PrudentCloud

Oracle acquires Taleo – reactionary or strategic acquisition?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:19:23 +0000

Uncle Larry is at it again!!. First he threw a left hook at SAP by announcing a in-memory offering just when SAP was hoping to bask in the glory of their results and highlighting how, with HANA, they would unseat Oracle in their customer base. If that was not enough now to negate SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, he goes and acquires their biggest rival Taleo. To rub it in he does so at almost half the price mocking the rich acquisition SAP made.

Wonder, what would be his reaction if someone were to ask him what Cloud Computing was – his old rant berating Cloud Computing still reverberating in many years. But we all knew he would come around eventually and he was merely posturing to buy time for his teams’ to catch up.

Anyway I digress.

Enough has been written about the Taleo acquisition and how Oracle is eating the humble pie when it comes to Cloud Computing and Oracle is venturing into Cloud Computing despite Larry’s histrionics. So this will be a quick 3 points for and 3 points against post.

Here are three things I think Oracle would gain from this acquisition

Oracle got a company equivalent to what SAP did from their SuccessFactors acquisition. At a much cheaper cost compared to the spendthrift SAP. Although Taleo and SuccessFactors had slightly different focus. Here are some details. Same revenue better margins at almost half the price just when both the companies were demonstrating fatigue from their breathtaking runs in the last 3-4 years and with the eventual leader in this space Workday looming large in the review mirror.With this acquisition Oracle should be able to defend any potential customer loss in the SMB space happening to either SuccessFactors and Workday.
Talent Management was not Oracle’s forte. Even after and with the Fusion applications. (What kind of endorsement of Fusion Applications is this you ask?) So this acquisition will be net additive in terms of the capabilities.
Taleo brings with it 5000 more customers to Oracle. Most of the customers are SMBs and new era companies that are not currently sending annuity checks to Oracle.

But there seems to be more things not to like about this acquisition, here are three from my point of view

It is public knowledge in the industry that PeopleSoft had the best HR products before they got consumed by Oracle. When that happened, two factions emerged from the erstwhile Peoplesoft leaders. A Dave Duffield faction and a Craig Conway faction. No prizes for guessing which faction was more passionate about HR space and where they have landed since. So with this acquisition Oracle seems to have ended up getting the faction that is made up of Sales, Consulting, Bizdev. And Workday with the product, passionate team and consequently a better product.
Talking about Product. Another well known fact about Taleo is that it is not “True SaaS” company in the strict sense of implementing multi-tenancy and single code base etc. It is more closer to ASP than a True SaaS with heavy customization involved. Taleo is an amalgamation of 3-4 platforms, if not more, coming from acquisitions and a person in the know told me that a new customer on-boarding effort involved a lot of professional services effort to finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Not sure Oracle needed that hairball. Then again it might be just what Oracle wanted given Larry’s distaste for multi-tenancy.
Oracle has one of the best profit margins in the technology industry and have had that for a long time. Taleo on the other hand has negative profit margins (-4.76%). This will not be tolerated at Oracle. If you apply the Oracle playbook to this acquisition that will involve serious re-jiggering and will change Taleo big time as we know it. It is not a big enough business to let it run as business unit all to itself. If it is rolled up under the PeopleSoft or Fusion product lines then it will be a lot of fun.

Some interesting things to note in the days to come

HP and IBM are customers of Taleo and I am guessing they will not be for long.
Taleo and Workday had a complementary relationship due to the different areas of HCM space they played in (Talent Management and HR respectively). Now with Taleo becoming part of Oracle, that relationship might be done. Will this mean Workday, which itself is readying for an IPO, would go and buy someone like a Cornerstone OnDemand to augment the Talent Management capability.

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

How complete is your product? 50%? 60%?

Subraya Mallya — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 06:02:15 +0000

I was having this interesting chat with a salesperson today as I was trying to help get him hired to a software company. As we went through all the details of the product he posed this interesting question to me. How complete do you think is the product? 50%? 60%? I had heard this question before posed exactly that way in a startup I had worked in the past – coincidentally also by a sales guy I used to work with.

