Thank you Professor Smith!
It has been a great semester learning from you. I will always remember and recall all those interesting techniques, patterns, and discussions that you have mentioned in the class.
Suggestion: Less puzzle games, more stimulation games. I know you are an expert in films as well, do you think it is possible that you bring in more films to the class and share them with the students? I really liked it when you played us those TV drama clips!
Happy holidays!
Friday, May 8, 2009
Symantec Promotional Plan (Third Major Blog)
Promotional Plan
Memo
To: Symantec Healthcare Industry Solutions Manager: John Lazarus
From: William Chen
Date: 5/8/2009
Re: Strategy in Promoting Symantec Vontu after the Acquisition
_________________________________________________________________________
Symantec has been established for almost 30 years, and it has gained its reputation in many different software industries. It went IPO in 1989, and it now has a market capacity of 12.22 billion and 17 thousands employees working globally in 40 countries. The company is very subtle, so a lot of people may not even be aware of its existence. However, almost everyone that has some kinds of basic computer experiences would know or heard of Norton Antivirus. Unsurprisingly, the developer of this famous antivirus program is Symantec.
Norton Antivirus is popular and widely accepted by many computer consumers; yet, that is only part of what Symantec actually does. Symantec focuses on helping customers protect their infrastructure, information and interactions by delivering software and services providing IT security, data privacy and compliance. Currently, the company is servicing more than 99% of the Fortune 1000 companies and possessing more than 400 patents worldwide.
A year and half ago, Symantec acquired the biggest healthcare data-loss-prevention (DLP) giant Vontu. The company is aiming to take a big share of the healthcare data industry; thus, it went under negotiation and finally bought out Vontu for 350 million dollars. Because Symantec is new into the field, it comes to a bottleneck of how the company is going to promote itself to medium to large hospitals and clinics with 200 beds or more in the US market.
In this advisory memo, I will focus on analyzing the market and the company ,and come up with a step-by-step promotional strategies that will help Symantec to sell itself by offering the most comprehensive protocol coverage with Vontu DLP program.
_________________________________________________________________________
Company Goals:
Symantec’s Mission:
Symantec seeks to become the leader in security, data privacy, and compliance in Healthcare. Vontu DLP supports this mission by offering the most comprehensive protocol coverage on the market, including the monitoring and securing the web traffic. It also allows organizations to protect intellectual property, demonstrate compliance, and guard their brand.
Expected Penetration:
Symantec is expecting to have a $30M annual booking for this product from Healthcare, as well as to increase market awareness by 40%. Assuming the price of this product is 150K, the company expects to sell 200 units of this product.
Marketing Budget:
Market budget will be determined by sales. I would recommend re-investing 10% of gross profit towards the marketing budget thereby allowing the marketing budget to be directly pegged to the success of Vontu.
Industry Overview:
The Need of the Industry:
Companies, especially hospitals, need to stop the confidential data from being sent outside their organization to ensure compliance with data security and privacy policies. Vontu Data Loss Prevention will give companies the ability to ensure that confidential data regarding their customers and employees is protected.
Market Potential:
In the U.S., there are 6013 hospitals, and 1629 hospitals with 200+ beds. Across endpoint, network, and storage system comprises of approximately 60% of the market share. The data loss prevention market is worth around $250 million in 2008.
Competition:
Many other firms exist in the DLP market, ranging from small firms like GLB and Code Green to big companies such as McAfee, Trend Micro, Websense, and Tiblus, a company which RSA, a sub-division of EMC, has bought. The problem with these companies is that none of them is comprehensive. Most of the products from these companies can only provide one or two needs. The solution to this problem is to create a product that would cover all customers’ needs. Vontu, now part of Symantec, has already occupied 60% of the market share and introduced its Vontu DLP 8.0 program that fulfills different areas of needs.
Future:
As cost of data breach continues to rise, more companies are going to be aware of the importance of DLP. Once Symantec Vontu DLP 8.0 program has completely entered the market, it will continue to improve and ensure that the program, with its 3 dynamic sections
--network, storage, and endpoint-- strives to satisfy customer needs. Most importantly, Symantec Vontu will keep up with its customer service with all hospitals, as well as many of the Fortune companies. Lastly, it will continue to maintain its status as market leader.
