SCIP Oregon

Shadow Boxing with Virtual Machine Images

Posted by campsean - 03/11/08 at 11:11:02 pm

Virtualization has had a significant impact on the hardware and software industry over the last couple of years. The ability to package virtualized operating systems and their applications as virtual machines has generated a true “sea change” in the way that the software and hardware industry operates, markets, performs consulting activities, etc.

However, while virtualization is becoming more prevalent in the data center and is also expanding its reach to desktops and mobile devices, there are other areas where its potential is overlooked.

Competitive intelligence (CI) is one of them.

With virtual machines it is easy (and relatively trivial) to spin up five or ten competing products and quickly ascertain differences in features and function among them. In addition, utilizing virtual machines for this type of analysis alleviates any concerns that arise about how these multiple product installations might conflict with the default OS install that you use daily.

Virtualization also makes it easy to suspend any activities you are performing with these products for a period of time (hours, days, or even weeks) and quickly return to investigating these products at a later time.

Virtualization also removes the need to set up or maintain dedicated hardware to perform competitive tear downs. This is a process that typically involves flat lining the box, loading the software, etc. As a matter of fact, you can get a fair amount of competitive CI done with a garden-variety laptop that also happens to be running a virtualization stack.

Virtualization technology makes it easy to “shadow box” with competing products at will and persist the state of your FUD decryption experiments for a later review period.

Accessing your competitors’ software via trial downloads is also a very easy process. Of course you need to ensure that you are representing yourself ethically and that you review the end user license agreement (EULA) and terms of use of the software.

Companies that have an entrenched set of competitors should be making available a library of competing products as virtual machines. Giving the field access to a library of virtual machines makes it easy for them to gain hands-on intelligence about competitors’ products without the need for each person in the field to individually set up an environment for experimentation purposes.

Virtual machines can be delivered directly to users and run via technologies such as VirtualPC, VirtualBox, VMware Player, or Workstation. They can also be centrally hosted on server-based virtualization solutions and accessed via the appropriate remote desktop protocols and interfaces.

“Shadow boxing” with competitors with a virtual machine “opponent” is one of the fastest ways you, as a CI professional, or others in your field can gain hands-on knowledge about competitors’ products.

Putting together a competitive “lab” such as this requires the development of a partnership between the CI professional and the technical professionals in a firm, but the benefits that result from such a partnership can be significant.

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