Hello,
18.02.2009 00:28, Mag Gam wrote:
> Interesting problem. I was the one who started the previous thread
> about the naming.
Ah, nice to see you're still with us here :-)
>> When I'm talking with the management of a potential customer, I
>> neither use the tag line, nor do we read over the website together...
>> it's more that I offer a solution which can do this and that, works
>> reliably as shown by some things, and so on. It's called Bacula, is
>> open source, etc. pp.
>
> My previous and current experience is opposite.
Well, I already learned that not everybody shares my experiences ;-)
> I work or have worked
> very closely with CIO/CTOs of various lines of businesses at our firm
> (Fortune 10 company) which has close to 70k servers. You would be
> amazed how much these people know the technical aspects of software
Amazed I'm not sure, but those companies are probably a bit bigger
than the customers I'm working with. In my case, the decision-makers
often don't have a technical background but rely on their technical
staff to prepare a final decision. Quite often, after an initial
introduction to Bacula, the management decides that their admin staff
should do a test of Bacula and decide based on those results. The
important part is the actual testing, and the product name or brand
is, I believe, not discussed in-depth between the management level and
the technical guys. Thus the management really doesn't care much for
the actual product - they are interested in my final offer, but mostly
in the financial part, once whatever service level they want is defined.
> since most of them were previous programmers but came to the darkside
> -- MBA :-)
Actually, I wouldn't say MBA is necessarily really dark-side - that
would be the purely university-educated ones without any practical
knowledge of their business... ;-)
> These are the final decision makers. My team is very
> hesitant to propose open source software primarily because of strange
> names (assuming the license is free enough).
Another data point against my personal impression... well, I admit
that, even though I disagree with those experiences, I think about
your facts. Kevins as well, of course...
>> In fact, if they want to talk about those things, they probably know a
>> web server called "apache", whose name is also quite ridiculous. Or
>> think about "Thunderbird" - that's a complete nonsense name if you
>> want to relate it to the products function - Bacula, at least, refers
>> to the actual function of the product.
>
> The name "Apache" is weird indeed but you are also stating Bacucla's
> has the reputation of the world's most popular Webserver.
Oh, that's a statement I didn't express and didn't want to imply...
I'd like that situation, though :-)
> In addition,
> Apache is a "frontend" application, where backup software is
> considered extreme backend.
That depends on your point of view - a web server could be considered
just a backend behind your marketing front, when the frontend is some CMS.
>> Given the company's intentions, if you're sure that tag line has to go
>> or to be replaced, I would suggest you start a poll on this mailing
>> list and forward the result... I'm pretty sure Kern (who's IP the name
>> and tag line are, probably) will consider any such request, though I'm
>> also sure he's quite fond of both name and tag line (actually, by now,
>> I share that fondness :-)
>
> Many people face this. For instance, we initially suggested
> "PostgreSQL" for one of our Retail Data warehouse -- 500TB at that
> time -- and the execs were frightened. Once we changed the name to
> "EnterpriseDB" and stated we have a support contract with them it was
> a done deal.
I still wonder about the relative importance of the name and the
support package. You seem to imply the name contributed about half of
the advantage, which doesn't fit to my experiences (which are
definitely limited, but still exist...)
Anyway, there is commercial support available from Bacula Systems as
well as other people and companies. As I don't want to start
advertising too openly here :-) I just recommend you review the
professional support page of the bacula.org web site and pick some of
the entries to ask for references.
> The end users have been extremely happy and the cost were
> almost 20x cheaper than compared RDBMS.
Not an uncommon result with open-source software.
> I think Bacucla should take a page from Apple's marketing department,
> instead of calling their next OS revision, "Uncia uncia" they are
> calling it "Snow Leopard" which is in line of their naming scheme and
> easy to present to the end user.
I'll suggest that both to Kern and to the Bacula Systems marketing and
we'll see what happens.
> Personally, I think Bacula is a great product. Its a good replacement
> for TSM to a certain degree and extremely cost cutting but I doubt it
> will make a lot of leadway to the enterprise without proper marketing.
Hmm, my own customers wouldn't qualify as "enterprise", though some of
them are rather big. And they chose Bacula not because of any
marketing effort. And I know that some really big companies and public
services organizations are using Bacula today, even without commercial
support... if Bacula will be used by more enterprises in the future is
definitely something I can't foresee, though I guess that Bacula will
grow it's market share most among SMBs.
> However, it will be popular in SMB sector.
It already is! But we're working to grow it's market share :-)
Arno
--
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
www.its-lehmann.de
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