The Recession Casts a Long Shadow Over AIIM 2009

Right on, Ron. I was not at the event, but I can imagine myself saying just that. Sometimes at events like this one, I walk the tradeshow floor and ask the people manning the booth this simple question:

"What problems does your product solve?"

It is amazing how many people stumble on this!!

Ron,

I think your argument above would apply to the larger so-called "enterprise" vendors, however, many VARS, dealers, and document conversion companies adopted the start small strategy years ago and continue to do very well in these challenging times. Proof of concept is nothing new to this group of solution providers and they continue to be successful because they do in fact show an easy ROI on their departmental and workgroup solutions - whether they are an on premise installation or a web-hosted solution.

Interestingly, in my AIIM A to Z presentation each day on the show floor, I reviewed all 170 exhibitors and not a single one provided any material in advance that said "This is the problem we solve." Guess there are still some people out there that haven't read David's books yet!

Hi David:

Thanks for the comment. I'm going to stick that question in my hip pocket and ask that the next time I'm at a conference. Should make an interesting column.

Ron

Bob,
It's amazing how few people can answer that question as David pointed out. You would think it would be on the top of mind wouldn't you? Thanks for the comment.

Ron

I agree with you all in regards to "What problem does your product solve?" In fact, as Director of Marketing for Word-Tech I am asked this question daily regarding our DocMinder product. It is one of the most valid questions you can ask any software vendor or reseller. As opposed to "What's it do" question. I enjoy answering what my product does, because it's quite simple. DocMinder allows you to set a tickler to a document and forget it. No more chasing others down for input, no more forgetting important dates and certainly no more reminding individuals of deadlines - DocMinder will do this for you.

With that said, I would have enjoyed attending AIIM 2009. But more so I would have enjoyed answering your epic question of "What problems does your product solve?"

"What problems does your product solve?" is OK for some vendors, but runs into problems with others.

In some cases, it is overly simplistic. What answer does the vendor give when the vendor has multiple products targeted at solving many significantly different customer problems?

Replying "Our current 500+ customers are solving several hundred discrete business problems using our 70+ different products we offer; shall I list them all for you?" usually doesn't result in a "Yes, please." :-)

So we try and determine what the person who walked up to our booth does and what issues they are currently facing; that narrows down what we solutions and products we tell them about.

I agree with Ron. Our customers are still funding and implementing IT projects, but they must show a quick (usually 12-18 month) ROI to move forward.

Thanks,
Stephen D. Poe
VP, Product Management
Crawford Technologies

The emailed material (reproduced below) we provided, in advance, for Bob Zagami's AIIM A to Z presentation detailed a number of examples of "the problems we solve" with our highly custmizable enterprise search development platform.

Featured Product: Thunderstone's Texis RDBMS optimized for full-text search

* TEXIS, the innovative development platform behind Thunderstone's entire line of enterprise search products (including Thunderstone Search Appliances,) lets users and developers incorporate their own unique knowledge and expertise into customized search solutions that easily integrate with other applications. It intelligently queries and manages databases containing natural language text, numeric values, standard data types, geographic information, images, video, audio and other payload data.

* TEXIS supports zero-latency data insertion, providing immediate search availability of new or rapidly-changing data without waiting for scheduled index updates. It powers many diverse, real-time and integrated applications such as message profiling & handling, image library management, help-desk support, online news retrieval, business intelligence, research libraries, litigation support and eCommerce search engines for online catalogs.

* Thunderstone's TEXIS is the only search engine developed from the ground up as a fully integrated SQL RDBMS optimized for full-text search, and it's the only known relational database that can store and search text documents of unlimited size within standard database tables. It efficiently sorts/groups search results by any field(s) in the data and can quickly sort tens of thousands of hits or more.

Note: We've also always provided significant ROI advantages that typically include a 40 to 60 percent upfront savings (all Thunderstone products come with one-time, perpetual licenses) and even more dramatic year-to-year TCO savings compared to our enterprise search industry competitors.

Peter,
Thanks for the comment, but that sure sounds a laundry lists of features to me. :-)

Ron,

While Bob Zagami requested 3 - 5 bulleted points on one featured product from each AIIM exhibitor, which we provided -- visitors to Thunderstone's booth at the show got to hear actual success stories (followed up with case studies emailed to them, if desired) about customers who deployed Thunderstone search solutions in environments similar to their own. We shared details about the specific challenges overcome (from initial proof-of-concept demo to custom prototype development, free on-site evaluation, implementation methodology, ongoing tech support, etc.) plus the actual timelines, investments, management/user responses and other factors that each prospect deemed most relevant to their own particular needs and decision-making process.

Peter Thusat
Communication Director and CMO
Thunderstone Software LLC

Peter,
I was being flip. If you presented customer cases with business problems and solutions, you were doing it the right way.

Ron