Re: Oracle on a laptop - how to support large-scale sales demos

> There is most certainly a difference between what a laptop can demonstrate
> versus what a full-scale system can provide. I think the key words here are
> demonstrate and provide. Ideally, we would be able to reduce the data along
> appropriate axis in an attempt to scale down to "laptop" size. Granted
> there are more aspects than simple CPU/hard drive quantities to consider,
> but we should be able to demonstrate the functionality at some quantifiable
> level (e.g. benchmark) without completely throwing performance out the
> window.

Sales people in our company (Our core business is ERP) almost always do the initial demos off of their laptops (Mostly Win2K or XP with 1GB RAM). The demo is basically 100% to show the functionality and 0% to show the performance. Their laptops are self sufficient with small footprint database that can show all areas of our application with one user. If the customer is more interested and wants to know more about e.g. performance, then we move the demo to an actual system and show the bench markings from an enterprise wide system. So it all depends on what you want to show in a demo.

>
> Something we, as a company, have been experiencing is that demonstration
> performance is a go/no-go decision point for many of the prospects. It
> shouldn't be this way, but when showing an application intended to replace
> something that exists in a spreadsheet, scalability lands on unhearing ears.
> "Ours runs this fast on my laptop, why can't yours?" is a generalization of

As far as I have seen, initial demos are generally for managerial level positions or people who make "buying" decisions and they are generally more technically informed then "Ours runs this fast on my laptop, why can't yours?". Maybe your sales people are doing laptop demos in front of the end users where you would expect a response like this. Sales people in our company are very quick to throw a disclaimer before the demo that it is meant for just viewing the functionality and not much else. Performance is one of the big factors (besides $$$ and functionality) that influences the buying decisions of a customer. Attempting to show the performance of your applications off of a laptop may not win you many deals... IMHO.

Regards
/Rauf Received on Mon Oct 25 2004 - 04:06:26 CDT