CodeFutures News & Industry Commentary Blog

We're doing our Hibernate marketing launch today. You can see the press release here:

http://www.codefutures.com/hibernate-java-persistence/

It is what you might call a very progressive launch.

First step was to allow any customer that had requested Hibernate support to see an early access preview.

Then we rolled it out to our existing user base a few weeks ago.

At that point, we actually provided a new page on the Web site describing what we offered for Hibernate:

http://www.codefutures.com/hibernate

But we didn't link to the new page from anywhere yet - it was just to explain to our existing customers the new Hibernate feature.

The roll out to existing users resulted in fixing a bunch of things based on their feedback. This was expected, of course.

Last week we switched over from allowing new evaluators to use the latest release (3.0) rather than 2.4 GA.

Again, we got more feedback - especially regarding usabilty since a lot of first time users were trying out Hibernate support.

This week we started to link to the Hibernate page - and posting on some forums.

And now we're ready for a flood of downloads from Hibernate users, confident that we're delivering the functionality they expect.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software

And today we're putting out the press release...

I had lunch last weekend with the CEO of an cognac brandy producer where we discussed the similaries and differences between our products (Java developer tool versus fine cognac).

In both cases, we've very well defined target audiences. The market for cognac brandy is a lot more diverse than Java tools and a lot harder to reach. The age profile is very different - cognac drinkers are much older than Java developers! Both markets have a strong Asian component. But whereas cognac is popular in Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan, Java is important in India.

One striking similarity is the effect of time on the value of Java products versus the best cognac. French cognac is stored in wooden barrels that loose about 5% of the volume each year. The slippage for Java toolsis a lot more - new JDKs, application servers, database versions, etc make tools go out of date much sooner. The key difference is that Java tools loose value while French cognac gains value.

Overall, the impression I got was that marketing fine cognac is about having a very high quality product and carefully positioning it as unique in a crowded market. So not too different from the Java tools market.

PJ Murray
CodeFutures Software