Artists and SaaS Vendors are Not Created Equal

The Creation of Adam fresco by Michelangelo

One of the most iconic images from all works of art is The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, part of his Sistine Chapel ceiling frescos in the Vatican. Learn more about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel frescos in this video. I saw the Sistine Chapel frescos and many other works of art while backpacking through Europe as a student. It was very interesting to learn and see how the Renaissance transformed Europe in all of the arts and sciences, and laid the foundation of the world we live in today.

I think the greatest advancement during the Renaissance was the invention of the printing press, which dramatically increased the dissemination of knowledge and ideas. The same thing is happening now at a far greater scale with the Internet; we can now learn almost anything online. Furthermore, there is yet another advancement occurring now: the ability to run business applications online from almost anywhere.

Sistine Chapel Ceiling

Artists and works of art are not equal. Studying art helps us to understand why some works and artists are considered great, while others are not. Forrester analyst Boris Evelson provides similar insights about BI SaaS vendors in this post, “BI SaaS Vendors are Not Created Equal.” He provides excellent criteria for evaluating BI SaaS vendors, and most of his suggestions apply to any type of enterprise SaaS application.

Although it’s good to evaluate art based on our own experience and criteria, we learn more quickly and thoroughly from formal study. The same is true for evaluating enterprise SaaS applications, which are new advancements in our quest that began in the Renaissance for more information more quickly to more people. Consider these enterprise SaaS applications that are among the best works of modern art:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Attensity360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

The Last Judgement fresco by Michelangelo

As an enterprise application artist at your organization, what would you focus on if you were asked to create a “fresco” of cloud-based applications to improve knowledge, insights, and business performance?

Do You Have a Price Leak or a Price Waterfall?

USS Constitution

While living on the East Coast for a couple years, I enjoyed visiting the USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned naval vessel afloat in the world. Learn more about the USS Constitution in this video. It takes a lot of effort and resources to keep a wooden warship in service since 1797; it also takes a lot to keep a business afloat for many years, through good times and bad.

Even after downsizing, reducing expenses, and lowering prices to stay afloat during the recession, some companies are still having difficulty staying above water. What else can they do to keep their ship from sinking while sailing away from danger toward calmer seas of prosperity and stability? They can look for leaks in the vessel itself rather than further reducing crew and cargo. In business, one of the main leaks that can lead to drowning is a price leak.

According to this article, “Price Fixing,” in CFO Magazine, a price leak occurs when a company doesn’t get the price it could or should get for an item. If enough price leaks occur, the company will sink into a sea of losses that cannot be recovered without significant effort, investment, analysis, and correction of the root causes. In some cases, there is no way to stem the tide in time to rescue the company from going under.

Niagara Falls

Before any price leaks that you may have create a deluge that sinks your ship, you can perform a price waterfall analysis to discover the patterns in your costs, the discounts you offer, your current profit, and how you may be able to increase profit by making adjustments to your operations or deal structure. Read more about price waterfall analysis in this article, “The Profit Leakage: The Price Waterfall” in Chief Executive Officer magazine. You can also optimize price by segmenting the types of customers you have, their buying habits, and the circumstances that determine what various customer segments are willing to pay for your product or service.

Do price waterfall analysis and price optimization sound like entering unchartered waters of undiscovered revenue, worthwhile for the long voyage but fraught with time and expense in the short term? You probably will discover ways of increasing revenue with price waterfall analysis and price optimization. According to the CEO magazine article cited above, companies can increase profit by up to 15 percent with price waterfall analysis. However, it doesn’t need to be expensive or time consuming. With software-as-a-service (SaaS) price optimization products such as Sales Compass from Mimiran, you can quickly get the business intelligence you need to fix price leaks and help keep your ship afloat.

Do you want to learn more about steering your business to increased profitability by identifying and fixing price leaks that may be threatening your business just like battles, icebergs, or leaks threaten a ship? Here’s a great way to do that free of charge in an hour: check out the webinar, “Where B2B Companies Leave 10% of Their Profit on the Table,” conducted by Mimiran on Wednesday, February 24 at 10:00 a.m. Central Time. According to Mimiran, B2B companies often leave 10 percent or more of their money on the table during manual discount negotiation processes.  In this webinar, Mimiran will show how this happens, the impact on sales organizations and the company, and approaches to getting that money back in your pocket. Mimiran Sales Compass can help you navigate through the straits of price optimization and price waterfalls to an undiscovered sea of increased profitability. Price optimization may be one of the best investments you ever made in your business.

Do you have a good chart of your customer segments, the price they’re willing to pay, the price they do pay, what factors determined that price, how it affects your revenue and profit margin, and what you can do to change course and fix price leaks?