Possible Promotional Strategies:
In order to achieve the expected penetration, Symantec will employ the following strategies:
Corporate Image: Symantec will connect its corporate image with Vontu. Symantec Vontu will be viewed as the leader in security for hospital data privacy, security, and compliance. Symantec Vontu will (1) assist organizations in the protection of their confidential and proprietary data, (2) focus on healthcare providers (i.e. medium to large hospitals), and (3) provide complete data loss prevention solutions as a trusted and experience company. Symantec Vontu has excellent corporate image, leveraging it will be essential in achieving the goal of increased awareness.
Position: Market Targets (lock): Large and mid-size hospitals (200 – 500+ beds) will be primarily targeted, due to the wealth of information they have that is susceptible to breaches. Product Image (key): Symantec Vontu will be positioned as a complete solution to data loss.
Symantec’s competitors are beginning to produce more “complete” data loss prevention solutions, which in turn may potentially hurt Vontu’s uniqueness. Therefore, to combat this, Symantec should focus its positioning on “quality”, “experience”, and “trust”.
Vontu should also aim to differentiate itself via the peripheral components of their product; for example, customer service.
Product: Comprehensive Symantec Vontu DLP program is needed and will be provided here.
Price: To protect Symantec’s “leader” positioning, it should utilize the “leader” pricing strategy. It should also utilize “volume pricing” and “bundle pricing”. These strategies will benefit Symantec. The price of Symantec Vontu is dependent on the amount of beds in the hospital and the number of hours resellers need to work with hospitals on implementation and maintenance. The price of Symantec Vontu’s DLP program should be charged at between $25,000 and $500,000 with the service cost being $120 per hour and 50 to 200 hours are needed.
Distribution: A direct sales force will be the primary distribution technique. A limited amount of the product will be available to resellers, who will need to be highly trained. Due to the complexity of setting up a complete system such as Symantec’s data loss prevention, Symantec should utilize a direct-to-end-buyer marketing strategy. In other words, Symantec needs to directly sell its products to the buyers in USA.
Promotion: Events such as trade shows (for example, ANI:Healthcare Finance Conference), seminars, and webinars will provide a focused and detailed promotion. A newsletter mailed to those ,who have expressed interest, will help to maintain interest and awareness. A website is available online, with detailed information available on the compliance, analyst research, and others, which requires a user to provide his or her name and email address in order to access these documents. Users’ info will allow Symantec to keep in contact with those who would be interested in this information. Ads will be run in Healthcare Financial Management and Hospitals & Health Networks, two healthcare-management magazines.
Market Information System (MIS): Constant monitoring of market needs is a requirement for success. In order to collect information from the marketplace, Symantec is going to focus on booked revenues, opportunities, qualified leads, leads, customer satisfaction (or NPS), average deal size, and sales cycle.
Conclusion (Recommendation):
To be successful in marketing the company, Symantec requires identifying its goal, understanding the industry situation, and providing comprehensive promotional strategies. Most importantly, Symantec needs all the steps and possible strategies listed above in the promotional strategy section. Marketing is incomplete when one of the building blocks of strategies (corporate image, positioning, etc.) is missing. Marketing, especially promotion, requires companies to have a full picture. There are may be other possible routes to success in promoting Symantec, but if all the strategies above are followed, the company should be able to give itself a unique opportunity to satisfy its goals/missions.
Memo
To: Symantec Healthcare Industry Solutions Manager: John Lazarus
From: William Chen
Date: 5/8/2009
Re: Strategy in Promoting Symantec Vontu after the Acquisition
_________________________________________________________________________
Symantec has been established for almost 30 years, and it has gained its reputation in many different software industries. It went IPO in 1989, and it now has a market capacity of 12.22 billion and 17 thousands employees working globally in 40 countries. The company is very subtle, so a lot of people may not even be aware of its existence. However, almost everyone that has some kinds of basic computer experiences would know or heard of Norton Antivirus. Unsurprisingly, the developer of this famous antivirus program is Symantec.
Norton Antivirus is popular and widely accepted by many computer consumers; yet, that is only part of what Symantec actually does. Symantec focuses on helping customers protect their infrastructure, information and interactions by delivering software and services providing IT security, data privacy and compliance. Currently, the company is servicing more than 99% of the Fortune 1000 companies and possessing more than 400 patents worldwide.
A year and half ago, Symantec acquired the biggest healthcare data-loss-prevention (DLP) giant Vontu. The company is aiming to take a big share of the healthcare data industry; thus, it went under negotiation and finally bought out Vontu for 350 million dollars. Because Symantec is new into the field, it comes to a bottleneck of how the company is going to promote itself to medium to large hospitals and clinics with 200 beds or more in the US market.
