Software Industry’s Alphabet Stew: CRM, XDR, …

Why software vendors manage to discredit any new product category before its maturity, leading to never-ending cycle of inventing new buzzwords.

Surfing the hype wave

It is a familiar and recurring pattern in the software industry. Someone comes up with a new concept, a new product category and creates a name for it, a new term, to claim the market segment. Whenever such a newly named product category generates sufficient buzz and subsequently turns into hype, we can witness a stampede of software vendors from close and afar to affiliate with the newly hyped product category and slap the fancy label on their existing products while implement only a few minor tweaks.

From a customer perspective, it is confusing. Customers buy the idea, they buy the vision, but the products fail to deliver on that vision in pretty much every nascent product category. The product maturity can’t simply be there, many vendors have not moved the needle yet.

CRM =/= single customer view

Many years ago, when I first heard about Customer Relationship Management (CRM), I got excited about the proposition of holistic insight into all customer interactions throughout the customer lifecycle (marketing, sales, service & support) and the synergies such an insight can bring to the businesses while serving their customers.

For me, the single customer view was the key ingredience of CRM. However, with the nascent of popular SaaS based CRMs such as SFDC, I realized that CRM mostly means just a sales tool. Even small companies and startups would often implement three different tools from three different vendors for sales, marketing, and support automation. To achieve the original goal of the single customer view, companies would have to employ a fourth tool, such as GoodData business intelligence to get all the data in one place and correlate it to gain 360 degrees insights.

As the market category matured over the years and the hype wave subdued, you could see the usage of the CRM term decreased and even SFDC itself has been selling three separate products for Sales, Service and Marketing.

Interestingly, one of the more recent SFDC offerings is called Customer 360, sounds a lot like “a dream within a dream”, the original CRM vision fulfilled…

XDR

Another more recent example from cybersecurity is eXtended Detection & Response (XDR). Building on the successes and failures of adjacent product categories (and former hype waves) such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR), and Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR), XDR is the new hype and cyber security vendors scramble to relabel their existing offerings XDR.

The need for the new product category is partly driven by the failure of previous offerings to deliver on their promises of automating security monitoring, detection, and response at reasonable effectivity and costs.

The XDR core proposition for security is not unlike CRM’s single customer view: it promises to intelligently combine information across various security tools and products to drive better visibility, contextualized detection, and response automation. If only the vendors could deliver on their promises…

Analysts to the rescue?

As always during the hype cycles, analysts, such as Gartner and Forrester, are trying to help their customers navigate the landscape and are fighting the terminology wars, trying to portray their definition of XDR as the only truthful-in-spirit to the original term:

Allie Mellen on Twitter: “SIEM isn’t XDR. Security analytics isn’t XDR. Here’s why the differentiation matters.”

twitter.com
SIEM isn’t XDR. Security analytics isn’t XDR. Here’s why the differentiation matters.

Does it matter in the end?

Regardless of the amount of analysts’ efforts and purity of their intentions, all these terminology wars are just a storm in a teacup. There is no such product category definition which could stand up when confronted with fearless marketing departments unleashed on the mission of rebranding the product portfolio to the latest hype.

And my take on XDR? It is a great idea, but we will need a new name in time when reality catches up with the original vision because no one would buy XDR by then…