OfficeAutoPilot: Simple, Powerful, Low Cost Demand Generation for Small Business

My personal definition of demand generations systems (see Introduction to Demand Generation Systems from the Raab Guide site) explicitly states that they do not incorporate sales automation. The division makes sense in most organizations, since marketing and sales are separate. (See Should Demand Generation and Sales Automation Be Separate Systems? for whether this will change.)

But small businesses are different. Sales and marketing are often handled by the same department, if not the same person, and owners want as few systems as possible to keep costs to a minimum. So it’s pretty common for small-business-oriented systems to support both marketing and sales. Of products I’ve written about recently, Infusionsoft is the best example of this, extending beyond sales and marketing all the way to order processing. (See my Infusionsoft review.)

OfficeAutoPilot from MoonRay LLC is another small-business-oriented product that combines marketing and sales automation. The latest version actually offers integration with Salesforce.com as well, making the system more suitable for larger organizations. Indeed, the functionality of OfficeAutoPilot compares favorably with conventional demand generation systems, while the pricing – starting at just under $600 per month for 50,000 contacts and 100,000 monthly emails – is hugely attractive. Business marketers who can’t afford to pay more or want a low-risk way to get started with demand generation will find OfficeAutoPilot an intriguing option.

The basics are certainly there. Users can create personalized emails, landing pages and Web forms with the system’s tools or import externally-created HTML. Emails are sent from the OfficeAutoPilot server while forms can either be hosted by OfficeAutoPilot or externally. Web pages are built by dragging and dropping objects in the way you build a Powerpoint slide. Although most demand generation systems use an interface more like building a Word document, OfficeAutoPilot’s approach is a fairly common alternative and perfectly acceptable. Some marketers may even find it easier.

OfficeAutoPilot actually does a better job at split testing than most demand generation systems. Users can define two versions of an email or Web page when they set it up, and the system will automatically alternate between them during execution. Standard reports compare the performance of the two versions. This is the easiest approach I’ve seen to split testing. The only other demand generation system I’ve seen use it is Marketo.

OfficeAutoPilot takes a straightforward approach to multi-step campaigns. Users lay these out as a series of steps timed relative to a single date. This can be the start of the sequences, a fixed date such as a birthday, or an activity such as the last purchase. Leads can enter a sequence when they fill out a Web form, are manually added by the user, or trigger the conditions specified in a “global rule”. The system checks each lead against all the global rules every time the lead’s data changes, allowing real time response to lead activities.

Each step in a sequence does one thing: send an email, postcard or voice message, add the lead to a fulfillment list, create a sales automation task or execute a user-defined rule that triggers an action if its conditions are met. Available actions include adding or removing the lead from a sequence, adding or removing a tag from the lead profile, changing a data field, sending the lead an email or post card, sending an email to someone else (a sales rep or program administrator), adding or removing the lead from a fulfillment list, and sending the lead to the sales system.

The rules let OfficeAutoPilot react to new behaviors even though the sequence itself is fixed in advance. There is no true branching within a sequence, in the sense of sending different leads down different multi-step paths. But this isn’t necessarily a problem: it’s how linear campaign designs work in most demand generation systems and, as I argued last week, helps to avoid confusion. If anything, OfficeAutoPilot’s combination of steps, rules and actions makes it more flexible than the average demand generation product.

Treatment of tasks illustrates the tight connection between marketing sequences and sales automation. Tasks can be scheduled relative to the date of the step in the sequence, and the system can pause the sequence until the task is complete. Tasks can be assigned to the lead’s salesperson or another owner; the system can notify the owner by email, telephone or adding the task to their to-do list; and the system can notify the owner’s manager if the task is not completed on schedule.

