Archive for March, 2010

Tech talk – Cloud, Multitenant, J2EE, Open Source and other techie buzz words

Friday, March 26th, 2010

I’ve been asked a lot lately to talk about our solution platform and technology used here at LoopFuse, so figured it would be worth a blog… To start, LoopFuse OneView is an on-demand marketing automation software solution. In a nutshell, this means it is software hosted by a vendor on the internet that can be run using a web browser without having to install any software, so is ready for use immediately. This is also called SaaS (software as a service), which is a term originally made popular by vendors such as SalesForce.com. Lately the term “Cloud” has replaced SaaS as the new buzz word.

Cloud computing as a concept and even as a practice has been around for a long time. Although “the cloud” is often seen as a synonym for SaaS, it actually is a broader term in that it refers to hosting all types of internet based services such as remote file storage and not just packaged software solutions. Many “cloud” hosting vendors exist, but the most well known one is Amazon with their AWS (Amazon web services) which includes offerings ranging from data storage to payment services to distributed database hosting.

Although there are many upsides for on-demand software vendors to deploy in the cloud, there still exist a few downsides as well; the main one being loss of complete control of the NOC (network operations center) they run their software service from. For many on-demand applications that are not mission critical, such as photo sharing sites, the tradeoff between losing control of network operations and the cost savings of outsourcing their IT is very acceptable. However, for mission critical applications such as marketing automation where businesses rely on leads being captured to drive revenue, the tradeoff can be less compelling.

At LoopFuse, we made the decision to host all our core services ourselves within our own NOC instead of hosting with a cloud hosting provider such Amazon. Collectively, we’ve had a lot of experience building out network infrastructures and felt this would be the best way for us to ensure the reliability, security, and scale which our customers would depend on. To date, this decision has proven to be a good one. For example, under the Amazon EC2 Service Level Agreement the target uptime is at least 99.95%. While this is very good, it could potentially translate into almost 55 minutes of downtime since the beginning of this year (54.72 to be exact). The actual uptime for the LoopFuse lead capture service since the beginning of this year has been 100% (i.e. no downtime). Even though just under an hour of downtime over a three month period may not seem like much, not being able to capture leads after launching a major customer acquisition campaign would be a major problem for most businesses. Another area where having complete control of the NOC is beneficial is being able to implement specific security controls. An example we encountered of this at LoopFuse was a customer who worked with government agencies that had the specific requirement of degaussing hard drives containing their data after being decommissioned. Because we have direct physical access to all our hardware running within our NOC, we were able to meet this requirement.

Another somewhat unique decision we made related to being an on-demand software provider is how we implemented our multi-tenant architecture. Most SaaS vendors use a multi-tenant architecture where all their customers share all the same hardware, application instance and the same database instance. Although LoopFuse OneView is a multi-tenant application with shared resources, all customer accounts are stored in separate database instances. Because every customer has their own database instance, there is no commingling of customer data (i.e. customer A’s leads to not sit next to customer B’s leads within a database table). Besides being inherently more secure, customers having separate database instances also helps will scalability since can allocate hardware based on size and usage of individual accounts. For example, many smaller customers can be put on a database server where share hardware resources such as CPU and memory and a large enterprise customer can be put on a similar database server by themselves. This prevents the smaller customers from being impacted by the larger customer consuming all the hardware resources and vice versa. Also, scaling up as more customer accounts are added is not limited by what a single server can handle across all customer accounts which would require expensive hardware upgrades, but instead can simply add more reasonably priced servers to the server farm.

Finally there is the actual technology we used to build LoopFuse Oneview, which is primarily J2EE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition). This was an easy decision for us since Roy Russo, the other founder, and myself both came from JBoss, an Open Source J2EE vendor, we were already very familiar with J2EE.  As you might guess, we also deploy on JBoss as well.  Using J2EE, along with JBoss, provides many inherently “enterprise” features such as clustering, failover, load balancing, caching, and distributed processing along with enterprise grade security via JAAS.

We also use a number of other Open Source products such as Red Hat linux and MySQL.The use of Open Source technologies and products was a no-brainer as well since we were already well aware of all the benefits.  The first and most obvious benefit is cost.  The next biggest benefit of Open Source is access; not only to the code but to information.  Because of free and open access within the Open Source world, it is much easier to find information about issues and work-arounds, how to implement specialized requirements, and best practices in general.  This is a very powerful benefit and one of the main reasons access to our customer support portal is free and open to all.

Loopfuse Welcomes Marcus Tewksbury!

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

I would like to welcome Marcus Tewksbury to the Loopfuse team.  Last week, we formally announced that Marcus joined our advisory board but Marcus has been good friend of the Loopfuse team for about a year.  By way of introduction, he is an expert on how companies can turbocharge their inbound marketing efforts, select and implement successful social media marketing strategies, and drive customer engagement.  In addition, Marcus is known throughout the industry for his work in engagement marketing, where he focuses on helping marketers manage the disruption of digital saturation and the effect of word of mouth.  While Marcus has worked companies such as Wal-Mart, JP Morgan, Hallmark, Walgreens and Coach, he is currently the director of customer intelligence at Alterian, a publicly traded, integrated marketing platform company.  Without question, Marcus brings a wealth of knowledge, expertise and engagement strategies across sales and marketing automation, demand generation technologies, and social media.  We are very excited to have him join LoopFuse’s advisory board and contribute to our next stage of growth and success.