The question was ambiguous to begin with on a multitude of fronts. Here is why

First of, a software product is never complete and attributing a percentage complete to the product is not right. Since all metrics around software product are only valid if they are looked from the point-of-view of value a customer derives. So a 100% complete product from a product manager’s point-of-view might not necessarily mean 100% from the market/customer point of view. So no one can tell with certainty that a product is 60% or 70% complete.
Secondly, even if we managed to concoct a percentage complete for a product it is still not accurate because a 100% complete from the point of view of the mom-and-pop shop round the corner might just translate to 50% complete from the medium sized company downtown or 10% complete from the point of view of Fortune 100 company like GE. So it is all relative and misleading.
Thirdly, if you are looking for a company that claims to have a product that is 100% complete and still looking for a sales guy, that implies they have missed the boat. They should have built a ramp way before they reached 100% and had a sales force created to capitalize on the increased value delivered by the product. You might be joining this company a bit too late.

Coming back to the original question – how does one answer that question.

A software product should always be measured and rated based on the value it delivers to the customers. Always refer to the value proposition of the product with respect to target market it is looking to serve. So a better answer to the question would be something like

we have managed to help 50 customers derive tremendous cost savings that they continue to find the need to use it after 5 years or
we have helped customers so much so that 50% of our customers are from referrals.
we have been growing 50% year-over-year, which indirectly points to the increasing value delivered to customers and the consequent increased adoption.

That should give enough indication of the viability of the product and convince someone looking to join. %complete for a product is a vanity metric which means nothing.

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

Sales Demo techniques for a unique product

Subraya Mallya — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 21:02:39 +0000

Sales demos are tricky no matter what. Unless your product is a well-known brand like Band-Aid solving, a clear and distinct problem. Sales demos need a whole lot of strategy to go into it. If yours is a software product, a early version of your product and a unique product that falls in between the traditional product categories, then the demos become even more challenging. I landed in a similar situation helping a customer of mine who has a unique enterprise software product at the intersection of BI and Performance Management. Looking at the Gartner Quadrant and explanation of both those aforementioned product categories it becomes clear that this product addresses a white space that has not been addressed by the incumbent vendors. (Unfortunately I can’t get very specific about the company and the niche they are going after.. for obvious reasons)

The company has been doing well making opportunistic sales across a wide spectrum of companies either through referrals or personal contacts of the founders. As you well know, personal contacts and referrals can help you get your early adoption but at some point you need to have a strategy to build a customer base organically. That is where I got introduced to help crystallize the product strategy. Much as the companies would have liked that to be true, it is unrealistic for a small company to target a horizontal customer base and meaningfully meet their customer needs over time. They were targeting a niche usergroup within a large company and that made it even more tougher. So as the first course of action, I recommended that, we narrow the focus to a particular industry vertical rather than making it a horizontal offering. After evaluating the existing customer and product evolution it was clear that we had to focus on one vertical that would give us what would amount to a viral growth (Is there such thing as virality in an enterprise software world? there is and I will get to that in another post). After the management team bought into the strategy, the next step was to come up with a clear value proposition that would resonate with that target segment. This had to take into account the specific personas we were targeting in the companies.

Some background on the target users in the companies. The personas we would be targeting fall under the broad investment banker community. Mostly comprising of smart MBAs that deal with complex business challenges. So imagine the prospect of us walking into their flashy offices and saying we have something that will help them. We were risking getting thrown out by the security guard for the sheer audacity behind that claim. So to sidestep that here is what I came up with. We identified a few contacts in the target segment and reached out. We would have not gotten an appointment if we said that we had something that would help them. So our pitch was along these lines

“We have something that we have been selling to the Capital Equipment companies and suddenly in the last 3-6 months we have been getting a series of repeat requests from guys in to sell them our product and that they would love to have this tool and they think it would help them immensely in and . Before we license our product to them, we wanted to run it by you and make sure we are not getting into an area we are not experts in.”

Voila!. we got our appointment. Notice that by saying that their fellow professionals/rivals feel it can really help them created the urgency for them to meet with us and see our product. Our saying “area we are not experts in” mellowed their ego I am sure. Now we had to prepare the demo to win them over while continuing to maintain that we are not there to sell and merely there to get their approval of the product solving critical problems for their industry.

So the objectives were clear – orchestrate the demo in such a way that we eek our their validation, perk their interest and get them to give us a chance to sell to them. The operative phrase being “give us a chance”. If we were too eager to sell to them, it would have shown in our actions.