In this advisory memo, I will focus on analyzing the market and the company ,and come up with a step-by-step promotional strategies that will help Symantec to sell itself by offering the most comprehensive protocol coverage with Vontu DLP program.
_________________________________________________________________________
Company Goals:
Symantec’s Mission:
Symantec seeks to become the leader in security, data privacy, and compliance in Healthcare. Vontu DLP supports this mission by offering the most comprehensive protocol coverage on the market, including the monitoring and securing the web traffic. It also allows organizations to protect intellectual property, demonstrate compliance, and guard their brand.
Expected Penetration:
Symantec is expecting to have a $30M annual booking for this product from Healthcare, as well as to increase market awareness by 40%. Assuming the price of this product is 150K, the company expects to sell 200 units of this product.
Marketing Budget:
Market budget will be determined by sales. I would recommend re-investing 10% of gross profit towards the marketing budget thereby allowing the marketing budget to be directly pegged to the success of Vontu.
Industry Overview:
The Need of the Industry:
Companies, especially hospitals, need to stop the confidential data from being sent outside their organization to ensure compliance with data security and privacy policies. Vontu Data Loss Prevention will give companies the ability to ensure that confidential data regarding their customers and employees is protected.
Market Potential:
In the U.S., there are 6013 hospitals, and 1629 hospitals with 200+ beds. Across endpoint, network, and storage system comprises of approximately 60% of the market share. The data loss prevention market is worth around $250 million in 2008.
Competition:
Many other firms exist in the DLP market, ranging from small firms like GLB and Code Green to big companies such as McAfee, Trend Micro, Websense, and Tiblus, a company which RSA, a sub-division of EMC, has bought. The problem with these companies is that none of them is comprehensive. Most of the products from these companies can only provide one or two needs. The solution to this problem is to create a product that would cover all customers’ needs. Vontu, now part of Symantec, has already occupied 60% of the market share and introduced its Vontu DLP 8.0 program that fulfills different areas of needs.
Future:
As cost of data breach continues to rise, more companies are going to be aware of the importance of DLP. Once Symantec Vontu DLP 8.0 program has completely entered the market, it will continue to improve and ensure that the program, with its 3 dynamic sections
--network, storage, and endpoint-- strives to satisfy customer needs. Most importantly, Symantec Vontu will keep up with its customer service with all hospitals, as well as many of the Fortune companies. Lastly, it will continue to maintain its status as market leader.
Possible Promotional Strategies:
In order to achieve the expected penetration, Symantec will employ the following strategies:
Corporate Image: Symantec will connect its corporate image with Vontu. Symantec Vontu will be viewed as the leader in security for hospital data privacy, security, and compliance. Symantec Vontu will (1) assist organizations in the protection of their confidential and proprietary data, (2) focus on healthcare providers (i.e. medium to large hospitals), and (3) provide complete data loss prevention solutions as a trusted and experience company. Symantec Vontu has excellent corporate image, leveraging it will be essential in achieving the goal of increased awareness.
Position: Market Targets (lock): Large and mid-size hospitals (200 – 500+ beds) will be primarily targeted, due to the wealth of information they have that is susceptible to breaches. Product Image (key): Symantec Vontu will be positioned as a complete solution to data loss.
Symantec’s competitors are beginning to produce more “complete” data loss prevention solutions, which in turn may potentially hurt Vontu’s uniqueness. Therefore, to combat this, Symantec should focus its positioning on “quality”, “experience”, and “trust”.
Vontu should also aim to differentiate itself via the peripheral components of their product; for example, customer service.
Product: Comprehensive Symantec Vontu DLP program is needed and will be provided here.
Price: To protect Symantec’s “leader” positioning, it should utilize the “leader” pricing strategy. It should also utilize “volume pricing” and “bundle pricing”. These strategies will benefit Symantec. The price of Symantec Vontu is dependent on the amount of beds in the hospital and the number of hours resellers need to work with hospitals on implementation and maintenance. The price of Symantec Vontu’s DLP program should be charged at between $25,000 and $500,000 with the service cost being $120 per hour and 50 to 200 hours are needed.
