Software Business
Executive Report

February 25, 2008

Taking the Pain Out of Software Evaluations
What you can do to enhance the software evaluation phase
By Sebastian Holst, S enior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, PreEmptive Solutions 

What do software vendors hate more than losing a sale? Having to submit to a drawn out software evaluation process.

Software evaluations are often a pivotal stage in the software sales cycle. Yet, visibility into a prospect’s evaluation activity is rarely, if ever, available. Further, any anecdotal information that can be gathered indirectly through discussion is not easily incorporated into CRM, ERP or other relevant business systems. These factors make software evaluations expensive, difficult to manage and ultimately a high-risk proposition that is often best to avoid. However, there is good news on the horizon. The convergence of managed services, web-based software delivery models and managed code (e.g., .NET and Java), hold a promise to move the software evaluation process from “expensive liability” to “pivotal success factor” by shortening the sales cycle and increasing ISV win rates.

Challenges in the Evaluation Phase

“Try before you buy” is a common sales technique that has taken hold in the software industry but, unlike fitness clubs that offer trial memberships or cheese stores offering samples, software publishers face unique challenges that make “try/buy” especially problematic.

Complexity of evaluation

User satisfaction is highly dependent upon previous experience, training and expectations. Minor issues that can often be trivially remedied frequently go undetected, resulting in frustration and dissatisfaction. The inability to monitor evaluation activity, environmental configurations and user behavior inside an application hamper support that can lead to inaccurate assessments of product quality and effectiveness. A poor review may directly result in a sales loss for the supplier and a suboptimal selection by the consumer.

Cost of sale

Support and sales staff are valuable and expensive resources that are forced to proactively probe to compensate for the inability to effectively monitor evaluation activity. In addition to the wasted time and resources, prospective clients are needlessly interrupted or, alternatively, neglected during their software trial. Many software evaluations occur early in the sales cycle. In other words, the sales pipeline is still rather broad, making the evaluation phase a relatively high volume activity and exacerbating the toll that inefficient evaluation process management takes on a sales organization.

Figure1: The software evaluation process is unmanaged, expensive and, ultimately, a high risk proposition for the software publisher.

Enterprise Risk Stemming from Mismanaged Software Evaluations

Moving beyond individual sales opportunities, evaluation software is also a favorite target of software pirates who will attempt to transform it into a hacked version for resale. Pirated software costs the software industry

billions of dollars a year and damages the supplier’s reputation.

Further, erstwhile competitors will reverse engineer evaluation software to misappropriate intellectual property. Still other hackers will probe evaluation software for vulnerabilities to exploit. Vulnerability exploitation at customer sites can lead directly to increased liability and could also have a negative impact on reputation.

Effective Evaluation Process Management

The challenges discussed above are often perceived as fundamentally inherent in the evaluation process. However, as the following sample calculations illustrate, small efficiencies can lead to material improvements in both bookings and profitability. The following table shows how a 5% reduction in the duration of the average evaluation (from 30 days to 28.5) and a modest improvement in win rates (from 30% likelihood of a win at the start of an evaluation to 31.5%) can lead to a $300,000 contribution to the bottom line of a “typical software vendor”.

Is Optimization Possible?

Given the potential upside that modest improvements in the evaluation process can yield, why isn’t the

optimization of this phase of the sales cycle a higher priority? The cliché “if there is no solution, then there is no problem” comes to mind. However, as the following scenarios illustrate, emerging solutions are leaving laggard software sales organizations with a potentially serious set of problems to manage.

Improving prospect responsiveness, shortening the sales cycle and improving evaluation outcomes follow directly from improved visibility into and responsiveness within the evaluation process.

Figure 2: Visibility into the sales cycle improved customer responsiveness conserves valuable sales and support resources and increases prospect satisfaction and sales outcome.

Traditional sales techniques require outbound inquiries; however, usage level tracking and feature utilization can materially streamline the entire process while significantly improving the prospect’s assessment of the product and enhancing their view of the supplier.

The emergence of managed services that can integrate business intelligence with customer relationship management solutions, combined with application instrumentation techniques that simplify and automate application analytics, have created new and important opportunities to tackle the challenges associated with software evaluations and significantly improve software supplier profitability as well as end-user satisfaction.

For example, applications that run in a managed code environment such as.NET can be easily instrumented after compilation to enable these kinds of solutions without requiring separate or new product releases. The resulting runtime data can be securely streamed to managed services that aggregate and integrate this data into relevant CRM systems, transforming the runtime data into runtime intelligence. Sales and support teams can be proactively alerted as prospects move from one phase of their evaluation to another or when technical issues appear to be negatively impacting an evaluation.

