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Power Tools 1993 November - Disc 2
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Power Tools Plus (Disc 2 of 2)(November 1993)(HP).iso
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lundps.txt
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1993-03-23
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Item Subject: LUNDPS
COMPETITIVE BRIEF - compiled 10/3/91 by Joe Thomas (HP
Performance Technology Center)
Product: SOS/3000 Performance Advisor
Company: Lund Performance Solutions Albany, Oregon
BACKGROUND: Bob Lund, the founder of Lund Performance
Solutions, was an account SE in the HP Fullerton office for
approximately one year in the early 1980s. He has worked at
an HP VAB, and began his entrance into the performance arena
around 1988 with a performance tips and techniques book
called "Taming the HP3000" (MPE V based). He began teaching
two-day performance seminars in the fall of 1988 at major
populations centers, and used an MPE/V tool he wrote called
SOS as a teaching aid. He bundled it in as an extra to
anyone taking the seminar, and made each attendee sign a
nondisclosure about its use.
In late 1988 and early 1989 he began selling SOS/V and doing
performance consulting. He again used SOS/V as the basis
for that and began to combine and leverage efforts in
teaching and training with selling his product. With the
advent of architected interfaces (AIFs) on MPE XL 2.1 and
later, he has made SOS/XL available. Since then his
extremely aggressive sales and marketing has driven his
company to become the top competitor for HP's performance
tools.
SELLING TACTICS: LPS (Lund Performance Solutions) positions
SOS as a functional replacement for both Glance and LaserRX
at the price of Glance. His product does have batch data
collection and an export facility to a "comma delimited"
format digestible to PC spreadsheets and data bases.
LaserRX will be presented as "fancy" and complicated. The
customer often ends up with the impression that it is
complicated because: 1) LPS can offer trial copies with the
ability to collect and present historical data and HP cannot
2) HP may propose consulting to get the customer going with
LaserRX. Although LaserRX offers an interactive graphics
capability setting it apart from any other tool in the
industry, it is presented as "fancy" and "restrictive"
because spreadsheeting allows the customer to graph the data
any way they want to see it. Very attentive support
(sometime to the point of teaching the customer performance
with SOS over the phone) is available with the trial copies,
and generous and seemingly arbitrary discounting is used to
win business. LPS pictures themselves as a group dedicated
to performance on the HP3000, and stresses their consulting
services are at "modest rates" and impartial (the
implication is that an HP person has hardware selling
interests and is therefore not). For a taste of this see
July 91 Interact article "The Perils of Flying Blind" by Bob
Lund, page 21 - "Flying blind leaves you at the mercy of
hardware vendors and expensive consultants. Perish the
thought!"
PRODUCT STRENGTHS - In speaking with 10 SOS customers, the
following reasons for buying SOS came up (listed in order of
importance):
1) Price/functionality - getting an on-line diagnostic tool
and a tool that shows historical trends (i.e., batch
logging) for the price of GlancePlus/XL. Adding in LaserRX
makes the cost differentials large enough in some cases that
the customer is compelled to choose SOS.
2) English Language Advice capability - SOS will give an
English language summary (configurable off or on and to
different levels) at the bottom of their global screen.
While many medium to advanced users do not use this feature,
most people seem to agree it is a great help to the novice
user.
3) The manual offers performance guidelines and tips as well
as product usage information.
4) Support is deemed excellent. Two users mentioned the
fact that they could get some first-cut help at performance
evaluation without being told immediately to buy consulting.
5) An alarms capability that will notify the operator and a
defined user of certain conditions (low on disc, out of
ports, CPU usage high, etc).
6) A few people used the character graphics capability
(histogram bars made with a character across a terminal
screen) to look at trended data.
7) Batch reporting from the collected log files.
HOW TO COMPETE: Right now, the low-end customer (single,
small system) is a difficult sell if they need batch logging
and an interactive diagnostic at a modest price. In this
arena, stress:
1) HP's closeness to the operating system. For example,
when Image file pointers went away in GlancePlux/XL with the
mapped files on MPE XL 2.1, HP was able to restore them in a
patch release available today by going beyond AIF data. You
might ask an Image shop to look at progress through a data
set with SOS/XL.
2) GlancePlus/XL's interesting process concept. It will
point out both processes using a lot of resources or getting
bad response as well as those starving for those resources.
Just spending a few minutes showing people how to set up
thresholds for interesting processes on their system will
open a new world.
3) Ease of tracking a job or session - to our knowledge,
there is no tracking of a job or session in version A.20 of
SOS/XL. This had been mentioned by two of their customers
as a difficulty.
4) The dynamic nature of the performance products - both
GlancePlus/XL and LaserRX have had major enhancements
recently ... and are continuing to be enhanced. Note the
continued commitment to MPE/V products with the major
GlancePlus/V enhancement. All of these were included as
part of the customer's support dollars.
5) Multiplatform presence - versions of Glance, LaserRX,
and Forecast have been available on HPUX systems since 7.0.
If multiple platforms are in the customers future, our tools
are in the market and proven.
6) HP's size, stability, and reputation for quality and
support. It applies equally to the performance tools.
For the LaserRX prospect where trial copies or ease of use
are made an issue, it is most effective to get the customers
hands on the product looking at their own data. This
usually debunks the "ease of use" and "fancy" issues. And
while it may not be deemed justifiable to spend the
resources to do this, the result of not doing it is often
surrender of performance tools and consulting business with
the account from then on. For this situation, in addition
to the points above stress:
1) Ease of use. It takes most people with Windows 3.0 and
a CD-ROM reader installed about 10 minutes to install the
analysis software on their PC and start drawing graphs with
the demo files.
2) Interactive graphic interface - it is a generation
beyond anything else we have seen. It is not "fancy". It
is an incredible productivity boost that lets people "zoom
in" and spot problems they might not even notice with a
different tool. We can give you examples if you need them.
People can look at data live (up to the last five minutes)
as it is being logged on the system or bring it to the PC
for a more detailed analysis. By using cooperative services
to compile only the data points needed on the host and send
them to the PC for graphing, it is practical and efficient
to graphically look at a system continents away AS THE DATA
IS BEING LOGGED. With a tool which logs and then extracts
data, you could easily be forced to either extract
everything and bring it to your PC (very slow), or make
several loops of extract a subset, transfer the data to your
PC, and draw a graph (very aggravating and a waste of
valuable time).
3) Quality of the data - HP has spent tremendous resources
in the performance lab getting the data right ... even if it
means making adjustments to the data that come out of the
AIFs. The Image pointers in Glance are only one example.
There are countless others in LaserRX. The value of high
quality data is hard to define, until it leads you to an
incorrect conclusion.
4) Pricing - if the customer already owns GlancePlus/XL and
wants historical data, the price per system generally goes
down the more systems a customer has or buys with LaserRX.
Don't overlook the fact that the customer may receive
discounts for volume purchases, government, education, etc
from HP.
5) CD-ROM - Allows the customer to look at megabytes of log
files of real systems. The "Journey to Discovery", a
tutorial bundled with LaserRX, makes use of one of these log
files to step a customer through a performance scenario on a
real system. Varied customer experience is available to the
customer through this media.
Ifyou need help or have further information for the
Competitive Hotline, call either:
Marketing:
Ronny The
Phone:(415) T692-5773
Desk: HP5000/80
Lab:
Joe Thomas
Phone: (916) T785-5636
Desk: HPc200/45