Messaging capabilities are designed to help small businesses whose own resources are limited. MoonRay has negotiated with VoiceShot for outbound recorded voice messages and with a network of printers for low-volume personalized post card printing and mailing. Users design the post cards with the same interface used to build Web pages. Fulfillment lists accumulate names in a queue and then periodically send them to a list for a call center, warehouse, or other destination. The user specifies how often the list is generated, who it will go to, and what data it contains. Emails and postcards can include a personalized URL to help with tracking. The system also provides a pool of telephone 800 numbers that can be assigned to different promotions and will automatically route to a central number.

Lead scoring in OfficeAutoPilot is handled by an independent process similar to the “global rules”. That is, users define point values to different conditions and the scores are recalculated whenever the lead has an activity or data change. There’s even a standard feature to reduce activity-based score values by a specified percentage for each day after the activity occurs. This is more than some conventional demand generation products provide.

Leads can be sent to sales by actions within a sequence or by a global rule triggered by the lead score or other conditions. The system provides standard sales automation features including lead routing (“round robin”, weighted and others), contact management, task scheduling, sales funnels, call notes and disposition tracking. Dispositions can be tied to rules to automate follow-up actions. Since these are the same rules used elsewhere in the system, the actions can encompass any option available to the automated sequences. This is another benefit of running marketing and sales on the same system.

The system also handles user rights like a sales automation system, which is to say, more precisely than imost demand generation products. The system administrator decides which functions are available to which users, and users see only their authorized features. This is an important usability benefit when companies have many different types of users.

OfficeAutoPilot’s sales automation is not as sophisticated as specialized sales automation systems like Salesforce.com or even Goldmine. For example, there is no separate account or company level.

MoonRay says about 20% of its clients use its bi-directional Salesforce.com synchronization. This shares data between the two systems and can display a history of the lead’s OfficeAutoPilot activities within the Salesforce.com screens. Another adapter lets users view and edit contact records from within Microsoft Outlook and will add Outlook emails to the OfficeAutoPilot history. Data from other sources can be posted to the system through a standard SOAP API or by importing structured email messages. This is most typically used to add purchase information. Users can add new fields to the lead profiles as needed.

The system tracks marketing results from the lead source all the way through the sales funnel, and on to revenue if available. A marketing dashboard provides standard reports on Web activity and emails. Users can also drill into the details of each campaign sequence, listing the leads in each stage and drilling further to see the individual messages they received.

Pricing of OfficeAutoPilot is based largely on the number of users, subject to some fairly generous volume constraints. A five-user system with up to 50,000 contacts and 100,000 emails per month costs $597 per month. A dedicated email IP address adds $147 per month for up to 500,000 messages.

MoonRay also offers simpler systems at lower costs, including a new product called SendPepper scheduled to launch today (March 30). SendPepper includes outbound email and postcards, Web forms and landing pages, and simple auto-response sequences. Two versions are available, priced at $29 per month and $79 per month.

The original version of OfficeAutoPilot was introduced in 2003. The system currently has more than 100 active accounts. It is sold directly by MoonRay and through partners.

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Webinar April 2: Does On-Demand Business Intelligence Make Sense?

I just realized I hadn't mentioned this upcoming Webinar in the blog. It's on April 2 at 2 p.m. Eastern.

I'll be talking about whether and when to use on-demand business intelligence. Webinar is sponsored by Birst, an on-demand BI vendor. (I guess that eliminates most of the suspense about how I'll answer to the title question.) Birst co-founder Paul Staelin will also present, and of course we'll take questions.

Please register here.

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Multi-Step Campaign Interfaces: A Quick Vendor Survey

If you read this blog regularly (and who doesn't?), you know that I see a lot of demand generation systems. Naturally, the vendors showing them to me have all thought very carefully about their designs and made the best choices they could, typically based on feedback from their customers. As a result, they tend to be quite certain that they have made the right decisions and are correspondingly unreceptive should I suggest otherwise.

The area where this comes up more often than any other is the design of multi-step campaign flows. There are two basic approaches to this: use a flow chart, or present a list of steps. My own opinion is quite firm: flow charts don't work. They look good in demonstrations and can lay out simple processes quite nicely. But they get impossibly convoluted once you try to do something complex.

