From a drawing on a whiteboard to the acquisition of a product and its team - by Angus Fox, Director, Multizone Limited
Intuwave Limited, a 3i backed UK based startup produced a useful mobile middleware technology, which was difficult to position in the market since it sat uneasily in the Symbian OS through an OEM licencing arrangement and yet clearly had much more capability. 
Intuwave searched for market extensions that the technology could be repurposed for and one of the most promising was that of mobile handset testing. We felt that the technology could be positined and sold in a new market at a much higher price, dragging services revenue in its wake.
We formed a product team at Intuwave of engineering, sales, and marketing and produced a competitive analysis of the requirements necessary to be successful in mobile testing.
Intuwave did not have the resources or the skill set to be the provider of a test automation tool, although what the technology could do was to extend use of such tools into a new market area.
So, to contain and clarify the market requirements we made it a requirement that our technology be used with a third party tool. Its one of the most difficult yet most important things to do in product management - narrowing down the market requirements such that a product can be built in a timely fashion that meets the requirements and gets considered for purchase.
We then set about identifying with whom to partner and quickly narrowed down to IBM, Mercury Interactive, or Compuware.
We built a fantastic prototype and took it to see everyone of interest including the potential partners, the potential customers, consulting partners we could expect to achieve service revenues, and indeed back to Symbian and Microsoft Mobile division themselves.
After convincing their CTO in Sunnyvale, CA and their CEO in Tel Aviv, we signed a partner agreement with Mercury Interactive, and using their consulting partners, built a proof of concept trial with Nokia in Finland.
We created our first product and for the first time an “add-in” to QuickTest Pro was released which was priced higher than QuickTest Pro itself.
We sold Intuwave’s first ever application software licence that was not part of an OEM deal for a six figure Euro sum for the deployment. 
We worked openly with our partners on the product strategy and planning to bring about further sales success and services revenue.
Ultimately, after this initial success Mercury Interactive bought the product from Intuwave and sought to create a wireless division and integrate the technology into all products. The product was fully integrated with QuickTest Professional in a special mobile phone enabled version of Mercury’s flagship functional testing product.
We had taken an idea from a white board in a startup to production in a multi national and my job was done. |