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Q&A with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research – Part 2: Market Momentum

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

Following up on my post last week, I am releasing the second part of my interview with Laura Ramos of Forrester Research (blog).

Part 2:  Market Momentum

4.    Dwyer:  What key trends drive adoption of Lead Management Automation (LMA) today?

Ramos:  Besides the economy and the need to improve sales pipelines short term, I think there are 3 more systemic changes driving lead management automation investment and use. These are: 1) the need for greater marketing accountability, 2) the need to produce not just more demand, but better qualified demand, and 3) the need to scale the sales process more efficiently (another way of putting this is reducing the cost of customer acquisition).  There are a number of macro trends driving widespread change in B2B marketing, where I see automated demand management as a key response to these trends. In short, I expect marketers to adopt lead management automation to build customer dialogue and relationships much earlier in the purchase process and counteract issues like advertising avoidance, commoditization, and social computing (which creates unprecedented transparency and information sharing that is wonderful for buyers, but challenging for sellers).

5.    Dwyer:  What impact will a Lead Management Automation (LMA) system have on the typical marketing organization?

Ramos:  I think the impact of automation on a large marketing organization can be quite different than the impact for a small one.  Both experience different issues and challenges. Let me focus on the midmarket here and refer to the three trends I mentioned in the prior question to address the question of impact:

1) Greater marketing accountability. Over the past 10 years, B2B marketers have witnessed an explosion in available marketing approaches, especially in the digital world. While this has made more channels available, many marketers struggle to execute tactics in an integrated fashion that engage B2B buyers during what is often a lengthy sales cycle. Running from tactic to tactic, B2B marketers can also fail to demonstrate marketing’s impact beyond the point of campaign execution. Lead management automation helps marketers get a handle on the marketing mix and to learn which approaches work at which points in the buyer’s journey. LMA can also give marketers more flexibility to try new approaches and experiment with new techniques because the system lets them see, more directly, the impact between marketing activity and the volume and quality of leads that result.

2) Better qualified leads. Sales doesn’t really want more leads from marketing, but they do want better ones. Lead management automation helps marketing and sales get onto the same page and to answer the critical question “what makes a great lead?” Without automation to score leads across the purchase cycle, and the capability to nurture leads – start a conversation, educate, build dialogue, persuade – marketers will fail to put the best leads in front of sales and to help sales to convert pipeline into closed deals.

3) Scaling the sales process. Many executives think LMA helps marketing.  In fact, it helps sales. And it helps the bottomline.  Starting in the last decade, trends like software as a service, virtualization, and on-demand provisioning have changed how firms deliver high technology products. The services component of any solution has become more important. And IT buyers want to pay as they go. Long-term, on-premise, perpetual licenses will decline in favor of the on-demand model.  This also means that long sales processes, backed by high-commission sales reps, must become less expensive. Marketing will become key in this transition as buyers rely more on online channels – and communities of like-minded participants – to inform and validate purchase decisions. Lead management automation can help marketers connect with these buyers long before the first sales call and make selling more efficient as a result.

I think large, multinational firms can certainly achieve these results at the departmental level.  However, the challenges associated with building a global brand, driving message consistency, and managing marketing interactions across geographies, regions, industries, and multiple product lines increases demand management complexity significantly.

6.    Dwyer:  Are you seeing a shift in focus from traditional outbound marketing activities to inbound marketing? If so, how can marketing leaders prepare themselves?

Ramos:  In 2009, we saw B2B marketers shift from traditional to digital channels in a big way as marketing budgets got the ax and as buyers became harder to engage.  Social media popularity also accelerated the digital transformation.  However, much of what I see happening online in B2B – with social media in particular – I would characterize as “outbound marketing using new channels.” For example, firms put out a stream of press releases and marketing communications, and then tweet about them on Twitter.  Little value is added and certainly not much happening there to make buyers want to strike up a conversation.

To truly move to inbound marketing, B2B marketers need to stop thinking about campaigns and start thinking about multi-step conversations.  They need to efficiently reach buyers at a group or individual level. Mass marketing doesn’t work in B2B, relationship marketing does. This is where I can see LMA playing a key role because lets vertical industry, product management, or local marketers in the field have conversations with targeted groups of prospects – customer segments in the truest sense – using online tools and social media to fuel the dialogue.  By tracking their behavior and interactions, marketers can then pass a rich set of “background” information – behavior, preferences, activity — to sales and help them close deals more efficiently.  When this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t always, the LMA system can now give both marketing and sales quantitative, factual information about what they need to do differently.

Next up, Part 3:  Implementation & Keys to Success

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