I say this with the fervor of a reformed sinner, since for many years I looked at flow charts as the mark of an advanced marketing automation system. But in all that time I never saw a flow chart interface that actually did a good job handling complexity. So I've reluctantly concluded that flow charts are only suitable for serious technical experts.

Such specialists are fairly common at big consumer marketers such as banks and retailers. These organizations have marketing operations staff members whose entire job is to set up campaigns. They do perfectly well with flow chart interfaces, which indeed are standard on enterprise marketing automation products (e.g. Unica, Teradata Relationship Manager, SAS Marketing Automation, Siebel Marketing, Alterian, Aprimo, SmartFocus).

But the vast majority of demand generation systems are installed in much smaller marketing departments, where setting up campaigns is just a fraction of the user's job. Those people don't have the time or inclination to master the subtleties of a flow chart interface.

Of course, holding an opinion strongly doesn't make it correct, even when I'm the one doing the holding. So I thought I'd take a little scan of the demand generation systems I've looked at to see how the vendors themselves had voted. I'm pleased to see that the majority of vendors (11 of 16) , and particularly those tending towards serving smaller clients, have in fact chosen against the flow chart approach. (Gone against the flow, as it were.)

I don't expect this news to change the minds of vendors who made the opposite decision. In fact, if they're any kind of marketers at all, they'll argue it's a competitive differentiator. But at least I'll feel more justified the next I tell one of them I disagree with their choice.

Here, then, is a list of vendors (alphabetically) and their interfaces.

	flow	list
Act-On Software		x
ActiveConversion		x
Eloqua	x
Infusionsoft		x
LeadLife		x
LoopFuse	x
Manticore Technology	x
Market2Lead	(1)	x
Marketbright	(1)	x
Marketo		x
Neolane	x
OfficeAutoPilot		x
Pardot		x
Silverpop Engage B2B		x
Treehouse Interactive		x
True Influence	x

(1) embeds simple list- based campaign in a larger flow chart. I'm in favor of that approach.

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Act-On Software Adds Webinar Integration to Small Business Demand Generation

Summary: Act-On Software provides a solid set of demand generation features at a small business price. This review was revised in May, 2010 to reflect developments since the original post of March, 2009.

If you look at the Web site of Act-On Software, you’ll see a typical set of demand generation features: email marketing, demand generation (equated with landing pages and forms), lead nurturing, Website visitor tracking, channel (partner) marketing, and lead scoring. Oddly, it does not highlight Act-On’s most distinctive advantage, which is tight integration with Webex for Webinar presentations.

Working with Act-On is like working with other products: users build emails, landing pages and Web forms; track activities through page tags and cookies; do scoring and segmentation with activity history and lead attributes; and pass qualified leads to Salesforce.com. The specific features to do this are reasonably powerful: for example, emails and Web pages can be built from scratch, based on templates or imported, while the templates themselves can be built from components stored in a central library. The components can include prebuilt surveys, which can be embedded in an email or linked to a separate Web form. This is more than many other products offer.

The system also offers above-average flexibility in its delivery arrangements: clients can send the email either from their own servers or through Act-On, and can display Act-On-host forms within external Web pages as iframes.

Act-On does a good job of capturing activity history and form entries. The system will track both known and anonymous visitors, using the IP address to look up the company of anonymous visitors and linking to JigSaw to show company information It can also send alerts when it sees visits from specified individuals, companies, or locations. All activities for a given lead (identified by an email address or cookie ID) can be used for scoring and segmentation. Data posted to Web forms can also be stored in a central file. Scoring rules can reference both lead attributes and activities, and are updated in real time as new data arrives. Users can also apply scores, attributes or activities to define lists that are updated in real time.

So far so good, and now we can talk about Webinars. Users can define a Webinar within Act-On, entering name, time, date, duration, password, and teleconference number, and then push this to their Webex account. They can also create a registration page and form, auto-response message, invitation emails, reminders and follow-up emails. The system will feed the registrations into Webex and pull back attendee lists, gathering all the related data within Act-On for reporting. This is a significant improvement over the usual situation, where data is scattered between the different systems.

