Ultimus

In the fall of 2004, Ultimus planned to launch a new product that represented a completely new approach to business process management, called Adaptive Discovery™. Adaptive Discovery bucks the conventional wisdom of process and application design that assumes a process or application has to be fully defined before being implemented. With Adaptive Discovery, automated business processes can be deployed without complete definitions. Instead, real business situations drive the “build out” of the process based on real business events. Ultimus developed the technology based on the realities of process they have seen in hundreds of clients—processes change constantly and it’s impossible to ever have a complete definition.

With such a different approach, our combined teams knew there would have to be a lot of advance work to seed the market for the new solution to foster a successful launch.

The Approach

PAN developed a three-part strategic approach to the new product announcement.

First, we started with the analysts. Pre-briefing selected analysts very early in the process helped refine messaging and gain early support and confidence.

Second, we knew that we needed to highlight the business problem associated with this new product. Through a series of Q&A’s, trend stories, and bylines in the key IT trade publications, we set the stage relating how companies grapple with current BPM solutions because they get caught up in trying to model the perfect process.

Once we’d established the business problem, our third step was to announce the solution: we showcased the product and how it would help with BPM issues. The team briefed additional analysts and customers well-ahead of the launch date, so that we would have plenty of resources available to support us as we took the news out to the media. PAN secured interviews for Ultimus’ CEO and VP of products with the appropriate targets at the IT trade publications at least one week in advance of the announcement, so that coverage would appear as the release hit the wire.

The Results to Date

PAN’s results were evident in two waves. The first came as a result of our efforts to seed the market with the business problem. PAN secured Q&A coverage for Ulitmus’ CEO discussing the need for a new form of BPM in both eWEEK and CRN. We also secured several byline placements in publications like eBizQ.net, Line56, and Business Integration Journal.

The second wave of results featured Ultimus’ new product in more than 30 pieces of coverage, including outstanding coverage in eWEEK, InformationWeek, Line56.com, Internet.com, and CRN. The coverage varied from stand-alone customer case studies with a headline that read “Giving Credit to BPM” in eWeek to full product briefing updates.

In addition, analyst coverage included a glowing report by AMR, coverage by Kinetic Information and Upside Research, and positive ratings in the Gartner and Forrester Reports.

Next Steps

Ultimus has been pleased with the results to date. The PAN team plans to extend this effort with additional bylines, case studies, and product reviews as the technology comes to market and gets widely adopted.