I am settling into my new position at Cisco and life is starting to establish a new cadence, this post is from inspiration gathered in a new perspective I have for competitive education. I say competitive education because at Cisco I am now exclusively dedicated to The Virtual Computing Environment Coalition (VCE) and prior to Cisco I was in the storage industry but working for a storage manufacture competitive to EMC, NetApp. Prior to joining NetApp I really didn’t have significant experience in the storage industry I had just used NetApp for a few virtualization projects and really liked the product. That thought hasn’t changed by the way, I still like NetApp products.
On the competitive education front, every manufacture educates its employees on the products in the marketplace that will be positioned against their product. That education from anyone in this forum is often laser focused on weaknesses and dismissive of strengths. I had a healthy heaping of this in terms of EMC capabilities so coming back to Cisco and having the potential to be dedicated to VCE was initially a uncomfortable position. I forced myself to look beyond that competitive perspective and said I must know for myself. I was also proud to return to Cisco, who I worked for in the 1990s and no one can argue that Cisco’s position in the history books is one that “could” rival General Electric’s contribution to business. Safe to say I felt very good about supporting a business endeavor Cisco was offering. So I have now been back at Cisco for a solid month and that time has had me heads down learning through “hands on education” and “original source manuals” versus excerpts posted in emails.
I write this to do my best at articulating how changed I am in establishing opinions without an “original source” perspective. To state more clearly I am forever against competitive education as the exclusive source of information about what a product or solution can or cannot do. Competitive education is critical to preparing for what solutions you are up against but in my case it can never be the sole source knowledge base.
I have always tried to focus on what strengths the solutions I represent can do but you often get into situations where the preverbal statement will be made “blank said that your X product can’t do this”. Anyone in the technology industry that says they have never been pushed to the brink of saying “That is complete rubbish and could you ask them about why blank’s Y product won’t do this”, is well not being forthright or they simply haven’t been in the business long enough. I venture a guess that there are a few exceptions but when making statements based on averages, I feel I am safe to make the previous.
The exchange described above is just an absolute waste of time in actually addressing the needs the customer has. Sure architecturally, if product X doesn’t do something that the customers requirements plainly state then there is a functional gap. However, there is usually always an alternative answer to satisfy that requirement. It is then in the customers hands to ultimately decide that the solution presented to them “in totality” can address their technical needs and business requirements.
I am proud to say that I have now had in depth hands on experience with two highly competitive manufactures and both products are excellent products. Products however do not address the needs of business and CIO’s which run their IT organizations.
This is the reason why I returned to Cisco and ultimately dedicated my focus to VCE. Customers want integrated, installed, serviced and architecturally synchronized solutions. VCE and VBLOCKs are laser focused on that objective and in my brief tenure but seasoned perspective this solution is wildly exceeding expectations today, with a future that is exciting.
More on why soon,
Trey
Wed, Jul 14, 2010
General