Tangent Thought Gallery

I just finished reading Gartner’s “MarketScope for Sales Configuration, 3Q07”, by Gene Alvarez, which came out this week.  Over the years I’ve read quite a bit from Gartner; for me, this one was more interesting, however, since I was among those interviewed for their published analysis.  If you’re replaying scenes from “The Jerk”, with Steve Martin’s lead character wildly running about and shouting out, “The new phone books are here…the new phone books are here!” you may be a bit off, but, yeah, this one had my interest big time.

The backdrop: I’ve worked extensively with online configuration and have conducted detailed comparative analysis from many providers in the past, which I’m assuming is the reason Gartner was interested in my perspective.  At the outset of our most recent project, I had set up an in house “Selection/Configuration” mini-conference for our organization, more or less a parade of vendors diving into their technical and business capabilities.  Most of those were represented in the recent Gartner report, which made it even a bit more interesting to me.

Now, unless you’re really fascinated by the topic of online sales configuration, addressing this in depth here would move even the most stalwart audience into a soporific stupor so I’ll leave that to other venues and other discussions.  If you’ve specific questions outside the scope of this post please feel free to email me.  What I’d like to cover here is the results, at least from my vantage point.

During the phone interview with Gartner, which lasted less than an hour, I answered a number of open ended questions (“Why did you choose this product?”,  “What others did you consider?”, “How are we using it?”, and the like). I actually had an enjoyable time talking with the author since he was well familiar with online configuration and the vendors involved. We went on to discuss more specifics such as customer satisfaction and the comparative strengths between some of the products he was evaluating.  Wrapping up, I was looking forward to seeing the end results of his analysis in print.  Let’s see, that was toward the end of June so the remaining interviews (I’ll assume there were multiple others like mine—Gartner is fairly secretive about their process details, and I can respect that), analysis, authoring, and publication process took about four months.

The Results.  You’re probably well familiar with the legendary Gartner “magic quadrant”.  I was glad in this instance that they refrained from boxing in the vendors in that array this time.  Limiting assessments to four graduated “vision”/”capabilities” quadrants doesn’t really has seldom, if ever, given anyone effective reference tools.  In this analysis, rather than the “MQ”, there’s a ratings matrix in which each of the vendors is given one of five overall ratings: strong negative, caution, promising, positive, and strong positive.  Whew—not much granularity here!  In all fairness, there are a few paragraphs given to vendor/product details, and maybe that’s the better focus.  When I think of all the attributes I pulled together in our assessment I think Gartner could have gone a little further here.  However, again trying to be fair, the analysis is looking at a larger picture than just feature lists. 

There’s one disparity that warrants mention, and this is one that only those involved in online configuration and online commerce may be able to closely relate.  When stacking up vendor to vendor, I believe it would have been better to focus exclusively on the configuration capability, not the commerce component.  Frankly, this is where, imo, Mr. Alvarez missed a bit. 

Commerce tools are exceptionally demanding animals.  If you’ve got an exceptional, best-of-breed configurator, do you want to also attempt to develop a best-of-breed commerce engine?  Or, would you rather augment your business case by easily integrating with best-of-breed tools?

Scanning the vendor line up, some are rewarded for having good commerce engines while others are penalized for not building those themselves.  My take on it is this is not necessarily wise.  I’d much rather be able to deal with a “best tools in the box” approach, particularly if they’ve demonstrated effective integration with past deployments. 

Further, some key configuration issues aren’t addressed thoroughly and some aren’t covered at all.  For example, a key issue with configuration engines is the nature of their modeled data interpretation: are they rules based or constraints based?  This was not compared within the analysis.  I’d underscore this is a huge data maintenance issue.  When calculating the ongoing costs involved in online configuration, data maintenance will typically easily eclipse all other costs.  You don’t want to stumble on this topic.  Constraint based systems largely tend to be less labor intensive as you build and maintain your data models.

In summary, since I’m familiar with a number of these players, who do I think should have been rated higher?  Although the Swedish firm, Tacton, is not a software behemoth like Oracle or SAP (and for this we can give thanks) the integration that they demonstrate is outstanding, their data modeling is lucid, and their support and deployment options work very well.  I couldn’t justify rating any of the other vendors more highly (and may have rated some of the others a bit lower).  Tacton plays exceptionally well with IBM’s WebSphere Commerce, which is a powerhouse in online B2B and B2C commerce.  They also have a very impressive array of other application partners, including Microsoft, Autodesk and  Dassault Systems (SMARTEAM and SolidWorks).   It’s clear that Tacton understands not only configuration, but how to move in a veritable arsenal of high impact supporting systems, all in a best-of-breed environment.