The message is the same; it’s just the words that have changed
I dropped my daughter off at her first day of high school this week and got caught up in a “get back to business/summer’s over” mentality–get to the office, sharpen my pencils, and focus on what’s really important.
First order of business: Blogging. It’s been weighing on my mind that I haven’t posted in a while, and as I mentioned previously, I’ve been anxious to talk about our new tagline, Advancing Applications. Partnering for Success.
Our tagline for years was “Take Part in Creating Success.” These five words were plastered on everything we sent out. The concept was to convey to our customers, employees, and vendors that we are only successful when our customers are successful. I polled some Synergex new-hires for candid comments, however, and learned that they found the tagline confusing – i.e., who was taking part in whose success? We slowly backed away from the mantra to the point that we got rid of it all together.
This troubled me. Taglines articulate a company’s vision and empower people – employees, customers, vendors – to make decisions in line with the company’s overall objectives. (Think FedEx when they were just an overnight service – Surely “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight” empowered their employees to make that happen, at whatever cost, without having to ask permission first.) So, we recruited some Mad Men types (in our case Mad Women) to help us find a way to convey the original message without the confusion. We white-boarded ideas around customers, products…everything. We finally chose “Advancing Applications. Partnering for Success.”
That’s it. Our application of the Law of the Little Shovel. Our existence is based on these simple words: “Advancing Applications” because that’s what we’ve been doing since the early days of helping customers migrate from one platform to another; to today’s customers who want to implement new Windows user interfaces and Web front ends, or integrate data with Oracle and SQL Server, hand held apps, and a lot more. And “partnering for success” because we recognize that we are partners with our customers.
Our role extends much farther than providing products and services to help customers advance applications. It means coming up with ideas and ways to help them succeed – from designing new logos for them, to sending out mailings to help them get new business, to training their support departments on new technology — simply, partnering with them however we can to ensure their continued success.
So, armed with my sharp pencils and little shovel, empowered by the vision present and clear, I am eager to help my partners advance their applications to ensure success. Please call on me to let me know how we can help you.
In: Uncategorized
SPC Boston comes to a close
We just wrapped up the SPC in Boston and it went great. Customers seemed to really like the ChronoTrack demo app (and all that sample code to take home!) and the Code Phantom‘s challenge was answered by nearly all of the attendees – in fact, many stayed late just to make sure they’d completed it. (We kept them energized with pizza and beer, of course.) I received lots of positive comments from customers about the conference and Synergy/DE in general. One customer mentioned that he had written us off 10 years ago but is absolutely amazed at how far we have come and what can be done with Synergy/DE. Another customer at one of the lunches referenced how much he had learned about what is possible with Synergy/DE that he hadn’t known about because he’d been “heads-down” for so long with his current project. Overall, customers were really pleased about learning what they can do right now with their existing Synergy/DE-based applications to make them more powerful.
We were also joined by Bigbah and his team (Manny, Jodah, and Mark), who seemed to really enjoy the conference – at least according to their Facebook pages!
It was a really informative conference and a great time was had by all. We’re looking forward to seeing our friends “across the pond” in a couple of weeks.
Customers going to great lengths to attend the SPC
Not surprisingly, the upcoming SPC (Success Partner Conference) has been prevalent in my recent conversations and customer visits.
Today I was speaking to a customer in the Midwest who told me the Boston SPC overlaps his company’s conference, so he’s trying to make it to the London SPC instead. Another customer is paying out of his own pocket to get the conference because his company has limited travel this year. And another customer is using his own money *and* vacation time to get to the conference for the very same reason.
It really struck me how much our customers value our conference—both for the benefits it provides to their companies, and to them professionally— and reassured me about all of the man-hours we have put into preparing all of the content for the conference. Our Professional Services Group has been working since last June on this year’s sessions and demo application, making sure they cover all of the recent enhancements to the Synergy/DE product line. When I hear the lengths customers go to be a part of this knowledge transfer, and I see the resulting impact on their applications and their businesses, I know our investment has paid off.
I’m looking forward to a great conference – see you in Boston or London!
In: Uncategorized
My initiation into the blogosphere: SPC 2009
OK, time to jump into the blog scene. It’s either that or start “tweeting”—and I’m just not there yet. I was asked to start a blog, so here goes…
The biggest hurdle I’ve faced re. starting a blog is Where To Start. There is so much to talk about! Most of the things I expect to blog about are recurring themes from conversations I have with customers—it will be great to document and share these. Other blogs will cover random topics that I feel would be of interest to you. So my first blog will be a hybrid of the two, with the subject being our upcoming SPC (Synergex Success Partner Conference). Some of you may remember that the original name of the SPC was DC for “Developer Conference.” Today, still, the conference primarily targets developers, but the overall theme is, as it always has been, “Partnering with our customers to help them succeed.” (On that note, stay tuned for a future blog about our new tagline: “Advancing Applications. Partnering for Success.”) While most of our customer contact is with the actual developers of Synergy/DE-based software, Synergy/DE products also impact those in an organization who are not developers. It is for that reason that we strive to partner with several different types of players in an organization to help the company overall make the best use of our products.
