“How can we create more urgency in customer adoption of our product?” The challenge of creating superior shareholder value.
Challenge
Sever-based computing, a compelling albeit “on again, off again” category in the 90’s had seemingly grown stale for this growing enterprise software vendor. Wall Street discounted the company’s dominance in the category and the company worried that its future products, innovative as they were, would not be given their just due in a noisy and now “depressed” marketplace.
The executive team believed that market conditions were emerging—the trend to mobile and on-demand enterprise computing paradigms—that offered a chance to broaden the company’s position and subsequent appeal to both investors and, more importantly, customers and prospects.
Solution
Power and influence are a function of your category.
Based on our market category analysis bolstered with interviews of customers, channel partners and industry gurus, it became clear that a new product category would need to be posited so that company strategy and go-to-market programs could be tailored for an advantaged future position, rather than just recasting a “new” strategy and story for an existing category. Working closely with our client’s executive team, we created a new category—access infrastructure—that resonated with three major constituencies: customers, partners, and technical/financial analysts. Now we could help our client design market strategy and go-to-market programs that addressed an aggregate $8 billion opportunity—considerably larger than server-based computing market within which the company had previously competed.
Result
Reasserting leadership.
A re-launch of the company soon followed, broadly acknowledged as “breakthrough” by the company’s channel partners, the financial community, and the press. The new positioning and the resulting product portfolio were accepted enthusiastically by channel partners and customers alike. Since the commencement of the assignment, the company’s share price has quadrupled. The company is now recognized as an expert in solving the problems of mobile computing and complex application deployment, and is making important strides in reaching it short-term objective of doubling its revenue to $1 billion in 2 years hence.
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