Great analyst presentation by a vendor: SealedMedia

Just got off the phone with SealedMedia. I was impressed.

CEO George Everhard is a no-nonsense guy who admits to the limits of a technology-only approach in delivering on compliance and document lifecycle management. Processes often need to change too. If only more software companies were willing to concede that software isn’t a solution to everything. The firm competes with vendors like Adobe and Workshare.

RedMonk is a big believer in vendor stacks and consolidation. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are increasingly not the competion for smaller vendors, but the environments in which they compete. George made it clear that another player emerging with stack-level clout is EMC Documentum. SealedMedia sees EMC as its key go to market partner. Having a big vendor big brother should help SealedMedia shrug off account control challenges from the likes of IBM and Microsoft. Of course any CEO worth their salt is likely to have exit strategy in mind; my take is that EMC is not exactly afraid of software acquisitions…

What did I like most about the slide deck? Brevity: 5 slides and out.

Because SealedMedia cut the slide deck down before it called us we were able to have a smarter conversation. The presentation was simple which allowed more nuance. George wasn’t thinking about the deck, its transitions and internal connections, he was actually engaging, listening to us and responding with full attention. Cool.

I recently argued its called a briefing because its supposed to be brief.

Well this was like taking a briefing from a PHP application, rather than J2EE… [a lesscode analogy – use less code to get more done]

Credit to the team: Tanya Candia, VP marketing, and Paula Dunne, of ContosDunne Communications. I have known Paula since the Boole&Babbage days. She is likeable and is evidently helping her clients to keep things simple. Good job.