Precise Sql

Case Analysis

Case Context

In 1996, three years after their first successful entry into the field of application performance

management with their launch of Precise/SQL, Precise Software Solutions began pursuing a new Product Development opportunity. This new venture, Precise/Insight, had a tentative launch aimed at the Oracle OpenWorld 2000 conference. The OpenWorld conference allowed them to introduce and demo the new product to thousands of prospective clients. The main problem was that as of July 1999 development had not yet begun on the product. This left Precise likely unable to develop, test, and launch a fully functional new product in time for the OpenWorld 2000 conference. In light of this information the questions that remained to be addressed at that time were: What should the product look like? Or what can it look like by OpenWorld 2000? What should the selling strategy for this new product be? And, What should the pricing structure be?

Analysis

Competitive Landscape

The concept for Precise/Insight spurred from Precise’s regular client survey. During the

February 1999 survey Precise asked, “Which metrics are important indicators of your system’s effectiveness?”, approximately 95% of respondents indicated “end-to-end response time”. As a rework of Exhibit 3, shown here as Figure 1, illustrates the fragmentation and differentiation of the Application Performance Management market as it lacked overlap across tiers. Many products on the market, Precise/SQL being a key player, could manage cross functionality from resource monitoring, detection of suboptimal wait times, suggesting improvements based on the detected issues, all the way through an analysis of the impact the recommended changes would have on the performance of the server. However, these applications were single-tier oriented. In other words, they could only monitor, detect, improve, and analyze either the Application Server, or the Database Server, or the Storage Server. This...