“Nice con­tent — awe­some pre­sen­ta­tion! What did you use to make it?!”

That’s what every­one who sees my BRITE pre­sen­ta­tion asks me. It’s a new ser­vice called Prezi. And it’s insanely great — the minute I saw it I had to have it, no ques­tions asked. So, for the first time in half a decade, I found myself doing the unthink­able: pay­ing for software.

As Umair’s expe­ri­ence illus­trates, Prezi is an amaz­ing piece of tech­nol­ogy. The Hun­gar­ian com­pany has a great team, got a lot of press and recently set its sight on the US mar­ket. The ser­vice is obvi­ously geared towards pro­fes­sion­als: indi­vid­u­als or small com­pa­nies, not con­sumers or large com­pa­nies. I have embed­ded an exam­ple below (the embed fea­ture is still in the works, so this is an exam­ple of no par­tic­u­lar subject)

So how could Prezi best enter the Enter­prise mar­ket? I don’t have the time to do a full strat­egy analy­sis, but here are the key points I would explore more deeply for such an expansion:

Pro­vide an on-premise appli­ance ready for the enter­prise context

Sit­u­a­tion: Large com­pa­nies are para­noid about their data being hosted out­side of their net­work. The more valu­able the data, the more para­noid they are. Pre­sen­ta­tions often con­tain the most sen­si­tive data of a com­pany, apart from its finan­cial details: strat­egy roadmap, prod­uct pipelines, etc. Pro­vid­ing a SAAS ver­sion will be costly due to strict audits and cer­ti­fi­ca­tions required (ex: SAS 70 Type II for data center).

Path for­ward: Pro­vide enter­prises with a non-customizable appli­ance that is deployed on their net­work and upgraded by Prezi at the same time the SAAS ver­sion is upgraded. Cus­tomers have no con­trol on the soft­ware, sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion as in the SAAS ver­sion. Only change is con­trol on data loca­tion. This solves the cost issues asso­ci­ated with on-premise deploy­ments. Appli­ances can be hard­ware or vir­tual machines. Only require­ment is to pro­vide built-in sup­port for authen­ti­ca­tion through LDAP/AD and easy imple­men­ta­tion of SSO. More details in this post.

Deploy appli­ance at cost, charge per activity

Sit­u­a­tion: Prezi is a dis­rup­tive prod­uct that do not fit any exist­ing box in this mar­ket. If approached in a clas­sic way, the enter­prise mar­ket will require long sales cycles, very pro­gres­sive entry and a host of unnec­es­sary dif­fi­cul­ties. While com­peti­tors will use this time to imi­tate the product.

Path for­ward: As I detailed here, the best strat­egy is to offer a deploy­ment at cost (this also works for a SAAS ver­sion at very low cost). Charge for the hard­ware and time spent, but noth­ing more. Then charge per activ­ity or per active user. Also pro­vide the first tri­als for free: either the first month com­pletely free or the first XXX prezis com­pletely free (to be adapted based on the size of the client of course). This would lower the cost for IT func­tions, elim­i­nate the risks, and be scal­able on Prezi’s side as you do charge at cost for the ini­tial deployment.

Posi­tion as a visu­al­iza­tion tool, not as a Pow­er­Point killer

Sit­u­a­tion: Prezi can­not replace Pow­er­Point (or Keynote), as there is no way to pro­duce com­plex enough graphs, dia­grams, tables in Prezi. Strate­gi­cally, Prezi should not try to match these fea­tures, this would be impos­si­ble. Keep in mind most com­pa­nies actu­ally use add-ins to com­ple­ment even PPT.

Path for­ward: Posi­tion Prezi as a visu­al­iza­tion tool for mate­r­ial pro­duced in other tools, not as an equiv­a­lent to these tools, so that no cred­i­bil­ity is lost. If this mar­ket is entered head-on as a replace­ment for Pow­er­Point, rep­u­ta­tion will be damaged.

Pro­vide users with stan­dard tem­plates, less choice, to appease fears

Sit­u­a­tion: Prezi’s capa­bil­i­ties are impres­sive, but can be daunt­ing for cor­po­rate users who may be afraid of design­ing a bad visu­al­iza­tion, and look not so great in front of their peers. The total free­dom offered by the infi­nite canva and scales may in fact hin­der­ing the adop­tion of the tool.

Path for­ward: Pro­vide “tem­plates” based on log­i­cal units to allow the cre­ation of Prezi by spec­i­fy­ing the mate­ri­als and the log­i­cal flow of the visu­al­iza­tion. This would be sim­i­lar to the LaTeX type­set­ting soft­ware which sep­a­rates the struc­ture and the for­mat­ting. The user could build an out­line, with sec­tions, sub­sec­tions, and items. For each item, he would be able to select a mate­r­ial (video, graphic, etc.) or type in some text. Prezi then takes care of con­vert­ing the out­line to a visu­al­iza­tion, based on the log­i­cal struc­ture, and with­out requir­ing the user to select him­self the visu­al­iza­tion details.

Charge sup­port sep­a­rately to dis­crim­i­nate among segments

Trans­par­ent.

Bring pro­fes­sional ser­vices to a Prezi platform

Sit­u­a­tion: Prezi has impres­sive capa­bil­i­ties, but is much more fit­ted for pre­sen­ta­tions to large audi­ences on a big screen than your casual 10 per­sons meet­ing in a small room. The exec­u­tives in charge of large pre­sen­ta­tions, how­ever, are not the one in charge of the con­tent. The respon­si­ble would wel­come assis­tance to design a Prezi surelly to wow the audi­ence. The man­ager want­ing to design her­self a Prezi will also likely not have the time to do it. What they need is assis­tance, in an effi­cient and trusted manner.

Path for­ward: An axis of devel­op­ment would be to offer, through the Prezi plat­form, access to design­ers offer­ing to turn exist­ing con­tent into a a Prezi. Value added fea­tures would be the obvi­ous rat­ings, feed­back, reviews on the ser­vice providers. It would also be a legal frame­work in place, with insur­ance, that all ser­vice providers are required to have in place. This would ensure con­fi­den­tial­ity for clients. No cost for Prezi once frame­work in place, mul­ti­ple mon­e­ti­za­tion points.

Why SAAS is not the eas­i­est way to the enterprise

It is com­mon among start-ups to think that large com­pa­nies should just use the SAAS ver­sion. This is a mis­take though, as the secu­rity risks are com­plex. The Cloud Secu­rity Alliance has pro­duced an excel­lent doc­u­ment, title Secu­rity Guid­ance, that will give an overview of the broad secu­rity aspects of cloud com­put­ing. The exec­u­tive sum­mary is enough to grasp the chal­lenges at play.

So what do you think of Prezi? How do you think they should tackle the enter­prise mar­ket? Should they even con­sider it?