Distribution: A direct sales force will be the primary distribution technique. A limited amount of the product will be available to resellers, who will need to be highly trained. Due to the complexity of setting up a complete system such as Symantec’s data loss prevention, Symantec should utilize a direct-to-end-buyer marketing strategy. In other words, Symantec needs to directly sell its products to the buyers in USA.
Promotion: Events such as trade shows (for example, ANI:Healthcare Finance Conference), seminars, and webinars will provide a focused and detailed promotion. A newsletter mailed to those ,who have expressed interest, will help to maintain interest and awareness. A website is available online, with detailed information available on the compliance, analyst research, and others, which requires a user to provide his or her name and email address in order to access these documents. Users’ info will allow Symantec to keep in contact with those who would be interested in this information. Ads will be run in Healthcare Financial Management and Hospitals & Health Networks, two healthcare-management magazines.
Market Information System (MIS): Constant monitoring of market needs is a requirement for success. In order to collect information from the marketplace, Symantec is going to focus on booked revenues, opportunities, qualified leads, leads, customer satisfaction (or NPS), average deal size, and sales cycle.
Conclusion (Recommendation):
To be successful in marketing the company, Symantec requires identifying its goal, understanding the industry situation, and providing comprehensive promotional strategies. Most importantly, Symantec needs all the steps and possible strategies listed above in the promotional strategy section. Marketing is incomplete when one of the building blocks of strategies (corporate image, positioning, etc.) is missing. Marketing, especially promotion, requires companies to have a full picture. There are may be other possible routes to success in promoting Symantec, but if all the strategies above are followed, the company should be able to give itself a unique opportunity to satisfy its goals/missions.
Faithful in Sony
I agree with the author that Sony was a pioneer in its field for many years. It was the number one and had been a revolutionist in creating its products including, Sony Walkman, U-Matic and Beta Video, and Playstation. Yet, I don't quite agree with Diaz that Sony's design is a bland now and no longer the "world's firsts." If Diaz opinion were to be true, then that should also be applied to many other companies or giants in the field today. How come I don't see Nitendo coming out with a new game widget either, besides the Wii that everyone has been playing for a while?
The author forgets to compare Sony with many other companies out there today. During this economic crisis, it is hard to imagine companies will still have the budgets to create something ground-breaking. It's true they should, if they really want to stand out and make a profit especially during this period of time. However, reality is always hitting companies harder than they think. Plus, to a degree, the author is very subject in his view that he didn't talk about how Sony is still a pioneer in creating portable video-game widget like PSP and many other games. Moreover, Sony is still the ground-breaking company in providing better graphics with HDTV and Blue-Ray supported PS3. Lastly, the author probably didn't check out some of the Sony Ericsson phones lately because they are cool with lots of functions than expected.
Though regression is seem almost everywhere in every industry today, things will get better, at least we are not in another Great Depression. Rather than thinking gloomy, it's better to have more faith. This is only the beginning of the recession, perhaps a year down the road, Sony will come out with something crazy if it wants to save itself from this market turmoil.
Hollywoodland
Looking at the map of LA, about 10 miles northwest of Los Angeles, a city named Hollywood is found. Across the globe, many people know the importance of this city. It is famous for its cinema industry, where both Universal City Studios and Warner Brothers Studios are located. Many movies are filmed and delivered to the rest of the world from this city every year. And not far away from these studios, the famous big white sign of HOLLYWOOD is also seen on the mountain. People, including many of us living in Los Angeles area, seem to think this city is extremely busy and noisy, especially around Hollywood Blvd.. But, it is not until today, I discovered a little bit more about this city. First of all, the city was originally called Hollywoodland, not Hollywood. People adopted to the name Hollywood after a mudslide that had caused the letters “land” to disappear from the HOLLYWOODLAND sign. Second, Hollywood is not only a place for partying and clubbing, most importantly, it is and can be a wonderful place to live. The designs of houses there are unique, pretty, and creative. Most houses possess beautiful views of the greater LA area, and the actual neighborhood that lies northeast of the freeway 101 is very quiet and clean. For the first time, my perception of Hollywood has changed. Next time, perhaps when you want go to Hollywood, try driving further west or north a little bit, maybe you'll find yourself in a very different Hollywoodland.