Super Bowl Ads and Social Media Monitoring

The New Hyundai Sonata

What do you think of the commercials shown during Super Bowl XLIV? If you’re not sure which Super Bowl that is, it’s the one played in the year MMX. Please post a comment below. Even though this blog still doesn’t get quite as many hits as The New York Times, I assure you, with social media monitoring, your comment will be seen by the companies you mention.

Social media monitoring products such as Attensity360 allow companies to collect and analyze what is being written and said about them in global print, broadcast, online news, social media, and customer opinion sources. The value of this information is very high, because it provides direct insights into how consumers, bloggers, and journalists value a brand. It creates limitless possibilities for companies to react by reaching out to customers, re-thinking their messaging, analyzing their competitors, creating or re-designing products, and tweaking their keywords for search engine optimization.

The cost of a Super Bowl commercial is high, but I think the cost of not monitoring the public’s reaction through all media outlets is even higher, given the fact that social media is a goldmine of information about consumer sentiment. I’m now driving my second Hyundai Sonata, and the Hyundai Super Bowl ads (here’s one featuring Brett Favre) made me want a third because of the new design. What is it worth to Hyundai to read sentences like that, to find out directly from the public what they think of the new Hyundai Sonata and the Super Bowl ads? I think MasterCard would agree it’s priceless. If Hyundai uses social media monitoring and reads this, they could directly offer me a 25-percent discount on my next Sonata.

Do you think that CBS got the right price for the advertisements? How would you know, and how would CBS know? CBS would know if they used price optimization software as a service from companies such as Mimiran. Price optimization is a hot sector of business intelligence that analyzes the many factors contributing to getting the right price, including what consumers are willing to pay and your cost of providing a product or service. Pricing makes or breaks a business, so it’s crucial to get the right price.

Social media monitoring also informs other analytics, such as predicting and reporting sales results. For example, if the response to an advertisement is positive, there’s a good chance that sales will increase. You can even predict in which segments sales will increase based on the granular level of social media reporting. Companies can also use SaaS predictive analytics products such as eiVia to predict sales results based on social media monitoring reports, so that they can prepare to meet demand. SaaS BI products such as Birst can report sales results, and those results can be compared to consumer sentiment from social-media monitoring reports from Attensity360 and sales forecasts from eiVia.

Rather than switching between SaaS applications to get reports on social media monitoring, price optimization, sales results, and sales forecasts, how about seeing all of it on one screen, in a dashboard? That level of visualization gives you the power and confidence to define and execute a strategy like the best CEOs and coaches. With SaaS enterprise mashup products such as mashmatrix Dashboard, you can create or modify a dashboard in minutes to see whatever you need from available information to chart your course.

I used Attensity360 to analyze recent buzz about the Hyundai Sonata. Attensity360 found 1,116 content items mentioning the Hyundai Sonata over the last seven days (Super Bowl XLIV was five days ago). Here are some results:

• On Saturday before the Super Bowl nothing was written.
• On Super Bowl Sunday 236 items were written.
• On Monday through Friday following the Super Bowl, 270, 295, 186, 117 and 12 items were written, respectively.
• Sentiment was 44 percent positive; 40 percent neutral; 12 percent negative; and 4 percent mixed over the last seven days.
• Coverage has been trending up over the last 30 days; the highest daily peak four weeks ago was 50 items; the highest daily peak this week was 295 items.
• I can drill down and read any of the articles, posts, and tweets, and contact the writers directly.
• Social media content distribution over the last seven days was 42 percent discussion forums; 31 percent blogs; 27 percent micro blogs.

What possibilities can you imagine with similar information from social media monitoring for your company, products, industry keywords, competitors, and their products?

A 360-Degree View is Best for Your Business

Yes performing "in the round."

One of my favorite concert experiences was watching the progressive-rock band Yes perform “in the round” on a circular, revolving stage located in the center of the arena. With this approach, there wasn’t a bad seat in the house; everyone had a 360-degree view of the performance, rather than only a partial or distant view as is sometimes the case in concert halls. The sound was also excellent, because the speakers were also arranged in a circle to project equally in all directions. Check it out in this video.

In business, we also prefer 360-degree views over partial views. For example, we want a 360-degree view of our customers so that we have a complete picture of their relationships and interactions with our company to better serve their needs. Some companies prefer 360-degree performance reviews, which incorporate perspectives from peers, subordinates, superiors, and possibly also customers and other business partners in addition to supervisors.

With the advent and importance of social media, we definitely need a 360-degree view of all that is being written or spoken about our company and our competitors. It is no longer sufficient to only monitor traditional media, because we can learn more than ever before from all who interact with our organizations and share their experiences online. The largest focus group in history is available to us in social media today if we just put some effort in to listen, participate, and share with our audience, and measure the results.

