Capellas speech - Part II
... simplify how we do
business, and we know that, we know we've got to continue to simplify. We, at
times, can be very complex, and we're driving that complexity out. This is going
to be an absolute position. We need to demonstrate through our actions that
the partners are fundamental.
And, finally, we've got to continue. The good news is, the rhetoric is over. This is
not a story in the marketplace anymore. The hybrid model of going to market in
different ways, at targeted market segments, is very clearly going to be the
winning model. So now it's all about customer solutions, and very clearly
nobody in this market can do it alone. We acknowledge that. And the leadership
position we want to make sure we stress in the market is that we are open to
partnerships of all kinds.
Now, how do we drive more profitable business? We started really to work on
increased training, which is a very complex marketplace. I'm not going to go
through the programs, but there are some examples up here. You'll see us put
more technical training into the marketplace. This is particularly true as we come
out with some new solution sets. Every solution set we deliver will come with a
partner training program embedded into it. I'm particularly pleased at the
amount of training we put into the marketplace until maybe the last six months,
and I know we need to step it up.
We'll continue to streamline Cs and Cs that are across the board with a number
of new programs. Jim is going to up here in a minute, and he'll talk to you in
more detail, but we're continuing to work on the streamlining of it just simply to
make things easier to do. Some of the programs we look at and we say, this is
a collection of individual pieces we've rolled out in six month increments over
five years, they just need to be cleaned up a lot. And we'll continue to work on
enhanced product procurement. We know that we've got to extend the
programs out. We've got to make more products available. In some cases, we'll
be simplifying product lines. In other cases, we'll be launching new products.
We've got to get new products into the market faster and available to our
partners faster.
In terms of the simplification, well, one of the real things that we're really driving,
you've seen some demos of this around, I will admit it is not ready yet for
launch, but it is getting closer every day, is a single partner portal. A single line in,
and the ability to do global profiling. This means that you no longer will have to
understand the maze that we have of hitting in about 10 different ways. We'll
get everything down to a single portal. We've done an awful lot of the
background work on this, and you'll see this being rolled out.
We really need to simplify our pricing structure. We have got to go to the
Internet list pricing. We all know that one of the benefits and one of the curses
of the Internet is price transparency, and there's no question in this market, in
order to avoid all the conflicts you can get into, complexity is like the gray
market. We have to have singular pricing, and an Internet price list pricing is
being rolled out. And we've got to become more competitive on our volume
products. In addition to doing all this stuff, we've also got to get the cost of the
product down. We're doing some great engineering around that.
We'll continue to do simplification of the product. And that means we'll have
better products. We'll have products that really meet the market faster. We'll
continue to introduce new products. But, overall, we've got to have greater
clarity around the product road maps, particularly on the server side. And our
engineering teams clearly understand that.
And, finally, we have created a singular worldwide distribution partner team that
is under Peter's direction and we'll continue to be far more consistent both in
terms of content and our messaging.
I do want to thank all you for our success in Q2. It was a great quarter. Very
clearly the people in this room are the ones that helped us make it. So, you
made a major contribution to our success, and we appreciate that. There's no
question that in order to extend our reach, and we do have a very broad reach,
we need to continue to work the partner base line. We need to help you and
continue to expand our solutions portfolio, and that's particularly on the high
end. I ran into a number of you last night, a lot of questions about the solution
set on the high end, particularly with Alpha. We are working new target markets,
new solution sets, and we know we've got some work to do there. And as you
talk and hear some of the other partners we'll have on stage, I think you'll see
that we are really starting to get that in gear. But it's not just on Alpha, it's on
the entire product set, and you'll also see us with some tighter relationships with
the ISVs.
We'll continue to exploit some emerging markets. The service provider market,
this has been a great market for us. I don't know if you saw the recent data
that came out, but we now are up in the mid-30s in terms of share of the
service provider market. That puts us number one in terms of total dollar
volume in service providers. The reason why we do that is because we've got
great price performance, and that engineering really matters. A great example
was the DL-360, the 1u stackable device that was built entirely to provide the
service market with the solution they needed, less space, the ability to scale on
the fly. So it's an example of our engineering kicking in to really meet a market
niche.
