"Two years ago we commissioned research to help us decide whether we should take on the task of marketing a new product in our portfolio.

Our core business has been in the service management sector and the new product that we were in the process of evaluating was a heterogeneous enterprise scheduling system. It was really vital for us to understand the market for this product and have a clear idea of how Ultracomp was perceived by its target customers before we made the decision to include it as part of our offering.

The research had two phases:

• The market understanding phase helped us find out three things:-
  - The needs of enterprise scheduling customers;
  - How they perceived current offerings in the marketplace;
  - What their price expectations were.
• The perception phase then looked at:
  - Who our target customers saw as the movers and shakers in the scheduling and enterprise framework field;
  - How Ultracomp's reputation as a proprietary VME scheduling supplier would impact on - and be impacted by - a move into the UNIX NT scheduling and framework sectors.

The research findings were really very useful. They confirmed our suspicions about the market, gave us a real insight into the market's maturity and unearthed some extremely important issues - for instance we found out lots of our target customers didn't have a comprehensive overview of the market and also there was considerable variety in price expectations. That information gave us a considerable advantage over the competition.

The research confirmed the way we wanted to go as a business and gave us all the strategic market opportunity information we needed to decide to add the enterprise scheduling product to our portfolio and continue with our push into the framework market. It gave us a strategic platform from which to begin our marketing and communications planning and two years on I don't regret the decisions we made."