I'm shillin' like a villain

I just had a great time at the security bloggers thing. I was a little surprised that not only a number of them read my blog, but given that, they don't realize I work for BigFix. Speaking of vendor bias, I will now attempt to provide a good clear example.

We have been trying some new ad campaigns lately. First, there are the Software Truth viral videos. I think they're worth a chuckle. We've gotten some good feedback, and people seem to like them. So far, the only complaint has been from one blogger who seems to have been fooled into thinking they were some sort of real senate hearing. But I think that reflects more on that particular blogger than it does on our videos.

And then the last couple weeks at work, I see this ad taped to the door of our CEO's office. I assumed it was an internal joke thing, and that we would not go there.

Apparently, we would. We are on the playground talking smack, and our competitors should consider it to have officially been brought.

Check out this ad (~1MB .pdf). I'm told that this ran nice and large in the Northern California edition of the Wall Street Journal today. And you should expect to see it in a number of magazines Real Soon Now. Should you enjoy it as much as I do, you can go to our site and sign up for a demo of our stuff, and get a poster version of it. (If you don't want to grab the PDF, that link also shows the picture and text, so you'll get the idea.)

Yes, those are McAfee, Symantec, altiris, and Landesk we are ramming our sword through.

Generally speaking, I'm not big on cheerleading for my employer. I try to be careful about plugging my company's stuff out of context. If I'm writing a book or an article, a mention in my bio is usually sufficient. If I'm speaking, the line on the first page of the slide deck is usually good enough, even though they probably paid for my travel. And when I'm overtly pointing out something we're doing, I try to make it abundantly clear that I'm an employee, and that I'm in sell mode.

But when my employer does something above and beyond, and I really approve of it, I'm willing to occasionally give props like this. I think an ad campaign like this takes balls of a certain minimum diameter, and I'm glad to see we've got 'em.

The cynics (and maybe competitors) among you might look at an ad like this, think to yourself that you haven't heard much about BigFix before, and conclude that this is a desperate cry for attention from a struggling company. And frankly, if I weren't on the inside seeing what we are doing, I might agree with you, and cringe when I saw us doing this.

But the fact is, we are growing big time. We are replacing our competition all the time, and beat them regularly in customer evaluations. Despite the fact that these guys pay me, and I'm talking about the software that I QA every day, I'm still sincerely impressed with it. It actually works.

We do not come in peace.