Conclusion

Sebastian Holst is senior vice president of Sales and Marketing for PreEmptive Solutions, an application security and analytics ISV with more than 3,000 corporate clients and software on over six million desktops. Sebastian has held executive sales, marketing and product management positions in both public and private software companies focusing on security, risk management and content management. In addition to his work building software companies, he has been active in a variety of computing and industry standards bodies as a member of the W3C Advisory Committee for five years, a board member of IDEAlliance for four years and a co-founder the Compliance Consortium.

Sebastian can be reached at sebastian@preemptive.com and his blog can be found at  http://apps-are-people-too.blogspot.com/  

Top 10 Internationalization Tips

Few application development teams have historically had the opportunity to incorporate world market foresight. They had to produce a product to market for the most immediate business requirements. Most internationalization happens on existing code because someone sells something, a global company buys another company, or a strategic initiative has taken form. Suddenly there is a new requirement for software to work in any number of new languages and locales. Business requirements drive technical schedules first, rather than involving a creative path of inventing new cool functionality or products from the ground up.

Internationalization efforts tend to each have their own unique challenges when you get into the details. Below is a series of i18n process tips that apply across the board. In general Internationalization (i18n) is messy, full of exceptions, and generally not considered optimally from a development perspective.


1. Internationalization is ugly.

Expect this from the start. You are reverse engineering basic logic of how your software inputs, stores, retrieves, transforms and displays data. You are adding user interaction functionality that your product wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s rarely just about embedded strings. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. It’s a lot of work. In some cases you can run into weird stuff from areas such as compilers, middleware, database connectivity, and even low level operating system issues.

2. Get the big picture questions handled quickly.

Be prepared to ask for what you need in the CFO’s or CEO’s language. Here are questions to consider: What are the high level requirements? How much time do you have? How much time do you need? How much budget can you get?

3. Remember what’s driving this – Revenue.

Internationalizing a complex application is a big new requirement. Don’t underestimate. Being late will cause delays in revenue, stall marketing and sales investments and make you very unpopular. Do it poorly and rushed, and your product will be shabby for the very new customers you seek.

4. Do some good research or get help identifying requirements.

For instance, consider language only as one aspect of a locale. English is a language, yet England is a different locale, with different expected behavior than the States. Consider numerical formats, dates, times, postal addresses, phone numbers, paper size, currencies and more. Then add the specifics that your application may need, like any possible customizations of workflow, locale selection and more. Consider what the optimal character encoding implementation strategy is for your computer platforms, application tiers, programming languages, database requirements, etc.

5. Get some good code intelligence.

It’s way better to get a good inventory of what you need to inspect and change, rather than hunting through your myriad lines of code trying to anticipate all kinds of variable conditions using grep, and then trial and error your way through the boatloads of issues you’ll miss.

6. Prepare for difficulties depending upon programming language(s), database and third party products.

They are not always built for your new internationalization needs. For instance, a couple of years ago we worked on a product that used a third party product for displaying animations in a kid’s game. At first glance, you wouldn’t think it would be an issue, as there was no text being processed or displayed. But when we looked at things more closely, user name and file path info was being passed into the animation tool, which in this case could very well involve wide characters (e.g. Chinese). But the particular version of the animation product could not support this and so it would always crash. The fix took time and some inventiveness.

Another example involved a third party product that generated a spreadsheet view. While data within the cells was handling Kanji just fine, tabs were corrupting. The third party product provider had declared their product Unicode compliant, but in practice it wasn’t done all the way through. The choice became to find a better third party product to replace this one, or get the spreadsheet provider to fix their product –which they may or may not want to do on your schedule.

8. Remember i18n fundamentals.

Don’t embed strings or concatenate them. Watch out for sorting. The letters “A” and “Z” are not the beginning and end of all alphabets - some languages don’t use the concept of alphabets. Don’t hardcode fonts. Remember your interface Geometry will need to expand. Use functions, methods or classes that adapt to locale needs. Use Locale adapting sorting (i.e. java.text.Collator class in Java) or let your database perform sorting for you whenever possible.

9. Account for merging code with parallel feature developments.

This can be tricky, as your new feature development cycles could be quite different from your internationalization milestones. In most cases, be prepared to branch the code for internationalization efforts.