Salesforce: CRM (Second Major Blog Post)
Recently, Fortune Magazine published an article about how the big software company, Salesforce, hits its stride. The article was interesting enough to catch some IT people’s eyes when flipping through the magazine. Not saying I am an IT guy, but an article about Salesforce is definitely something that many would be aware of. It is one of the fastest growing companies at the turn of the century with today’s market capacity hitting 5.46 billion and stock market price of $43.6 a share. Very hard to imagine, a decade ago this company didn’t even exist, but now it’s being one of the best 100 companies to work for.
In 1999, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, announced that software industry was dead. Earlier that year, he quit his job at Oracle, another well known software company, and decided to start his own company: Salesforce. Benioff believed the industry was not providing what the customers truly wanted; sooner or later, people would end up searching for something else to replace the industry. So, he wanted to search for a new key that would satisfy the consumer’s demand-lock. As a result, he came up with the idea of letting companies to rent the software instead of buying it. The software that Benioff was aiming to provide is a web-based program that manages customer relationship and data. Everyone was able to access the program through the use of the Internet, as long as one has registered and paid to be a subscriber. The idea was unheard of, but it worked. The company is making a billion dollars a year and growing at a rate of 60% per year. Benioff successfully provided companies and business people with what they have always been looking for.
People like Salesforce, and many reasons contribute to its strength and success. The first thing that people like about Salesforce.com is its convenience. Staffs in companies can operate Salesforce.com’s programs easily through the use of the Internet. In other words, people don’t have to be in offices to work on their projects or to receive services; as long as they are connected to the Internet, Salesforce’s on-demand services can be provided, which is extremely convenient.
Second of all, ever since 1999 when the company was founded, Salesforce has been expanding dramatically. It now has more than 3300 employees working for the company. On top of that, it has a large customer base of 55,400 and over 1.5 million subscribers.
Salesforce provides many different programs that satisfy customers’ demand. Some of these programs include the most frequently used CRM (Customer Relationship Management), AppExchange, Force.com Platform, etc. Today, these programs are called “software as a service.” To further enhance its programs, Salesforce allows users or customers to customize their applications and software.
As a result of its success, Salesforce is now ranked 43rd on the list of the largest software companies. It is no longer an American company, but a global one. It has regional headquarters in Dublin, Singapore, Tokyo, serving Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Moreover, it has offices in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney and San Mateo. Also, the software and application that they provide are also available in many other languages.
The strongest strength of Salesforce mainly comes from the passionate professions that operate and invest in this company. Some of these people include former executive Marc Benioff, (founder of Salesforce), Larry Ellison (co-founder and CEO of Oracle), and Halsey Minor (founder of CNET). These people give the company a very strong background.
A lot of people are investing in this company, and they continue to have good words about its success. Simply looking at the company’s most recent SEC 10K report filed in January this year, it is impressive. Based on a recent financial analysis done by Morgan Stanley, the result of the company’s previous quarter’s revenue was, in fact, unexpectedly higher than predicted, especially during this recessionary period of the economy. Although the numbers are doing well, there are many other factors that start to worry the investors and users of the CRM software. It is true that this new idea is hot, and people are interested about it, but people are also wondering how long this hot idea is actually going to last when they start to spot some crucial problems with this company.
There are a lot of problems with Salesforce, but the obvious one is its company’s software demos. Many users that have used or experienced Salesforce’s software complained that the demos are nice and make the software seemed to be something easy to use, but in reality, the software is complicated and hard to operate. Hence, it is to say that the demos give a false image of what the actual software is like.
Second of all, Salesforce, like many other vendors, is believed to have a very high turnover rate. Because switching cost is low and hardly any restrictions exist, subscribers can easily cancel their subscriptions.
Third, though customizing function of the software is allowed and given, for small business owners, customization is costly. Furthermore, even if people do buy the customizing functions, once again, it turns out to be hard to use.
Another big problem with Salesforce is that it doesn’t have any service level agreement with its customers. So, the company has the right to shut down its servers whenever it wants to. Though the company will shut down its servers randomly, if it does, for sure it will bring a lot of troubles and losses for its customers. Customers have complained that outages and downtime occurred before.
The second biggest problem with Salesforce is its customer service. It has been noted by many people that the company’s sales representatives are overly aggressive and tend to think they know better than their customers. Especially when the sales representatives are informed that they are no longer being considered, they tend to perform some outrageous revengeful actions towards the customers by filing some law suits or complaining to people in higher positions of the customer’s company that the project management team was not making the right decision to choose Salesforce. This kind of situation happened many times as if that was the company’s routine behavior. In essence, the company’s sales representatives’ arrogance has transformed into unethical behaviors.
