Chris, thanks for those thoughts.
"is this standard (optical industry) practice?"
Absolutely. Not only for optical, I might add. Sometimes the vendor is so out in front and feeling their way, in the blind so to speak, that I suspect that they are not sure of themselves and don't want to reveal any shortcomings, as well as not wanting to reveal anything proprietary.
I faced this with the leading three or four WAN vendors about two years ago (you know who they are) who insisted that I sign NDAs with them for VoIP gateway product information. In each case I gave them more information than they gave me, simply by asking them questions. Be that as it may, as it turns out... some of their products weren't up to my expectations, far from it in fact, and some were already obsolete by the time we either got to speak about them or by the time they were released. I guess you could chalk this up to both "Internet time" and legacy thinking on behalf of their product teams. This was before many of them 'got it.'
"'It is not a fast sales cycle,' [exec veep] Falcao says, because the customers are 'betting their business on you.'"
Indeed. More likely, they are getting their needs assessments done in this fashion in order to round out their specifications list, and that's what's adding additional time, and nothing else. What Chutzpah! |
