Hello and welcome! I’m John Dragoon, Novell’s Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer and I’m delighted you’ve made it this far. With over 35.3 million blogs in the world (according to Technorati), it’s hard to get anyone to notice these days and I, for one, take your time and the choices you make quite seriously. I guess you could say it’s an occupational hazard. With all these blogs in existence and one new one popping up every second of the day, one could easily conclude the world doesn’t need yet another set of musings from some IT worker seeking to flex his or her literary muscle. It’s a fair point but my 22 years of high technology experience suggests that those who live, work and play in high technology care as much, if not more, about the conversations occurring in the marketplace, how they are sold, marketed and serviced then the underlying technology itself.
Peter Drucker, the well-regarded management consultant and popular writer, concluded long ago that the business enterprise had two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. Frankly, there are a lot of blogs focusing on the technical aspects of our industry and they are far more qualified then I to do so. My colleague and Novell’s Chief Technology Officer, Jeff Jaffe, has already been writing about the marketplace implications of various technologies and I encourage you to give his blog a read if you haven’t already. I intend to complement Jeff’s views with a dialog about how technologies enter the market place and how we want to be informed about our choices. Your comments and views are critical to this conversation. Let’s get started.
Many of you who visit our website are in the IT industry or are in some way connected to its vast ecosystem. You could be a software developer, IT architect, consultant or be in marketing or sales. You could also be a part of the sizable group of thought leaders and pundits; analysts, press, professional “guru”. The $1 trillion plus technology industry is, in fact, so big we’re not even sure how big “it” is. A well respected industry pundit guessed back in 2000 that by 2002 all global information technology spending would surpass $2.4 trillion by 2002. Well, 2002 has come and gone and the industry actually shrank a little by 2002 and (again depending on who you listen to) is now well north of $1 trillion once again and growing.
Interesting, but what does this have to do with marketing? Well, in an industry where a well-respected pundit can be off in his projection on industry size by a mere trillion $, is it no wonder marketing is a somewhat inexact science? Today the industry sits at between $1 and $1.5 trillion. Depends on whether you include telecom, and a few other adjacent sectors, but it’s big no doubt. That much we can agree on. Assume the average IT player spends about 5% of sales on marketing (trade shows, events, product marketing, advertising, PR, etc.). That’s annual marketing spend of between $50- $75 billion per year, maybe more.
So the paradox is this. How can an industry that spends so much money on marketing be arguably so bad at it? Well, part of the answer is in the nature of our business. In the consumer world, for example, change comes slowly and products, styles and tastes can weather the test of time rather well. Take the ubiquitous Campbell Soup “red and white” Tomato Soup can. A while back, Campbell Soup company updated its famous package—so famous artist Andy Warhol once made it the subject of one of his most notable paintings. The package was updated in a significant way for the first time in about 100 years. That’s not a knock on Campbell Soup, but more of a testimony to the staying power of strong brands and associated identities with supermarket products.
Turn to the IT field, anybody have any 100 year old examples? Of course not—the industry didn’t exist 100 years ago. My company, Novell, is about 23 years old and has seen hundreds of players come and go even in that relatively short time. And therein lies the paradox and the challenge. Things change so fast in our space that you need to keep pace with change to survive and thrive. At the same time you need to keep pace but also you need to change at the RIGHT pace. Change too fast and you can outrun a trend before it even catches on. Keep pace too slow and you can miss a transformational technology completely and suffer the consequences.
As an example, take Linux and open source. Many were infatuated with Linux and other open source technologies in the early years. Here the “early” years are between 1996 and 2000. Then the bandwagon started to fill-up but there was some disappointment with the technology and progress being made. Why? Remember the 2.2 Linux kernel. The technologists reading this know better than I the early versions of Linux weren’t workload ready, scalable and manageable enough. As the technology got better; and partners, developers and vendors all started to make it a priority – customers started to embrace it. Not too many companies worth their salt consider Linux and open source a “skunkworks” project any more. Several of our customers here at Novell are, in fact, standardizing on it. In fact it has become so powerful that many of these same customers have asked us to keep quiet about exactly how powerful a tool is has become for them in their respective business. This is a blog not an advertisement for Novell so I’ll refrain from rambling on about how our solutions can help harness the power of open source technologies – but we can and do.
So back to the paradox. This $1 trillion + industry that spends tens of billions on marketing. And yet, most agree, marketing is rarely a strong suit among players in this space. Heck, in my travels as Novell’s head marketing guy I get plenty of feedback and advice on our own marketing and not all of it is good. So, how do we see it getting better. Mostly it’s about placing bets, taking risks – intelligent ones – and then having the tenacity to ride out the inevitable waves of euphoria followed by some stretches of despair and disappointment. It’s also about treating your audience, your customers and prospects, with the respect they deserve. The market’s brutally efficient when it comes to sniffing out the bull factor. I frankly believe our industry does a poor job at the “respect” thing.
No, unlike the classic Campbell Tomato Soup can,we don’t have 100 years to decide how the technology infrastructure race will end. We have placed our bets. We call that bet – OK- one sales pitch here- “Software for the Open Enterprise”. It’s a world where, imagine this, the customer decides which combination of open standards based commercial software and/or open source software they will use to build their software infrastructure. Why not save money. Why not create a more simple, secure, stable and integrated environment. So far it seems to be working. Not because I say so but because our customers do. But remember the IT industry marketing paradox- lot’s of money spent, it’s a huge industry with a giant ecosystem of pundits, researchers, and “gurus”. And yet, many bets taken and marketing campaigns launched end up being short lived.
We are not going to let that happen with our Software for the Open Enterprise approach. While the returns are early, we’re seeing it work. We don’t own the trend nor did we start it. But we’re a player in it, and we’re in it for keeps.
If you have made it this far, my sincere thanks. Above all I want to hear from you. What do you like or dislike about IT marketing? What are your pet peeves? Where do you see the industry going? I promise not all future blogs will be this long…but every journey has to start with a single step. Take a step with me.
John
