service network"

"Oracle Service Bus delivers built-in capabilities for service virtualization, Web service security (WS-Security), and enforcement of policies around throttling and service pooling to meet the reliability, availability, scalability, and performance requirements and avoid overloading the back-end services for the real-world enterprise-class applications"

"Oracle Service Bus provides built-in monitoring capabilities, including comprehensive dashboards displaying service-level agreement (SLA) alerts, operational metrics, and message pipelines for the business services it hosts."

"Oracle Service Bus delivers service-oriented BPM by using optimized connectivity for seamless integration with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite."

"[Oracle] is the first solution to combine integration, messaging, operational service management, and security-enforcement capabilities"

"[Oracle offers] code free configuration-based service integration"

So full marks to Oracle for both sharpening that marketing knife and for also understanding who to stick it into.  This is a company that truly understands guerrilla product marketing. 

That said they’ve got a little bit of an acquisition to swallow at the moment and whilst they are digesting that, they could be fairly easy prey for savvy vendors.  Once digested however, early results suggest they’ll be executing a text book competitive marketing strategy.  And whilst it’s not my role to comment in detail on the product or functional strategy (that’s the job of my colleagues Steve Craggs and Ronan Bradley), from a pure marketing perspective I’d say ESB market beware.

Dan.

[Posted with iBlogger from my iPhone]

Running the REPAMA rule over mainframe SOA

I'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 to ask you who you think would be the typical target organisation and audience for a vendor of mainframe integration and SOA solutions, you might think that they'd be in the picture above. 

That said, from the work I've done so far this image couldn't be further from the truth.  The mainframe; the only truly secure and reliable platform for some organisations, or the incumbent legacy platform that it isn't cost effective to move away from for other organisations.  Either way it's a bottleneck for truly effective SOA projects. 

With so much data of record and critical processes residing on the world's mainframes, an organisation's ability to bring the mainframe into broader integration and SOA projects in as quick, simple and cost effective way will determine the success or otherwise of many broader, non-mainframe SOA projects. 

The mainframe is now at the hub of many SOA projects as is the software that makes it possible to securely integrate the mainframe world into "mainstream" enterprise computing.

Anyway the vendors on the long list so far include:  

IBM (CICs, IMS, WebSphere, RD for System Z)
DataDirect’s Shadow (Progress Software)
GT Software’s Ivory
SOA Software’s SOLA
Hostbridge
Software AG
Microfocus
Rocket Software

Some of these might not make the cut as we're aiming to look at about 4 of them in total.  I'll keep you posted on the early findings over the next couple of weeks.

Dan.