10. Use Pseudo Localization to perform many internationalization functional tests before your localize.

That means you add pad characters from target locales to the beginning and end of strings, and stretch the whole string based on target requirements. You’ll then be able to see how those strings behave in your display and moving through application tiers, without your engineers needing to understand the target language.

Bonus Tip : Plan for QA to take longer than it did when your app was just monolingual. Remember, you have internationalization functional testing and bug fixing, with new testing cases, and then, should you be localizing, you have linguistic testing.

Adam Asnes founded Lingoport in 2001. As Lingoport's President and CEO, Adam focuses on sales and marketing alliances, while maintaining oversight of Lingoport's internationalization services engineering and Globalyzer product development. He is a frequent speaker on globalization technology as it affects businesses expanding their worldwide reach.  Adam can be reached at aasnes@lingoport.com or +1 (303) 444 8020.

IT Salaries to Increase by 5.3 Percent in 2008

Starting salaries for IT professionals in the U.S. will increase an average of 5.3 percent over 2007, according to research conducted by Bluewolf, a leading on-demand IT resourcing and consulting firm. Application developers are predicted to have the largest increase in base compensation, rising 7.6 percent from 2007 to 2008, bringing their salaries to between $80,250 and $112,500.

“Companies are creating new IT jobs as fast or faster than they can export them overseas,” said Michael Kirven, Bluewolf co-founder and principal. “These trends clearly lead to a rise in demand for IT professionals in the U.S., resulting in a significant increase in the average salary.”

According to Bluewolf’s research, the following IT positions also are predicted to show salary growth in 2008:

• Application architects will experience a starting salary rise of 7.5 percent in 2008, to between $87,250 to $120,000.
• Project managers’ salaries are expected to increase of 7.4 percent from 2007 to 2008, with an average starting salary of between $85,000 to $150,000 annually.
• Quality assurance analysts can expect base compensation to increase by 5.1 percent in 2008, to between $65,250 and $85,500.
• Network security administrators’ starting salary will increase by 3.7 percent, ranging from $81,500 and $102,500

To be noted, the Bluewolf salary research is primarily focused on New York area salaries, which are approximately 25 percent higher than salaries in the Northeast and West Coast, and 50 percent higher than the national average. Salary information on additional IT positions is available.

Importantly, database administrators continue to be in strong demand and are among the top earners, with compensation ranging from $70,000-$130,000. According to Bluewolf’s Kirven, data base administrators are in short supply and many organizations are turning to significant cost-saving programs such as the Bluewolf’s Remote DBA service which enables organizations to outsource that function to a U.S.-based team of professionals.

eVapt Inc., a software infrastructure provider for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications, has closed a seed round of funding led by Applied Reasoning, LLC. The terms of the financing were not disclosed.

"Applied Reasoning, with its emphasis on Austin-based technology companies, is the perfect investor to help fuel our growth," said Divakar Jandhyala, CEO, eVapt Inc. "This funding will allow us to capitalize on the market opportunity in the SaaS infrastructure space."

John Kinnaird of Applied Reasoning will join the eVapt Board of Directors effective immediately. As a former enior Dell executive, Kinnaird adds high tech sales and marketing expertise to our management team. "The SaaS market is growing substantially faster than traditional software and is expected to be over $10 Billion in a few years," said Kinnaird. "eVapt is well positioned to take advantage of the latest technologies and become a leader in enabling the pay-as-you-use model."

"Our solution allows SaaS providers to focus on their core competence and help with revenue assurance," said Jandhyala. "Tight integration into the Salesforce.com platform allows SaaS vendors to incorporate our offering easily into their sales workflow."

Contact www.evapt.com

Electronic Arts Inc. has proposed to acquire Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. in an all-cash merger valued at approximately $2.0 billion.

EA’s proposal of $26 per share in cash represents a premium of 64 percent over Take-Two’s closing stock price on Feb. 15 th, the last trading day before EA sent its revised proposal to Take-Two, and a 63 percent premium over Take-Two’s 30-day trailing average price over the thirty trading days ending on that date.

EA’s proposal was contained in a letter sent on Feb. 19 th by EA Chief Executive Officer John Riccitiello to Strauss Zelnick, Executive Chairman of the Board of Directors of Take-Two. The Take-Two Board’s subsequent rejection of the EA proposal led to EA’s decision to release the letter and bring its proposal to the attention of all Take-Two shareholders.

Mr. Riccitiello said today: “Our all-cash proposal is a unique opportunity for Take-Two shareholders to realize immediate value at a substantial premium, while creating long-term value for EA shareholders. Take-Two’s game designers would also benefit from EA’s financial resources, stable, game-focused management team, and strong global publishing capabilities.”