As for product demo itself here is a script we followed

We made the demo about the life-in-a-day of that executive that we showed the demo to. We also took a realistic scenario of how they were tackling a problem. In fact, we mocked up the demo with that executive as the user. A little bit of pandering of ego has never been wasted in opening up the discussion.
We deliberately mocked up another company (a fierce competitor of theirs) and accidentally opened up that portfolio before the demo. Just long enough to give him a glimpse, and make it seem like we are talking to them as well, all the while never saying anything. This ensured that we got their full attention.
We made the demo about them and not so much about features and asked some open-ended questions like
- What would you do in this scenario ?
- Does is it really work this way?
- I am sure you have sophisticated applications that do this already
- How would modify this feature to do that?
We also did some role playing to pretend we disagreed on some topics thereby allowing that executive a chance to interject with his sagely advice.
Finally asked the question, if he were in our position, would he see the value of going into this vertical and why would someone buy it and importantly who would buy it. That was the watershed moment. He started explaining how we should sell, whom to sell, how to articulate the value proposition, how to price the solution.
If that was not all, he also turned around and said, he would be happy to introduce us to others within his company to discuss other aspects on business where this product might be helpful.
When we finally ended the demo, we said, if it was not too much of a hassle, we would like to update him with the feedback we received from other companies in their vertical we were due to meet. Needless to say, he said, he would have rather we circled back to him in a couple of weeks, while he thought some more on how this could help his firm. That was hook, line and sinker !!. Perked his interest and got a lead to call him back.
Some things we ensured during the demo were
- we avoided the customary elaborate introductions to highlight the “earth-shattering stuff” we have done in our pasts and spent that time on how their company has been executing.
- we avoided elaborate numbers (remember they live and die by numbers so we did not want to evoke the monster) and stuck to the problem.
- we avoided any implication of us knowing how they work and stuck to the “you are the expert” theme. It is usually tough for tech guys to sustain that stance during the entire demo. Being a tech guy myself I can vouch that we rank right behind, if not on par with, the Wall Street MBAs in terms of our egos.
- we left our sales mindset back in our offices and instead wore our Product Management hat and listened and took notes.
- and foremost of all, we religiously obeyed nature and listened twice as much as we talked (remember two ears and one mouth are there for that specific reason)

Time will tell how repeatable this strategy is. But we are confident that this will get us further in penetrating this vertical. As we find other personas we will tailor our demo script accordingly. In the meanwhile, we are waiting to hear back from that executive so we can go and nurture that opportunity further and hopefully one day close the deal.

What other techniques have worked for you to get traction for a new product?

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

Offshoring is an art

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:24:23 +0000

By now you would think offshoring has acquired enough notoriety. Lots of water has flown under the offshoring bridge. Best practices have been written, re-visited and rewritten. So it was kind of a surprise when I got this call from a friend of mine who was trying to get this “offshoring” thing started in his new job at a midsize company. He wanted to know if there were some rules of the road and preferably a ready reference of potholes on that road. While having been involved with offshoring in some form or the other through my career either from the offshore side or hiring someone from offshore for work to be done in the United States, I thought this was a good opportunity to capture the strategy I follow while doing offshoring. I will make it a series of bullet points so it is easy to digest

I classify the whole offshoring effort into four buckets -

Vendor Selection

90% of the success is driven based on vendor selection
Conduct small engagements with 2-3 shortlisted vendors to sample their capabilities – most overrate themselves. Seeing is believing – don’t tell them that there is a long term engagement in the offing. See if they can connect the dots. References are overrated and, most often than not, irrelevant to your specific case so evaluate their competency for yourself.
Evaluate the generals not the soldiers. Soldiers leave or get transferred, so measuring generals is a must.
Choose vendors from two different countries if you have the flexibility and split the work between them. Let them know there is a split and let them also know the fittest survives. Healthy competition is good. Don’t look for volume discounts initially.
Bake the quality metrics into the SLA and split the comp based on fixed + performance based parts.

Contract Process/SLA

Most SLA in offshore contracts involve availability of resource on time, for a desired amount of time etc. Those are vanity metrics. Metrics should be focused purely on quality of work, sticking to committed dates and value they bring to your organization.
Insist on a bench for an on-demand burst of resource needs you might have.
Know the country you are offshoring to and ensure that you get coverage during the off-day in that country. For example a country like India has a lot of holidays (national, religious, regional and then Force- Majeure holidays like strikes, rains, trains). I am sure there are similar issues to worry about in other countries.
Insist on the need to have shadow/backup resources who can take over in case of churn in the offshore company.
Notice period in case of the Leaders transitioning off the project is a must. Specifically call that out in a clause. (Think service credits) Remember: they might be augmented resources but treat them like employees – notice period is a must. If not service credits should trigger.
Insist on short term contracts (11 month at the most) and replacements of resources if someone is found wanting.