But remember that channel marketing listed on the home page? It’s pretty limited. Dealers and similar channel partners can be assigned Act-On accounts with access to the library of marketing materials, including documents and email templates. They can also import lists and execute email campaigns. The parent company can’t use the partners’ lists (always a sensitive issue) but does have access to responders. At present, email templates are either fully locked-down (no changes allowed) or totally open. Act-On plans to refine this so the parent can allow partners to change some portions of the template and not others. Even with these changes, the channel management features in Act-On don’t compare with Marketbright or Treehouse International. (For more information, see my blog post on Marketbright and my post on Treehouse International.)

Lead nurturing supports multi-step, event-triggered email campaigns. These are defined as a sequence of steps with conditions inside each step to select different messages for different individuals. Campaign steps can also assign leads to a new list, change a data value, and wait a specified period before continuing. In addition, users can assign an exit condition to each campaign that removes leads at any step when the condition is met. This is used to end a message stream when leads are submitted to sales or qualify for a different campaign with higher priority.

Act-On describes its contents as stored in a collection of lists rather than a conventional database. I found this perplexing in my original look at the product but have decided after closer examination that it's mostly a matter of semantics. In practice, customers maintain a single “master marketing list” with all lead profiles and an activity history linked to each profile. The other lists are either segments derived from the master list or supplementary data such as survey responses that are best kept separate from the main profile. The system has standard connectors to import data from Salesforce.com (it can pull members of a specific campaign, all contacts or all leads), Microsoft Outlook, and Webex. It can also take data from Excel, comma-separated text files and its own Web forms. Data can be automatically synchronized at user-defined intervals.

The system also provides an unusal Twitter marketing feature that makes it easy to scan for prospects and send them standardized messages. See my May 2010 post on social marketing feature for details.

Pricing is based on the number of “active” contacts (defined as having an interaction or receiving a message), starting at $500 per month for 5,000 active contacts. It’s hard to compare this with other vendors, since most charge based on database size or communication volume. But it seems competitive with small business-oriented demand generation systems and lower than products aimed at larger firms. There are no set-up fees, clients can have month-to-month contracts, and you can start with a 30 day free trial. So this is a pretty easy system to buy.

Act-On also offers a sales automation system that could be an alternative to Salesforce.com. Pricing on this starts at $14.95 per month for three users and 1,000 contacts.

Act-On released its beta version in June 2008 and started selling that October. As of April 2010 it had about 80 clients. Most are small or mid-sized, but they also include Cisco, which invested in Act-On in 2008.

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Should Demand Generation and Sales Automation Be Separate Systems?

I’ve been focusing (obsessing?) recently on the idea that the boundaries between marketing and sales are breaking down because leads now interact with both departments throughout the purchase cycle. This is clearly inevitable: if nothing else, leads still visit your Web site (controlled by marketing) even after they are “turned over” to sales. More fundamentally, the very idea of a lead being “turned over” is now obsolete: today the buyers are in control; neither department ever owns them in the first place.

The sheer volume of interactions also means that sales can’t cost-effectively handle every contact, even for the highest-priority individuals. Rather, salespeople must focus on what only they can do – provide nuanced, personal service – and delegate other tasks to resources that can handle them more cheaply and often more quickly. In many cases, those resources will be automated systems that are run by marketing. (Yes, sales could duplicate those systems for itself. But buyers would still sometimes enter through marketing-run channels, so marketing and sales would still need to coordinate. Remember, the buyer is in control.)

The immediate implication of this is that marketing and sales must work together to ensure that every lead is treated appropriately in both marketing and sales systems. Today, this is accomplished by synchronizing data between demand generation and sales automation systems. But that is inherently complex. The obvious (or perhaps simple-minded) solution is to skip the synchronization and have marketing and sales work on one shared system.

