Another Burned Unveiler: The UK's OGC

(Revised: see endnote)

Branding always has it problems. Often, they're international in nature; remember the Unix systems vendor Arete? They had big problems in France where arrete means "stop." Who wants to buy the stop computer?

Sometimes, they're cultural -- I remember at Business Objects when the (English) product manager for BusinessMiner proposed a product icon that had two huge letters BM along with a flashlight running across them. I also remember when I lived in Paris literally begging the French to stop abbreviating Business Objects as "B.O." But I digress.

Sometimes, the brand name is just dumb. Remember Monday? Some professsional services firm (was it PwC?) was trying to rebrand itself as a day-of-the-week right before they were acquired. Imagine this conversation: "hey, we're meeting with the Monday guys on Tuesday ... or was it the Tuesday guys on Monday."

In that vein, I am frankly amazed that UPS has continued its "brown" campaign for so long. Are they actually trying to rebrand themselves as brown (as the tagline "what can brown do you for" suggests), or is it a just an expense exercise in synonym creation?

While I'm riffing, one wonders if the Mexican Groupo Bimbo should regionally brand their "Bimbo" baked good products much as it's Hellman's mayonaise on the East coast and Best Foods out West, or Hardee's in some states and Carl's Junior in others.

Sometimes you succesfully run the gauntlet of brand naming only to explode on logo design.

I remember once at (the original) Ingres when marketing spent hundreds of thousands on a new corporate identity only to discover from an engineer at the internal launch that: "the logo looks just like Borland's new logo." But by then it was too late to do anything: new cards had been printed, new signs had been made, new ads had been placed. Watching that one experience permamently cured me from the "unveil mentality" that I see common in most marketers.

But this post was inspired by a story in the UK's Telegraph about the Office of Government Commerce which, despite a simple and descriptive name, managed to blow up on the logo design. Viewed as intended, the logo is a simple set of initials. But in the text message, emoticon culture of today people don't always view things as intended. Often you look at things sideways, as with the smiley face :-) emoticon.

Sadly for the OGC and its design agency, I guess they didn't show their new logo to enough generation Y types because, when viewed sideways, the otherwise-innocuous logo resembles, ... well, of all things, an aroused snowman. Whoda guessed?

The simple moral -- don't unveil; show your draft work early and often to a wide variety of people.

Endnote: post revised to remove accidental inclusion of not one, but two, urban myths: the Chevy Nova anecdote and the Gerber baby food one (which I admit being a bit nervous about while typing it, but heck, it made it into Harvard Business Review in 1984).

Mark Logic User Conference Keynote Named 38th Most Influential Person in IT

Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, who will be delivering the keynote address at the upcoming Mark Logic User Conference, was recently named the 38th most influential person in IT by the editors at Ziff Davis Enterprise. McAfee is just behind Sir Tim Berners-Lee (#35) and just ahead of Nicholas Negroponte (#39) and Mark Zuckerberg (#40). Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs, and Steve Balmer took the 1-3 slots.

This is just more validation that Andrew is one of the real thought leaders in information technology. After scanning the list, he's the only university professor -- and a business school one at that -- and one of just a few individual pundits on the list, which is largely populated with vendor executives, a few CIOs, and a handful of other author/pundit/influencers such as Nicholas Carr, Chris Andersen, and Jim Collins.

We just had our pre-briefing call with Andrew as preparation for his speech and I'm very excited that he's coming. Andrew is most famous for his thoughts on Enterprise 2.0, the application of Web 2.0 concepts to enterprise information systems. In addition, I think he is an excellent thinker on the general topic of the intersection of business and information technology.

While Mark Logic's business strategy has been Geoffrey Moore, bowling-alley focused, it is important to note that both our Information & Media and our Federal government customers use MarkLogic as a platform for building Web 2.0-style information services. That is, MarkLogic Server is an excellent platform for building both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 style apps, though thus far we have not emphasized the latter as part of our go-to-market approach.

However, in an increasingly XML-oriented world (thanks to Microsoft Open XML) and thanks to innovative applications like MarkMail, I believe that customers will increasingly use MarkLogic for Enterprise 2.0 style information applications, such as collaborative dynamic enterprise publishing or knowledge extraction from e-mail. But I digress.

I look forward hearing Andrew's ideas on Enterprise 2.0 and his vision for IT and can't wait to see him at the Mark Logic User Conference on June 11-13, 2008.

