Marketing, spin and substance?

One of the functions of marketing is to promote a company's services or products. Traditionally this is achieved by talking up the good points of the promoted item, ignoring the bad points and maybe talking down the opposition. What marketing departments are bad about is emphasising the positives about working with competing vendors.

A couple of days ago I mentioned the Sunopsis purchase and back in spring Oracle acquired the Siebel Analytics suite. These tools are outstanding and more interestingly not tied into the sole use of Oracle as database technology. To my mind that is an enormous plus point; many of the customers I work with have a mixed environment, some may have a preferred database vendor but that does remove their need to integrate legacy and tactical departmental systems. This may not be the world that corporate marketing like, but it is the real world. People want to buy stuff that allows them to join up their business without the need to throw out systems that just have the wrong brand on the package.

Another vendor I have worked with has a real problem with inter-operation, it's not that they can't do it, it is that their marketing department has always worked on an 'all you need is a single vendor, us' model and they actively stifle messages that deviate from the corporate norm. In the longer term this harms their ability to win significant enterprise business

Oracle have shown vision in acknowledging that it is valid to have databases other than Oracle in a business, lets hope that their corporate marketing can put out a message to support the vision.