Jonathan Oxer
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Thu, Aug 23rd 1:18pm 2007: Misc
While we were in the US a few weeks ago Luke and I were idly talking about market penetration and how we could come up with a metric for how successful we've been. A major problem we have as a company is that we're largely invisible: we build systems for our clients, who in turn have customers who are end users of the systems we build, but those end users would mostly have no idea who it is that actually created the software. As far as they are concerned they're using a system provided by our client, not by us. We therefore get almost no branding benefit from all the work we do while some of our clients are household names. So Luke started pondering how many end users we have. Not in the sense of random web visitors: I mean actual, registered users in web-based systems we've built for our clients. That includes intranets, extranets, public-facing websites, and a huge variety of custom business systems. After a bit of SQL and some mucking about with a spreadsheet I can now put a real figure on it: 1,818,631 That's 1.8 million people who are currently registered users on a system we built. Given that we have almost zero international penetration it can safely be assumed they're nearly all Australian, so looking at it another way, 8.6% of the entire population of Australia is a registered user on a system built by IVT. And they almost certainly don't know it. That sucks.
While we were in the US a few weeks ago Luke and I were idly talking about market penetration and how we could come up with a metric for how successful we've been. A major problem we have as a company is that we're largely invisible: we build systems for our clients, who in turn have customers who are end users of the systems we build, but those end users would mostly have no idea who it is that actually created the software. As far as they are concerned they're using a system provided by our client, not by us. We therefore get almost no branding benefit from all the work we do while some of our clients are household names. So Luke started pondering how many end users we have. Not in the sense of random web visitors: I mean actual, registered users in web-based systems we've built for our clients. That includes intranets, extranets, public-facing websites, and a huge variety of custom business systems. After a bit of SQL and some mucking about with a spreadsheet I can now put a real figure on it: 1,818,631 That's 1.8 million people who are currently registered users on a system we built. Given that we have almost zero international penetration it can safely be assumed they're nearly all Australian, so looking at it another way, 8.6% of the entire population of Australia is a registered user on a system built by IVT. And they almost certainly don't know it. That sucks.
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