mcbru product launch case study - isilon
DESCRIPTION
McBru runs back-to-back product launches for Isilon, aligning coverage in tech and business outlets around a big trade show.TRANSCRIPT
A Nimble Strategy Scores Coverage
For Back-To-Back Product Launches.
ISILON CASE STUDY
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SummaryFast on the heels of one very successful product launch,
scale-out storage leader Isilon had another new offering
to bring to the market. Timing for the new launch would
be dictated by a strategically aligned industry trade show,
presenting the communications team with the opportunity
to tell a timely story. But it would be a challenge to bring
key media and analyst influencers back to briefing table
just weeks after an extensively covered product launch.
Isilon and McBru carefully crafted and persistently
pitched a launch story that, despite prior coverage and
the noise from the trade show, resulted in 32 briefings and 21 feature stories in trade and business publications.
Research & PlanningIn highly competitive, crowded IT markets such as
data storage, innovative new products provide singular
opportunities to boost awareness and portray competitive
differentiation to buyers and influencers. The summer
of 2010 found Isilon ready to launch not one, but two
such products.
In June, McBru served in support of the launch of the
Isilon’s SmartPoolsTM automated data tiering platform
for scale-out storage. McBru developed and managed a
hybrid press tour – equal parts face-to-face road tour and
phone-conference briefings – to earn maximum impact
for what was the company’s most significant product
announcement in more than a year. Hard-to-please
industry press covered the news well, with 18 positive
articles from those briefed and a highly favorable response
from the analyst community.
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Immediately following the SmartPools announcement, a
new launch plan was confirmed: go out and do it again, and do it bigger. With the addition of iSCSI functionality
across its product line, Isilon was poised to announce
another industry first among scale out storage providers
by storing and managing both structured (or block-based)
and unstructured (file-based) data within a single file
system. To that point, the nine-year-old company had built
its business solely on file based data; the new functionality
would position Isilon squarely within a highly desirable
target market for storage consolidation – a market largely
driven by the booming adoption of server virtualization
across the enterprise.
ExecutionIsilon and McBru targeted the announcement for
August 31, during the annual VMworld conference in
San Francisco. The timing would help ensure that the
“Unified Storage Platform” announcement, as it would
be called, would be seen in its proper context as a boon
to virtualization users. However, McBru advised that the
launch team reach out to, and brief, industry press and
analysts well in advance of the conference. VMworld
has grown to become one of IT’s biggest annual events,
attracting leading press and analysts from around the
world and giving the industry’s biggest players a platform
to announce their own groundbreaking products and
make limelight-stealing acquisitions. Rather than peg
the success of the launch on breaking through the
escalating noise level surrounding VMworld, the launch
would rely on a phone tour to begin three weeks prior
to the conference, despite the fact that many of the
influencers targeted for briefings had just been briefed
as part of the SmartPools tour.
To break through to influencers who might otherwise
claim fatigue, McBru developed tightly focused launch
Chris Preimesberger,eWeek
In short, Isilon now enables users to consolidate both file- and block-based applications into one shared pool of virtualized storage. Now that makes things a lot easier, doesn’t it? No more separate apps for separate workloads. A storage engineer’s dream, no doubt.
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messages that made abundantly clear the unique value
propositions, market positioning and newsworthiness of
the Unified Storage Platform, and took those messages
to high-value media and analysts with a campaign of aggressive, proactive pitching. A deep team of experienced
Isilon spokespersons was recruited, giving McBru the right
mix of executive vision, technical depth and sales channel
expertise to deploy for each briefing depending on the
influencer. For each briefing, a McBru representative
facilitated the proceedings, both to help ensure a focused
dialogue and to capture any coverage opportunities that
might emerge. Press and analysts agreed to receive launch
materials under embargo until the August 31 launch
date, allowing McBru to direct the bulk of coverage to
land within the VMworld timeframe while giving writers
ample time to develop and source stories before finding
themselves caught up in the VMworld time crunch.
ResultsIn managing and executing the Isilon Unified Storage
Platform launch, McBru recorded qualitative and
quantifiable results to rival any announcement in Isilon’s
history. The tour generated 32 briefings with top media
from general IT and business publications to storage and
vertical outlets, as well as industry analysts ranging from
IT heavyweights such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC to
Steve Wexler,Network Computing
Pushan Rinnen, research director at Gartner, agrees that this gives Isilon a leg up on the competition. The most significant aspect of this announcement is that Isilon will be the first major scale-out storage architecture vendor to offer file and block support with iSCSI, so it will bring to the market the ease of use of scale-out NAS into the block storage arena, she says. ‘The key thing is the simplicity of Isilon storage systems can now be applied to the block side of the world.’
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influential boutique firms specializing in storage. The tone
of the briefings was extremely favorable, as well-targeted
spokespersons built affinity with influencers, fomenting
more engaged and productive briefings and ultimately,
impacting the tone of media coverage.
Twenty-one feature stories covered the launch news,
with top properties such as Network Computing, eWeek,
SearchStorage and CRN among those who wrote, with the
bulk of the coverage landing during the VMworld timeframe.
Message penetration rated extremely high as the majority
of writers captured the virtualization and consolidation
contexts of the announcement in their stories, and the tone
of the coverage was uniformly positive. Most importantly,
the success of the Unified Storage Platform launch added
considerable momentum to what had become a breakout
year for the company, supporting its solid growth curve in
a highly competitive, extremely noisy marketplace.
Dave RaffoSearchStorage.com
Isilon customer John Welter, vice president of technology at Calgary, Alberta-based North West Geomatics Ltd., was an early adopter of the vendor’s iSCSI and said he’s using it to consolidate onto a single storage platform. He had been running a Dell MD3000 direct-attached storage (DAS) system for block storage.
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