Prabhu' blog

A blog detailing my business activities What i was upto and my notes and stuff... How to go about company and entrepreneurship

Friday, November 10, 2006

My notes on Product Marketing for Telesto- general strategy

Business Case

Search is a growing segment with a good market. The future is expected to revolve around search where information management and retrieval plays a vital role. There is enough scope even among this competitive market to understand a particular vertical and deliver a particular solution. Relatively this is a new market opportunity where low profile companies are very few and there is a good ROI even if a miniscule segment of this market is captured.

Summary: Predicting strong future growth in search applications and a growing market with more players acknowledging the importance of search.
Abundant scope for distinguishing product as it evolves and identify a key USP for a vertical market (customised solution)
Even capturing a small section of the market will help us reap good ROI
Huge market which is still there to be tapped.
A Good understanding of the client network can offer addons which can be used for drawing other benefits (even offering Hardware based solutions and network solutions)

Positioning

We will position ourselves as a products company focussing on deliverng essential needs of customer and clients. The enterprise search product will be an end to end solution taking into account different aspects of a corporate company from intranet needs to their web based needs.

What we mean by the above statement is that we are trying to satisy two search requirements of a company

1) one is to satiate their intranet needs (and offering our solution to do it)
2) external web requirements of the company (we are addressing the search requirements of the company on the web)
B2B B2C

Addressing such multiple needs will help us position in a good way.

What kind of providers are we?
Low cost search framework. Since we are projecting the end product as a low cost search framework, it should allow us to reach more customers.


It will transform into a tool which provides a means of providing basic content management which will involve and provide a search based interface to project team to work on. This should also involve security aspects where accessibiliy wil be based upon access control lists


Summary

Positioning ourselves as a provider of search solution (software as well as hardware. The strategy will be to evolve from a software player to a hardware player)
Should address different verticals according to their needs (still have to evolve to this level as we have to identify two or three verticals to tackle)

The current verticals which we are targeting are midsized IT companies having a sizeable intranetwork presence where the need has to be that the same information has to be accessed by many people.


HR firms in IT industry

Mid sized IT companies with content management issues
Banking,insurance and Law Firms


Educational institues (where such a need for public dissemmination of information is essential)

Marketing Plan

The marketing plan will be based on a web based marketing strategy to increase the reach and widen the customer base.

The basic method will be do an evaluation and decide strategy.

Attracting prospective clients to the site will be done through a marketing team whose efforts will be to identify customer and get them to the company site. Customer referrals will also play a crucial part.

The following methods can be considered to market

1) emarketing
2) direct marketing through sales team
3) web marketing (the strategy would be that the other two marketing lead the customer to web marketing)

Distinctive Competence

In terms of the tool

The tool is flexible and extensibe and so can be adopted easily.
Platform independent, easy to deploy and maintain with minimal administration and no other operating costs
Can hande huge volume of data and at the same time provide good performance in terms of speed

In terms of other models
A low cost framework for search which can be considered by all companies
Since it is a low cost search framework , we are looking at a increased client base
So cost model is very competitive

Market sizing
(with respect to clients)

The ideal market for the tool would be a company which needs search for a sizeable number of its employee population.
The company can be anywhere from a 10 member strong company to a 500 member strong company (in terms of No of computers)
It would be a great value add if the organisation has intranet portals and other needs like content management


(with respect to our company)

Position ourself as a small team catering to the user needs through efficient use of resources

Since the concept is leveraging open source technologies, a few people having the technical know how in this field would be good enough.

There is a need for increasing the marketing team as this is a crucial aspect for a products based company.


Pricing

The product is prized at 1000 dollars with additional costs which will be support based costs . There can be additional AMC contracts for updates and further releases

The Hardware solution (according to specific client requirement) will have a corresponding pricing in addition to the software cost.

The pricing is very competitive to create a good corporate identity and will be for a user set of licenses

Say – 1000 dollar installation can be used for 5 deployments in a company
2000 dollar will be applicable to 10 installations of the product


If he needs security we can provide him security, people who will have access to search application based on user name and password

2)it wil be product installation cost + hardware cost(profit margin will
300 dollars ) + support ( our profit margin on support will be 600 dollars)

A long term model will be drawn on the response and the further features which we add to the product.


Sales Process—

Awareness plan –



Market Research

The Market Research was basically done by gathering materials on the net and analysing the reports of Major research frames.
This is because the company is a growing one and we don’t have resources to hire out actual reports

A need for search swf has been put up on the site projecting market and how it is poised to grow in the near future

Product performance

The product performance is that of industrial expectations with it providing and even exceeding benchmark goals

In terms of Volume – can handle Huge data

In terms of speed – Can retreive results fast

In terms of features – Support a wide variety of data sources (Plan to extend this)

In terms of end user operation – Very simple and no extra administration costs and personal required

In terms of deployment – a simplified installer package (there is also an option to go for a hardware integrated solution also which is a simple connect to the network and use concept)

Buy Build a partner

We should identify a partner who is also working on a similar technology and where a mutual relationship will benefit both the parties.

Thing on the do list – Chalk out such a unique partner.

Market requirements

Main pitch

Support advertisements in future (a revenue earner)

The market requirement are the software bundled with additional facilities. The client expection is in terms of

1) support for additional data sources (including database support)
2) security aspect
3) added features which support even advanced querying features
4) distributed search and indexing
5) internationalization (support for many languages)
In terms of market requirements, all the features can be completed as the product evolves. There is no timeframework for implementing the above details as these can be done as and when we get funding.

