In the grand tradition of using the word "SUCK" in the title of a blog entry to attract attention ( see Why Subversion Doesn't Suck), I am proud to author my first blog article at Assembla.

As the new marketing guy at Assembla, I was recently doing some competitive research on our newest product - Private Assembla.  Private Assembla takes our Assembla.com hosted solution and bundles it up in such a way that companies can download and install it on their own servers or on a server in the cloud.  It's a great alternative for companies that want an integrated software development tool (source code repository + ticketing tool + collaboration suite) but just don't want their code sitting on someone else's server regardless of how safe it is.

Anyway, I called up the sales/support teams at some of our more venerable competitors - companies like Atlassian, Fog Creek and Collabnet - that have installed products that are in the same ballpark as Private Assembla.  The folks who answered the phone were all relatively sharp and well informed.  They answered most, if not all, of my questions and were very helpful in giving me the information that I needed to competitively position Private Assembla against their products (thanks alot guys ;)

All the Web based vendors get held to a high standard of responsiveness.  Users want to be able to try the product immediately.  I had forgotten what a pain it is to go through the old-style enterprise sales process.

I figured that I might as well call up Big Blue (IBM) and see if I could get similar information about Rational ClearCase and ClearQuest, the teetering incumbents in the software development tool space.  Those of you who are familiar with Rational's products will know that they were built quite some time ago and are more appropriate for waterfall development, whereas Assembla prides itself on equipping companies to succeed at agile development.  But, since so many companies use Rational's software that aspire to be on the agile bandwagon, I figured that it was worth it.

Now, with every other company on my list, I was able to visit their website, download and install a trial copy of their software (or at least try a demo that they made available online) and then speak with a live person and ask some detailed feature questions all within in 30 - 60 minutes.  After spending about 45 minutes at the IBM website playing around with their online demo, I got on the phone and called IBM looking for someone to speak with.  I didn't get through to a live person, but did manage to leave a voicemail message for a sales rep that handles my region. The next day, 21 hours later, I got a call back from IBM and spent 30 minutes going through my list of 10 questions - of which I got definitive answers to 2. However, the kind IBM rep offered to set up a call with one of their SMEs (subject matter experts) for the next day.  By the way, SME is pronounced "smeeee".  The next day, 28 hrs later, I had a conference call with my Rep and the SME.  The SME (I just can't use this silly-sounding acronym enough) was much better and answered 9 out of 10 of my questions.  However, neither of them were able to answer my 10th question which was about pricing.  The rep begged off and said that she would have a pricing expert give me call.  Two business days and 96 hrs later (there was a weekend in the middle), the pricing expert called me and spent another half an hour re-visiting my needs and promised to bet back to me the next day with pricing.  True to his word, 26 hrs later I got an email that answered my final question about pricing.

So, let's do the math ... 21 + 28 + 96 + 28 = 173 hours after my initially inquiry which included conversations with 3 IBM employees - I finally got the answers I was looking for.  IBM, Rational and the not-so-dyanmic duo ClearCase and ClearQuest are not only losing market share because they are mediocre, outdated pieces of software that cost 2 to 3 times the price of comparable products but also because their crackerjack sales team takes 173 times longer than their nimbler, more agile (pun intended) competitors to deliver the most basic information that any customer would want.

You can tell I really hate it when archaically oragnized companies like IBM frustrate my efforts to research their clunky software.

But, hey, I try to remain open-minded.  If any Rational IBMers read this blog, I would love to hear your side of the story.