The Panda Rocket Ride

The Panda Rocket Ride

TechTransform, 25 November 2003: Panda Software - what a rocket ride. I engaged personally in February to expand US operations - and in eight short months we doubled the revenues and created a new software player in the US. (release, clippings)

Creating a US Player

How did we do it? Well, the first problem that any growing, self-funded company faces is how to upgrade its sales, marketing and operations practices to meet the incredibly tough US national market - which is a global market in disguise.

So, that's what we did: we upgraded every aspect of the US-based operation of this well-run Spanish company.

A Commodity Market - Or Is It?

The second problem this kind of company faces is how to get noticed. After all, anti virus is a commodity market, isn't it? Fortunately, that's not exactly true.

In fact, the major vendors clearly don't protect their customers properly, because security threats are ramping up fast. (The latest type of attack, called "flash threats", can propagate through the world net in just minutes.)

We had discovered that when people tried out Panda, they found viruses on already-protected machines. This put their existing vendor instantly in some doubt!

(This first appeared - with our support - in the the May 9 issue of Stu Sjouwerman's W2Knews, a prominent IT newsletter - "Panda Software Found Viruses On My PC").

The Panda Challenge

So all we had to do was get our software in the hands of as many IT managers as possible, get them to try it, and we could get them to consider Panda at work.

Well, the idea worked. With the help of W2Knews, Survey.com and many other partners, we handed out full copies of our professional AV software, with one-year subscriptions, to tens of thousands of IT Managers at no obligation.

The campaign, with additional PR elements, became known as The Panda Challenge.

Update: this story has since been told as a case study by Marketing Sherpa in their yearbook "Marketing Wisdom for 2004 - 99 Marketers Share Real-Life Tips".

And The Rest Was...

Our numbers started to move and then when the big virus storms hit in August, they just took off. Check out the graph here:

I'm proud as heck of the Panda Software USA team and of the Spain-based management that bravely supported my initiatives. The US market can be very, very tough.

Meanwhile, TechTransform...

While I was working on Panda Software, the TechTransform team wasn't idle.

In fact, a July funding of a stealth startup in the wireless digitization space ended up absorbing our entire Convergence Team.

And out of Toronto, sales ace Jim Courtney was helping Web Arrow take off.

And there's more.

This is a great time to be commercializing technology. Funding is available, and corporate users are investing fast.

Let me know how I can help! (Just click on the signature.)

Updated October 4, 2004