Measure, Monitor, Track, Act

Dashboard the metrics, track them and make that available to the offshore company leadership. Both sides should be measuring the same metrics. That way you are on the “proverbial” same page.
Metrics should be based on performance, quality, on-boarding new resources, communication skills, presentation skills, problem solving, root-cause-analysis capability.
Compare & Contrast quarter-over-quarter results.
Act decisively, if there is a weak link. One bad performer brings with him his friend/relative. Look out for that stale slice of bread snuck in the middle of two good ones.
If you are paying for a lead in offshore team, expect him/her to lead and measure their performance. Weight the performance of leaders higher than the rest of the members of the team. Make sure the lead is a active member on the project not a figure head. 1 lead for every 5 members optimal.
Post-mortem quarterly results. Reward performers. Clearly identify areas of improvement and indicate that you are looking for them to be fixed in the next review period.

Finally, Points to remember

If you are doing offshoring purely for cost arbitrage – DON’T. It is the wrong reason. Not to mention, the cost arbitrage you are seeking is no longer there thanks to inflation in the offshoring countries.
Truly engage with the resource assigned to build loyalty. If your treat it just as a line item on your expense sheet then the feeling will be reciprocated.
Plan to visit them or have them visit you once every contract term for a face-to-face meeting (11months). Bake that into the cost model.
Don’t micromanage – let the lead in the offshore team manage and you manage the lead.
Sell on the overall company vision than just the project. That builds the purpose for the team. If you treat them like a handyman they will do a handyman’s job and not a architect’s job.
Offshore teams need more hugs than others – they seek it. It does not cost you anything, so give them that. That said – don’t overdo the “Great Job. Pat on the shoulder” thing. You might just be trying to be nice, they will take it literally. It is the culture thing, it is quite different.
By now if you have not already figured it out here is the final tip – DON’T do the corporate american thing – “Being nice on your face and then screw them during performance reviews”. Be brutally honest with your feedback and don’t wait until the review date to share your feedback. A Stitch in Time saves Nine.

Hope my offshore philosophy helps in your offshoring efforts.

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

Go-To Market strategy for geeks

Subraya Mallya — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 17:19:30 +0000

An excellent video by Chris Yeh(@ChrisYeh), an angel investor and one of the better speakers in the valley talks about Go-To Market strategy and many other critical things in a startup. Although the goal of the video was around readying the company for raising money, the points made are applicable to all companies. Specifically around when to hire the sales guy and how the founders should learn sales tactics etc.

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

CSS Sprite Generator

Subraya Mallya — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 19:56:17 +0000

An essential part of any web application design is to ensure the size of the page that is downloaded to the user’s browser is kept to a minimum. Notwithstanding the high speed internet access people have and the proliferation of CDNs, it is still a critical design consideration to ensure less packets are downloaded given the fact that we are seeing more interactive and visual applications.

CSS Sprites help us bundle up multiple images into one and reduce the number of images that are downloaded to the browser. It also reduces the contention that is created during page rendering while browser is still waiting for the image to be downloaded.

Project Foundue CSS Sprite Generator is one of the best free sites that allow you to upload a bundle of images and generate a sprite alongwith the CSS styles that will provide accessors for each image in the sprite

Check out one of the sprites I created for my blog

combined image

the styles to access those individual images

.pc-social-icon{background:url(http://static.prudentcloud.com/pc-social.png)}
.pc-facebook{ background-position: 0 0;display:inline-block;height: 32px;width: 32px;}
.pc-feed{ background-position: -42px 0;display:inline-block;height: 32px;width: 32px;}
.pc-linkedin{ background-position: -84px 0;display:inline-block;height: 32px;width: 32px;}
.pc-twitter{ background-position: -126px 0;display:inline-block;height: 32px;width: 32px;}

The Actual code to display the image in HTML

Connect with us @

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

Adminer – the leaner meaner Database Administration tool

Subraya Mallya — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:39:19 +0000

We all have used databases hosted by web hosts or cloud infrastructure like Amazon AWS. Be it as a datastore for a blog or a custom application that you have built and hosted. While tools for managing databases that are hosted near you have been excellent, the same could not be said of the web-based tools for managing databases hosted in not so open environments. PHPMyAdmin has been a widely used tool but those who used it will vouch for its limitations. But then again you cannot complain against something that is free.

Now to make life better, there is a new kid on the block. A leaner, friendlier improvement on PHPMyAdmin – Adminer. While there is something to be said about the naming skills of the creators, the tool definitely is a marked improvement on PHPMyAdmin. The tool has support for MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS-SQL and SQL*Lite. Besides that they also plugins for a host of content platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, TYPO3 etc.

