How Competitive Intelligence Exploited the Violin Memory Leak
Before it was Violin Systems, it was called Violin Memory. But a quick five-minute mistake led to a long year of lost sales that changed everything.
Competitive intelligence (CI) has become one of the most influential disciplines in the marketplace. Yet, many Canadian businesses are just beginning to grasp the importance of the 30-year-old concept of business intelligence, competitive intelligenceâs better-known sister disciplineâboth of which reside under the umbrella of commercial intelligence.
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Anyone can look up the Wikipedia article and read about what competitive, business, and commercial intelligence are. But it can be difficult to grasp just how these intelligence capabilities can help your business.
In this article, I want to help you understand how I used competitive intelligence during my time as a competitive intelligence consultant and social media analyst to exploit a serious public gaffe by a Violin Memory employee and convert their customers.
Why the Violin Memory leak happened
Sometime before Violin Memoryâs IPO in 2013, a salesman working for them had uploaded a slideshow to Scribd. It was live just long enoughâa total of five minutesâfor a coworker to have noticed it in one of her social media alerts. She turned the original link, which was no longer functional, over to me. With that link, I was able to retrieve a publicly-accessible cached version of its contents.
It was obvious from the start that the slides were intended for internal use only; they outlined Violin Memoryâs talking points for their flash memory storage arrays, how they would attack their competitors, and which potential customersâlike ESPNâthey were desperate for. A thoroughly-annotated list of which companies they viewed as their competitors included helpful insights into what their current and potential customers were saying about our products at the time. It even listed in bullet-point format how to attack our offerings and dodge uncomfortable comparisons and questions that were unfavourable to Violin Memoryâs products.
Playing Violin like a fiddle
That year, our marketing and sales teams played Violin Memory like a fiddle. We were always prepared. For a year straight we took their customers out from under their noses. When Violinâs salespeople approached potential customers, they found that weâd already been there and eaten their lunch. When they tried to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt, theyâd find their target customer armed with material that debunked Violin Memoryâs own claims. We destroyed their sales teamâs ability to execute an effective sales strategy for an entire year, and they never figured out how we did itâor why we were even able to do it.
Violin Memory never recovered. In what seemed like a desperate move to raise capital, they soon shot for an IPO. But shares consistently slid quarter over quarter and two years later they were bankrupt. According to a ComputerWeekly article, a lack of customers despite a supposedly decent product was one of the key reasons for Violin Memoryâs bankruptcy.1
Some might think that we got lucky with the Violin Memory leak. But we werenât luckyâwe were watchful. The company I worked for had vigilant marketing and sales teams. And those teams had privileged access to an analyst they could turn to who had the capability to convert bits and pieces of open source information into intelligence packages that they and other teams could use on a daily basis.
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CI helps you outperform your competitors
In highly competitive industries, you must exploit the missteps made by your competitors. The window to do so can be so short that it passes in the blink of an eye. And thatâs why itâs so important for your company to have someone with knowledge of competitive intelligence practices.
If your business is operating without a competitive intelligence capability, youâre guaranteed to be missing critical opportunities for sales and market share growth. Those missed opportunities are impairing your companyâs performance. And that impairment, caused by a lack of investment in competitive intelligence, is limiting your bottom line.
Any company couldâve made the mistake that Violin Memory did. But only a business that had invested in competitive intelligence wouldâve beenâand wasâpositioned to exploit it.
Donât be the next Violin Memory, and donât just sit on the sidelines while the competition uses competitive intelligence to catapult past you. Start thinking of ways competitive intelligence can help your business against your competitors before your competitors figure out how to use competitive intelligence against you.
Adshead, Antony. âViolin memory: Reasons behind the demise of an all-flash pioneerâ, ComputerWeekly, 5 Jan 2017, https://www.computerweekly.com/blog/StorageBuzz/Violin-memory-Reasons-behind-the-demise-of-an-all-flash-pioneer