This isn’t a new idea: indeed, “marketing, sales and service” have long been the three components of Customer Relationship Management products. But marketing was always the weakest link, and, typically, was pretty much separate when you looked under the hood. There was a sound technical reason for this: sales and service are operational systems with a transactional data architecture, while marketing databases are structured for analysis. But this distinction is less important given the power of modern databases, particularly at the relatively low volumes of most business-to-business marketers.

In fact, the division between demand generation and sales automation today is probably more a reflection of organizational divisions than technical imperatives. But as the two departments become more intertwined, this will increasingly be an anachronism that presents an obstacle to success.

So are independent demand generation systems doomed to be assimilated into larger CRM products? If so, the obvious but unspoken threat looming over the industry (“the elephant in the room of Damocles”) was always Salesforce.com, which is the main data source for most demand generation products. That particular, um, shoe may have dropped, according to a BNET article yesterday from Michael Hickins (Marketing Automation Next For Salesforce.com)

Whether Salesforce.com would really do this, how quickly they would move, and whether they would build or buy are all intriguing questions. But regardless of what Salesforce.com does in the short term, it's worth asking whether independent demand generation systems really have a long-term future.

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Treehouse Interactive MarketingView Combines Demand Generation with Campaign ROI Tracking

I originally spoke with Treehouse Interactive in late January, but didn’t write about them because weren’t quite ready to talk about their Salesforce.com integration. Since that’s critical to many demand generation users, I didn’t want to give a false impression by leaving it out. They officially announced the Salesforce integration and other changes (more about that later) on March 3. So now the story can be told.

It’s actually quite a long story, dating back to the company’s initial sales automation system in 1997, followed by its MarketingView demand generation product in 1999. Finding a demand generation system that old is always a surprise, since most products were launched much more recently. But Treehouse Interactive has been growing quietly all that time, now reaching a perfectly respectable 100 or so clients, of which more than half use MarketingView. The balance use the company's sales automation product, SalesView, (which is what let them get away without Salesforce.com integration for so long), and a partner portal called ResellerView.

Given the number of perfectly acceptable demand generation products available today, it’s tempting to focus on SalesView and ResellerView as items that really distinguish Treehouse Interactive. But any evaluation still has to start with the core functions, since each product does these slightly differently. MarketingView is no exception. It provides a pretty typical email builder, with a graphical editor that lets users modify HTML templates and insert personalization variables. The system is a little above-average in that emails can contain if/then rules to display different images based on differences in lead data. These rules require a little script writing, which is always a negative in my book, but nothing fancy.

MarketingView is also unusual, though not unique, in assigning a separate IP address to each client. This ensures that spam problems of one client don’t spill over to affect the others. I was just discussing this recently with another vendor who also gives everybody their own IP address, and it seems the cost is quite minimal. So far as I’m concerned, it should be provided by every vendor as part of their base price.

Emails can be attached to lists, which are either maintained within the system based on user-specified criteria or imported from external files. The list definition interface is a bit old-school: users fill in the blanks on a form that shows lead attributes and a few behavioral attributes: numbers of email clicks, email opens, spending and purchases. This is a very limited set of behavioral attributes compared with what’s available in other demand generation systems. Users do get to specify threshold values, greater or less than operators, and date ranges to measure.

Although most of the old fill-in-the-blanks query interfaces could only select records that contained all of the user-specified field values, MarketingView is a bit more flexible: it lets users specify ‘or and ‘not’ relationships among the values. The interface to do this still seems old-fashioned: users get a numbered list of the specified attributes and can then write script statements such as “1 and 2 or 3 and not 4’. This is a bit awkward, since you have to look somewhere else on the screen to find what each number refers to. It could also be misread when users leave out parentheses. But it’s basically serviceable and I suspect few MarketingView clients have trouble with it.

