When an enterprise Internet strategist is evaluating a set of vendors in a specific software solution category, how much of a factor is the vendor’s senior management?
Part of that depends on the size of the vendor company in question. For small to mid-size vendors, the senior management team can have a big impact. When I was evaluating mid-tier Content Management Systems as Director of Internet Strategy at Oregon Health & Science University, a large academic health center, the President of the winning vendor was a really smart guy with strong technical chops who could communicate the vision for his product’s architecture and road map in a way that was compelling.
But what about for larger vendors? In my experience, and in listening to Internet management at several large companies over the past several years via the Internet Strategy Forum, I don’t think senior management is as much of a factor as other important criteria.
However, I recently ran across what I think will be an exception to that general rule. My sense is that the recruitment of Daniel Stickel out of Google to be the new CEO of WebTrends will have a major positive impact on how enterprise Internet managers view WebTrends, both for existing customers and for new prospects.
It is well documented that WebTrends experienced a lot of executive turnover in 2007 and an interim CEO came in. While the interim CEO, Bruce Coleman, had an interesting and successful background, it didn’t have anything to do with the web analytics industry and he has almost always been a short-timer (15 companies in the last 18 years).
If you were an enterprise Web manager evaluating Web analytics vendors, all of this had to make you think twice about putting WebTrends on the short list. If you were already a WebTrends customer, you may have been a bit nervous.
Enter Dan Stickel in early April as the new CEO of WebTrends. My first thought was “Wow, they recruited this guy away from Google and away from Silicon Valley–there must really be something compelling here.” It had to go beyond just a great compensation package, etc. You have to really believe in something to make that kind of change.
Then I read more about Daniel’s background, experience and responsibilities at Google and I realized that he really had the chops where it was important, at least as far as an enterprise customer goes.
All other things being equal with regard to specific business needs for any given enterprise, my hunch is that this new senior management addition for WebTrends will have a big impact when it comes time for enterprise Web executives to evaluate Web analytics vendors.
NOTE: I thought it would be really interesting to hear what Daniel has to say about his change, so I invited him to be a special guest presenter at the 5th annual Internet Strategy Forum Summit on July 17-18 and he accepted.