The biggest problem with Salesforce.com is that the company’s strategy is short term and mismatched. The company likes to boost its sales and revenues by keeping stock price high, but in long run, this doesn’t really help big enterprises. And, the company defines itself as helping customers to manage their customer relationship database, but the “corporate DNA” is still about pushing sales and getting as many customers as possible, not exactly helping.
Consequently, the company’s success should start to become a question mark for people who have truly looked beyond the content in magazine pages. Putting aside all the successful stories or numbers that have been heard or out-performed, the company’s sales teams’ unethical attitude and its unfit strategy are definitely not going to make the company survive in the next 10 or 15 years. I wouldn’t say people who are buying or using its service today are naïve, because it is understandable that this is a new product strategy and everybody wants to give it a try. But, people are rational; therefore, it would be hard to imagine that customers will want to go back to Salesforce again.
Salesforce is “the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud computing,” but how ironic its sales-force team does not even understand how to manage its customer relationship. Four years ago, there was a major competitor in the field named Sieble System; it functioned and provided something very much like Salesforce. But, at the end, it was bought out by Oracle for 5.9 billion dollars. So, if Salesforce continues the way it is today, it is not hard to predict its future.
In 1999, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, announced that software industry was dead. Earlier that year, he quit his job at Oracle, another well known software company, and decided to start his own company: Salesforce. Benioff believed the industry was not providing what the customers truly wanted; sooner or later, people would end up searching for something else to replace the industry. So, he wanted to search for a new key that would satisfy the consumer’s demand-lock. As a result, he came up with the idea of letting companies to rent the software instead of buying it. The software that Benioff was aiming to provide is a web-based program that manages customer relationship and data. Everyone was able to access the program through the use of the Internet, as long as one has registered and paid to be a subscriber. The idea was unheard of, but it worked. The company is making a billion dollars a year and growing at a rate of 60% per year. Benioff successfully provided companies and business people with what they have always been looking for.
People like Salesforce, and many reasons contribute to its strength and success. The first thing that people like about Salesforce.com is its convenience. Staffs in companies can operate Salesforce.com’s programs easily through the use of the Internet. In other words, people don’t have to be in offices to work on their projects or to receive services; as long as they are connected to the Internet, Salesforce’s on-demand services can be provided, which is extremely convenient.
Second of all, ever since 1999 when the company was founded, Salesforce has been expanding dramatically. It now has more than 3300 employees working for the company. On top of that, it has a large customer base of 55,400 and over 1.5 million subscribers.
Salesforce provides many different programs that satisfy customers’ demand. Some of these programs include the most frequently used CRM (Customer Relationship Management), AppExchange, Force.com Platform, etc. Today, these programs are called “software as a service.” To further enhance its programs, Salesforce allows users or customers to customize their applications and software.
As a result of its success, Salesforce is now ranked 43rd on the list of the largest software companies. It is no longer an American company, but a global one. It has regional headquarters in Dublin, Singapore, Tokyo, serving Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Moreover, it has offices in Toronto, New York, London, Sydney and San Mateo. Also, the software and application that they provide are also available in many other languages.
The strongest strength of Salesforce mainly comes from the passionate professions that operate and invest in this company. Some of these people include former executive Marc Benioff, (founder of Salesforce), Larry Ellison (co-founder and CEO of Oracle), and Halsey Minor (founder of CNET). These people give the company a very strong background.
A lot of people are investing in this company, and they continue to have good words about its success. Simply looking at the company’s most recent SEC 10K report filed in January this year, it is impressive. Based on a recent financial analysis done by Morgan Stanley, the result of the company’s previous quarter’s revenue was, in fact, unexpectedly higher than predicted, especially during this recessionary period of the economy. Although the numbers are doing well, there are many other factors that start to worry the investors and users of the CRM software. It is true that this new idea is hot, and people are interested about it, but people are also wondering how long this hot idea is actually going to last when they start to spot some crucial problems with this company.
There are a lot of problems with Salesforce, but the obvious one is its company’s software demos. Many users that have used or experienced Salesforce’s software complained that the demos are nice and make the software seemed to be something easy to use, but in reality, the software is complicated and hard to operate. Hence, it is to say that the demos give a false image of what the actual software is like.
Second of all, Salesforce, like many other vendors, is believed to have a very high turnover rate. Because switching cost is low and hardly any restrictions exist, subscribers can easily cancel their subscriptions.