The system’s Web form builder is considerably more advanced. Users can create questions on the fly, list allowable answers, specify required items, and either map results to database fields or store them separately. New questions are automatically added to a library so they can be reused across surveys. Users can also set up form-level rules that let visitors save and return to a partly completed form, set an expiration date on a survey, authenticate the visitor based on their name or other value, prepopulate the form with data for known visitors, and control what happens when someone fills out the same form more than once. (The system can prevent this, overwrite previous entries, or keep each the entry as a separate record.) Forms can be hosted by Treehouse Interactive or run on an external server. MarketingView can also accept data posted from forms built outside of the system.

This is all good stuff, and some is above the industry average. But what really makes a MarketingView form special is what happens after it’s completed. Users can attach any number of actions to a form and can assign both selection conditions and time intervals to each action.

In fact, campaigns in MarketingView are nothing more (or less) than a list of actions attached to a form. This is certainly an unusual approach, and I can’t quite decide whether I like it. Since the available actions include all the basic campaign tasks – sending an email, adding a name to a list, sending a lead to the CRM system, notifying a salesperson, and sending another form – it does give users pretty much the same functionality as a conventional approach. In fact, it’s arguably just a slightly different version of the small linear campaigns I consider the basic building blocks of an easy-to-use campaign interface. (See my earlier posts on the topic.) But without a way to visualize the flow of leads from one campaign to another, it would be difficult to use MarketingView for complex programs.

There are also some significant limits to how MarketingView implements its campaign approach. The most important is that filter conditions for subsequent actions can only look at the data on the original form. This means you can’t define different paths based on other information in a lead record or on subsequent behaviors. Even something as simple as removing a lead from a campaign when the lead is sent to sales requires terminating the campaign for everyone.

Another issue is that all campaign actions are scheduled relative to the original form submission date. This means a campaign can’t wait for an event and then resume once it happens. I think there are ways to achieve similar outcomes by having separate campaigns trigger each other in sequence: that is, one campaign would end in an email that links to a form, which would then start another campaign. But this seems considerably harder to manage than doing everything within one campaign.

Ok, people looking for the world’s fanciest campaign manager are probably not going to buy MarketingView. But there are other reasons to consider it.

- ROI reporting. This was the other key point in the March 3 release. MarketingView can pull revenues from the CRM opportunity records, pretty much the same as other demand generation systems. But it can also insert a script into an ecommerce system transaction page to pull revenues from online purchases. The system links this to campaigns through a campaign cookie on the buyer’s computer. I believe this is unique to MarketingView, at least as a standard feature.

MarketingView can capture revenue from sales through channel partners. It does this through its ResellerView portal, which attaches campaigns to leads it distributes to partners and reports back the revenues that partners associated with those leads. The actual process is somewhat complex: the leads are actually sent to a sales automation system (SalesView or Salesforce.com) which in turn sends them to ResellerView, and the revenues are read from opportunity records that also flow from ResellerView to sales automation to MarketingView. This makes it easier to coordinate direct sales and channel sales efforts, and it done without requiring partners to license the sales automation system. Again, this particular approach is apparently unique.

Taken together, these features mean that MarketingView can link campaigns to revenue for direct sales (from CRM), online sales (from ecommerce) and channel sales (from ResellerView). For clients who use those channels, the result is a more complete view of campaign revenue than traditional demand generation products can provide. The system also captures campaign costs, so it can produce a proper ROI report. In fact, it produces a bevy of statistics based on the different combinations of cost, revenue and response statistics, such as cost per opportunity and revenue per click.

- lead scoring based on actual purchases. This draws on the revenue capture features just discussed. In particular, the system has a “Who’s Climbing Up” report that tracks scores based on recent email opens, link clicks, form submissions, purchase dollars and purchase events. This report can be turned into a list of hot prospects. Of course, every demand generation system does lead scoring. But access to online and channel revenue lets MarketingView produce more useful scores, at least for companies where those sales are important.