To that end, we have expanded our communications this year to target those different players specifically. Our Marketing team has developed four characters: Jodah Veloper, Mark Etting,Manny Jurr, and Bigbah Smann. Each character is an exaggerated representation of his role’s interests within an organization and how they may interact with those of another role’s. So far, we have had some good success with this expansion of communication and are having a lot of fun with the characters. (Look for them on Facebook!)
The message is that no matter what role you play in your organization, the SPC will benefit you – by providing a firsthand look at how easily you can advance your applications with today’s Synergy/DE; by helping you hone your development skills; and/or by showing you the new features your development team should be taking advantage of.
- Presidents, CEOs, VPs, General Managers—basically those who are responsible for your P/L (AKA Bigbah Smann): Your Synergy/DE-based application(s) are among your company’s most important assets. I recommend you attend at least the first day of the conference so you can get a firsthand view of all of the functionality that can be immediately attained to make your applications more powerful, and for ISVs, more marketable. I’m confident you’ll be very surprised. In fact, I’ll even comp the first day of the conference for any CEO/CIO/CTO/GM who accompanies a developer to the SPC.
- Those who are responsible for the sales and marketing of your Synergy/DE based applications (AKA Mark Etting): Like the person (above) who is responsible for the bottom line, you can gain significant benefits by attending the conference. It’s a great opportunity to see what your application is capable of, and what other Synergy/DE customers have done to make their applications more marketable.
- And of course the people responsible for the development of your applications (AKA Jodah Veloper and Manny Jurr): I recommend you attend all three days of the conference – this will enable you to take away the skills and knowledge required to quickly and easily advance your applications.
So, whatever role you play in your organization, I look forward to catching up with you at the conference, or meeting you if we have not yet had the opportunity.
OK, that first blog was relatively painless! I look forward to blogging again soon.
In: Uncategorized
Get your ducks in a row for the Next Generation
At the risk of dating myself, I recall several years ago seeing some of our customers (who were there when I started at Synergex) entering retirement and sailing off into the sunset. I got a bit nostalgic, as many of these people really took me under their wings and showed me the ropes when I first entered this field. At the same time, I was excited to begin new relationships with their successors — the Next Generation — who would be working with me as they carried on the legacy of their predecessors. What I didn’t consider then, but have since witnessed time and time again, is how important it is to prepare one’s business applications for the Next Generation. Passing the torch involves more than handing down a title and a business plan. It means getting all your ducks neatly in a row so the next person is sure to make the RIGHT decisions to best support and sustain the business.
The decision makers at our customer sites come in all shapes and sizes: some are executives, some are application users, and some are developers. For most of our existence, we have focused on the developer. After all, it is the developers we are most in contact with, and most, if not all, of our customers’ original owners and executives were developers. And we’ve been very successful at addressing their needs and providing them an exceptional array of development tools to get the job done. Our integrated Workbench, OO language, Java/.NET Integration, and SQL access to SQL Server, Oracle, and MySQL are meeting and exceeding their requirements. And many of the developer decision makers, including those in the Next Generation, have done some amazing things to advance their Synergy/DE-based applications to meet current look-and-feel demands while maximizing their very rich and proven business logic.
It is another group of Next Generation decision makers that can wreak major havoc on a business. It is the new executives who decide to replace everything because the existing application isn’t pretty enough. They expect a Windows or GUI-based system, and they are willing to pay for it. It doesn’t matter that the existing application is the most robust and appropriate solution to run their company, and that their employees are highly productive because they know the application inside and out. Nope, if it’s not <insert whatever they had at the last place or whatever they think is the latest thing>, it must go. Because some of these Next Generation decision makers don’t know about the history of the application, the years of customizations, the value of the rich and proven business logic, they decide to throw it out and start with some name-brand, high-end system that costs lots of money, requires new resources (and often makes the current ones obsolete), takes forever to implement and customize (and never achieves the functionality of the original application anyway), and in the end demolishes their business processes — just because the application looks good. We’ve seen companies fold after spending millions down this road. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good-looking application too. But functionality is king, followed by look and feel, not the other way around. Fortunately, with Synergy/DE you can have both.
So what do you do to avoid this fate? Simple. Get your application ready for the Next Generation. It’s much easier to add a new front end to proven business logic than the other way around. You wouldn’t consider tearing down your house if you didn’t like its curb appeal, would you? Get your application current, make it look modern, give it all the look and feel that new Next Generation executives might demand, before they have the chance to come in, take one look, and throw it (and all of your intellectual capital) out because the application doesn’t look like they think it should. Don’t get caught off-guard with an outdated application: Advance it to meet the needs of the Next Generation!
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