It’s not often that I’ll break out into a full fledge guffaw while reading the Wall Street Journal, so when it happens it’s understandable that my wife gets a little concerned. This morning, while reading the page one Marketplace article How Kerkorian Won Wynn’s Mirage (WSJ.com login required), this is exactly what happened.
Mr. Wynn’s ranting excited his precision-trained guard dogs. Perceiving a threat to their master, the German shepherds commenced to case the room for danger. One dog shoved his nose into Mr. Fusco’s [a Goldman Sachs banker] crotch in an attack position. The dog stayed that way, staring at the investment banker, for the full length of Wynn’s tirade. “I was petrified,” Fusco recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘This job isn’t worth this.’ “
The vision of a high power wall street banker making a “sales call” on a prospective new client and finding himself petrified with an attack dog staring at him hungrily is delicious! Oh the pain of landing a $15M new client…
(Disclaimer: I currently work for IONA Technologies)
My other alter-ego is back, Greg the Architect has a new episode out that talks about SOA ROI. First, we should all be afraid when there are too many acronyms used right next to each other…
Even though I have issue with the transparency of the sponsorship behind Greg, I have to admit that the episodes are very well done, highly relevant (as anyone who has been selling or buying enterprise technology, specifically SOA technology, can tell you), and funny.
Side Box: I do have to congratulate the TIBCO Marketing team. I was contacted by their Worldwide Direct of Marketing and was informed that they received an Internet Advertising Competition (IAC) Award by the Web Marketing Association for the first episode of Greg the Architect. Dan and Ram, keep up the great work!
This episode talks about something that is near and dear to my heart, how to measure the value of technology. This is one of the corner stones of my new role at IONA. As part of the Customer Value Sales Team, I’m responsible for working with IONA’s west coast account teams to apply IONA’s value selling model, what we call the Value Assessment Program, to how our clients use IONA’s technology within their enterprises.
Everyone has heard the terms ROI and Value before. If you’re a buyer of technology you have heard countless vendors claim ROI numbers for their products or provide statements of value that you can achieve through the use of their products and/or solutions. If you are (or have been) a vendor selling technology then you have most likely been given ROI and value statements from your marketing department at some point to assist with your sales. You might have even used one of those magic ROI Calculator spreadsheets to help show a customer the value in hard numbers (more on that later).
I think this is a good topic to cause us to sit backwards on our horses to see where we have traveled over the past few years in technology with regards to RIO and Value.
A long, long time ago, back when you needed to go through 2+ years of serious and all encompassing training to receive the title of sales executive, value was something that described how a technology would directly impact your business. Granted, when dealing with new technologies there was a bit of faith involved in accepting the numbers. But that risk is what lead to great rewards. During the most recent bubble years, when a monkey wearing a vendor’s logo polo shirt could sell technology, the concept of understanding (or explaining) the business value that a technology purchase would create was considered “old fashioned”. How many millions of dollars were wasted…
The past five years has seen the industry pendulum swing back. Right after the bubble burst, technology companies started to realize this “new way” of selling technology, based on a calculated Return On Investment. Unfortunately, a lot of these ROI models were just smoke and mirrors reflecting MBA speak around a product. I have seen countless ROI calculators that would generate a positive ROI…even when all zeros were entered int them.
Now we are back full circle to businesses expecting to see financial validation behind their technology purchases. Most monkeys are back in the zoo (though I think we are running short on animal catchers), and an account executive for enterprise technology and solution companies are expected to be business partners of their customers. This means helping their customer use the technology to help address business problems their customers are facing or sometimes ones they don’t even see. This also includes explaining that business value in the customer’s business terms.
This was one of the primary reasons why I decided to join IONA almost a year ago. We have a dedicated team with executive support focused on helping us and our clients understand the value that can be achieved through the use of IONA’s Distributed SOA Infrastructure technology. Our Value Assessment Program (VAP) involves a commitment from both IONA and our clients to understand this value. This 30-45 day program consists leveraging IONA’s decade long set of experiences from Global 2000 companies to conduct focused interviews within a client’s organization, validate of the risk areas identified, and jointly craft a solutions to minimize these risk areas. This solution’s core is a value statement, built upon numbers provided and confirmed by the client’s people, detailing how this solution will impact the client’s business.
As I promised in my entry about recent changes back in February, I was planning on writing more about this Value Selling Methodology. I have not had a lot of entries on this topic since due to the success that we have been having with it in the field. I have been working clients over the past three months detailing how IONA can savee them millions of dollars in technology spend or create millions of dollars of business revenue thought the acceleration of their software development lifecycles.
Consider this my renewed pledge to start sharing more of this with you in the near future. To quote a good friend of mine “a couple of no-doze and a pot of coffee and I’ll be up all night writing manifestos.”
I’ve haven’t posted for a while due to a hectic week of travel and training classes and then a week long vacation (minus laptop of course). So, I thought I would get back into the swing of things by sharing this video. It’s a spoof video that a few creative IONA-ites put together for our 2007 Sales Kick-Off. There are a lot of references to CORBA, so the more you know about CORBA the funner this gets. Also, keep in mind that IONA was started out of Dublin, Ireland.
Google’s been holding their cards close to their vest for a long time, today they finally announced their ISP strategy with a flush of excitement. Google’s “free in-home wireless broadband service” is called TiSP and is a revolution in the market.
Please link over to the TiSP website before scrolling down to continuing reading here…
By now you should have figured out that today is April 1st and that TiSP is a royal flush of a gag (pun highly intended). I gotta give credit to Google for being a public company that still isn’t afraid of having a public sense of humor. I can’t think of another public company of Google’s size that would have had to porcelain to do an April fool’s joke like this.
Here’s a tip of the hat to the entire Google exec staff and April Fool’s team…
— Update: I’m always one of a great joke, I remember fondly the UWEC homepage joke of 1996… While digging around the net this morning, I found a few more items worth sharing:
Everyone has an alter ego out there in the world. I found out today that I’m lucky enough to have two. My first is my twin out of Rhode Island that is a musician and owns the domain of our names. (I’m still trying to figure out if we are related in the family tree or not…). The second I discovered this morning…Greg the Architect.
I was doing some SOA blog reading this morning when I came across Greg the Architect. This is Tibco’s way of trying to tap the viral and community marketing engine. As attempts by larger established IT vendors go…their attempt isn’t bad. It’s got the humor factor down pretty, I found my self laughing and thinking…”been there” (from both the client and vendor perspective). What will be interesting is to see if Tibco has the fortitude to do more of these and build something behind it. Viral marketing takes more than just a single shot to work…that is where most large companies tend to fall down, not willing to stay the course long enough to see the effect.I do find it interesting how the YouTube clip has no mention of Tibco as the vendor behind the clip. The end of the video clip mentions SOA Now Journal, which is a “thought leadership” site that is authored by Tibco. Tibco is using Greg as a way to drive people to this website. Personally, I have issue with the lack of transparency behind both of these.
Tibco, don’t hide the fact that your doing both of these…it usually burns the audience you’re trying to capture. At the same time, don’t swing the other way and make these both Tibco items. There is a middle ground in there that has to be found…I think there close, but think they need to be a bit more up front with their involvement.
