Customer Collaboration
You may have heard me say once or twice (okay- admittedly a lot more than that!) that there is nothing more important than our customers… Well, one of the ways that I live that mantra is by participating in our Enterasys Customer Council (ECC). The ECC provides customers with direct access to our product managers and executives and gives them the opportunity to help us drive improvements at Enterasys in areas of product development, services, training, marketing, supply chain, sales and IT.
We recently held an ECC meeting during Interop Las Vegas which brought together fourteen customers representing seven vertical industries and six countries to discuss current challenges in IT and how we can continue to provide relevant technology solutions. The ECC opened up with a welcome dinner on the first night which provided a great opportunity to get people acquainted as we had five repeat customer attendees and nine new customer attendees.
Trent Waterhouse, Barry Cioe, Steve Hargis and I spread out around the table in order to jumpstart the conversations. The conversation predictably started out about technology, but then took some unpredictable turns which broke the ice with laughter as people talked about their very first jobs. It was a fun evening which provided the platform for the meaningful dialogue that would unfold over the next two days. Steve Hargis provided a report card to the group on how Enterasys has responded to ECC requests and I was pleased to hear that we measured up very well.
The next day the ECC members discussed the continued challenges they are having with network security, server consolidation/virtualization, as well as a host of other IT issues and compliance mandates. Customers shared how they are struggling to keep operations running with the same staff and smaller budgets while deploying new voice/video/data applications – including IP-based surveillance cameras and HD video conferencing.
One healthcare customer shared how they are enabling web access for surgeons to foster collaboration with peers and enable on-demand access to the latest research information, during surgical procedures! Another person who is new to his CIO role expressed how difficult it was to hire certified Enterasys IT staff. All of our other ECC members stated how they just advertise for CCIE’s, receive lots of resumes, and choose the best candidate. If a person has fundamental networking skills, after a single Enterasys training class, they have a fully qualified Enterasys professional. All agreed the learning curve is minimal. In fact, since the ECC meeting we have already developed a fast track course for CCIE customers to receive their Enterasys Certification (ECIE). See page 4 for more information.
John Gallant, CEO of Network World joined the ECC for an extremely interesting roundtable discussion where views were shared about security, convergence, and network operations. We started over lunch on the topic of “Green IT” with John facilitating. The first part of the conversation was “What is your definition of Green IT?” and the answer varied, but the common theme was “savings in cooling, power and space costs.” We also discussed whether the driver for Green IT was environmental responsibility or cost reduction, and the answer was clearly reducing cost.
John drilled-down on this and every member of the ECC commented that cost reduction in IT infrastructure, even while supporting more applications like voice and video, is the main driver behind all of their IT decisions. They all complimented Enterasys for our customer support and told anecdotal stories about real-life situations where Enterasys came through for them. The council members also shared with Mr. Gallant why they continue to invest in Enterasys, and some of the clear advantages that their Enterasys deployments have given their businesses.
Before the meeting drew to a close, the ECC members were able to spend time on the Interop show floor and took a private tour of the InteropNet where they saw, first-hand, the Enterasys network in action, running the entire Interop event. InteropNet was the favorite highlight of the ECC, and they encouraged us to issue press releases and whitepapers with all of the details about the design and statistics for this standards-based, open-architecture network.
The ECC meeting was extremely productive and serves as a perfect example of how Enterasys collaborates with our customers to deliver solutions that help them get their job done better, faster and more cost-effectively. I would like to personally thank all of our ECC members for taking the time to share your thoughts with us and to help set our product direction for the coming year. I am already looking forward to our next meeting.