2/24/2009:: Categories:
events, powerpoint
Posted by: Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing
A reminder to join us TODAY at 11am EST for a free webinar on Managing PowerPoint Presentations! This live webinar will feature a demonstration of Open Text's Presentation Partner, developed by n-tara works. This easy-to-use PowerPoint management tool enables centralized control, creation, assembly and distribution of PowerPoint presentations, resulting in compliant, compelling presentations and a more productive sales force.
n-tara works' chief technology officer Jeff Morris will be presenting the tool and Jon Schupp, VP of Software Services with Open Text Digital Media Group will be leading the conversation about using Presentation Partner and digital asset management to dramatically increase ROI of your media investments.
You won't want to miss this discussion! Please click here to register.
2/17/2009:: Categories:
products, events, powerpoint
Do you know where all of your latest, most compliant PowerPoint files are located? Are you certain your field sales and marketing teams are using the most up to date presentations? How do you find, assemble, create and distribute PowerPoint presentations to your sales and marketing teams?
If you use PowerPoint (with 35,000,000+ PowerPoint presentations given every day, virtually all of us do) you'll want to join Open Text Digital Media Group and n-tara works for a live webinar to learn about Presentation Partner, Open Text and n-tara works' presentation management solution. n-tara's chief technology officer Jeff Morris will be presenting the tool. The webinar will be held on Tuesday, February 24 at 11am EST. It's free and you'll learn how you can easily manage your organization's PowerPoint presentations with a simple solution that requires no IT support. We hope you'll join us! Click here to register.
12/11/2008:: Categories:
marketing, news
Posted by Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing
Welcome to the our new front door - an all new online experience for n-tara. The websites and blogs you are viewing represent the materialization of our new brands: n-tara interactive and n-tara works. For an interactive design firm to launch its own new web presence (even a single one) is a daunting task, especially for our company, which has seen phenomenal growth over the past 4 years. It’s daunting, because our pipeline is full of online endeavors, sales enablement tools, and branding strategies for our growing customer base. But, we made a committed effort to apply our discovery and development processes to the creation of our own websites, with good success.
The new websites are a work in progress, with many improvements to be made. We hope you’ll keep visiting the sites to see additional features and content, and we especially hope you will subscribe to our blogs and join in conversations with our team and other marketing professionals.
Again, thanks for visiting, thanks for being supportive of n-tara, and if you find any bugs or misspellings - or even colloquialisms -please don’t hesitate to point them out to us.
12/9/2008:: Categories:
n-tara staff, news
Ron Williams has been hired as Vice President of Business Development for n-tara works, the product development division of n-tara, inc., which specializes in communication tools and platforms for sales and marketing organizations within Fortune 1000 companies. In his new position, Williams will be responsible for both direct sales and managing distribution channels for n-tara works’ line of custom sales enablement and presentation management software solutions.
Williams was most recently Sales Manager for ModernTech/SolidWorks VAR based out of Knoxville, Tenn., where he was a member of the President’s Club in 2007, attaining 110 percent of quota. Prior to that he was Regional Channel Sales Manager for SolidWorks where he achieved 115% of quota and President’s Club status in 2003. Williams also has sales experience with Paraform Inc. as Eastern Regional Business Development Manager, SGI/Alias as Southeast Region and South American Territory Manager, and Summagraphics/Houston Instruments as Business Development Manager.
“Ron Williams’ skill set as a seasoned product sales professional brings the kind of expertise we need to the n-tara team,” said n-tara CEO Ralph O’Dell. “Ron will be a team leader in developing new customers for our sales enablement and presentation management solutions, which provide immediately impactful and measureable benefits for sales and marketing organizations.”
Williams attended East Tennessee State University and the University of Tennessee where he studied Advertising, Marketing Communications, Fine Arts and Photography.
10/24/2008:: Categories:
n-tara staff, fun stuff
Ralph
addresses the hard questions, and some fun ones too, in this first in a series of get-to-know-you interviews with n-tara's Director of Marketing, Mary Ellen Miller.
What is the most significant thing that you see coming down the pike for n-tara?
Business opportunity for the works group.
What is unique about your role here?
Being the CEO ….I’m very sales and marketing focused, so as the CEO I’m also CMO.
What is the hardest thing you have to deal with?
The hardest thing we have to deal with is to manage exponential growth on cash flow.
What is the hardest thing you have to deal with pertaining to clients?
From a sales and marketing aspect its setting their expectations and dealing with the very severe budget cuts and turndowns that we’ve had in the last six months.
Due to the economy?