See you there!

User Conferences, Pigs, Wigs, and Lipstick

I've been traveling a lot recently (including a nice vacation at Club Med in Mexico) so please excuse the hiatus in posting.

In restarting, I thought I'd blaze out of the gates with a controversial marketing rant on user conference branding provoked, in part, by a Stephen Arnold post on his Beyond Search blog about (what I consider) the disguising of Nstein's user conference.

Stephen comes from a different place than I do; his focus is to question whether users should attend these topical, vendor-driven conferences or topical, vendor-neutral ones? In some sense, I think he's taking the bait. Fact is, these supposedly topical conferences simply aren't: they're user conferences wearing wigs and lipstick.

Don't believe me? Then see the descriptive copy on Nstein's site: "... to create a unique user conference for executives & technical developers ..." They buried it, but it's there.

My question to marketing VPs is simple: when did "user conference" become a four-letter word? Why do marketing teams insist on dressing their user conferences up in wigs and lipstick? Examples:

• Endeca's Discover
• Nstein's Innovation Leaders Summit
• Business Objects' Insight
• SAP's Sapphire
• Cognos' Performance

I have three problems with these faux-topical conferences:

• They're brand dilutive. Does Nstein really believe that people will say, "hey Joe, are you going to the Innovation Leaders Summit this year?" Sure, given enough size and money you can actually achieve that goal -- people really do say "are you going to Sapphire?" -- but even when you succeed you fail because you've diluted your branding. What's more, if asked, "hey Joe, what's Sapphire?" he'll say "the SAP user conference." All you've done is to create a synonym, and where's the marketing value in that? And, sure as the sun rises, marketing will print the conference brand on all those bags and t-shirts in 10x bigger type than the company brand. Heck, I've seen examples where they fail to print the company brand at all.
  

• They're misleading. A disguised user conference isn't a topical conference. If you went to the Insight conference hoping to hear case studies of how people have used Cognos or MicroStrategy to gather insight from data, then you were sorely disappointed. If you're going to the Innovation Leaders Summit, don't expect to hear how Elsevier, Oxford University Press, or Nerac have used MarkLogic to innovate in publishing. Good marketing doesn't deceive.
  

• They're confusing. Reversing the prior case, whither the poor Nstein user who wants to learn about product directions, network with fellow users, meet with product developers, and visit with corporate executives? Should he go to the Innovation Leaders Summit? No, he'll think, it couldn't be something high hifalutin like that. By misnaming the event you appeal to people who shouldn't be there and fail to appeal to those who should.

I'm fine with themes. I think user conferences should have them to provide a unifying element to the program. And I think the themes should be topical. But when it comes to names and branding, just keep it simple.

• Call it the XYZ user conference, as we do at Mark Logic ("Discovering Agility" is the theme, not the name.)
  
• Or emulate Fast and Cognos who (now) use simple variants of the corporate brand that pretty clearly indicate it's a user conference (e.g., FastForward, Cognos Forum)

Aside: Some might argue that Sapphire falls into the second category. While Sapphire clearly does not try to position the event as something topical (i.e., there's no confusion with a gemstone conference), I don't think it qualifies a good, simple variant either because the company is called S-A-P by some or "sap" by others and when you say "sapphire" you make neither of those sounds. SAP Forum or SAP World would be better imho.

Sure, there's an appeal in giving your user conference a sexy name. And, yes, everybody else does it. But does that make it right? No. Does it make it good marketing? No. Does it serve your customers? No. All it does is train them not to believe you.

By the way, if you want to host a real topical conference, go for it. It's a great idea, and I've done a few in my day. But if the event is your user conference, then just call it that. Don't worry: if you have users, then they'll want to come. (And if you don't, you have deeper problems than your conference name.)

By the way, I'll see you at the Discovering Agility conference -- just kidding-- at the Mark Logic User Conference in June.

EMC/Documentum: MarkLogic is the Enemy?

I found this post the other day, entitled X-Hive and the Content Server, on the Word of Pie blog, authored by Laurence Hart who leads an ECM solution group for a regional management consultancy.

(Aside: as I linked to the Wikipedia ECM entry above, I chuckled to see Wikipedia announce that "all or part of this article may be confusing or unclear." Maybe it's not just the article but the subject itself.)