That’s why I’m excited about Attensity360, which provides 360-degree monitoring of all the “buzz” about anyone or anything from all media sources based on selected keywords. You can use the information that Attensity60 provides to connect with customers, answer a question, solve a problem, create or modify a product, and see how you stack up against other companies in your category.

You can also use Attensity360 to analyze the specific words and phrases that your audience uses in social communities when discussing your products, services, solutions, and issues. Then, you can integrate those words and phrases into your page titles, website content, pay-per-click campaigns and ad copy. In the new world of social media, customers own, define, and refine your brand and messages almost as much as you do.

For more information, take a 360-degree view of Attensity360, and say “yes” to the benefits of social media monitoring. Social media monitoring is part of a complete business and communications strategy; it will put you ahead of your time and your competition, just like the members of Yes were when they performed “in the round” and interacted in ways never before possible with their audience.

What is your social-media strategy, and how do you plan to monitor the many outlets that customers, media, and other influencers have to share their opinions and observations of your business performance?

A Tornado is Coming from the Cloud

In the movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy suffers a head injury during a tornado and is catapulted, with her house and dog, Toto, to the magical Land of Oz, where she has many adventures and cleanses the land of two wicked witches. In the business book, “Inside the Tornado,” author Geoffrey Moore describes the tornado as a period of exponential growth for new companies and technologies as the market tips in their favor. Moore uses the “Land of Oz” metaphor to describe the spectacular, “magical,” rapid growth that new companies and technologies achieve after they cross the chasm from early adopters to the mainstream market. Read the “Land of Oz” and “Crossing the Chasm” chapters of “Inside the Tornado” here, thanks to Google Books!

In a recent post on TechCrunch, “The Coming Tornado: Cloud in the Enterprise,” Aaron Levie, CEO and co-founder of cloud content management provider Box.net, argues that cloud computing is ready to go inside the tornado of mainstream adoption in enterprise computing. I think he is right, because several funnel clouds have already touched down to positively change the computing landscape at high-profile enterprises.

For example, last year Los Angeles County approved a $7.25 million deal to move its 30,000 employees to Google Apps, while global electrical engineering and electronics powerhouse Siemens signed a deal to roll out SuccessFactors software-as-a-service human resources solution to 420,000 users in 80 countries and in 20 languages. Last month, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft announced they would spend $250 million to co-develop cloud computing systems, while IBM announced what it says is the biggest cloud deal to date: Panasonic will port more than 300,000 employees, partners, and suppliers to IBM’s LotusLive online collaboration system. Also last month, Salesforce.com announced record quarterly revenue and Google’s profit more than quintupled in the fourth quarter 2009 to $1.97 billion, or $6.13 a share, from $382 million, or $1.21 a share, a year ago. Gartner forecasted last month that, by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. That prediction follows Gartner’s listing of cloud computing as the top strategic technology for 2010.

If we are now moving inside the tornado to the Land of Oz with enterprise adoption of cloud computing, we, like Dorothy in the “Wizard of Oz,” have a few “wicked witches” to destroy in the chasms of compliance, security, privacy, and interoperability. However, just like Dorothy found fast friends in the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Man, and the Scarecrow in the Land of Oz, we have seasoned IT professionals at vendor, customer, and research organizations with the courage, heart, and intelligence to help us cross those chasms; follow the yellow brick road to success; and build better information systems to support the new generation of mobile information workers and agile organizations in the cloud.

Consider these magical cloud-based solutions that are experiencing mainstream enterprise adoption inside the tornado in the Land of Oz:

• Enterprise mashup dashboards such as mashmatrix Dashboard provide rapid, personalized development of dashboards from any web-facing data source; get a complete view of all the information you need on one screen without having to switch between screens and applications.
• SaaS business intelligence (BI) applications from Birst and eiVia provide quick reporting and predictive analytics for decision-making.
• Enterprise relationship management solutions such as BranchIt help your business leverage relationships that colleagues may have with prospective customer or partner contacts.
• Price optimization applications from companies such as Mimiran help you avoid leaving money on the table in pricing your products or services.
• Enterprise brand management solutions from Biz360 aggregate, measure, and analyze news media and consumer opinion from print and social-media sources to yield insights that enable sales, marketing, PR, and executives to better understand their customers, competitors, influencer communities, industry trends and issues, the press, and the investment community.
• Enterprise cloud databases such as TrackVia help you quickly design and deploy cloud-based applications to solve business problems.
• Integration products from Pervasive Software and Sesame Software provide data exchange and interoperability between legacy on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.
• Cloud-based single sign-on systems from companies such as TriCipher provide a secure, single login for a user to access all authorized cloud-based applications.

What is your yellow brick roadmap of success with enterprise solutions in the cloud? How can cloud-based applications help you reach the Emerald City of optimized business performance and revenue growth?