Both your questions are about mkt research. Market research done right can give a lot broad guidance about customer attitudes. I have an MBA, and my wife was a heavy duty market researcher; with that background, I was impressed with Frahman's explanations of the details of how they'd done the research underpinning his decisions about dealing with branding. I think he's a savvy, serious user of research. So, I hope he was involved with the round they referenced today.
The way they laid out the options for various company roles is great (the bands with several columns, and various crayon checkmarks). I got confused (probably on purpose) in the presentation about how when they were talking to customers vs. prospects, but they surely have those cross-tabbed.
The ""surveys vs. results"" is, I think, critical. For the moment, assume that Houllion & Co. are only idiots when it comes to channel issues. So, an exec coming into a foundering operation with limited $$$ for R&D is going to do 2 things. 1) buy some time by increasing Gross Profit on existing operations. 2) figure out how to focus his R&D on the efforts most likely to pay off in medium term.
To do (2) you must do some mkt research. If I were in his shoes, I would want some explicit, outside Reality Checks on my product management team because they are quite likely part of The Problem. So I do research. This primary research they quote was likely primed by secondary research from the AMR's, Aberdeens, etc.
Anyway, I don't think it's a weakness; I think it's pretty smart. They're still stuck with old technology, and with Corp who ain't going to front big $$ to change that. From a product perspective, I don't thing Pascal has any better option.
I think we're going to hear A LOT of messaging about remote sales-related connected services and integrated CRM. A lot about BI. They'll be silent on browser-ERP and SaaS, except to make sound like there's some reason for prospects to pick up the phone.