Don DeLoach's CEO Blog

As we push forward here at Infobright, we are striving to be more and more open and accessible in our operation. You should be seeing signs of that already. Our goal is to de-mystify what we bring to the market, both from a community standpoint as well as as with our Enterprise Edition. I have noticed a number of companies over the years who do this well, and even more who make doing business with them a struggle.

In our quest to be more open, we are doing things like our Youtube channel, where we will be posting everything from short whiteboard discussions to quick demos to video blogs. It’s already up and running, so please check it out at http://www.youtube.com/user/InfobrightDB. Soon we will also have “Infobright Radio” established as a podcast, exploring various topics in the database and analytics space. We are close to launching an educational webinar series aimed at the Infobright community to make coming up to speed with Infobright as easy as possible. Later this year, we plan to bring forward a series of sample applications that we will make available on the community website so you get get up and running quickly as you experiment with new applications. And last, we plan to evaluate the trial programs and procedure for evaluating our Enterprise Edition offering to ensure it’s easy and straightforward.

Good products are often limited by not-so-good companies. It takes more than just a product to help your business. It takes a company behind the product that is easy to work with, friendly, knowledgeable, and committed to helping you succeed. My observations of other companies suggest that the ones that do that well are both more fun and more prosperous. This observation is not rocket science, but rather basic common sense that may seem all too uncommon.

The last key to all this is listening. We want to hear from you. What are we doing that helps you succeed? Where can we be doing a better job? We are launching a customer advisory council with some of the Enterprise customers and our Community users to collaborate on everything from our roadmap to our overall processes in place to support you. We think you know more about what you need than we do, so we ask, and then ask some more.

Our report card then becomes our success. Are we gaining ground with new customers? Is revenue growing? Are we seeing repeat customers? Are we seeing a growth in resellers and ISV/OEM relationships embedding Infobright in their offerings? Are we seeing growth in the community? The answer to every one of these questions is, at this point, yes. We are very grateful for that. And to that end, we think the best way to sustain that is to continue to challenge ourselves to do better, hence our push for a greater level of accessibility and interaction.

I hope you like the things we are doing. I encourage you to check them out. And I absolutely welcome the feedback.

All the best;

Don
 

Recently Infobright had the opportunity to meet with the Boulder BI Brain Trust, a group of leading industry analysts and BI practitioners. Listen to Claudia Imhoff's interview with Infobright CEO Don DeLoach at the bottom of the Webcasts/Podcasts page.

“Partner” is perhaps the most overused, rhetorical word in the technology business. When IT buyers want a better price, they want the vendor to behave like a ‘partner”. When vendors want a deal to get done, they speak of the pending “partnership”. Vendor hype (and for that matter, buyer hype) is generally motivated by personal gain. So sales people, service people, contracts people, even CEO’s will often say whatever believed to be appropriate in order to get what they want. I sat in a contract negotiation a few years ago with a bank where the chief negotiator was their outside counsel. He wasn’t even a bank employee. He kept telling me we needed to give them a better deal because of the unique partnership based on their status as our “Inaugural Customer”. Really? I tried pointing out that they were, in fact, not our original (or to use his words, “inaugural”) customer, and that the price that was on the table was, in fact, extremely aggressive already. Then we were told that they had really spent way, way, way too much money with another vendor on the failed project that we were about to help them rescue. Of course, this part was entirely true. They had. But then he followed up with another “partner” request. As their ‘close partner”, we needed to understand that since they really had no money left after their aborted project, they “truly” needed for us to be aggressive. They were so conditioned to assume they were always getting taken to the cleaners that they would not recognize the very behavior they wanted. And herein lies the problem with the rhetoric, and my disdain for vendor blather. It is so accepted to speak in lofty terms without the corresponding commitment, understanding, or concern for the other parties well being that using the words does more harm than good – especially if you are working towards a very real meaningful partnership.

I have enjoyed several meaningful partnerships in my career. Without naming personal names (because they know who they are anyway), I would include FedEx, Bank of America, Barclays, ITG, and a few others on this list. These were relationships where both parties took the time to understand what the other wanted and needed, when there were times of slack and times of stress, and how we could work together, always, towards shared success. The “partnership” was earned in both directions through challenges, opportunities for failure, and expectations of commitment which were often beyond reasonable. In every case, we gave more as a vendor than we would have under normal circumstances, and we received more in return. And in every case, the customer received far more than would have been reasonably expected, but also went out of their way to help with our success.

At Infobright we signed a really nice contract this past week. Hopefully we will be able to announce this in public in the future. But the really meaningful side to this contract was that the signature was the beginning, not the end. Leading up to the signature were times of slack and stress, opportunities and challenges, expectations that were unreasonable yet met, in both directions. The trust, goodwill, and shared sense of direction will be worth more that the value of the contract to either of us. But then again, with true partnerships, however uncommon, they always are.