- Partner management. I didn’t examine ResellerView in depth, but it promises a broad set of partner relationship management features. In addition to distributing leads and capturing revenues, the system can register partners, give them accounts, manage contracts, track their certifications, manage coop advertising, send newsletters and other notices, register opportunities, and even run a dealer locator. The only other demand generation vendor I’ve seen with serious partner management is Marketbright.

- bidirectional real time data synchronization with sales automation. This applies both to SalesView and Salesforce.com. Several, but not all, demand generation vendors support real time synchronization. It’s increasingly important as marketing and sales groups both stay involved with leads throughout their life cycle, instead of abruptly ending marketing involvement once sales takes over. Real time alerts from demand generation to sales automation are relatively easy to find, but real time updates from sales automation to demand generation are not. MarketingView does both. The value of real time updates from sales automation is that they can trigger immediate automated responses from demand generation, allowing more attentive service than sales people can do on their own.

Treehouse Interactive products are offered as subscription services. Pricing on MarketingView is based on the number of contacts in the database, without regard to volume of emails or Web transactions. A 5,000 contact system costs $599 per month, which puts the pricing firmly in small business territory. Rates for higher volumes are confidential but still priced with small and mid-sized business in mind. The company has some larger firms among its existing clients, although it isn’t actively targeting the enterprise market. Treehouse Interactive also offers custom development, Web design, and marketing consulting.

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Notes from SAS Analyst Conference

I spent yesterday at an analyst conference for SAS, being briefed on the company’s plans for 2009. The presentations are considered confidential, so I can’t go into details. But I think it’s okay to share a few points that struck me.

- credit and other financial risk analysis are a very strong business for the company right now. Of course this makes perfect sense, but it’s nice to see on two levels: first, that financial institutions are working on the issue and second, that there’s some good news somewhere.

- SAS sees itself as selling software applications for specific tasks (like credit risk analysis) rather than the underlying analytical tools. This isn’t news, but I hadn’t quite realized how fully the company had committed to this approach. One big difference with SAS is that they essentially create a separate data warehouse using SAS technology, instead of drawing on other systems for data integration and database management. The SAS “framework” (they avoid the term “platform”) might draw from a conventional warehouse, exist alongside it, or replace it altogether. But however you structure it, the SAS approach implies a relatively substantial investment to bring up the initial SAS application. The advantage is it's easier to add later applications – a major selling point when SAS tries to expand its footprint within an existing client.

This approach also puts SAS in conflict with several other parties: corporate IT departments who may view its foundation as redundant; other application software developers; and channel partners who may want to integrate solutions from several sources. SAS did mention several initiatives to cooperate with other players (except maybe other application software developers), but also seems quite willing to go it alone when necessary. The underlying attitude seemed to be that their solutions are good enough to win on their merits, and ultimately that’s what matters.

- improved user interfaces are a major initiative this year. SAS leaders mentioned several times that they had lost deals to less capable products that looked more attractive, and clearly this rankles. However, SAS seems to believe that better user interfaces are all about flash (and, in this case, specifically Adobe Flash). I saw and heard little that suggested a deeper understanding of usability as a way of helping people to do their jobs more efficiently and effectively. One red flag: the sample dashboard they proudly displayed included many gauges, which are almost universally rejected as a poor use of screen real estate. Ironically, one of SAS’s own presentations made this exact point about gauges—but then someone illustrated emailing a picture of a gauge as a way of alerting a colleague to a value. Ouch!

(In case it's not clear why you wouldn't email a gauge: if you just wanted to tell someone the number, you'd just send the number and save the person the need to look at the gauge, find the needle, and then relate it to the scale. If you wanted to show the number in context, you'd send a note along the lines of "revenue is $45,000, 20% ahead of plan". Again, much easier than trying to interpret values and color zones on the gauge, and conveys precisely the point you intended.)

But those are just my little quibbles. SAS remains a tremendously strong company with great technology, far-sighted management and dedicated employees. I have no doubt that they’ll continue to succeed and, more important, deliver great value to their clients.

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