Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

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If you’ve never read Seth Godin’s blog (or books), you should. It’s full of gems. One of his recent postings was on a subject that is very relevant for us, hence the title of this post is borrowed from his.

“That’s the choice most of us make when we launch a product or service. We can make a market or we can take share from a market.”

Software products are particularly hard to describe by their nature and it does not help that IT terminology is polluted. Even commonly used terms like network management, event management, etc. mean very different things to different people. As a result, we often face using existing products to describe new ones:

“This is just like the Gillette razor, but cheaper.”

“It is just like HP OpenView, but better/cheaper/works…”

As Seth indicates, this strategy takes advantage of the recognition established product has and makes it easier for the potential customer/user to compare & contrast.

I think this explains why HP OV (NNM) is still the yardstick new monitoring tool vendors use to compare/define their products even though HP OV has been stagnant for over a decade and not even close to be the best tool from a technical perspective.

RapidInsight is different than the alternatives in the IT management market. It is meant to be. We’ve designed it with the hindsight of having lived with the the shortcomings of traditional solutions currently in the market. But articulating this difference in the market is challenging.

So far, RapidInsight customers have been direct contacts. We knew the customers’ well, hence we could articulate what RapidInsight is, why it is better than alternatives, etc. within the context of the needs of these customers. But when you go to the broader market you don’t have the opportunity to talk to each potential customer at length, if at all. Direct access to customers is where smaller companies run into difficulties. We need a way to articulate what RapidInsight is, and why it is worth fir anyone to invest their time to learn more about it.

So we face with the choice Seth states eloquently in his post. Should we try to take market share by identifying RapidInsight with existing solution or should we try to make the market? The answer should not be that difficult. We’re way too small to make a market. We can easily say “RapidInsight is like Netcool, only better . An open source IT event management solution” It’s probably better marketing position for us. From a technical perspective, this is an inadequate description of our product. I want to talk about why focusing only on consolidating events, restricted proprietary languages, storing data in relational databases are flawed approaches and why one needs a built-in CMDB, object based data store, use of standard based dynamic scripting language , etc. Yet I have to accept that “making the market” is out of our reach, however “right” it feels.

So it helps when others join in describing why consolidated event management is not sufficient and we need more It turns out, HP has just announced a new product/release, HP Operations Manager,OMi.

The blog author (shouldn’t a blog have info on who the author is?) describes HP OMi as a “next-generation consolidated event and performance management product“. What make OMi different? It sits on top our HP’s CMDB, which means it has access to service dependency information and have access to availability and performance data. It sounds like folks in HP understand that consolidated event management alone is a positive but insufficient, and why a solution that models and consolidates all IT operations information is needed. That will be great if they can educate the market to why. May be then, we can say RapidInsight is like OMi, but only better