This weekend I’m re-reading Market-Driven Management by Frederick Webster, the core book in his MBA elective on business-to-business marketing which I took at Dartmouth. It focuses on the major shift in the 1990s away from strategic planning and towards customer-orientation. That’s a shift than analyst relations has yet to complete. In a nutshell, the strategic…
Vinnie has kindly written on our Recession communications course. There’s very deep interest in this topic, and our webinar on the topic had our highest-ever number of registrations. Vinnie compares the cooling of the high tech markets to the ‘nuclear winter’ of January 2002, when that course last ran. However, there’s another climatic comparison that…
One of Lighthouse’s traditions is the Boardroom: an annual working lunch for AR professionals, hosted in San Jose, CA, the week before Gartner’s Symposium. In April 2007, we met to discuss ways to maximize the value of AR in a recessionary environment. Geoff Roach is an wonderful host, and arranged a private boardroom for us…
Two firms that have both reoriented themselves over the last year, Jupiter and Yankee, are developing similarly deep focus on online, business-to-consumer, technologies. It’s less of an evolution for Jupiter (whose announced name-change from Jupiter Research to JupiterKagan seems to have not appeared) than for telecoms-specialist Yankee. That business now focuses on “anywhere” business, where…
This month the star performer of the month in the Lighthouse Software Index is WebEx Communications. The firm has been acquired by Cisco for a hefty $3.2 billion in cash and has the analysts focusing on both the firms to see how the acquisition will affect Cisco and its current strategy of developing solutions with…
Océ is the hot topic for many analysts as it manages an impressive gain of 7 positions to end up at the 35th spot in this month’s Lighthouse Systems Index. The inking of a strategic partnership with Founder Group certainly helping it to gain analyst focus as the firm now seemes poised to further explore…
Phew! We’ve just finished the number crunching from our readers’ survey. We’ve asked readers to rate the importance of 75 topics covered in analyst relations training courses. Participants have already received the results. We had an excellent response, with respondents spread fairly evenly between AR managers in telecoms, software, storage and ‘powerhouse’ technology providers. Around…
A “military victory,” in the sense of total control over the whole territory imposed on the entire population, is not possible.Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State, quoted in this week’s Marine Corps Times. Competitive approaches in tech market reflects military doctrine in two ways. First, there is great variance between the dominant doctrines found…