Contact www.eatake2.com

TrialPay, a leader in alternative payments, has recently reached several milestones:

• Closed $12.7 million in a Series B round of funding, bringing the total amount raised to $15.8 million.
• Surpassed 5 million registered users (5.2 million, as of this release). More than 15,000 new users join TrialPay every day.
• As of this release, TrialPay will have 3,000 individual merchant partners and 4 strategic partnerships with premier e-commerce platforms (Kagi, asknet AG, E-junkie and Mercantec).

Over the last year, TrialPay has emerged as a leading alternative payment platform—the only payment method that increases a shopper’s willingness to pay. TrialPay’s patent-pending Offer-Matching Technology pairs shoppers with ideal offers from premier advertisers, including FTD, Gap, American Express, RealNetworks, eBay and 2,000 others, ensuring that every customer can find an offer that compels him or her to purchase.

Index Ventures was part of a Series B that included Atomico Ventures and former PayPal executives. The Series A round included Battery Ventures, Ron Conway and Bob Pittman.

Alex Rampell, TrialPay’s co-founder and CEO, attracted the attention of VCs with a new platform that lets customers pay…and get paid. The customer gets his or her original product for free by trying or buying one advertiser offer.

TrialPay appeals to software publishers as a means of converting trial customers and boosting sales through creative marketing initiatives (e-mail campaigns, exit and uninstall messaging, direct payment method, etc…). TrialPay recently launched an exclusive free software promotion on CNET Download.com: www.download.com/freesoftware. Visitors can select their preferred advertising offer and get a free license from over a dozen of the most popular downloads, including titles from McAfee, AVG, PC Tools, Webroot, WinZip, Lavasoft, Trend Micro and many more.

Contact www.trialpay.com

Ubicom, Inc., a leading provider of communications processor and software solutions, has completed its Series 4 financing round totaling $18 million. Led by Lehman Brothers  Venture Partners and Samsung Venture Investment Corporation, this financing also includes the company's existing investors. Brian Melton, a partner in Lehman Brothers Venture Partners, will join the board of directors.

“With their innovative and proven processor and software platform, Ubicom is well positioned to take advantage of the transition to higher speed networks and the proliferation of network connected media devices in the home,” said Brian Melton of Lehman Brothers.

Contact www.ubicom.com.

VFA, Inc., the leading provider of end-to-end solutions for facilities capital planning and asset management, has released its capital spend management software, VFA.spendManager. This release gives CFOs and capital planners better ability to understand and manage spending with new tools for categorizing cost data, reporting in local currencies, and consolidation of capital project status and financial information.

"To effectively control capital spending, organizations need real-time information about the progress of capital expenses from the budget through requisition and invoicing,” said Deborah Wilson, Research Director, Procurement Strategies & Systems at Gartner.  “Capital spend management software facilitates the process of synthesizing data about capital projects from across the enterprise and provides organizations with tools to keep spending on track.”

In VFA.spendManager 8.0, a new multi-level cost structure enables customers to easily replicate the cost categories in their existing purchasing system.  This parallel structure allows greater accuracy in tracking forecast and actual expenses, and facilitates the exchange of data between systems. 

Enhanced project tracking capabilities in VFA.spendManager 8.0 allow users to more easily track the progress of a capital project against milestones.  For example, they can readily compare the percentage of a project’s total budget that has been spent to date versus the planned percentage, and monitor project completion timelines against goals.

Also new in the release is the ability to report on capital spending in local currencies based on current exchange.  “This capability is important to VFA’s growing base of multi-national customers who manage capital spending in multiple currencies,” notes Ziegler.

Contact www.vfa.com

Driving industry innovation, ease-of-use and simplicity for on-demand Project Portfolio Management (PPM), Innotas has developed a Request Management feature that enables users to quickly and easily create, automate and extract reports on any incoming request, including project requests, work proposals, and project opportunities.

With Request Management, users gain greater visibility into every aspect of IT project portfolio management, from requests created via a single entry point to how requests rank in relationship to strategic corporate goals. Configuration is completed via a web browser interface, and the application includes templates for all request management reports, so customers can report on their new requests in minutes.

Request Management, including all customer-driven field and layout configurations, is fully integrated with Innotas’ reporting and dashboard functionality, and provides users with full visibility into both summary and detail information about incoming requests.

Contact www.innotas.com 

IBM is collaborating with nine business partners to help healthcare providers, clinics and hospitals improve productivity, increase quality and reduce costs through the use of service oriented architecture (SOA). These partners are all working to develop their latest healthcare applications using the IBM SOA Foundation and supporting a set of open technology and industry standards.

