Raise the Alarm!

It’s been about 6 weeks now since I started at PAS, and I have to say that I’m still very much impressed… lots of great people, superb technologies and a wonderful culture.  In fact, this is a pretty fun place to be with a lot of great opportunities.

I met one of those “opportunities” the other day.  Twice in fact.  A challenge disguised as opportunity.  And it’s name is MARKETING.

Our friend Luke here is a tip as to what the problem is - read on and find out....

Turns out that with all the other great things going on around here, someone more or less forgot to feed the marketing machine.  Duh!

I guess that’s pretty obvious, but it really hit me last week when two customers pointed out that their “Google” of “alarm management” didn’t even turn up PAS until page 3. Ugh!

To make matters worse, the customers pointed out that it looked like our web site hadn’t been updated in a while… It turns out they were being kind – our web site hasn’t been updated in over two years. Ouch!

All this is against the background of PAS as industry leader…

You see, PAS pretty much invented the concept of commercial alarm management software back in 1994, with a first product release of an Alarm Analysis, Documentation and Rationalization tool back in ’96.  Well before Alarm Management became the topic of interest that it is today. 

Since then others have jumped on the Alarm Management software bandwagon, and have been quite effective at marketing, promoting and selling their me-too solutions.  Clever marketing sure does make printer port or OPC software look pretty good… but no matter how you disguise it, it’s just not the same thing. 

PAS has retained its leadership position alright – but only by virtue of the addition of more and more enhancements and new functionalities each year.  After all, we do have a reputation to uphold as The Original Alarm Management Company – even without the clever marketing.

So now when customers tell me that a less-functional solution looks almost as good as ours – it’s time to crank up some marketing to set the record straight.  If I thought I had lots to do before… well, my list just got longer.

There’s surely no shortage of places to start – the website is out of date, the product has no name, branding is virtually non-existent, packaging is not obvious, and on and on…

The movie Cool Hand Luke sums it up pretty well:

           What we have here is… failure to communicate 

Yikes!