Enterasys CEO Chris Crowell on battling Cisco and HP, and a not-so-secret weapon named Isaac
What is the unique selling proposition for Enterasys? How do you position the company to customers versus the companies that they hear about a lot more, like the Ciscos, HPs and Junipers?
We compete with everybody, everyday, and when we win, we win for a variety of reasons. We like to think our biggest differentiation is total cost of ownership. I can list technical differentiators — there’s customer service differentiation, there’s value differentiation — but our total cost of ownership across our complete offering is going to be better than the next guy. A key part of our sales cycle is demonstrating that our total cost of ownership is better than the next guy’s.
Juniper talks about that a lot and tries to use that as a wedge against Cisco, talking about having a single software platform, for example. What do you hinge your TCO story on? What are the elements of making that case?
The first part, obviously, is the initial capital expenditure and I think we’re very competitive there. You know we’re not at the Cisco or Juniper end [of the price spectrum] and we’re not at the HP end in terms of the actual cost of acquiring the capital in the first place. But our cost per box is very competitive, certainly when you compare it to the big guys. But more than that is the longevity of that box, the value in that box, the quality of that box — and that’s just the hardware side.
The management piece is the most important part of the story. At Enterasys — and before that at Cabletron — we put a lot of value and a prioritisation on building out management solutions that make the job easier for the administrator. We have built-in automation capabilities in the firmware that allow the hardware to do things in a less burdensome way than the other guys do.
The last piece of TCO is really on the service side of things. Most of the vendors now are carrying lifetime warranties on their products. Our lifetime warranty on our hardware is very competitive, but the longevity of our box is going to be better than the next guy’s. We’re building hardware to last five to 10 years, not three to five years. We take a different angle on customer service and support and we have some things we live by. We assume the problem is ours until it’s not and the other guy assumes the problem is yours until it’s not. All of our support here is insourced, it’s not outsourced. Our guys are highly tenured and understand the market, understand the competition, and we’re there to help.
If you put all those pieces together, the cost of the box, the lifetime of that box, the manageability, the less burdened overhead and the serviceability, it’s going to be a better experience for you.
How would you say the buyer’s mindset has changed toward the big players? Is there an opening against Cisco that there hasn’t been in the past?
It depends. There is an opening, but Cisco is obviously closing a lot of business that none of us see. There’s still the Cisco mindshare. I do my own calling campaigns to try to open doors and there’s this mindset: “We’re Cisco. We’re not changing. We’re not looking at anybody else. It’s just Cisco.” That’s where Cisco is earning most of its money today. But for those that are willing to look at other opportunities I think the mindset is that it could be anybody. It’s not just, “OK, we’re going to look at HP.” It could be anybody. I think HP is getting more shots than the rest of us right now but all of us are in a position where we can be competitive against Cisco.
So how would you characterise the change of mindset among the network buyers? What are they looking for today and what are the big hot-button items for them?
Data centre is a big build-out opportunity. storage is going through the roof, as well as the advancement of the data centre with green initiatives and virtualisation and lower costs. Those are all big buying decisions. We’re focusing the messaging around the data centre because people are building out from the data centre. It has become the centre point for all things that are evolving: virtualisation, cloud computing. People are looking for that as an enabler in most of the commercial enterprise. In higher education, in K through 12, they’re doing things to enable the mobile user — the mobile user being the student, the teacher. Healthcare is much the same. The data centre is important but mobility is becoming more of the buying decision than the data centre.
Let’s talk about your Isaac technology, which is pretty cool stuff. Explain the evolution of Isaac and then talk about what early customers are experiencing with it.
With Isaac there are a lot of different things coming together. You have the next generation of users, consumers of IT. We talk about the consumerisation of IT. The next generation is used to a different interface that’s more and more about social media, whether it be Facebook or Twitter or whatever. These tools make it so easy to reach so many different people at so many different times. [We’re in the midst] of an evolution of machine-to-machine and machine-to-human communication. Putting all those ideas together our engineers asked: Why can’t we talk to our machines? There’s no reason why we can’t talk to our machines. We do it through traps and alerts already, but why can’t we do it in a proactive way and use social media interfaces which people are already accustomed to using to bring that ease of deployment, ease of implementation, to the next generation of IT users? That’s really how it came about.
Is Isaac still in a trial phase?
It’s still on trial. We offered anybody who was willing to take it on trial up to the end of this year, the calendar year — you could have it for free and then after that we’ll look at monetising it. But the idea here is really the simplification of IT and that’s what Isaac represents to us. Isaac is just the first part in a move to bring social media to the forefront of administering, controlling, using.
