Hi Denis,

Your 'strategy' seems to be based solidly on ASSUMPTIONS only. The FIRST thing I would do is to get the REAL STORY! And where does your "one sentence" sumamrization come from... yourself or a single user or the conclusion of their 'user group'?

You essentially are proposing to become "the other woman" (or man, if you prefer) in a relationship with the express objective of destroying the "marriage" in favour of marriage with your company. All the more reason to be SURE of the situation first AND to know if there is any real 'rift' between the two already.

I have no idea what existing application, that you can replace, you are talking about. But software 'adequacy' is a very funny thing... I offer MS Word as an example of a piece of software that has many many bugs and inadequacies YET would be extremely hard to displace. Possibly your replacement is far superior BUT if the existing software is doing the basic job that might be enough for all but the most discriminating users.

Good luck
Jim

>This one is lenghty.
>
>Here we go:
>
>We have a vertical market app. There is already established competition in that market. We saw the software offered from one of those competitors. From the demo we saw it's just awful compared to what we have to offer.
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>But here's their situation. From the information we've been able to gather it looks like there are two branches to that company.
>
>There is what we'd describe as the parent company which is international and appears to be a big business. The software branch would be the other branch but it does'nt appear as professional as the main branch. I say not as professional as the main branch because in one sentence "The software is not really doing the job it should do".
>
>Now that lead us to think that perhaps originally the parent branch did'nt have a software solution to offer and an external company came to them to offer them something additional to offer to their already established client base. So apparently a deal was made. The external company took the name of the parent company and a sofware solution was born.
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>So the big question to you UTers is this:
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>Should we approach the parent company to show them the software solution we have?
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>If yes should we do it right away or wait until we have sold more of our solution?
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>What would be the best ways to proceed?
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>What are the risks in such a move?
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>What negatives sides do you see in such a venture?
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>Do you know cases where it's been done?
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>Is there a book where strategies such as this one would be discussed?
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>Any input from you will be welcome.
>
>
>Thank you in advance.