zara technology: go to market strategy - University at Buffalo School ...

Zara Technology: Go to Market Strategy
It was a balmy morning in September, 2007 as two entrepreneurs, Francis Lim
and Christopher Harvey, were sipping their robust Singapore Coffee with Kaya butter
toast at the nimble office of Zara Technology. Chris, the Group CEO and computer
wizard, fired his Apple and instinctively logged on to listen to the Podcast of Eweek.com.
AMR Research’s President and CEO, Tony Friscia, and Chief Research Officer, Bruce
Richardson, were discussing the resurgence of the enterprise software market and its
affect on small and medium-sized businesses:
Hi, I’m Tony Friscia, CEO of AMR Research, and I’m here with
Bruce Richardson, our Chief Research Officer. Bruce, I wanted to talk
today about the overall technology economy because clearly what we’re
seeing is a resurgence in many ways.
………..Tony, most of our listeners, uh, today, are small, are
executives at small or mid-size companies. I think that they’re looking to
invest in probably two areas. One is in driving efficiencies in their
business, and this is leading to huge investments in software as a service.
The second thing is continuing to invest in productivity tools, and this is
leading to small and mid-sized companies spending a lot more money than
they have in the past on Blackberries and other devices that allow
employees to sort of be in touch 24/7 to the business, and I think those are
sort of two critical trends.
One thing that’s happened when we look at the small to mid-sized
players, five or six years ago, we kept hearing the internet changes
everything. When you look at the big spending in the late ‘90’s into 2000,
it was largely driven by the mega-companies, the big companies making
multi-hundred million dollar investments in software and new
infrastructure. What the internet has really done now is open the door for
the small and mid-sized companies to get into the game.
On the business systems side though, I’m not convinced that the
large companies, SAP included, can do it organically that, I think that
what you’re going to have to do is buy a market leader and move into this
space, and one of the things I’ve always questioned I mentioned earlier
that, Oracle’s Larry Ellison owns, you know, three-quarters of Net Suite,
does that become Oracle’s play within the mid-market? Do they buy a
company like Net Suite? I think it’s way too hard for a fifteen-billion or
an eighteen-billion-dollar company to try and guess what the needs of a
small or mid-sized company are. It’s just a much more different market
and perspective, and the channels are completely different, so I think
you’ve got to buy the channel capabilities, I think you’ve got to buy the
product, you’ve got to buy the easy-to-use technology, you have to simplify
the message. Small and mid-sized business owners, they don’t know what
you’re talking about if you start talking about grids and APservers and
XML and Middleware and Vizdal. You’ll send them running from the
building if you start talking about things like that. You have to talk about
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