In any case, I was unfortunately not surprised when I read this:

I learned that the enemy is Mark Logic. This wasn’t just a casual observation. Pretty much every time the need to state how X-Hive beat, was beating, was countering, or any other competitive action was mentioned, it was aimed at Mark Logic.

It's consistent with what I'm hearing in the field: that EMC / Documentum often position MarkLogic as the enemy. While at one level, it makes sense (x-Hive/DB is roughly in the same category as MarkLogic Server), at another level it doesn't. Why?

• We have many common customers. They want the products to work together.

• MarkLogic Server complements document management -- we deliberately decided not to build a CMS precisely to avoid competing with ECM vendors. (Ironically, x-Hive built a competing CMS called Docato on top of x-Hive/DB.)

• Mark Logic is about doing one thing better than anyone in the world: high-performance XQuery on top of large XML document stores. I don't believe that's the mission statement for x-Hive/DB (now "EMC Documentum XML Store") which I'd guess is more of "how can we get Oracle out from underneath all our implementations?"
  

• MarkLogic is more than just a basic "store." First, MarkLogic is a high-end product -- it goes very fast and scales to contentbases in the hundreds of terabytes. Second, MarkLogic provides a new top-to-bottom XML way of building web applications.
  

I have always seen Mark Logic's and Documentum's strategies as basically complementary. There has always been some overlap. And with the acquisition of x-Hive, that overlap increased. But I know today and believe tomorrow that many customers will want to use both systems together.

Going forward, I believe that customers will increasingly use Microsoft SharePoint for basic content services, so we are continuing to invest in building strong SharePoint and Open XML integration. Finally, I believe the high-end of the ECM market will split between Documentum and Alfresco.

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Get the Early-Bird Rate for the Mark Logic User Conference

Register now for the Mark Logic User Conference at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco on June 11-13, 2008 and get the early-bird rate of $229, instead of the $349 full-rate.

Our keynote speaker is Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee, coiner of the term Enterprise 2.0, and in my opinion a real thought leader on the intersection between business and information technology. Andrew's blog is here, and I highly recommend it. (I know Andrew because we met while he was working on this case study on Business Objects.)

There are two pre-conference technical training sessions on June 10th:

• A half-day technical introduction to MarkLogic, designed for newbies to the community (so you can get baselined prior to the conference)

• An all-day developer training that I'm guessing is a advanced topics workshop or such

We will continue to have a few general sessions (e.g,. Andrew McAfee keynote, my keynote, a product directions talk, a keynote panel hosted by Marc Strohlein from Outsell) complemented by a rich array of track sessions on two tracks: technology (how it works) and applications (what people do with it).

It is a great event and I encourage everyone to attend. You do not need to be a Mark Logic customer to come. Customers, prospects, partners, analysts, developers, and press are all welcome. (Competitors, however, will be politely asked to leave.)

I look forward to seeing you all there!

Google Launches Google App Engine

Yesterday Google launched Google App Engine, a platform that lets people create web applications and run them on Google's infrastructure. It's a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as EC2, S3, and SimpleDB but, unlike AWS, it's free for small web apps (where small means about 5M pageviews per month) and it seems more integrated as an end-to-end service.

This is all part of a broader trend towards platform as a service (PaaS) which includes AWS, Google App Engine, Salesforce's Force.com, and the Facebook platform. (Though I don't think Facebook offers hosting as do the others; KickIt, for example, runs on a server in Mark Logic's data center.)

In the emergent strategies department, I'm told that Amazon moved into the platform business because of the seasonality of retail. Basically, they built an infrastructure capable of handling extreme load the week before Christmas, but found that infrastructure idle the other 51 weeks of the year. I think Google motivation is different; it's part of their broad attack on Microsoft who, far as I can tell, hasn't even thrown its hat into this particular ring.

Here is a video of the launch that explains the offering. It's about 6 minutes long and well worth watching.

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I'm Trying Zemanta

Image by Gandalfar via FlickrYou may have noticed the "Zemified" bar and "related articles via Zemanta" on my last few posts. That's because I'm trying a new service called Zemanta, which is a browser add-in that integrates with Blogger and suggests tags, images, and articles for inclusion in your blog.

While I'm typing away in Blogger, Zemanta is watching what I'm doing and suggesting images, related articles, and tags that I can include in this post.

It reminds me of the now-defunct Watson contextual search add-in for Word that was marketed by Intellext, now a part of MediaRiver.