Not impressed yet?

Here are some more things they do

They also support a myriad of languages starting with Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish.

They are Apache 2.0 License so you can use it however you want.

Now go and get yourself a copy of Adminer.

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

Company Website – your best brand ambassador

Subraya Mallya — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:35:37 +0000

With marketing moving increasingly online, a company’s website has become, above all, the quintessential brand ambassador for the company. The way the company website speaks to the visitor (a prospect) goes a long way in convincing them in becoming your customer. For a startup in its early stage when it does not have credible references, lot of icons of existing customers that it can tout, the website becomes paramount.

A mid-stage software startup that I have been advising was planning their website and asked me for some advice. Here is what I drafted as a rough template for their website. Thought it might be useful for other companies thinking about their website.

Note: It is going to be a long page but I hope you will find it useful.

Software/Technology

While there is no standards as to what technology should be used for building your website, conventional wisdom is to use to use something that gives you more for less effort. WordPress is fantastic platform for building a website. Given the other things like blog, social engagement, newsletter, forms and more importantly SEO etc that you will need on the site, WordPress should be your first (and only) consideration. If philosophically you think Drupal, Joomla can do the job, you will not that wrong. If someone recommends that you build a website from scratch then run as far as possible from that person and look for someone smarter.

Website Structure

A typical minimal website structure should look like this.

You can always add more things to it as necessary. I will go into detail about each section and explain the necessary ingredients of each of those pages.

Home Page

The home page should clearly articulate the message in a crisp way. Don’t make it wordy as people don’t read and figure out your value proposition. Make it pictorial and easy to understand. Cap that off with a clear Call to Action to get the users to signup or download your product. The page should have at the most one or two things that the visitor should be expected to understand. Anything more than that increases the risk of losing your prospect.

Company

About Page

About page is the place where you demonstrate the passion that drove you to build this company. Use this page to share the following

The genesis of the company – as to how you came across the problem and were bothered about it and seeing that no one was solving it you got down to solving it.
Briefly talk about the founders and how they shared the common passion for this problem space and how the founding team got assembled.
Drive home the mission of the company and how the company would operate. Things like “Customers will always come first…” and “Don’t be evil…” messages that company stands by should make up the about page.
Don’t miss the opportunity to make a Call To Action on this page asking the reader to engage with you by either signing up/downloading for your app or reaching out to your customer engagement team.
End the page with links to the contact page and requesting readers to engage with you on the social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Leadership

I think Leadership page is where you build trust with the reader. The reader/prospect, after going through your product/service offering details looks at the Leadership page, they are essentially looking to see who is standing behind this service. Use the leadership page to demonstrate that you have all the ducks lined up. Here are some key guidelines for listing executive profiles

Each profile of the leader clearly talks to what they do in the company and what they are responsible for. If you are a product company let the profile show why they have done in the product space. All else like their other business interests should just be supplementary and if not required be omitted. Remember it is not a resume of the leader. It is their role in this company that needs to highlighted with a brief on their past credentials.
Every profile name their should have a role they play in the company. CEO, VP of Marketing, VP of Engineering, CFO and CTO etc. In the absence of a specific person for that role, it needs to be clear that someone listed is responsible for those roles. Make sure each profile includes photos of the leaders, links to learn more about them through their LinkedIn profile etc. I would even enlist their email contact information for people to reach out. Give them more reasons to start a conversation with you.
Have separate sections to list the Leaders of the company and Board of Directors. Customers will be first interested in the leaders of the company and then in Investors and Board of Directors.

Blog

In the current age having a blog where you interact with your stakeholders is paramount. A blog will allow you to share your thought leadership, company vision in a non-marketing-speak way. All top executives (CEO, CTO, Marketing) and other customer facing execs should blog. Blogs also provide the best way to build brand equity from readers and search engine perspective. Most companies struggle to create new content all the time. But it can be easily done if you follow these ideas. Here are some ideas for creating fresh content for your blog

Information on Industry Events that you are hosting/participating in like webinar, tradeshow, user-appreciation event, free training etc
Thought leadership on the challenges faced by companies in the space (not product speak)
Customer case studies (preferably from the horse’s mouth via an interview)
Tip/Tricks, Best Practices in using the product to generate the best value out of the investment in your product – keep generating day-in-a-life of your product user. Don’t publish product documentation or their fragments. Videos are better than text posts.
Integration scenarios between product and other industry leading products (this will be lead generation for services and partners)
Get partners to blog on their experiences in integration/selling your solution and lessons learnt.
Sharing new BIG hire that company made. Ideally make a video introduction.
Sharing any acquisition that company made and how it will help customers
Product Roadmap – high level with ideas with business motivation behind them.
Respond to other bloggers, tech news sites that make references to your product, company, execs. Good or bad. In case of bad, you better do it in a timely manner rather than let it fester on the internet.

