Last week I attended an IBM Workplace
sales Seminar for Business Partners. A good day, with some open and
frank questions, with some equally open and frank answers, therefore productive
on both sides. During the day (and while listening to the sales pitch)
I was talking with a colleague and began to discuss "selling"
workplace in the marketplace. The focus was on the excellent standards
compliance and integration features. Open standards was the phrase
of the day, and buzz words like "Cloudscape, Eclipse, JSR etc"
danced off tongues and onto notepads under the "how to impress
the customer" table. Our conversation during this all boiled
down to a simple question, does the marketplace really give a damn?
Lets not consider the big customers
here, lets consider the SMB market, where there are lots of IT managers
who have a very active job in a small company. For the most part,
I can assume they want to see WSE as an excellent portal product which
is easy to manage. Or they want to see WCS as an excellent document
management tool with an integrated client, that can also be their full
intranet solution, hook into mail etc. Simply put, they want to see
a product that works, and works well with low TCO, management overhead
etc.
All (or most) of these features apply
to the workplace family. Lets keep it simple and not mention the
open standard support in any detail, unless asked. Offer plenty of
resources for research and all the information they want, but don’t let
the customer think that the IBM solution is made from hacking together
all these other products. Let them just think of it as one IBM product
that fits their need out of the box with the supplied portlets.
Before the flaming commences, I see
the value in pointing out the open standard support, but I think that maybe
this will confuse the sale. For example, Microsoft will (and already
are) counter the workplace product suite by asking if you want this multi
product solution, or why not just get MS sharepoint? Microsoft brand
their products carefully, and we all know you will need lots of different
MS products to get the functionality of WCS, but they neglect to say that
to Mr SMB IT manager until after he is "sold" on the pretty interface.
Its the old "Keep It Simple"
routine. I know when I am going around selling such a complex beast
like Workplace, it will be demonstration led, with little (if any) reference
to those standards. Does anyone agree/disagree with this?
.