We’re all over the place in Marketing – Literally!

Working with a globally distributed Marketing team is the norm these days, posing a barrier to meeting goals and driving corporate initiatives across the Enterprise. The simple fact of being in widely-separated time zones makes it harder to work on team efforts, or to speak with one voice to the market.

The goal of bringing a geographically distributed team together to create one, unified team is hard enough to achieve when there is a shared language and culture. Often, just the act of defining a “strike team” to work on a focused program or initiative will be enough to bring a sense of shared purpose. Most of the time, though careful leadership is needed; team leaders need to set the bar high - clearly setting out team goals and activities that involve all members.

The problem is much harder to solve when language and cultural barriers get in the way of the goal of creating one team to execute a shared plan, and to perform at top efficiency while doing so. These barriers create internal frictions that slow the “machine” down to the point that progress toward goals can be halted entirely.

Whichever is the case, perhaps the first step toward overcoming these barriers is to acknowledge their existence; only then can effective strategies be developed to overcome them.

Marketing-led, customer driven approach

The message has to come from the top management that the highest priority goal for the company must be simply this – taking care of the customer at every stage of the lifecycle – from lead, to prospect, to established account. Everything else is secondary.

To be continued….

The past few years have been good for data centers; growth is trending upwards, but now some large data centers are running into a few problems:

The Challenge – Inefficient, Underutilized Datacenters

Datacenters are critical to business operations but they carry with them a growing challenge – current datacenter models exhibit great inefficiencies resulting in the unnecessary loss of both time and money for the organizations they support. Typically, each division typically provides its own computing infrastructure to support the division’s own business functions.  Provisioning for the needs of these business functions, agencies generally purchase too much or excess capacity.  The result is underutilized computing capacity leading to:

Excess Power Consumption and Increased Greenhouse Gas Production – Datacenters accounted for 60 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) in 2006 (approximately 1.5% of total U.S. electricity consumption).  It is equivalent to the electricity consumed by 5.8 million average U.S. households. EPA, Report to Congress on Server and Data Center Energy Efficiency (2007).  The EPA notes that energy consumption of servers and datacenters has doubled in the past five years and is expected to almost double again in the next five years, to more than 100 billion kWh, costing about $7.4 billion annually. Id. According to the Energy Star Program, the US produces 1.55 pounds of CO2 per kWh.  This equates to over 90 billion pounds of CO2 from datacenter sources in 2006 alone.

The Needless Purchase of Excess Equipment – Under current workloads the average hardware server operates at 10% to 15% utilization, resulting in an unnecessary surplus of computer hardware across the organization. D. Scott (Gartner Consulting), Presentation to DataSynapse (2007).  An increase in utilization decreases the need for servers resulting in decreased hardware and software costs.

Wasted Man Hours – Staff (and staff benefits) costs are currently the greatest expense in IT.  On average, one person is needed to manage every 10-40 servers.  The personnel cost to maintain a system with 1000 servers is over $2 million dollars a year or more.  O. Young (Forester Research), 2007 Enterprise IT Budget Outlook: North America (2007).  By containing personnel costs, an agency could apply savings directly to the core mission of the agency rather than support services.

Increased Environmental impacts and Waste Disposal Costs – When hardware systems are retired much of the hazardous material found in these systems enters our waste stream for recycling or disposal.  In 2005, 2.6 million tons of electronic waste was generated in the U.S. EPA, Municipal Solid Waste in the U.S. (2005 Facts and Figures) (2006).  According to the EPA, this is the fastest growing waste stream in the U.S. Id. Furthermore, the useful life of computer hardware continues to decrease.  Current estimates for the useful life of such equipment are between 3 and 5 years. – Source: R Mohrman, Microsoft Corp., Lifecycle Report (2006). Technology that can extend the life of such equipment offers both economic and environmental benefits.

As Pike Research puts it, “In the past, the cost of energy was seldom a concern for IT departments and there was little incentive to invest in energy efficiency improvements. But as data center energy costs become more visible, the financial benefits of moving to a greener mode of operation are being recognized by CEOs, CFOs and CIOs. The data center of the future will be energy efficient; it will also be virtualized, to ensure optimal use of IT resources, space and energy, and it will be more dynamic in its operation, adaptable to new business needs and new technology opportunities.

