An Act of Faith Will Get You into the Wall Street Journal

  by Audra Tiner | 27 Mar 2009 | Permalink |

Today Tideway was front and center in the Wall Street Journal in an article highlighting the Tideway Foundation Community Edition. This type of top-tier business press coverage is great exposure for any company. But it’s even more gratifying to see the effort – and faith – we’ve put into this endeavor actually delivering measurable business benefits for us.

The idea for the Community Edition started about two years ago as a proactive and innovative approach to help us scale the market. As a smaller, private company competing against larger public vendors it was – and is – a way to differentiate ourselves. Because we’re so confident in our product, we can give our customers a “try-before-you-buy” advantage that the “acronym vendors” can’t (and don’t seem willing to) match. In addition to that, the Community Edition has expanded our market reach; we’re engaging with new market segments and have exposure in geographies we couldn’t reach previously.

We launched the Community Edition in November 2008, and as the Journal points out, we’ve had over 4,000 downloads since (actually, in the time since that interview, we’ve now exceeded 5,000!). Already, we’ve seen it impact sales cycles. Now when our sales folks show up at a prospect, sometimes they find the tech team has already downloaded the Community Edition and has it up and running in their IT environment. And what will that ultimately mean? Shorter and smoother sales cycles, thank you very much.

There are also technical and operational benefits. This approach puts our solution into the market for user feedback. Do these features matter to our users? How are they helping them solve every day problems? Even the feedback from smaller companies that traditionally wouldn’t buy an enterprise solution is helping us improve usability.

Ultimately, this move has allowed us to introduce a new level of transparency to our customers and community. The very nature of the free download has spurred us to enhance the online resources like documentation, tutorials and our product wiki, Configipedia. Right now we’re hosting over 7,000 people on the forum, and that number is growing every day.

The Journal quotes our CTO, Adam Kerrison, calling our release of the Community Edition an “act of faith.” While there are definitely risks if you think about this in the traditional sense (giving software away), this type of model can be extremely advantageous if executed properly. So yes, you could say it’s an act of faith. We might miss out on some sales from users who find the free version adequate for their needs. But we believe it’s a worthwhile trade-off – making the sales opportunity that much larger and our product development cycles that much shorter. If the Community Edition is helping us to achieve mindshare, that’s going to help us win a sale. We’re freely putting our product directly into the hands of the people who will be using it – not something enterprise software vendors typically do. But we were willing to take the leap.