Yes, but what does it do?

I was in a briefing call today by a large software vendor, it wasn’t a one to one briefing there were a few of us on the call – I am not going to say who they were and if you know I’d rather you didn’t either.
I am sure the point I am going to make can be applied to lots of briefings and is no way a reflection of quality of their product, services or makes them evil people. I just saw a slide, that for the good of product marketing, analysts relations and mankind – must be shared and well, I guess shamed.
Here are the bullet points, in verbatim:

• Moving ECM from “Point” to “Platform”
• Low Cost of Ownership
• Unified ECM
• High Return on Investment
• Leveraging Fastest Growing Middleware Stack
• Effective Standardization
• Content Platform for the Enterprise
• Improved Business Responsiveness
• Content Management for Enterprise Applications and Portal
• Risk Mitigation

I don’t think I am breaking any NDA by sharing that, as this says absolutely nothing.

Also, you may say – “but Truscott, you hilarious young man, you’ve taken it out of context” – but trust me. I didn’t.

The rest of the slides said it was big, enterprise, billions, DOD compliant and leading – with lots of architectures and TLA’s….

I can see the value in big, but being big doesn’t absolve your responsibility to be valuable and being able to put that in a form I understand – or more importantly in a form a business user, the guy that writes the cheques, a visitor to your website or shareholder understands.

I spent 30 minutes thinking – Yes, but what is it for? What does it do? How does it help?

What do you think?

Image of robot by KB35 reproduced under creative commons license.

Ian Truscott

I’m a marketing executive (CMO/VP), a marketing strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, but most of all; creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with.

You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter , and at Rockstarcmo.com

If the topic of this article is interesting, if I can help your business, or you just want to say hello please get in touch.