For more ideas on what goes into the blog checkout my blogpost – Online Marketing Anti-Pattern #2: Tis just another PR outlet

Press and News

This is one of the most underutilized parts of the site in most companies. Companies think having a Press Release with Businesswire or using some PR agency only constitutes press and leave this page blank. Here are some ideas

Press Release

Every month you should plan have one press release – no you don’t need to pay for it. You just format in the way you would for a PR agency (internet has free templates galore) and publish it albeit to your own site alone. The idea here is to show activity in the company and give content to lot of PR aggregators who harvest PR content from sites around the world.
PR need not be some BIG event that happened in the company. Anything of moderate importance can be worthy of PR. Every new customer acquisition might not need you spending 500 dollars and running a Press Release through an agency. Just do a Press Release on your site.
Any conference where one of the execs spoke is a Press Release or your executive being quoted is worthy of PR.

News

Same rules applies here as PR. Every news item like a reference on a blog, tech news site about the product, company, executive, partner is a news item that can be linked on this site.
To build a critical mass of news items reach out to those very sites to give an exclusive or interview. It is a you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours relationship. More links to your site = more google juice.

REMEMBER !! No news is not good news in the world of marketing and technology companies. Conversely, amplifying nuggets of what is going on with the company always demonstrates the “happening” company.

Contact Us

Give people ample ways to reach you. Here are the common ways to allow them reach you

Direct telephone number
Create a form to send emails to you rather than specifying email address. Provide drop down of different reasons people might want to reach you.
Twitter handle is another way to send you message
Facebook and LinkedIn pages are other ways to get them to reach you but for these channels you also need to have more bandwidth to closely manage those interactions.

Products

Products page should be broken into specific solutions so the message can be simple and crystal. We might start with one product. Here is the general structure of each page

helps you increase revenue by ……..

A screenshot of application or picture of people doing the activity that product helps with or process diagram

Using you will be able to do

…..

…..

……

……

……

Frequently Asked Questions

What is…..

How is ….

Where is ….

Quotes from customers

“ has helped us tremendously to optimize our business strategy ….” – Jon Adams, Chief Financial Officer, Big Company Inc

“We were struggling with …. challenges …. and then we decided to implement and the results have been outstanding” – General Manager GE Medical.

Download the whitepaper that highlights to learn more about how can help increase revenue.

Services

Each Service should have a separate page and provide details of the service and the why, when, how to avail of that service.

is geared toward organizations that need … and achieve that ….

A screenshot of swimlanes, chevrons or picture of people who might need the help with the service or process diagram that depicts the service

What can you expect as part of the ?

…..

…..

……

……

……

Frequently Asked Questions

What is…..

How is ….

Where is ….

Quotes from customers

“ has helped us tremendously to optimize our business strategy ….” – Jon Adams, Chief Financial Officer, Big Company Inc”

“We were struggling with …. challenges …. and then we decided to implement and the with their we have been able to achieve …” – General Manager GE Medical.

Download the datasheet that shows the value delivered by

Customers

Views of collage of icons of customers by Product, Geography

Partners

Technology Partnership
Brief description of what kind of partnerships your company will be interested in. What companies can expect to receive as part of the partnership.
Services Partnership
Brief description of the various services you will partner on. What companies can expect to receive as part of the partnership.
Product Integration
Brief description of what kind of partnerships your company will participate in. What companies can expect to receive as part of the partnership.
VAR Partnership
Brief description of what kind of partnerships your company will be seeking and what companies can expect to receive as part of the partnership.

Contact Form

Contact Name

Email Address

Contact Number

Partnership Type
*

Note

___________________________________________________ This post is part of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Open Source, Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategies

Who inside an organization is the primary buyer for an enterprise social networking tool? And why?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:32:48 +0000

Social Networking is very broad. As a vendor, you will have to lead with the value proposition that is much more focussed than just saying “It increases collaboration and consequently productivity and innovation”. Pretty much every vendor says that. I would also recommend that you go narrow initially to a small constituency like marketing, bizdev, PS organization or sales and deliver value for them and have enough viral aspects in the product for it to spread. So in that sense your buyer is different depending who you focus on.