IBM's healthcare strategy is based on the adoption of an SOA approach and the use of open standards and standards-based electronic health records to provide secure and private exchanges of records between authorized healthcare provider and healthcare payer organizations. To achieve these goals, IBM is currently working with clients within the healthcare industry to transform the information delivery processes and related business processes to be more “patient-centric.”

Clients who deploy infrastructures based on this strategy can improve the quality of healthcare delivered to their patents while reducing the costs and expenses of providing these healthcare services. SOA can also allow these healthcare providers to increase their agility to meet future changes as the healthcare industry adopts new regulations or embraces new methodologies in the delivery of care.

The nine partners announced today provide applications that support a growing healthcare community that currently includes more than 8,000 clients worldwide.  Their applications encompass many of the specialty fields that impact the healthcare industry including: electronic health records (Blueware:); clinical portal (Carefx); document management (CGI Solutions and Technologies and Ricoh); health analytics (Convergence CT.); consent management (HIPAAT); health enterprise management (Lawson); communications (Nortel); and clinical and financial information management (Siemens Medical Solutions).

Contact www.ibm.com/soa/impact2008

Openbravo, a developer of web-based open Source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point of Sale (PoS) solutions for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has surpassed 500,000 downloads on SourceForge.net for its ERP software.

With over 160,000 projects and over one million registered users hosted on it, SourceForge.net is the world's largest open source software development web site, according to company officials. Users are provided with a centralized resource for managing projects, issues, communications, and code.

Openbravo’s leading open source ERP solution was first published to SourceForge in April 2006. Rapidly gaining momentum, the software quickly rose to the top of its category. By August 2006, release 2.11 of Openbravo ERP dominated the ERP category on SourceForge.

Just three months later, Openbravo v2.13 became SourceForge’s top-ranked project out of a field of almost 160,000 projects posted on the site. Since then, Openbravo has remained in the top ten projects across all software categories and has averaged over 1,000 downloads per day.

In October 2007, Openbravo acquired Librepos, formerly Tina POS, an open source POS solution. The newly renamed Openbravo POS is a point-of-sales application designed for touch screens. It supports ESC/POS ticket printers, customer displays and barcode scanners. It can support single and multiple users and has a strong back-office including product entry form, reporting and easy-to-read charts. Openbravo POS is integrated with Openbravo ERP and is also available as a standalone product.

Contact www.openbravo.com

"We are very excited that Engine Ready has been granted the adExcellence Certification, in return for our contributions of testing, documenting, and providing feedback to Microsoft regarding their AdCenter technology," reports Engine Ready's Senior Search Marketing Manager Mike Poserina.

Designed especially for Microsoft's advertisers, the adExcellence program is Microsoft's official accreditation program that gives advertisers the opportunity to become a Microsoft adCenter expert.

Even in a relatively new marketplace like Internet Marketing, old-fashion business rules still have their place. "Our backgrounds are rooted in web analytics", comments Jamie Smith, CEO. "We have a strong affinity for numbers, and base all of our decision-making on in-depth analysis. It's the combination of our depth of experience in search marketing and web analytics that makes us uniquely qualified to meet our client's needs."

Engine Ready, Inc. is a recognized leader in providing online marketing strategies, services and software, helping organizations achieve unparalleled success on their web initiatives. Managing paid search accounts in excess of 15 million keywords, and just over $8.1 million in annual media spend, Engine Ready was the first organization to combine the power of website analytics with search marketing.

Contact www.engineready.com

February

February 20-21
The CEO Bootcamp, Austin, Texas. Contact www.clevelbootcamp.com

February 27-29
OpSource SaaS Summit, San Francisco, Calif. Contact www.opsource.net

March

March 3-7
SD West 2008, Santa Clara, Calif. Contact www.sdexpo.com

March 16-20
DAMA & Wilshire, San Diego, Calif. Contact www.wilshireconferences.com

March 17-20
The CEO Bootcamp plus Strategic Planning Retreat, Sedona, Ariz. Contact www.clevelbootcamp.com

March 18-20
AjaxWorld East, New York, NY. Contact www.ajaxworld.com

March 25-26
SaaSCon, Santa Clara, Calif. Contact www.saascon.com

April 3-4
SLAM 2008, San Francisco, Calif. Contact www.SLAMConference.com

April 3-4
SaaS Economics Summit

June 25-26
Ecosystems Summit

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