Support for mutli –languages is also there, but geographic marketing is not being currently done and this is already there in the tool

Cutomer Acquistion

There is no plan for customer acquistion by buying out any other companies or taking over some business area.

A prospective area would be to offer it as a web server hosting where we can try to get existing customers who make use of such indexing features provided on net


But such a thing may affect the intrinsic product value. But the advantage is it would take care of immediate funding requirements for maintenance and operations cost.

Still then this kind of customer acquistion would involve huge marketing expenses and additional capital from our pockets

Market problems


1)The market problems which we may face is due to geographic reach (running it out of india without marketing office abroad)
2) competitve environment ( already some of the big players have a presence in the field)
3) creating consumer awareness on criticality of the product and convince him of ROI
4) addressing security issues which also come along with the tool
5) availabilty off a bigger marketing team (in our perspective)


Operational Metrics

The operations would involve operating on a cheap low cost model. The idea is to eventually have a small team working in tandem to develop the product and keep it a debt free company.

Majority of the work would be done by part time specialists who are involved in this area and do a good job of it .

Low infrastructure and IT spending and more expenditure on marketing is what we are looking at.

Day to day metrics against which performance can be measured against

For example number of features complete, the no of lines of code written, the no of module integrations done.

Thought leaders

The future course of thought will be more directed by marketing requirements. The product ownership will be passed on to respective technical persons who will innovate and bring it to the market within a short time period

Innovation should be the buzzword.

Sounds a little clesche but this is what the company truly requires.


Product roadmap

As a product

1) A tool which will offer content management and knowledge management on top of our search engine architecture
2) Implement security aspects
3) Provide Database support and other data sources support
4) Support more file formats
5) Move towards a intranetwork portal solution where the portal will provide all the needed necessities for an organisation with a strong emphasis on its search aspects.
6) A distributed search and indexing solution

As a library

1) Which can be integrated with existing applications to provide a search platform for your search

2) This aspect is a crucial aspect as this can be a light weight component which takes care of this feature


Customer retention

Customer retention and customer referral plays an important role in the growth of the company and we would like to retain customers by offering value based services which will help them in their respective vertical

This should increase the quality of the product as well as distinguish the product for different verticals


Marketing Analysis

Technology assessment

Since the product is based upon open source, reliability and extensions in the future can be easily done.

The basic backbone technology is platform independent and can work unconstrained in different platforms

And there is also a wide variety of integration and sophistication possible by module wise integration. So integrating other modules and open source software with the package may result in an increased scope for the product as the value of the product can be extended beyond just being a search engine.

An example of this would be integrating WEBDAV which permits remote WEB Based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and hence will help in content management.


Competitive Analysis

Many companies are into the same foray and competition is a key area which we have to overcome.

But the enormity of the market allows coplayers to exist if they are able to adapt the product to respective environments.

Companies into this field

1) Google-Mini
2) Search Blox
3) Verity


Quantitative Analysis

Win/Loss Analysis
The Win loss analysis is based on the requirement that we break even and generate a 20 % earning on top of it.



Will have to do a technical analysis doing a justification here. But the chances of doing the above thing is a 70 to 30 (win to loss) based on a general market scenario



Product Strategy

The product should offer a unique USP.

Currently the USP when compared to that of competitors is the pricing and the ease of deployment. But in the future these two alone should not be selling point.

As we discussed above in the above points, the key will be selling the product and its services.

Services in the sense, setting up of a good network topology and add ons in terms of other tools along with which the full functionality of the product can be explored.




Product Planning

User personas – The end clients will be people with no exposure to technology with only the know how of the fundamentals of internet surfing .

Only the administrator is a person required to possess a reasonable degree of technical knowldege which will help him pick up the configuration aspects of the tool.

A somewhat a basic overview of the fundamentals would help him in configuring the product

We visualize a system administrator allocating a small share of his time to configure the product and get it working.

Product contract

Again is it end user license agreement and support agreements? Don’t have an idea .Should fill it up

Release milestones

We are still in a phase where we look forward to doing releases every 2 months which should offer additional features and advanced functionality.

Program Strategy

Buyer Personas

The top most things on the mind of the buyer would be the performance and security aspects. There can be a wide deal of skepticism over adopting the tool.

Advertising the tool over mail can also be a difficult issue as the user reception wud be different.

So the mindset of the customer should be changed to adopt this tool.




Market Messages

Launch Plan

The launch plan will involve a trial evaluation plan at the end of which the customer can make an informed decision about the product

Lead Generation

Sales Readiness

Collateral and Sales Tools

The tool can be installed with other tools which act as addons for exploiting the maximum feature of the tool. It can be used along with a LDAP server which takes care of the security aspects. Other aspects like ftp server can be deployed to use the maximum feature of the tool.


Presentations and Demos
t
The presentations and demos have been prepared with a view to highlight the Return on Investment which the organisation will reap out of adopting the tool . These highlight the comprehensive feature sets of the tool

White papers

The need for search has been compiled from the case studies of a few internet research companies.

Competitive Write Up

Channel Support

Product support will be done through emails and to an extent through telephone support based upon the request of the customer.
Specific Service Level Agreements will be reached upon based upon the kind of support requested by the customer.

Special Calls

Depending upon the nature of the client, special calls will be made to ensure that the customer is advised of a solution (either hardware or software) which will suit his requirements. This has to been done taking into consideration the network topology at the customers end.


Event support

The strategy has to be mended according to client needs. There is a need for flexibe plan which can be extensible as well as be the right solution for the client. In pursuing this goal, care has to be taken that marketing requirements are satisfied and goals adhered to.

Answer Desk

Answer Desk . It will be more directed via email operations.

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