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Thoughts on a Recent Neolane Demo

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Nov 9 2009

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a series of product demos for Neolane.  According to their web site, Neolane is "the only enterprise marketing software specifically designed to manage, automate and optimize programs across traditional and emerging channels including direct mail, email and mobile".  The Neolane team did a nice job detailing out this functionality and emphasizing their ability to integrate easily with numerous outbound channels.

The demos focused on three main points:

1.       Overall product offering

2.       Campaign planning and execution

3.       Technical architecture

The first phase of the demo showcased the overall product offering.  Neolane offers several plug and play applications and extensions to give marketers a variety of useful tools at their disposal.  This link explains and illustrates in greater detail the Neolane product offerings.  One of Neolane's strengths is that it is built from the ground up on a single code base.  This allows for quick and efficient deployment of additional product modules as well as stronger overall systems integration.  This becomes especially important when working with clients who wish to take a more phased or agile approach to their implementations.

The majority of the demo focused on Neolane's campaign management, planning, and execution capabilities.  The demo highlighted the process of setting up a campaign plan and budget.  We were then taken into a more detailed demonstration on how the actual campaign selection and process flow was built.  Neolane provides the campaign developer with all the standard functionality to build and manage robust campaign workflows.  Most of the campaign set up was very intuitive thanks to Neolane's clean and clear user interface, icons, and controls.  Within the campaign flow, each of the tasks were easily connected and configured to pass data from one step to the next.  The tool also offers a nice system for viewing the output records from your campaign and enforcing approvals prior to exporting lists to other systems (e.g. email service providers, print shops, etc).  Email notifications can also be set up between the team to help streamline the approval process.  Scheduling of campaigns was also very easy and straightforward as one would expect from an enterprise level tool. 

The final portion of the demo focused on the technical architecture and data storage.  The overall architecture seemed fairly simple compared with other enterprise campaign management tools.  One key benefit is Neolane has figured out an efficient means to quickly deploy new instances of the product across to multiple systems.  This becomes especially useful when you have a client who needs multiple installs (such as test and production environments) up and running quickly with similar configurations.  For data storage, Neolane offers its own data store which can be set up and expanded using the built in ETL tool.   Alternatively, Neolane has the flexibility to integrate with external data sources or databases.  The one drawback I saw is that reaching out to external data sources does require some additional advanced configuration.  Generally speaking, it seems as though Neolane can easily support any conventional data requirement.

Based on what I saw, I really liked the Neolane product.  Neolane offers a clean and simple means to implement marketing initiatives in an ever growing and complex space.  I would look for Neolane to continue to grow and earn market share in the coming years.  I personally look forward to working more with the tool and sharing my thoughts and findings with all of you.  Stay tuned!

 

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