Gary,
I think you are worrying too much about sales at this point. It's never good to be first to market with a new product. This is a product that will sell itself. It's a product that will be talked about between the personnel in different organizations, i.e., at the club, at the business lunch. There will be only two sales obstacles:
1) FTEL's capacity for production ( I'm assuming outsourcing will handle any potential bottlenecks in this area);
2) The reluctance of companies to switch from a current vendor to
an unknown vendor that maynot offer adequate support services--
Most businesses will pay a lot more ( as long as there is a reasonable
timeframe for expense/payback) for a product that they know if there
is problems with it, that they will have near instaneous support from the vendor. LU is a good example. If LU sells a similar product at twice the price--instead of 6 mos. it takes a year to recapture the expense-many companys would do business with them because of their position as a recognized leader in technology and customer support. Can you imagine now disquieting it is for a CEO to contempate loss of telecommunication services for a day in a multinational corp --an airline for example.
So, in my opinion, FTEL's biggest hurdle is not its product, or sales
of it. Rather, it is the resources to build a superior customer support corps. I suspect that the IPO will provide enough revenues
to FNET so it can infuse FTEL with adequate funds to not only build the needed boxes, but, also, create a large and adequately trained
worldwide support staff.
Hope this helps and doesn't give you something else to worry about.
Lew |