This Pike Research report addresses the growth of Green Data Centers, and has a more -in-depth discussion of the latest facts and figures in the Green Data Center area.

This post is a followup to Part 1.

In Part 1, I suggested that the marketing approach taken by The Walt Disney Company can hold some good ideas for technology marketers. Now, of course I realize that you can’t just apply the same techniques to, say, Enterprise-class software, that Disney uses to sell Theme Park tickets. Nevertheless, bear with me and see if we can’t abstract a couple of ideas.

Classic Disney Marketing Campaign
This series of ad spots that Disney ran several years back mention little or nothing to do with Disney; rather, it’s about eliciting a feeling. The Disney name is only mentioned at the end of the ad spot.

To be sure, Disney is most definitely NOT the only company taking this approach to messaging the market. I have noticed that a few of the largest technology companies (Cisco comes immediately to mind to mind) are catching on to his mindset; check out this page of one of Cisco’s partner print ad portfolios.

So what Does This Product Mean TO ME?
Notice that the ad places the Unified Communications solutions in the context of the reader’s own workday. Again, nothing earth shatteringly difficult here, but then ask yourself – why do so few tech companies take this approach?

It’s NOT about you, or your products – it’s about the Prospect!
Many technology companies get wrapped up in their latest product, and all 31 new features and improvements to the last version. It also has to do with whether the company culture is market-driven or Development-driven. In several small software companies (including, most recently, a SaaS collaboration company) that I have consulted for, fall into the latter category; their held back from really stepping back and abstracting the impact of their products on the daily lives of their users.

NEXT TIME – How companies can build up and harness the power of their users’ “warm fuzzies”

As a followup to my last post, “Will we ever be able to take off our SOX?” an article in Computerworld, Peter Thibodeau opines that:

The United States Supreme Court has taken a look at the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, legislation that was adopted in 2002 in response to lapses in executive oversight uncovered by the collapse of Enron, Tyco and other major public companies. Sarbanes-Oxley requires public companies to document their internal controls, but gave little direction to harried IT departments as to HOW to implement the law. This uncertainty has led to a lot of wasted effort, expense, and just plain agita.

The issue before the court was a lawsuit (Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board) filed in 2006 challenging the constitutionality of the PCAOB. Their ruling, which did strike down a portion of the law is available here.

What does this mean for IT and the high-tech industry in general? Well, not much, at least right now. The court ruled 5-4 that a section of SOX related to appointments violates the Constitution’s separation of powers mandate. But, the balance of the law remains “fully operative as a law” pending a process correction.

According to a recent IDC Study recently released, “Worldwide and Regional Public IT Cloud Services 2010-2014 Forecast” (IDC #223549), IDC found that

Public IT cloud services revenue is expected to hit $55.5 billion in 2014, up from $16 billion in 2009. That adds up to a compound annual growth rate of 27.4 percent. Traditional IT product growth is expected to be 5 percent over the same period.

Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at IDC says that “Additionally, our research with many CIOs about their plans for adopting cloud computing shows that IT customers are excited about the cost and agility advantages of cloud computing, but they also have serious concerns about the maturity of cloud computing offerings, specifically around security, availability, cost monitoring/management, integration, and standards.”

You can find more information about this study here.

Today I attended a breakfast panel discussion at the Microsoft NERD (New England Research & Development) Center in Cambridge – “The End of Labels: A Convergence of Traditional and New Media”. This panel discussion was jointly sponsored by RF/Binder Partners and Ruder Finn, and graciously hosted by Microsoft as a way to give back to the local community. The moderator was Scott Kirsner, who writes the “Innovation Economy” column in the Boston Globe; the Globe also sent Shirley Leung, Assistant Managing Editor, to be part of the panel.

In addition to Mr. Kirsner and Ms. Leung, the panel consisted of:
- Bill Bulkeley, freelance journalist and former Wall Street Journal writer
- Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review
- Arlyn Gajilan, business and technology editor at Newsweek.com
- Jim Malone, senior editor at IDG Enterprise Custom Solutions Group

Some of the interesting topics covered:

- Does social media splinter brands?
- Does the social media audience even care about quality of the content, or the quality of the source of a story?
- The challenge of maintaining a single “voice” that is brand-consistent across different social media

Budget and staff cuts at the print media companies have made it harder than ever to engage their interest in corporate messages, such as new product launches. According to Bill Bulkeley, the most effective way to build a relationship with a reporter who you want to engage with, is to be responsive if/when they call to ask for more information or details. Dropping the ball isn’t an option when trying to get someone in the media to pick up your story and run with it; be there when the reporter calls!