Oh, yes. There’s no question we’ve been impacted by the economy although we still enjoy phenomenal growth it’s not at the same level it has been for the last five years.
The hardest thing we have to deal with, with clients, is getting information from them so we can do our job. Those are the two number one things in my mind that stick out.
What is the most significant thing that you’ve had to deal with a client in the last six months?
It’s the budget cuts with our two largest customers; 50 percent.
What is your favorite sandwich?
Oyster poor boy.
And how is that made?
Fried, oyster poor boy. It’s just a poor boy with fried oysters on it.
What is something we don’t know about you that might surprise us?
I ran a 4:19 mile in high school.
And I was a PADI SCUBA instructor for 11 years.
9/25/2008:: Categories:
n-tara staff, news
Posted by Mary Ellen Miller, Director of Marketing.
Jeff Morris has been named by the Business Journal of Tri-Cities/Tennessee/Virginia to the 2008 class of the 40 under Forty. Jeff will be honored at Friday's gala dinner at Millennium Centre. Jeff is n-tara's co-founder and Chief Technology Officer. With his leadership, the company has grown from five people at its founding in 1999 to over 45 employees serving Fortune 500 clients worldwide.
Jeff is a graduate of Purdue University with a B.S. in Technical Graphics and an MS in Computer Graphics Animation from East Tennessee State University. He was Assistant Professor/Co-founder of the Advanced Visualization Lab at ETSU. It became the premier site in the world for the program he and his colleagues created in Computer graphics and 3-D animation. Jeff designed and taught courses in digital imaging, computer animation, motion graphics and computer illustration at both the graduate and undergraduate level. The program grew from 47 students to over 350.
In addition to serving the students he taught and mentored through the years, he is an Eagle Scout.
9/15/2008:: Categories:
marketing
Posted by Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing
With the launch of our new brands, you’re bound to have questions regarding our motivations behind why we launched divisional brands, and what the brands mean. I’m hopeful this post will explain our new direction. And don’t worry, the familiar ‘arcs’ of the original n-tara logo are still around, but now they’ve been joined by two closely-linked children to round out the n-tara family.
So first, why: the re-branding initiative was begun to better position our offerings to our customers and future customers. n-tara has always been a unique company – rich in the dual heritages of design and technology, fortified with an underlying current of strategy and the discovery of critical insights. With that much capability, (from a marketing perspective) it was often difficult to ‘bucket’ our offerings in the most efficient manner.
We also analyzed what our brand means through the benefits and value we provide to our customers. This exercise included reviewing every project we’ve ever put out the door and a detailed analysis of our customer interactions and why our customers keep coming back to us. We found one common thread throughout every endeavor: our work creates connections. This became our theme. Our new mantra started with a simple statement:
n-tara connects buyers and brands.
This was fortified with other connective relationships:
-sales and customers
-marketing and prospects
-presenters and audiences
Out of our own applied discovery process, we had a clear roadmap of how to revise our brand platform, create our new marks, and position our offerings. Out of this effort came the logo designs you see here, the color palettes, the messaging, the imagery, and so on. Ethan Blumenstrauch, our world-class creative director, led the redefinition of our brand, which you can read about in this post. Joshua Hathaway, our talented lead designer, materialized the brand platform into the graphic elements that you can see on our websites. And our peerless team, whom we’ll introduce you to individually on the blogs in upcoming posts, programmed and developed the sites and blogs.
Some brand facts:
1. The original n-tara brand mark ‘arcs’ symbolized the synergy of three core technologies: animation, interactive, and digital video
2. The word ‘n-tara’ is a derivation of a Malaysian word meaning ‘between the curves, between time and space’. The word was chosen for its symbolic meaning…and because the five letter domain name was available back in 1999.
3. The n-tara company logo was reverted back to its original dark charcoal color from a brown/orange color used for the past 3 years
4. The icon in the new interactive and works marks is symbolic of human connection, and the potential for connection. Thus derived the ‘glue’ metaphor on ntarainteractive.com
5. The two marks are nearly identical in design to symbolize the close collaborative, cross-functional relationship of the divisions.
We hope you enjoy our ‘new look’ as much as we do. We’re always open for your feedback, to help us continue to grow our company and most importantly, to better serve you.
9/15/2008:: Categories:
marketing
Posted by Thomas Eorgan, SVP, Marketing
Our creative director, Ethan Blumenstrauch, guided our brand development process and envisioned the story that’s told in the ‘gateway’ of each website. He’s a great storyteller, so in his own words, Ethan defines the meaning behind our new brands:
“n-tara’s focus is to create branded user experiences that connect buyers to brand, and sales to prospect, in an innovative, emotional way that inspires wonder and fuels business opportunity. Our designers relish the discovery of crucial consumer insights that organically – from the targeted individual user up - drive a user experience, and our creative culture is one of fluidity, flexibility and is highly reactive.