And here is a little rant of mine on the whole jargon

Personally, I think the term “enterprise social networking” is borderline oxymoron. (almost like Private Cloud). Social encompasses you’re engagement with people in and out of the enterprise. So social networking should have controls which should allow discussions/conversations to be private and that should suffice. It does not need a whole set of tools for inside the enterprise. But that is just me.

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What are some examples of highly successful reseller/channel partnerships for selling web services/software to small-medium businesses?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:31:48 +0000

Intacct has a extremely successful partnership with AICPA for selling their SaaS accounting software. Through this partnership they have nicely complemented the technology with industry domain expertise in accounting by the channel partner. Check out my interview with their marketing and business development executives for more details on how they went about building this channel strategy.

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What is the ideal size of a Marketing team for a SaaS Business?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:29:25 +0000

It depends on how big your SaaS company is and the nature of your business. At a minimum you will definitely need a demand generation + lead nurturing person, as you would tend to move the upfront activities in qualifying the prospects to marketing. If you are in the later stage then you need to broaden the capabilities around inbound marketing, SEO/SEM/PR etc.

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What are the main challenges for a VP of Sales in a SaaS company?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:28:09 +0000

A while ago, I took a stab at capturing what were the challenges for a VP of Sales based on the state of affairs then in my post SaaS Sales: On-premise to SaaS. Now that SaaS has all but become a viable option, the challenges are slightly different. I still think the biggest challenge for the Sales VP in a SaaS organization is the velocity. It gets challenging if the solution they are trying to sell requires multiple stakeholders in the client organization to sign off on like Supply Chain, Accounting, Human Capital, Project Management. A second is around the decision to expand to different geographies.That comes with a variety of challenges around presence, COGS etc.

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What is the best way for a product manager to get a director or VP job at a start-up?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:25:56 +0000

The best way to get a leadership role is not to obsess about it. Most often people from big companies expect to automatically get leadership roles in startups by the virtue of their tenure in the large company. But working in startup is a different ball game. I would approach it differently. Instead of looking for the title/role in any startup, I would first find the right startup that I am interested in and join them and start adding value. What most people forget about startups is that – in a startup if someone adds value and is seen as smarter than the others she/he gets the right of way and can get to a leadership role pretty quickly. It is not like the single lane log jam in a large company where tenure, connections determine your journey to the top.

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What are the unique challenges of self-service SaaS-model startups?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:24:52 +0000

I think the unique challenge for a self-service startup is the maintain the cost of service delivery down (thru extensive automation), on-boarding etc, at the same time being a customer friendly organization and ensuring customer success. It is easy to make all things self-service with FAQ, tutorials, videos etc with the hope of keeps costs down but at the end of the day we are dealing with humans who still like to build relationships. Low touch but still accessible is what most customers look for. Having a vibrant community made up of other customers, customer outreach/success team putting themselves out there and being visible and accessible through twitter, forums, blogs are the best way to manage that.

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What are the best questions to ask existing SaaS customers as an account manager?

Subraya Mallya — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:21:27 +0000

Not sure the context in which you are asking. But the most important question you could ask is – “Is there anything you could do to make them realize maximum value out of your application?”. That might lead you to other topics like – gap in the product, help with professional services and consequently a better understanding of usage of the application.

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The Impending Yahoo Swayamvar

Subraya Mallya — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:00:47 +0000

Swayamvar, for those not familiar with Indian history, was a practice in old days, where the father of the bride invited all the possible suitable grooms to come and demonstrate why they were the most suited for marrying his daughter. Most often it included some kind of contest like lifting a humongous bow or moving some large immovable object or something like that.

If you are one for more refined definitions here is what Wikipedia has to say (as opposed to my layman definition)

After demonstrating a perennial penchant for being in the news for the wrong reasons, most recent being the firing of a foul-mouthed CEO who was fired via a phone call, one of the most innovative companies in the valley (and web world) seems to be on the threshold of what would be a swayamvar.

