Repositioning Existing Technology for a New Use Case and Product Category

Third and final pivot of the Steve Jobs-founded NeXT, reinventing the development environment and operating system company as an Internet software company to increase the valuation for an IPO – until bought by Apple at the increased IPO value.

Domains

Web Application Server
Development Environment

Objectives

Make NeXT a top 5 web company in a yet-to-be determined category
Reposition legacy client/server software development environment into an innovative Internet product line
Revitalize company’s go-to-market strategy in dotcom era

Challenges

This was the third incarnation of NeXT, first as a hardware manufacturer, second as operating system and development environment vendors so there was some industry fatigue of the company
Extremely passionate and loyal sales and marketing teams dedicated to the past incarnations of the company
A strong internal bias to the client-server and development environment go-to-market messages from the past

Process

Evaluated customer applications of the technology and what they perceived they built with the technology
Researched emerging web application companies and technologies to understand their offering and value propositions

Findings

Customers were building dynamic web-based applications that behaved based on database and input parameters not just the then-status-quo static website
Web server product category had been defined and NeXT did not fit into it
Needed to establish and define a new category “Web Application Server” for the technology – a term one other very small company was using without much fanfare

Solutions

Repositioned product line as a Web Application Server (WebObjects)
Retrained sales force on how to sell as a web server and the value of being a server instead of a development tool
Booked thought leadership speaking engagements for Steve and his team to evangelize “web application server”
Marketed customer web site home pages as use cases instead of leading with product features

Results

Achieved $15 million license revenues in first year
Ranked #1 in market share for Internet applications
Ranked #2 for Intranet applications
Accounted for large portion of $429M value of Apple purchase representing a double digit revenue multiplier

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