Welcoming Scottish Widows to the Family

For the record, I think I've had three hours of horizontal sleep in the last 48 hours or so, and that was on a hard wood floor - though I did have a pillow and blanket.

That said, the title of this post makes perfect sense to me... See, we've just announced (this past Tuesday) a new customer relationship for Progress - Scottish Widows. Scottish Widows is a part of Lloyds TSB Group, and is a well known provider in the life, pensions and investment industry in the UK.

The press release is typical - you can read it - but it essentially says:

Scottish Widows performed a 20 month selection of an integration platform and selected Progress' offerings because they perform better than other offerings. Scottish Widows hope to

1. launch new products faster
2. integrate easier (probably why they hope to launch new products faster)
3. lower their IT costs overall

In fact, it's this last point that's very interesting. I was only involved with the deal on the periphery but from the beginning the deployment team of both Scottish Widows and Progress are integrating metrics into determining the success of the deployment. Among other things, they will be measuring their cost savings by using Progress Software. From an Actional perspective, this means diagnosing issues faster and reducing support costs, as well as improving customer (and end-user) satisfaction.

We've done a similar case study with a Financial Services institution, validated by Forrester Research. Email me if you'd like a copy of the case study or watch the on-demand webinar with Forrester that explains the results (as a special perk to readers... you don't have to register). The case study provides real numbers about the Total Economic Impact (TEI) and measurable results achieved by this institution.

The press release also mentions that Sonic ESB and DataDirect Shadow (mainframe integration) were also selected. Congratulations to those teams, they're great products. We're starting to see some really interesting dynamics driven by customers selecting multiple products from the Progress SOA infrastructure portfolio, but more on that after I've gotten some more sleep.

Comments

[David Bressler]

Neil,

Agreed.

In my mind, the whole process of buying software is broken. Both from a vendor perspective and from a buyer one. I hope part of the trends appearing with open source change that, but I really think the industry just needs to start with a blank slate, and start again.

David

[Neil]

David - to my mind, the most interesting/surprising thing about the Scottish Widows story is that it took *20 months* to carry out a selection process.