How you compare eramba with the competition?
I get this question very often and I have prepared a response which i prefer it stays here and i would be glad to hear your opinions too. Remember i run GRC at a public company for the last 10 years and lead a team of 10 people or so (which 10 years was only me of course…!)
The following is the response i sent over to a customer asking me about this:
Hi ZZZZZZ,
I get this question often, in particular in the last couple of years where without really trying or intending, eramba seem to have taking customers from them.
I think comparing us with them is for nothing since the driving force of eramba is an open, not for profit, project built by practitioners. We simply have very different goals and any comparison is probably not fair.
Based on the fact we are non-profit driven and open by nature:
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We will always be far economical, this means we don’t care about competition at all, this means we don’t put features to “compete” or “win a customer deal at all costs”. This in our view leads to less complicated products that can evolve technologically over time.
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Investing large sums of money on anything puts a ton of responsibility on the team that pushed the purchase to deliver value. if the team or organisation as a whole does not have maturity in GRC, is quite a bet.
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If things don’t go well, meaning real value isnt delivered and therefore funding is cut off, you end up with a closed product that might stop working all together (unless you have a perpetual license). eramba is open and so you will always be able to take information out in one way or another and essentially is a perpetual license.
On the other side, i see good things about them:
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Their products have 4 or more times “run time” than ours, they have been used more and that is really important (so as long that experience is re-invested in quality support, training, features, Etc). Altough i don’t know their product in detail, i would expect to work very well.
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If you are a large company, more like a government, eramba wont fit most RFP as the requirements there exceed our capabilities and we are honestly not interested in being part of any of that as we run this part time.
My conclusion is the same as above, we seem to fit well a certain type of market (small GRC teams irrespectively of the company size or industry) and not very well others (large GRC teams). I do also believe we grow faster (both in terms of product and customer base) than most of the competition out there, at least if you look at the ratio of investment/output.
I’m interested to know your opinion and dont worry we have learned to take critics in a constructive way.
Regards
Esteban