Date: 12/12/2012
Name: Crystal C Li
Course: MKT 203
Case Analysis: Precise Software Solutions
Problem
When and how should Precise introduce this new product, Insight, to the market.Issues
Should the new product be introduced in Openworld 2000?
Try to figure out the tradeoff between time to market and functionality.
How to price this new product and what their selling strategy should be.
How to reduce the response time of the system and how to ensure the new product ran effectively and efficiently?
Industry/ Market Analysis
In 2000, the market for “performance management and availability” software was small but grew fast.
IT (information technology) had a significant impact on almost all aspects of most firms’ business, especially played a more and more important role in processing of large amounts of data.
In 2000,over 95% of IT system requests were made via a PC meanwhile other devices---PDA’s and cell phones are expected to become more popular than before.
The data was stored physically in some storage devices such as a disk drive or an optical drive. The uses of these data and the processing performed on them varied greatly across users and contexts. Till July 1999, all available products were designed for every single resource in the IT infrastructure, being responsible to manage the performance of a particular product in each different part.

However, that also means there is no current direct competitor to Insight. Precise owned a huge market to put forward Insight not only as a product but as a kind of solution.
Consumer Analysis
Who is the consumer? The users are PC users in companies that need software to manage the performance of its database and its SAP application suite. Moreover, the users included the staffs who attached importance to the excessive delays in waiting time. They are sensitive to the efficiency of delays. However, it was DBA(database administrator) who was responsible to value the products that can make a decision to purchase the product or not, such as Precise/SQL or Precise/Interpoint of this sort of price range. If the products were much more expensive like Insight cost $25000, higher level IT executive should be involved. That was one of the reasons that the sales cycle always was time costing.
Competition Analysis
The leading seller of software of performance management was Oracle followed by BMC Software and Quest Software.
Oracle built some performance monitoring functionality into SQL itself and also provided some measures to show how efficiently an application ran.
BMC Software’s product positioned to provide superior monitoring functionality. The revenues of 1998, 1999 and 2000 presented rapidly rising trend that are31.9% and 89.3%.

Quest Software offered around 25 different products for use in the availability and performance management space ranging from monitoring to detection.
BMC Software got revenues of $1.7 billion in its fiscal year 2000 also Quest Software got $150 million till mid-2000. Not mention than Oracle was the leader company. However Precise Software only set a goal to become a $100 million company. These three companies are more powerful than Precise Software. Thus it was more easier for them to catch up with Precise with the new products produced.
Product Analysis
The current products
Precise introduced its first product into the performance management market called Precise/SQL in 1996. This software product was designed for managing the performance of applications utilizing Oracle database. It remained the Precise’s core offering.
Other current offerings of Precise included Interpoint: Software product monitoring the database efficiency of large Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications; Precise/Pluse: Software product continuously monitoring the underlying database; Precise/ Presto: For monitoring the performance of EMC storage products: sold an OEM basis by EMC.
The new product: Insight
The products differed widely in terms