Vendors & Rants

I recently found myself in the market for a new car. Given the buyer's market, I decided to look at a larger pool of candidates—which is probably a good idea no matter what product you’re looking for these days. There were several good options in my chosen price range. There’s the Prius, the Jetta, the new Mazda, and the new Insight, among others.

As I visited each dealer, it was interesting to hear them compare and contrast their cars against the others. The VW folks, who were touting their Diesel cars, said the Prius is all hype and that its fuel savings is overshadowed by its battery issues. The Toyota folks were of the opinion that the Prius is the best selling car in the market, period, and that that anyone who drives anything else is silly to do so. The Mazda folks didn't dare venture into the mileage debate. They positioned around the performance and fun aspect. And so on.

Ultimately, my selection was based on my needs, not the car salesmen’s commentary or any brand positioning. More importantly, my choice took into account the entire sales experience including internet-based price quotes, visits to the dealerships, test-drives and the individuals I dealt with. Too negative a commentary or too pushy an approach puts me on high alert! I like to know that I can trust the person I'm interacting with.

No matter the product, you will always run into salespeople and evangelists who try to vilify their competition. However, it’s good to keep in mind that baseless comments, speculation and obsession with denigrating competitors ultimately say more about their companies and products than it does about the competition they're bashing.

We face these same issues in our market. We have competitors who watch every change on our website, critique it, then turn around and copy the same graphic, marketing message or product terminology they just finished bashing. Tolerating this kind of behavior is one of the costs of leadership. At AmberPoint, we have focused on building an experience that our customers rave about. My customers always have feedback for the product, both positive and negative. However, there is nothing but praise for our field and customer support staff. Kudos to those teams!

It would behoove you to search the blogosphere (and now twitto-sphere) for your own competitors. Rest assured, you’ll find interesting comments from them aplenty. How you respond to them defines you and your company.

This week we are announcing some truly unique capabilities in the area of Business Transaction Management. Having announced SLA Management and Exception Management for business transactions in the past, we ran into many customer scenarios where proactive detection of problems was next to impossible. Software systems always find a way to surprise you!

That’s why we’re rolling out an end-to-end Transaction Saftey Net™, a rich set of capabilities that help organizations manage the risk of their business transactions. Have a read here.