Magnus Marketing Blog

Once upon a time in a kingdom established long ago, there lived a family of royals who had a very olden rigid culture. They were quite established in a particular area with deep knowledge. The kingdom was built upon the outsourcing of machines which they tended to. The kingdom was also known for a product they created based upon their deep industry knowledge for those who built awareness of products/services for others. This kingdom was not overt, but had a nice group of patrons.

One day, the King desired to add more patrons to replace some patrons that left for other parts of the world. After some searching, they identified a resource that could help them - a Princess from another world. To make a long story shorter, the King and his Prince had a patron that not only gave them their machine to take care of, but also a product that ran on the machine. This was quite innovative at the time - this ASP model. The employees, if it is recalled, accessed this old product remotely. The Prince, to his credit, realized that this "ASP software hosting" may have some merit to it and launched a campaign to host other old software products for companies employees.

The Princess understood the opportunity and wanted to focus on the "ASP software hosting", some research indicated this was the way to go as more people were starting to refocus on the ASP model. She was in love with the in-house software, a really intelligent product. And, she noticed as they went to market that a lot of people were responding to it. They were interested, both in buying the software AND using it as an ASP model. The King however was more interested in finding patrons who would give their machines over and discouraged the Princess from putting too much emphasis on the ASP model and sales of their software. The Princess, known for insubordination of this type, continued to market the product anyway - shifting more time to the machine side.

One day the Princess from another world thought about the ASP software hosting idea. She happened to have a contact from a up and coming company known as "PeopleSoft", the contact was the product manager for an old software called "VANTIVE". She thought, I talked to this guy and its an old software - maybe he would be interested in this ASP thing? An email was sent, a discussion ensued. The recall was that the product manager was somewhat interested, but wanted more of a business case to be developed. A task that the Princess from another world was really not equipped to do and the Prince of the Kingdom in recall didn't want to do. Probably too much work to figure out with not enough return. After all, how would hosting "VANTIVE" really make any money for the Kingdom? Needless to say, the pursuit of the Product Manager ended. The Princess stayed on for a few more months, fruitlessly seeking patrons with machines to outsource - the sales cycle was very, very long. The King had no patience and really did not understand how long a direct sales cycle was. The Princess was summarily terminated.

Of course, we all know the fairytale ending never happened. Not for them at least. It happened however for Marc Benioff who left Oracle. He not only understood the "ASP software" idea, but took the idea of a hosted CRM solution to be in 2008 - the 43rd largest software company in the world with revenue of 1 billion+. Salesforce.com was a baby company when the discussion with Vantive, commonly known now as PeopleSoft CRM, occurred. Not many people were keen on Salesforce.com at the time because it meant giving up your data to an unknown entity, a start-up no less. I guess Marc put the pen to paper and made a compelling business case, more importantly he pushed it through. SAAS is now a standard for software offerings, too bad the "ASP" idea for the King's internal product wasn't marketed harder, it could have been groundbreaking. Sometimes sticking with what you know, versus what could be - can be the difference between a company becoming a billion dollars or having your Kingdom bought over by someone else.