Third, though customizing function of the software is allowed and given, for small business owners, customization is costly. Furthermore, even if people do buy the customizing functions, once again, it turns out to be hard to use.
Another big problem with Salesforce is that it doesn’t have any service level agreement with its customers. So, the company has the right to shut down its servers whenever it wants to. Though the company will shut down its servers randomly, if it does, for sure it will bring a lot of troubles and losses for its customers. Customers have complained that outages and downtime occurred before.
The second biggest problem with Salesforce is its customer service. It has been noted by many people that the company’s sales representatives are overly aggressive and tend to think they know better than their customers. Especially when the sales representatives are informed that they are no longer being considered, they tend to perform some outrageous revengeful actions towards the customers by filing some law suits or complaining to people in higher positions of the customer’s company that the project management team was not making the right decision to choose Salesforce. This kind of situation happened many times as if that was the company’s routine behavior. In essence, the company’s sales representatives’ arrogance has transformed into unethical behaviors.
The biggest problem with Salesforce.com is that the company’s strategy is short term and mismatched. The company likes to boost its sales and revenues by keeping stock price high, but in long run, this doesn’t really help big enterprises. And, the company defines itself as helping customers to manage their customer relationship database, but the “corporate DNA” is still about pushing sales and getting as many customers as possible, not exactly helping.
Consequently, the company’s success should start to become a question mark for people who have truly looked beyond the content in magazine pages. Putting aside all the successful stories or numbers that have been heard or out-performed, the company’s sales teams’ unethical attitude and its unfit strategy are definitely not going to make the company survive in the next 10 or 15 years. I wouldn’t say people who are buying or using its service today are naïve, because it is understandable that this is a new product strategy and everybody wants to give it a try. But, people are rational; therefore, it would be hard to imagine that customers will want to go back to Salesforce again.
Salesforce is “the leader in customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud computing,” but how ironic its sales-force team does not even understand how to manage its customer relationship. Four years ago, there was a major competitor in the field named Sieble System; it functioned and provided something very much like Salesforce. But, at the end, it was bought out by Oracle for 5.9 billion dollars. So, if Salesforce continues the way it is today, it is not hard to predict its future.
Green Green Green: Revised Version
Did you know that according to American Forest & Paper Association (AF&PA), in year 2007, only 56% of all the paper products were recycled? For every ton of paper we use, 17 trees are cut and 50% more water is used. And a ton of paper that is used, we produce an extra 3.3 cubic yards of waste in national's landfill. But, that doesn’t mean our planet will be exploited soon because people aren’t recycling.
Luckily for many of us who are really lazy to recycle, the single-stream technology is out there to save our natural resources. The single-stream technology helps us to recycle when we throw everything into one-single container. And when these one-single containers arrive at the waste management plants, the waste will be sorted by screening devices that separate fiber waste that is needed from the others.
Amazingly, this technology allows people to put all their waste in one-single container instead of separating waste into many different containers --one for paper, one for cans, another one for plastic, etc.
Based on Waste Management Recycle America, single-stream technology has increased its company's recycled volume from a range of 30% to 100%. Yet, only 30% of WM's 105 mills use this technology because this technology is costly. Of course, that doesn’t mean this number won’t grow. Due to uprising issues in global warming and increasing participation in green movements, soon enough, further implementations will definitely occur.
Luckily for many of us who are really lazy to recycle, the single-stream technology is out there to save our natural resources. The single-stream technology helps us to recycle when we throw everything into one-single container. And when these one-single containers arrive at the waste management plants, the waste will be sorted by screening devices that separate fiber waste that is needed from the others.
Amazingly, this technology allows people to put all their waste in one-single container instead of separating waste into many different containers --one for paper, one for cans, another one for plastic, etc.
Based on Waste Management Recycle America, single-stream technology has increased its company's recycled volume from a range of 30% to 100%. Yet, only 30% of WM's 105 mills use this technology because this technology is costly. Of course, that doesn’t mean this number won’t grow. Due to uprising issues in global warming and increasing participation in green movements, soon enough, further implementations will definitely occur.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Did you know?
Amazing YouTube video.
It's beyond interesting. It makes you quite speechless after you watched this video. It makes you wonder what life is about. It's very scary too, because it feels like we are going to be conquered by computers and robots pretty soon!!
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