I love those commercials for “Fresh and Easy” supermarkets where they use actual customers to talk about their products and explain they do this to save money on expensive actors and actresses and pass on those savings to help keep their products at such great prices.
Now, this may or may not be true but what I love is the concept of real customers talking about and promoting your products. I always enjoy attending sessions at conferences where customers present and talk about how they are using a product because they tend to tell it as it is – both the good and the bad.
So I was really excited when I recently heard about a webinar on Xcelsius and what’s new in the BOE 4.0 release. While the new features were being presented by representatives from the SAP Product group responsible for Xcelsius, there was also a lot of dialog going on in the Chat Window between the two hundred or so participants.
Someone asked the question about being able to burst and publish with Xcelsius. Within literally seconds, a customer by the name of Mike responded with:
“InfoBurst can burst Xcelsius already and is working with XI 3.1”.
A few seconds later, another customer, Gabe, chimed in:
“Yes and it can also imbed a xlf in an in-line html email”
Mike then added more:
“We had a need to burst to 3,000 sales reps their commissions, so we use InfoBurst”
Yet another customer, Jeanine, now entered the conversation:
“We use the InfoBurst and utilize the xml features – schedule Webi report to run at 3am, creates xml files, use the data connector in Xcelsius to pull the xml and publish the dashboard to InfoView. Info on demand!”
Another user, Mark, was interested by Jeanine’s comment and asked:
“How many manual steps do you have in that process vs. automated…?”
Jeanine responded:
“Just the setup is intense but haven’t touched it in over 6 months – runs daily for a 300 user base.”
The neat thing about this entire dialog was that it was open, honest and no vendor was involved in any of the exchanges yet it is more valuable in promoting and marketing InfoBurst with its Xcelsius Data Caching and dashboard bursting capabilities than any conventional sales or marketing promotion.
There have been a lot of enquiries since this webinar regarding how InfoBurst and Xcelsius Data Caching can improve connected dashboard performance, manage large amounts of data in Xcelsius applications and burst offline dashboards so, we figure the customer driven marketing really works. Fresh and Easy must know that too because those commercials keep coming!
Special thanks to Mike, Gabe, Jeanine and Mark for your great input – this blog is dedicated to you!
Disclaimer: fresh & easy Neighborhood Markets is a copyrighted trademark and the use of the name in this blog is purely to give credit that this blog post was inspired by the concept of their radio commercials. Some of our employees shop there and that is the extent of our relationship.