We're going to hit wireless in a big way, a really big way. You saw the
announcement with Nokia this morning. That's just one in a series, obviously,
from the device side, but there's also the infrastructure side where we'll continue
to go. We'll continue to hit the dot-coms, we'll continue to hit them with the
price/performance equation that just makes a huge amount of value sense. All
the dot-coms are now worried about this funny thing called cash flow seems like
we've known about that for a while. A new phenomenon, isn't it amazing? But
we'll continue to put price/performance skills out there, and we'll continue to
lead in the next generation of applications and in those applications we'll do a
much better job of bundling solutions.
Also, we know that you need better air cover. As I look back at what we did
well and what we didn't do so well and there's a couple of things we certainly
didn't do very well, our overall messaging was a mess. You'll see us really focus
on that. We've brought in a very talented new team under Doug Fox's
leadership. We're working on a new advertising program. We understand that
our messaging wasn't consistent. And so you'll really see us deliver better
messaging. We need to really do some work on the brand, we have a new
brand campaign that launches late September. I am particularly excited about it.
You'll see some of the advertising start to launch this month. And you'll see us in
spots we haven't been before, prime time TV, sports, cable, obviously we've
been in print for a while, but you'll see us be a lot edgier, and a lot closer to the
market.
We're really tying our communications together. We have worked on this a little
bit organizationally, where we brought our PR teams together, and so you'll see
this messaging get a lot clearer. And, again, we brought in not just Doug, but we
brought in a number of very talented people in terms of leadership positions
around messaging, PR, marketing. We have traditionally been an engineering
company, it is our foundation, it is our roots. That won't change. But we
certainly know that we've got to give much better air cover.
So, what are we going to do next? Well, we're going to continue this innovation
on the edge of the web. A year ago I talked about really developing an Internet
culture inside the company, an Internet culture inside of our design team. Every
product we build was built to think about how you do Internet interoperability.
You'll see us continue this year to push the next natural evolution of that, which
is really understanding that control is moving to the edge of the web, and how
you develop solution that capitalize on that.
You'll see us capitalize on some new service capabilities, work tighter with our
partnerships. We are going to move our services on the high end to architectural
design. That's what makes sense for us to be in, so we're going to go down to
six or eight key practices all around architectural design that puts the value of
our products and solutions out, that's the space we really want to work in.
We're going to continue to differentiate our high-end offerings, and you'll see us
have a much more coherent strategy around software, with interoperability
being the key. We've got some really great work going on there. You'll see us
continue to create new opportunities not for ourselves through some new
markets, but also for our partners. We'll do that by having, again, cleaner Cs
and Cs, but much better solution sets.
And our goal is for every one of those markets I showed is to drive double-digit
growth. And so every business we're in, we will be number one or number two
in the segment, and the minimum acceptable is to drive double-digit growth. I
believe we are actually not far from that, and so you'll see that start to pick up.
So, in summary, we very clearly understand we can't do it alone. We've come a
long way; we've got a long way to go. We understand the value of the partner
network. The rhetoric is over. It's all about delivering custom solutions. I'm very
pleased with the sort of the activity we have, with the momentum we have in
the market place, with the energy of the team. I mean, very clearly the market
is going our way, both in terms of where we're are positioning ourselves, where
our products and services fit, and the way we're starting to have chemistry.
I want to thank you for your loyalty. The last couple of years have been pretty
tough. Very clearly, on the abstract, I have never been more encouraged, I've
never been more upbeat about where things are going, other than the fact that
I'm really suffering from jet lag at the moment, and to that I will close on
thanking you so much for your time and your energy. I'll be around today, I
think the teams are all geared up. Have a great conference; we have a lot of
great stuff lined up for you.
My closing comment is the future really looks bright. Let's just go after it.
Thanks a lot. |