“In designing the brand signatures of both n-tara interactive and n-tara works, we turned to nature and viewed how organic elements – especially water – interact with one another. The brand signatures reflect the idea of “connection” in an ever-changing, always evolving fashion, much like an amoeba or sea-borne organism, hence the visual bridge between two forms contained within the mark. The particular shade of green utilized in the n-tara interactive mark reflected the rites of spring, the greening of a new season, signaling the birth a new era for n-tara. The particular shade of burnt orange used in the n-tara works signature reflects the larger idea of fire and energy.”
9/15/2008:: Categories:
products, marketing
Posted by Bob Markham, EVP, Strategy
One of the most fundamental problems that companies deal with everyday is how to more effective communicate. n-tara has been listening to our customers about this basic need for 10 years. What are we hearing? There is a large gap in both the platform and the means for presenting information both inside and outside of organizations. There have been large advances in tools that are focused on the written word and printed communications. The gap exists for presented information – information that is visually communicated. The web has provided one medium for this more dynamic communications but a corporate website is only a starting point, an initial step in the process and one that is interspersed with other direct and indirect communications.
The requirements and demands that customers have to be educated, informed and frankly enticed to participate with your company are numerous. We call this the communications gap. A communications gap exists because corporate communication tools have not caught up with the web and media management has not been connected into the corporate infrastructure. How could this be – the web has been around for over 10 years? The reason is simple – marketing and communications lives in a silo from the rest of the organization so tools that can connect the dots have not matured at the same rate as for example enterprise content management.
That is why we created n-tara works. Our focus is laser focused on solving communication gaps. Every platform and tool that we design is measured by improving communications both internal and external to the organization. This is the new frontier for organizations – in a high speed world – high speed, effective communications is needed and is demanded by customers.
This blog is all about how to better communicate and how to close the communications gap. We encourage you to look at our solutions, our posts and responses and participate with us to solve your toughest communications challenges. We’re here to listen and learn with you and share our insights and solutions.
9/15/2008:: Categories:
products, powerpoint
Posted by Bob Markham, EVP, Strategy
PowerPoint presentations pervade companies. They’re scattered throughout email and corporate file systems. They are one of the least managed and controlled forms of information dissemination in a company and yet they are one of the most widely used vehicles for communication. Furthermore, companies spend significant time, effort and money developing presentations to communicate with analysts, partners, prospects, and customers.
Where do the sanctioned PowerPoint slides reside?
Who owns them?
How do others get access to them for information or re-use?
Companies are constantly battling with presentations that contain out of date product information, branding, and legal disclaimers? How much time does your company spend trying to find and reuse existing slides… and can’t? How many times when developing a presentation are there multiple versions of the same slide to choose from… and you’re not sure which is the most current or accurate?
These problems plague companies, especially people in marketing, sales and the executive offices. And they take a toll – in wasted time, effort and money and in miscommunication, inaccuracies which then must be corrected, and potentially lost business or opportunities and tainted business relationships. The cost is significant, but largely unmeasured.
What does it cost your company to find presentation assets it needs or re-create ones it can’t find?
What does it cost your company to present the wrong information?
What is the real effect of representing an out-of-date logo, product or a non-compliant presentation?
There is value in being able to quickly find and reuse slides, to assemble a new presentation from pieces of others, and to empower teams of people to do so with only the most accurate, up-to-date slides. But value is not just derived from the cost to assemble the presentation. The value is in the timely, accurate and up-to-date presentation of relevant, accurate information and many times the image your company has to clients and prospects. The right information presented to the right audience has bottom line benefits that go far beyond missing a potential sales opportunity. How do you measure the nearly unquantifiable cost of someone presenting an inconsistent, wrongly branded, or inaccurate presentation to a customer, partner, board member or prospect?
Conversely what is the value of presenting the right information?
Of being able to control and restrict what a sales rep can present?
Confidently delivering consistent, compliant, and unchangeable presentations?
These are questions that we ask ourselves every day. ntara works is all about communications. Ballista is our technology to address the huge gap that exists for managing PowerPoint in corporations today. By providing the tools and platforms to deliver results that change the game for our customers.
Are these problems that your company is struggling with? We believe that communications is a new frontier that is only beginning to be addressed by solutions available in the marketplace. Let us know what your communications problems are and let’s discuss them in this blog. We think we have some great solutions that will only get better through your participation.