The economy is taking its toll on the event markets, that much has been seen with lower than normal attendance at many of the regional shows across the country in the opening of 2009. Specifically, the larger shows are either scaling back or being dumped altogether (read as: Gartner cancelling their Spring Symposium/ITxpo in Las Vegas and Barcelona). The fine folks over at SageCircle have some good advice about how vendors should deal with this in today's market [link here ].

What we find a bit surprising however, is that the vendor communiy, in some cases, is scaling back their outreach to their own customer base. In this case, Symantec has cancelled their annual Vision conference, opting instead to bolt it onto their ManageFusion event under the guise of an "expanded track" list in Vegas the first week of March. At the other end of the spectrum however, is McAfee, who appears to be going ahead with the show, in this case, their annual Focus event, also in Las Vegas.

While I fully understand the need to cut back on travel and expenses in this economy, it seems to me that curbing an opportunity to really connect with a wide swath of your existing customer-base at one time is just too good of an opporunity to pass up. The benefits of filling a room with the combined talent of your clients is a HUGE chance to gain valuable insight and direction about what is *really* keeping them up at night and what you can (or cannot) do to help them. also, in this crazy job market, providing an event where folks can cross-pollinate and make new contacts also serves a purpose and goes long way toward positioning the vendor as a trusted advisor. afterall, despite what your marketing department says, all business really is done between people…not companies.

For those of you attending either event, please reach out to us. We'd like to help you make the most of them while you are there and would love to know what you are expecting from your vendors as 2009 unfolds.

Continue Reading

On January 26th, Lumigent Technologies announced that it has secured a $6 million round from North Bridge Venture Partners to set a new course for the Acton, MA company [press release here]. Recently, we had the opportunity to sit down and chat with President and CEO, John Capobianco, and Paul Campaniello, the VP of Marketing, about this latest infusion and where they are headed with the company. One of the things that struck us immediately about the company was the introduction of Application GRC as a subset of the overall IT GRC market (Lumigent has actually trademarked the term). While technologically I can see the approach they are taking, especially considering where their product sits in the stack, it seems like spending $6 million to grow sales and marketing might not be enough cash to try to redefine the marketplace.  Market issues aside, Capobianco summed up their play against the other IT GRC players very succinctly when he said, "We don't just monitor the controls, we are the controls." We think this is a smart strategy as more and more vendors are trying to fight each other to the top of the pyramid as the single highest aggregation point for compliance related data. This also plays well to the "feature not a product" strategy that we've seen work so well in the DLP space. When asked about this, Capobianco elaborated by saying, "The IT GRC space still has a long way to go. It’s fraught with tools and consultants instead of finished business apps." We certainly can't argue with that, as it's something we have been railing against for some time. 

Based upon how quickly Lumigent can integrate with financial applications, we pondered out loud about who might be a good suitor for them down the road. Names like Oracle came up and were quickly dismissed by Capobianco; "Why won't Peoplesoft/Oracle do this? Because they don't have the subject matter expertise, it's a big distraction for them and it's non-core, and they aren't independent."

Of the new Lumigent executives that joined in conjunction with this round, John Capobianco, Tom Stiling, and Ron Nall have worked together previously at Bluestone Software, Computer Associates, Curl Corporation and MEDecision.  Paul Campaniello and Fred Edling are both brand new additions to the team.

All of these are very valid points and are similar to those echoed in other plays of this kind. Considering the opportunity for a platform play, Lumigent feels that they would be a better fit for the likes of HP, BMC, or IBM. While still a bit early for this kind of speculation, we plan to keep an eye on these guys and hope to meet up with them when we are in Boston for the SOURCE Conference next month.

Continue Reading