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Two Cool New Search Engines: SearchMe and ManagedQ

I've bumped into two cool, new search engines of late. One is SearchMe, the other is ManagedQ.

SearchMe is currently in public Beta. TechCrunch has twice written about them: SearchMe Launches New Search Engine with Heavy Backing from Sequoia and Get Into the SearchMe Private Beta. They were also covered in a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled Testing Souped-Up Search Solutions.

SearchMe is about two main concepts: (1) an iTunes-like cover-art rolodex of web pages and (2) categorization. You enter a search term, get back a rolodex of web pages along with some presumably dynamic categories on top. You can then either scroll through the rolodex or refine your search using the categories. Their tag line is, appropriately, "you'll know it when you see it." They're a sister, Sequoia-backed company and I wish them luck going forward.

I learned about ManagedQ through an article on VentureBeat entitled ManagedQ Wants to be Windows for Search. ManagedQ claims to be a "search application" and they want to transform search from a command-line interface to a rich application. Frankly, I'm not sure that's either possible nor desirable in a generic way -- I'm a bigger believer in specific content applications that include search functionality. But, nevertheless, what they've built is cool and shows yet another example of Snap-like webshots as are also found in SearchMe and SpaceTime.

With ManagedQ you enter a search term or phrase and then get a screen with about 16 webshots of various sites as well as some presumably extracted entities along the left-hand side of the page, which list the people, places, and things found in those results. (They are layering on top of Google so the results are regular Google results.) You can then navigate within the result set either by using the extracted entities (which get highlighted) or you can type another word/phrase to search within the result set.

I think it's important to keep tabs on where Internet Search is going (if only as a predictor of what people want in enterprise applications and information services) so take a moment to check out these two sites.

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Plattner vs. Benioff Smackdown Cagefight

Last night I attended what Forbes Moderator Quentin Hardy introduced as a "smackdown cagefight" panel on The Future of Enterprise Software between SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner and Salesforce founder Marc Benioff.

My first thought on attending was "why in the world would Plattner agree to this?" Were I his PR guy I'd never have let him done it. After all, he's putting himself on the same stage with a guy who runs a company that is 5% of the size of SAP and he's going to spend the whole night fighting on the other guy's turf, talking about SaaS and the problems with enterprise software. It seemed that from before the event even started there was no way Plattner could win.

As it turned out, I think I was right. At the end of the event, I liked Plattner better but Benioff scored the most punches. Compounding things, the moderator's task of controlling the debate was basically impossible, which ultimately played better into Benioff's hands than Plattner's.

I'm guessing there were 600 to 800 people in attendance. A stunning percentage of them were from Salesforce; a good chunk of the rest were from SAP. In fact, during cocktail time, two things were hard: (1) fighting the line to get a beer and (2) bumping into someone who didn't work at either company.

Hardy started with some stats:

• Salesforce is a $750M company. SAP is a $16B one.
• Salesforce's market cap is $7.4B. SAP's is $59B.
• Salesforce's forward price/earnings ratio is 97. SAP's is 15.
• Salesforce's margins are 2.7%. SAP's are 26%

Then they dove into the debate. Benioff sold and Plattner rambled. Plattner repeatedly got frustrated: "I don't know where you're going," "you're not sticking to the questions."

Benioff just stumped his core messages:

• Enterprise software doesn't deliver success
  
• "We marry our customers at Salesforce, perpetual licensing deals are one-night stands."
  
• We have 41,000 users on one system/platform
• We do the upgrades so you don't have to
  
• We're moving from SaaS to platform-as-a-service, seemingly his core message for the evening. (Dare I say PaaS?)
  
• We scale from 1 user to 60,000 user systems
  

Plattner walked headfirst into several traps:

• Complexity. He repeatedly explained the complexity of automating the entire enterprise. (See how complex SAP is?) The "it ain't so simple" pitch is hard to pull off in general, and harder still when the other guy is pitching simplicity.

• Failure. Plattner conceded failure both at a specific account (DuPont) and in general with SAP's first try at SaaS. (You won round 1, but I'll be back.)
  

• SaaS universal superiority. Plattner silently conceded the asserted problems with on-premises software; while he flirted a bit with it, he never gave a real challenge to the basic premise that SaaS is always better. Nor did he go on the offensive on how SaaS vendors are re-creating some of the classic on-premises software negatives (e.g., locking customers in prepaid three-year contracts looks a lot like the "shelfware" problem to me). Nor did he raise the obvious "if SaaS is so successful, then where are the other vendors" argument. In my mind, there is one successful SaaS company: Salesforce. The rest are generally tiny and their financials are horrific (e.g., Netsuite).
  

