In a bid to boost sales of its on-line analytical processing (OLAP) software, Speedware Corp has repositioned itself and is going all out to focus its sales efforts on end-users, rather than selling direct to the IS department. Earlier this year (CI No 3,405), the Canadian OLAP database and application software vendor reported second quarter net losses at the equivalent of $1.3m up from losses last time of $258,000 on revenues down 34.0% at $3.6m. David Cesareo, the company’s director of business development and strategic alliances, said Speedware used to concentrate on sales of its hybrid OLAP database, Media, to IT people and less on sales of its application development tools. But gradually the company started finding they were selling more and more to the end users themselves. The worst kind of data warehouse is a data warehouse that people don’t use, he said, we realized it was easier to go to end users and show them the business value of the application. That way, you’ve got the buy in already and the technology isn’t being imposed on them from the IT guys. He said the salespeople had actually been operating like this for a year or so but it was only recently that the company decided to turn the practice into a formal strategy. Cesario said Speedware will continue to focus on three core vertical markets; telecoms, healthcare and insurance and sell its OLAP software directly to heads of customer service, marketing and so on within each sector. The back-end Media database will be sold as part of the bundle but not marketed up front. He added that Speedware was about to announce a partnership, next week, with an industry giant to resell its telecoms front-end applications. The company already partners with EDS in the insurance sector.
