I never thought the subject of professional wrestling would appear in this blog. We actually have a few fans around the office (you know who you are Phil and Scott). Like most people, I’m aware of wrestling’s popularity and familiar with many of its characters. Over the past 30 years pro wrestling has become an undeniable part of American pop culture (see the South Park parody as proof), so from a business perspective they must be doing something right.
Fast Company ran an article called “10 Things Corporations Can Learn from Pro Wrestling.” I never really thought about pro wrestling as a business case study, but as the author points out, pro wrestling makes an emotional connection with its audience and continually innovates. From a marketing perspective, there’s a lot we can learn from these titans in tights.
Automatically extracting data from documents is a complex feature, typically involving a discussion of linguistics. We tried to simplify the subject in our new Auto Extract video by explaining the advantages and value of the end results: fast, accurate and consistent data extraction from existing documents. Please let us know what you think and thanks again!
Phil Wainewright wrote a great article outlining many problems with the way analysts judge SaaS products. The first and probably most important to many buyers is the total cost of ownership comparisons. Wainewright points out a built in bias in the formula most analysts use to compare on-premise solutions vs. SaaS applications (multiplying the subscription price by three years). This doesn’t account for the huge cost and disruption of upgrading to a new version of an on-premise solution while SaaS applications are continually upgraded at no cost.
In a recent Forrester report a SaaS collaboration tool was given a low rating for its lack of cross platform support. Since SaaS applications are not installed, it is absurd to penalize the application for not conforming to an on-premise grading criteria.
A reader pointed out that publishing timetables also skew analyst results. The typical two year lifetime of an analyst product comparison is designed to coincide with on-premise product delivery cycles. Normally on-premise products are made available to analysts long before customers have them deployed while a report on a SaaS product is likely two versions behind when the report is issued. The result is comparing apples to oranges.
Too bad so many enterprise purchasing decisions hinge on an analyst report. Let’s hope coverage becomes as agile as SaaS development.
