Great Day for Nimsoft! Nice day for KJR...Positioning matters

Yesterday, my first and still active client Nimsoft got acquired by CA for an OUTSTANDING valuation of $350M. You can read ALL about it a here.

Just a great result for Nimsoft customers, employees and shareholders, as CEO Gary Read said here, a "Triple Play!".

Lot's of commentators have lauded this deal, one particular comment stuck out for me from the Register here:


Specifically, the quote I'd point out (with the emphasis mine) is....
"Last October, the company rolled out a new integrated suite of products called Unified Monitoring, the main reason why CA is interested in Nimsoft. The Unified Monitoring suite doesn't just babysit all the physical and virtual stuff humming away in the data center, but also Amazon EC2 and Rackspace Cloud compute and storage utilities, Salesforce.com CRM software and Google Apps for Business...."

I am proud to have played a role in helping Gary and the team position and align both the communications and the product roadmap to this new vision last year. It's proven to be the right product at the right time, and the team has done an a great job of articulating and then acting on a vision with the speed and delivery of a great company. It's one thing to talk the talk, it's another to really embrace it. Yesterday, connecting vision, positioning AND execution really paid off. Congrats!!! Well done, and thanks for having me be part of it.

Gary talks alot about Cloud being a discontinuity in the market, and that new winners and leaders will emerge. Gary has both vision and execution, and CA is lucky to get the team, and in my opinion, got a bargain!

Keep up the great delivery and lead the CA team into the brave new future of Unified Monitoring....

Diagnosis - Poor Product Differentiation, How to Spot a Silent Killer!

So many products, product lines, and even companies suffer from poor differentiation and don't even know it. Poor differentiation is like high blood pressure, it kills silently and slowly. Products don't maintain price points, it's hard to scale sales, etc. If only we had a simple cuff to put on our arm to measure our "Product Differentiation Pressure™." Well, until then, here's a simple list of symptoms of this silent killer...

• Selling on price not value

• Difficult to replicate sales success across reps or channel partners
  

• Win rate below achievable (as benchmarked by best reps)
  

• Difficult to partner (long initial sales cycle or stuck with techies)

• Selling lower in org than desired

• Stagnant marketing (conversion rates, content, etc…)

• Lack of breakthrough beyond tech evaluators/cognoscenti

• Sub-optimal targeting

• Feature and/or generic focused discussion

• Product roadmap not “focused”, spread like “peanut butter”

• Product requests accepted that don’t seem to fit with agreed priorities

• Lack of real or perceived strategic “vision” in roadmap

Ask yourself honestly if these symptoms reflect your product or company. If you answer yes to more than a few, you've got a low Product Differentiation Pressure™ or PDP™, and unlike blood pressure, where high kills, low PDP is the killer here.

In my next blog, we will look at each of these symptoms in a bit more depth...