The old concepts of briefing reporters with embargoed content, and NDAs appears to be dead, at least according to the panel members, some of whom refuse to sign NDAs these daysRather than that approach to controlling how and when a story gets released, Arlyn Gajian opined that he’d place a much higher value on getting an opportunity to have an intensive engagement with, for example, the CEO or a development team in order to build a much more in-depth story.

Video of this panel discussion was recorded, so I’ll post a link to any online content that is made available, if and when it is released.

I came across a rather interesting article by Jonathan Feldman in Information week recently, that deals with the whole idea of ROI, TCO and the topic of how these figure into Enterprise users’ thinking about adding cloud capabilities to their existing infrastructure.

The article quotes Lew Moorman, CSO and President of Rackspace’s cloud computing unit that the Enterprise customers “are chiefly focused on how organizations look at adding cloud computing to the mix of what they’re doing today in a safe way, rather than ‘having a big TCO debate.’”

In my research on cloud ROI for our upcoming InformationWeek Analytics report, I haven’t yet found an end user that has put together a stringent return-on-investment analysis using discounted cash flow techniques. – Jonathan Feldman

Another view on this topic was expressed by Scott Crenshaw, VP and GM of RedHat’s cloud business unit – “CIOs never think they have enough money anyway — and any savings from cloud computing will likely get redeployed rather than returned to the corporate budget anyway.”

You can read the entire article here.

As you might suspect from the title of this post that I am a bit of a Disney fan. My wife and I just completed our annual vacation to Walt Disney World, in Orlando, Florida. But my keen marketing eye (lol) remained wide open during our trip; I’ll be posting some thoughts on how Disney’s focus on building and maintaining a positive customer experience could provide a few tip to technology companies who seek to grow their business despite the tough market.

What does this have to do with Technology Marketing?
Many small, and some large, technology companies (you know who you are!) focus on the features of their technology and product almost to the exclusion of anything else they might want to say to prospects. I have implemented, and seen the positive results of, changing the focus away from “us” to “you” – the prospect. That’s all it takes – and yet it’s such a big change in the mindset of the entire company that you might dismiss it as mere “fluff”‘ anything that would be so hard to implement.

Well, of course you would be right if the idea was to “throw the switch” and change the entire company overnight. But that’s, of course, unrealistic. No, what is needed is merely to take the fist step; see the value of changing the focus of the company’s growth strategy to be one of building and ensuring customer (and prospect) experience from the first time they hear of or interact with your company. It’s a big goal, I know.

Ok, so what’s this got to do with Disney?
I can’t pretend to be an expert of The Disney Way – other than as a long-time customer. So, my remarks are coming from my own experiences in that context. Some of the things I’ll be talking about seem super-obvious; but then, if they are so obvious, why do so few companies take the opportunity to improve?

Here’s one example of how to catch the attention of a new prospect – if you can get someone to listen to you, don’t talk about YOU; talk about THEM! I know, super-obvious, right? But think about how many times you get a mass email from a technology company extolling the virtues of the 23 “Exciting New Features in the latest release 13.2!!!”. Do you open them? I didn’t think so.

Consider instead how the Disney Vacation Club (Disney’s version of vacation ownership) tries to get your attention by saying just about NOTHING about the offering – “Heard the best-kept secret?” they ask. Does it work. Well let’s hear what Randy Garfield, president of the Walt Disney Travel Co., has to say:

“Last year marked an incredible level of growth in lodging options at Walt Disney World, which is kind of odd considering the economy. But we always have a long-term vision, and despite the economy, we’re confident that we have a great brand, which wasn’t created overnight.”

So now what should I do, assuming I agree with this approach?
Stay tuned as I explore that very topic with a few more examples of the Disney approach to growing their business in these tough times.

Ok, gotta unpack now!!!