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 – 51^st 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.)

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).

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.  

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