“We’ve hardly exploited the product – but we paid full price!”
This is what a customer told me here in Atlanta today. I had spent the morning talking with them about their identity management initiatives. Does anyone out there believe that a company has only one identity management product, suite or vendor? I hope note. I rarely meet a customer that has only one. This customer already had two and were talking to us about our capabilities. They had both XXXXXXX and XXXXXX. I’m happy to add Quest because I will make sure that they are H-A-P-P-Y with our solution.
I finish my meeting and head to my hotel room to interview a sales director for our identity management team and my mobile phone rings: “Dude, when are you back in Seattle? I have a customer who has XXXXXX Identity Manager. They’ve spent a ton of money and don’t want to spend any more. Will you talk with them?”
After I get off the candidate interview my mobile rings again. It’s a different sales rep: “I just talked with XXX and they have XXXXXX Identity Manager. They’ve spent $3M and have been asked to spend another $3M. They want to talk to us!”
So, I don’t know if it’s because we bought Voelcker that customers are falling out of trees or what but in one day we had three opportunities pop up! What a day. Oh, and of the three opportunities two were to displace XXXXXX Identity Manager and the other was to displace another Gartner Magic Quadrant “Leader”.
What are my take-aways?
1. Many customers have more than one identity management product, suite or vendor in the house already.
2. Customers are not happy with what they have.
3. IAM is important enough that despite rampant failures the customer is still wanting to solve the problem even if it means selecting another vendor and spending more money.
4. Being in the leadership quadrant has absolutely nothing to do with how successful you, as a customer, will be.
Exciting times for an upstart IAM vendor like Quest Software eh?!
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