Symantec wins today’s Buzzword Bingo Award
“Symantec Offers New Service Delivery Model that Helps Ensure Specific Business Outcomes”
That’s the headline of a press release received today from Symantec. My hat is off to the company’s marketing copywriters, whose prose is 100% buzzword compliant, but doesn’t appear to say anything.
Here is the first paragraph:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – October 21, 2009 – Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced the availability of a new Managed Outcome service delivery model designed to help customers better align their IT priorities with strategic business objectives to achieve measurable business outcomes. Delivered by Symantec’s Global Services organization, Managed Outcome enables customers to transform their IT environment from its current state to a desired future state while delivering on operational metrics and achieving greater efficiency and lower TCO.
Second paragraph:
The Managed Outcome model is designed around meeting agreed-upon business results based on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). While traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs) focus only on operational aspects, the KPIs in the Managed Outcome model are business values that IT organizations are expecting to get from solutions, such as measurable and improved security posture and data backup success rate. Symantec has begun to establish this framework with its Security Operations Management offerings, as well as Managed Backup Services and Managed Endpoint Protection Services.
The third paragraph:
“Traditionally, the vendor/customer relationship has been defined as that of a buyer and seller, with the vendor’s role limited to selling and helping with deployments,” said Ajay Nigam, vice president of product management, Symantec Global Services. “These older, more traditional customer relationships are no longer sufficient, affordable or successful in keeping up with the demands on business critical IT functions. The new Managed Outcome model provides customers with capabilities to deliver increased IT availability and system performance, while reducing IT management complexity, minimizing security risks and speeding deployment.”
It keeps going on and on like that. There’s even a bullet list of key customer benefits. But benefits to what? What is it exactly that Symantec is announcing? What’s new here?
According to the press release, it seems like they’re saying that customers will see measurable business benefits from buying Symantec products and services. If that’s right, then that’s a good idea… but hasn’t that allegedly been the case all along?
Symantec PR team: Great job on buzzwords and corporate doublespeak. Lousy job on communicating what the company’s news actually is.