OK, let's give it a shot here... oh, by the way, Casey is the current CEO...
Why would they need to radically change the sales force methods?
Because they were originally going to be a "carriers carrier", then they lost focus for a while when they went through a succession of CEOs. They are now back on focus, have divested their web hosting and CLEC businesses, and are ready to move forward.
Any customer is a good customer.
Not if that "customer" isn't really buying what you are selling. I see the "simple solution for a simple customer" situation more like someone like Boeing. If you are Boeing, and you sell very expensive airplanes to airlines, do you also therefore have to sell single seat aircraft to individuals, just because they want a plane? No. As a matter of fact, the more I think about it, Boeing is a good analogous company to GX. They both build or have built systems that carry items around the world (planes/people & stuff, fiber network/data & voice), but are really selling to corporations because that's where the big volume exists.
How complex can the problems be?
When connecting the multi-TRILLION dollars worth of financial transactions a day for SWIFT, or the worldwide embassies of the UK, or the US government research labs, or the NATO data centers, at Gigabyte/second speeds I imagine it's pretty complex. Especially if your customer wants to have a certain kind of interface, a certain method of billing, a certain amount of bandwidth available at all times...
If the large customers are 'coming to us', then they are an easy sell.
Again, see the Boeing analogy. Customers like carriers change bandwidth providers as often as airlines change from Boeing to Airbus...or European wireless carriers change technologies... ok, that was an exaggeration, but the good old boy network needs to be overcome here just like everywhere else. The US government contract that recently got all the news was an AT&T contract that will be switched to GX... now that the contract is expiring.
There was an item in one of GX's press releases a while back that said the 4000 (?) MNCs that they were targeting accounted for 70% (or thereabouts) of the total worldwide information traffic. Those are their customers. Not the great ocean of small fry that make up the other 30%.
Again, the issue related to salespeople is a carryover from their days as a carriers-carrier. Now they are driving for value added services rather than plain vanilla all-you-can-eat bandwidth.
Regarding the truth of the statements about the financial salesforce, it is true, but it's currently specific to the financial arena due to corporate acquisitions in the recent past (IXnet and IPC). This is one area where their carryover salesforce is exactly what they need, and probably one of the reasons they landed the SWIFT deal, and the Chicago trading Board deal...
But the benefit of big and broad isn't clear to me. I wonder if it is to the customers. It's perhaps more of an ego thing for the GX bosses.
Reduction in interconnect/handoff costs is a big driver in giving GX a price advantage. In addition, as you alluded, there is a speed and quality of service difference. When they got the NATO framework deal, this was one of the paragraphs in the news release...
"By moving from the existing system of procuring circuit segments within national boundaries, the framework agreement permits NATO to reduce its number of suppliers from five to one. Apart from cost reductions, added benefits include faster provisioning and greatly simplified billing. NATO will enjoy improved service levels as a result of end-to-end management and a single point of contact for ordering and fault reporting. NATO will benefit from commercial-level service agreements thanks to the high level of availability and resilience of the European network."
Here's another quote from another presentation (from late last year) by Gary Cohen (President and COO of Global Crossing Solutions) to better illustrate this point... The whole article is a good read if you have time...
globalcrossing.com
"Our strategy at Global Crossing is to be right ‘in-step’ with this shift. We partner with the board-level leadership of our clients. We listen to their discussions concerning evolving their products or services and business execution to a new level. We, in turn, mold our telecommunications capabilities around their companies to capture the best and most lucrative forms of business interactions in their markets around the world.
Take Deutsche Bank, as an example. They are one of our IXnet financial services customers – IXnet is a wholly owned subsidiary of Global Crossing that provides tailored telecom services to financial services providers. This is a worldwide market and a market area that requires in-depth industry understanding.
Deutsche has 7 million customers worldwide. They have 4000 traders located in 20 countries. This is a perfect case study of the kind of company that cannot afford having interoperability issues and hand-offs infecting their communication. They do business in 20 countries, yes, but they don’t want to have to manage relationships and integrate services with 20 different carriers.
Deutsche Bank and over 1,000 other commercial enterprises, in the largely deregulated financial services industry, use our IXnet extranet to gain communicative reach to over 34 countries – all on the same network. There are no middlemen, only direct connections on a network that connects continents, countries, and the e-business companies of tomorrow."
That's about it... take some time if you have it and flip through GX's website for a lot of good historical and current information globalcrossing.com Click on "About Us" to get an idea of what their large divisions are focused on doing.
DWB |
