Search and Content Processing Vendors: Me Too, Me Too
June 23, 2013
We just finished updating a broken Twitter function on the core Overflight system. We will add the fix to the text mining and taxonomy services early next week. Ah, we love Twitter.
In the course of working through the list of companies in Overflight, one of the goslings (pictured below) shared several observations with me. Here they are, and I present them for your intellectual stimulation. Remember. Verify observations, a step which is wise whether the big gosling (me) or a smaller gosling (programmers) generate.
An ArnoldIT-Xenky gosling at rest.
1. Webinars, Webinars, Webinars
According to the coding gosling, most search and content processing vendors are doing webinars. These come in several varieties, like roses I suppose. There is the “sign up and watch” version. There is the “catch us on YouTube or other video hosting service” type. There is the “audio only” either on an existing podcast show like Software Engineering Radio or the company’s tie up with a for fee out.
Is there webinar fatigue? On the part of the company trying to sell software licenses, webinars are apparently an adrenaline-charged sales opportunity. On the attendee side, I know I have webinar fatigue. But webinars won’t be going away any time soon. The cost of in person sales calls, traditional trade shows, and more deep thinking type of marketing are just not compatible with today’s go-go management time allocation calculus. Heck, shooting the breeze with PowerPoints or Keynote slides as visual hooks is a pretty low cost way to get the word out.
Do webinars sell? We have only anecdotal information, but we definitely have first hand experience with sign ups beginning at a good sized number and then after 15 minutes dwindling down to a hearty few nectar sippers.
2. Blogs
Most search and content processing companies have blogs. The problem, according to the goslings, is that most of these blogs are updated on an infrequent and/or irregular basis. The idea of a blog is so easy to conceptualize. Publishing content every day in a consistent, high-value manner. Well, that’s just not something whizzy high technology search and content processing firms embrace.
3. Musical chairs.
Executives are coming and going in the search and content processing sector. With vendors in the Overflight watch list embracing analytics, Big Data, sentiment analysis, and combinations of these technologies, the hiring is on. My view is that changing people may provide a short term injection of excitement. But over a longer span of time, investors and stakeholders want to see revenues grow. So far in 2013, vendors tell me at trade shows that sales are booming. The reality, based on other sources such as those at investment firms, is that those who write checks are fearful their big dollar investments will go south. Those predictive analytics methods may not be as effective as common sense. A company which has sucked in $8 million or more in funding has to generate more than $8 million or the heat in the kitchen gets turned up. Too many search and content processing vendors confuse raising money with their main job. The main job, in my opinion, is making sales. That remains fraught with long lead times, competition from multiple sources, and software which is often a “work in progress,” not a commercially viable product or service. Putting software on Amazon’s cloud is not a guarantee of revenue. The move generates a news release. Sales? Well, sales are tough.
What’s my view of the goslings’ inputs?
First, search and content processing vendors are getting desperate. Partnerships, repositioning, and fancy buzzwords are not as substitute for solving a prospect’s problem and getting paid enough to pay back the investors and build a business.
Second, licensees don’t get fired for listening to sales pitches. Licensees get fired when software doesn’t work. This suggests that sales cycles are likely to get longer and become marathons, not sprints, due to the risks of shifting to a little-known outfit.
Third, confusion is rampant. When I reviewed 30 companies in the Overflight list at www.arnoldit.com/overflight, I could not easily differentiate most companies. If I have difficulty figuring out what the search and content processing vendors deliver, how will the average business person read the hieroglyphics?
Net net: Revenue pressures are likely to mount as search and content vendors do the me too, me too thing.
Stephen E Arnold, June 23, 2013
Sponsored by Xenky, the portal to ArnoldIT
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