After the initial introduction of a product, its further development has a cadence built around development and test cycles to deliver new functions and provide updates or incorporations of fixes. This cadence is established around the cycles for test and release of new versions. The delivery cycle is generally six-months long for new functions or versions, with a quarterly minor update to include fixes for problems or issues discovered. Vendors need to take into account that an increase in frequency of releases increases the disruption for customers and internal support organizations.

There have been notable, misguided exceptions to this where hard lessons had to be learned by those who had not been through this before.

Major new product announcements start based on the product readiness (at least the hoped for readiness) for market. Even large mature companies sometimes blunder by announcing new products at times that guarantee to minimize the attention. One major product last year launched right before Thanksgiving.

Holidays are a bad time to get the attention of IT professionals. And the end of the year is the worst time to bring out a new product, whether it is sold directly or through the channel by Value Added Resellers (VARs). Sales people have quotas to make, and that is done with a product that has been introduced and promoted to customers. It is not done with a brand new product that must be explained and takes time for reference accounts to build.

The announcement season is upon us, and these announcements represent the planning, marketing, and engineering that went into a product. These are major undertakings by companies and the execution of the announcement including the timing, the venues, the supporting materials and the product delivery are critical for the success of companies. The announcement season isn’t just interesting — it’s important on a number of levels and impacts the success of a vendor and its individual products. Evaluating the products and how they are delivered could determine the continuation of a product line. That could affect a vendor’s reputation, and could even make-or-break smaller companies.

(Randy Kerns is Senior Strategist at Evaluator Group, an IT analyst firm).