• Upgrades. To Benioff's glee, Plattner suggested to a large customer that they needed to upgrade to benefit from more openness in the system. (Frankly, Benioff irritated me with his "you don't pay for upgrades" message. First, you do pay for upgrades with Salesforce -- every month in your subscription. Second, with SAP the customer is probably on maintenance and literally, at least, doesn't pay for the upgrade either.)

• Age / hipness / in-touchness. Benioff repeatedly tried to position this both in direct ("Hasso, I don't think everyone in the audience knows what IMS is") and indirect fashion (when asked what he respected about SAP/Plattner, Benioff replied "tenure," which to me was a transparent (if unsuccessful) attempt to position him as old and out-of-touch). While Plattner tried to counter with the "SaaS isn't new, multi-tenancy isn't new, etc." angle, he couldn't pull it off.
  

• Techno-babble. Plattner rambled about in-memory databases and the (non-obvious and supposed) impossibility of using them in multi-tenant environments. (One of my favorite moments was when Plattner sincerely asked Benioff if he coded at Oracle!)
  

Plattner also tried, and in my opinion failed, to play the "The Innovator's Dilemma wasn't written yesterday" card in response to assertions from Benioff that their business model would constrain SAP from moving to software as a service. "I'm not going to let the financial model drive the company ... if we see an opportunity, we will pursue it."

"Then how you do explain your lack of progress? ... How do you explain Microsoft's lack of progress? " Benioff chirped.

On the offensive, Plattner had many good barbs and fun jokes. He was clearly more likable, infinitely less smug, significantly more technical, and a lot more credible at enterprise automation than Benioff. He quipped a few times about being able to buy Salesforce.

Benioff harped that SAP should build an application on Saleforce's platform. In response, Plattner had his best punch of the night: "Look, you're a young man so you probably won't take this advice, but here it is: don't over-estimate your platform."

Plattner also remarked a few times that he felt that Marc was "still too close to Larry [Ellison]" and that he believed Oracle would probably buy them.

Benioff, the disruptor, got caught flat-footed in responding to a question about open source, and whether SugarCRM would disrupt him. The best he could do was to go back to the stump: "we believe in a different model."

In a display of questionable taste, Salesforce employees started asking questions. However, the first such question actually gave Plattner my favorite answer of the night. When asked, "why did you agree to do this" by a Salesforce hipster, Plattner paused, looked up a bit, and said: "for the challenge."

It shed a lot of light for me. Even though it's not great for SAP public relations, even though he's entering a debate on the other guy's turf that he'll probably lose, even though he's promoting a competitor to his level by sharing the stage with a guy who runs a company 1/20th of his size, even though he's a 64-year-old billionaire who could be anywhere doing anything he wanted, Plattner chose to debate Benioff "for the challenge." It tells you a lot about Plattner. And I thought it was pretty cool.

(Benioff later asked that employees "from both companies" refrain from asking questions despite the fact that only Salesforce employees had been asking.)

Update: Arma Partners has posted a report on the event, including a full transcript, available here.

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USA Today Article on Open Source Intelligence

If you've not read my previous post on Open Source Intelligence, known as OSINT in the Intelligence Community, then I'd go read it now -- it's called Open Secrets and it's about a delightfully well written article by Malcom Gladwell on the topic of deriving intelligence from public information.

Provided you've read that post, then you should find this recent USA Today story, entitled Today's Spies Find Secrets in Plain Sight, of interest as well.

Excerpts:

... the President's Daily Brief and other crucial intelligence reports often rely less on secrets from risky espionage missions than on material that's available to just about anyone.

Intelligence officers have gleaned insights on Iran's nuclear capabilities from photos on the Internet. They've scooped up documents, including a terrorist training manual, at international conferences and public forums. They've found information in foreign university libraries and newscasts.

[...]

Open sources can provide up to 90% of the information needed to meet most U.S. intelligence needs, Deputy Director of National Intelligence Thomas Fingar said in a recent speech. Harnessing that information "is terribly important," he said. "It ought to be a normal part of what we do, not being fixated on secrets dribbling into the computer's in-box."