renu and her marketing team have absolutely zero experience in branding or re-launching a software vendor while microsoft is busy tearing us apart.
exactly the dream team you want leading a tough turnaround.
who needs the best people with the right skills anyway when you can just wing it and hope for the best.
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Fundamentally it’s an issue where these id--ts have never had to market anything. VMware’s brand sold deals, commanded respect in blogs, empowered voices.
Omnissa, a no-one, with brain dead leadership, with a sub par vdi offering, and an archaic, buggy device management solution, backed by ego and presence it doesn’t deserve, will flounder and die under the current leadership.
I never thought I’d say this, but even Citrix would be a trade up, at least they earned their market share off their own back.
Seems like everyone in marketing is clinging to the glory days of when VMware was relevant, and we could count on the core sales team to help us reach customer CIOs. The most important decision makers don't know anything about Omnissa and don't care about our products because they're not a priority. Can product marketing fix that? I doubt it.
@ek This may be on the horizon. Citrix laid off a lot of their teams, including product marketing, when they were not longer innovating. You can't continue paying for R&D teams if you don't have anything to launch. PE knows this.
@av agree the role plays are a waste of time. If any sales person needs that they need another job role.
@bf lots of ideas have been suggested but shot down. Most of Renu’s direct reports are not adequately skilled or things are getting turned down higher up. Shankar and others are very set in their ways. We do need more experienced leadership who are open minded.
While agree it’s “not rocket science” and trying to stay realistic, how does such a company support compensation paid for software engineers employed to create new features if the company only had “boring tech” to sell to customers? Are “new features” on boring tech simply maintenance/tech-debt/promised-to-a-customer-feature programming type of work?
If that’s the case, wouldn’t we need to reduce Engineering staff to only the ones sufficient to do maintenance+new-OS-support? And have sales only for current-customer renewals, to keep the existing ones on our “boring tech”?
What do we have today that would motivate a “not-currently-an-Omnissa customer” to obtain a new subscription for any of our current offerings?
(If chips are boring tech, even today BC is producing new-style AI chips, attractive to their existing and new customers)
"Let’s be realistic of our place in the world."
That's the solution? Accept that Omnissa's future is boring tech like IBM mainframes?
But we're clearly not 'making a nice living' with UEM and VDI. We're in a rapid decline.
We sell MDM and VDI. It’s not rocket science :)
Business and the IT industry is focused on AI, and that’s all that matters to them right now. There are plenty of businesses that make a nice living selling boring tech. Mainframes, healthcare software, Unix, bespoke systems for example. Let’s be realistic of our place in the world.
I agree, Omnissa's go-to-market approach is like we're still part of VMware, routinely harvesting the installed base with uninspired messaging that's aligned with IT helpdesk SysAdmins. We know that we must change, but Renu and team aren't up to the task.
Who has offered meaningful new turnaround ideas since KKR acquired us? Nobody!
@OP Renu is objectively terrible at her job. Shankar does a vlog once a quarter and thinks that does anything, and Norlin sits back, watches dashboards and wastes everybody’s time with these horrible trainings to role play with what would be an ideal customer. Clueless.