Pervasive

October 2008 - Posts

• It's Vegas Baby!

  Dateline October 14 – Las Vegas Vegas.  This place always amazes me – middle of the desert, neon everywhere, absolutely no reason to exist except to feed our (apparently) insatiable appetite for gambling, drinking, and, um, whatever….  The scale and the scope of kitsch, garishness, and the generally tacky have to be seen to be believed. Looks great from the air (at night) and even interesting close up, but you’d have a screaming fit if anything remotely similar was plunked down next to your gated subdivision.  Awesome place for conventions, though.  Zippy and I were attending an Eloqua user group meeting at the Rio. Eloqua’s the company that has made millions hosting software for “demand generation, marketing automation” email.  It’s a pretty cool application and Eloqua has done a great job of moving the industry forward, including an appropriate amount of thought put into best practices and legitimate use of the software - so it's not just automating spam.  Plus, they throw a great happy hour (I mean “reception”). VooDoo Lounge – 51st floor roof – fantastic views. The trick to the demand generation marketing automation thing is to get the right message to the right audience –and in a timely fashion.  Las Vegas casinos are spectacularly good at identifying the target customer, putting them into a group, and getting more money out of them.  It’s all about getting you into the casino, keeping you there, and keeping you gaming.  Limos at the airport (unless you’re a really big roller and they send you a jet),  VIP check in lines, club passes on the casino floor, comped buffets and rooms, free drinks when you’re gambling .  It never stops. The software industry, on the other hand, sends newsletters, product announcements, press releases, and the occasional iPod contest emails. Honestly, if software transactions were as engaging as a typical casino/customer relationship we’d all be bazillionaires by now. (And probably chain smoking insomniac alcoholics.) What’s the Point…or How is a Pervasive Customer Like a Vegas VIP? How on earth does this all relate to Pervasive and Pervasive customers? Being a Pervasive customer isn’t exactly like partying in Vegas, but at least your chances of making money are considerably higher the longer you’ve been in the relationship. (In Las Vegas, even with house odds on a simple game like blackjack hovering around .3%, sooner or later you’re going to lose.)  And, we love all of our customers because we know how hard they are to get and who else is trying to attract them. Sun, Microsoft, Oracle – in other words, really big companies with really big marketing budgets.  However, we do have some customers that are more VIP than the average Pervasive VIP – the OEM’s.  These are software companies with contracts to buy PSQL directly from Pervasive in volume. They often embed the database into an application before shipping it to the end user.  Just like casinos catering to the big spenders, we really work hard to keep this group of customers happy. (This includes creating custom versions of PSQL so that they can sell to brand new markets – See Sept 18 and Sept 30 postings). New Stuff for OEM’s To make life easier for OEM’s, Pervasive recently added a feature to PSQL that allows the OEM to embed a library (DLL) into their application to dynamically generate a license key when the whole thing (OEM application and PSQL database) is installed.  OEMs are unique in that they can generate license keys and report back to us so we can calculate royalties (that they pay us according to their contract).  With the new DLL’s, OEM’s can generate keys at install – and make it specific to the install that’s happening at that time (e.g. user count, OS, etc.).  The OEM has more control over licensing and it’s a big time saver over the previous manual process. And that - saving time and being in charge - is what being a VIP is all about.   To learn more about this feature and all kinds of other interesting news, check out this month's newsletter. It will arrive in your in box in about 2 weeks. Posted Oct 16 2008, 04:01 PM by answerman with no comments

• What else could possibly go wrong.....?

  Dateline October 2 - Austin It’s been an interesting few weeks. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac get nationalized, sort of. We’re all now, as part owners of AIG, in the insurance business.  Merrill Lynch gets sold and Lehman Brothers sinks beneath the waves. Congress fails to pass a $700 billion Hail Mary (sorry, I just can’t resist the puns) legislation and the Dow loses a record 777 points in a day. The Wilshire 5000 index, which measures the performance of all publicly traded companies in the US, lost $1,000,000,000,000 (that’s one trillion) on the same day.  It’s a number that staggers the imagination and, in context, makes a $700B “rescue” somehow look reasonable – go figure.  All of this comes on the heels of Hurricane Ike demolishing most of Zippy and my favorite part of the Gulf Coast – namely Galveston Island, and in particular, the Balinese Room (great restaurant and bar, and up until the 50’s, great  gambling den).  We love tiki. The point in this discussion is that there are some things you can plan for (relaxed lending standards and lots of subprime loans in a heated real estate market are gonna eventually be a problem for somebody) and some things you can’t (the Balinese survived several hurricanes, economic downturns, raids by the Texas rangers and gets clobbered by a storm originally heading to South Texas – hundreds of miles away).  So…what’s your risk management plan?  How are you going to protect your business, your data, and your customers from a major crisis?  Can’t really protect them from a global financial meltdown, but you’d look like a fool in this day and age if you didn’t have remote backups of data in case of your own Hurricane Ike, or Hurricane Zippy (who can chew through a power cord faster than a Makita jigsaw).  If you’ve ever had to try and recover or, worse, recreate data after a loss, you already know that the cost of the software to manage the problem in the first place seems like a ridiculously good deal right about then. If you don’t already have solutions, definitely check out Backup Agent and DataExchange – two products that can really keep your data safe and your business running.  They’re cheap insurance and simple to use. Meanwhile, enjoy Fall wherever you are.  It’s the best time of year for weather in Texas (finally not crazy hot) – and it’s football season, when entire small towns empty out on Friday nights (creates another interesting risk management scenario), and about 100,000 people dress up in burnt orange every other weekend or so here in Austin.  I look awful in orange and Zippy don’t do clothes.   Excellent at tailgates though. Let’s be careful out there. Posted Oct 02 2008, 04:12 PM by answerman with no comments