Suitors

Microsoft: Once upon a time suitor/lover – back again in the fray to give it another go.
Google: Big G, not known to big fanfare marriages, trying to muster enough guts with the help of some rich relatives exploring the possibilities.
AOL: Fellow exec-bus-stop (Bus Stop, to those that did not get the analogy – is a place where people come, stay for a short while and go, they don’t stay for any meaningful duration) which has ventured thoughts of combining the two ailing companies into one hopefully healthy outfit. Time will tell if two bad eggs make one good one.
Alibaba: New Age emerging economy billionaire Jack Ma who has publicly expressed his desire, standing on top the Great Wall, to win over Yahoo.
Private Equity: Wild card entries a bunch PE (err salvage) companies thinking about potentially breaking up the complex joint family and helping Yahoo realize its true value

Get…Set..Go Start the Pitch

Microsoft: I am rich and I own a lot of things. People world over are forced to be at my mercy whether a like it or not. Notwithstanding the public outcry around the mismatch in our culture, Yahoo and I dated a while ago and came close to becoming one, but Protective Papa Jerry would have none of it. I was ready to go make certain concessions but he was getting greedy. Finally I walked away. Looking back it turned out to be a good thing. We need some time away from each other so we can appreciate the value of each other’s company. But that said, we decided to stay friends after Mama Bartz managed to show the value of sharing. We ended up sharing some ad revenue. Now that Yahoo is ready to make a strong commitment, given our history, I strongly urge that I be given the consideration. Granted this marriage will look like a marriage of Mike and Carol in The Brady Bunch given that we both have kids from previous marriages, we will follow all the rules that Mike and Carol set for their house.
Google: Big G in the house! Yeah! Yeah!. Wassup !!. Brady Bunch !! Thas funny!! Let me tell you. Before MS started dating Y!, I was her first lover. I provided her with a search engine to showcase all she had. People used to use me to get to her. We were happy until she realized I was skinning off the top and selling things on the side. Feeling betrayed, she decided to end it and go solo for sometime. After she gave it a go with MS and it did not work out, I am just the person she needs at this time of her struggles. We can get rid of those relatives that are not paying rent and be happy together. I will also bring in some relatives with big purple purses to help out with all the costs of marriage. Together we can go ahead of that Zuck’s joint where people waste too much time updating what they eat for breakfast. Beware of Papa Steve, he is nice now but he is known to do strange things once you get to know him – check it out for yourself – he just loves his company
AOL – I think I am the best suitor out of the lot here. Yahoo and I have the same core focus (?) we both think content is the king. People love us because of what we give them. They come to us to know a lot of things. I have a lot of experience with marriages – I had one spectacular marriage with Ted Turner’s baby Warner which ended spectacularly. So of all the people here I know what to avoid in any future marriages. I have strict policy for guests (read execs) visiting us – they cannot stay beyond the customary 6 months. So there will not be any long term meddling. Together we can make all the world come to us for help and use Big G or MS where necessary. You don’t need to marry them. With all the information we know, they will be forced to come to us on our terms. Be wary of Jack Ma – his house has dictatorial rules – with the in-laws snooping into all the information behind the scenes. You gotta marry someone in US, you will not be happy in China – more importantly your children will not like it.
Jack Ma/Alibaba – Hey AOL, don’t badmouth me. Your house is as dysfunctional as they get. We are much more disciplined when it comes to spending money. We don’t spend what we don’t have. And, you don’t need to come and live in China. We can live in Sunnyvale. Just need to make trips once in a while to see the in-laws back in China, that’s all. BTW, we are already related in someway. Your Chinese cousin is already part of our family after she married one of our cousins. I am loaded, you will never have to worry about anything after marriage. We have billions of people outside of US that we can socialize with and not have to be restricted to US. Also you don’t need have any relationship with MS or Big G. My “parents” have promised not to snoop into your affairs. So marry me – come to Baba!!.
Scrap guys – I think we are different. Unlike these other guys, we are not emotional about technologies so we will make all our decisions in the best interest of the family (right !). Let me tell you, sometimes it is better to be an atomic family rather than a joint family. A joint family brings with it too many obligations and baggage. Some sick family member can make all the rest sick. Staying atomic and having others fend for themselves or go and stay with other relatives is the best. You have been hurt too many times by these complex relationships. As you age, you should just look out for yourself and not worry about others. So come with me, we can live slim and trim and walk into the sunset to live happily.

Yahoo – Still Confused?

Okay here are some suggestions for a dear friend.

You are better off being by yourself. You don’t need to marry anyone. Any marriage will mean you will end up changing your culture. It is akin to changing a religion. You have way too many well wishers. So don’t be concerned. All you need at this point is someone who understands you and helps you along. Someone who knows you for who you are – an innovator and not a hoarder of things that you don’t need or someone who is just after money. Get rid of things you don’t need and go back to your true self – an innovator and soon you will see all your friends will be cheering for you. You will not be as rich as you once were but as the saying goes “Bad days come and go”. Make yourself healthy and you will be happy in days to come.

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