Brockmann and Company | Customer Insights

Sunil Cherian, the VP of Product Marketing at Array Networks and I had a great meeting at the end of a long day at Interop. The SSL VPN challenger has introduced a green product line. 

 Array's new AppVelocity (APV) appliance utilizes a low power 1U server. It uses 60% less power than other appliances, and the performance features assure that network bandwidth is 30% lower. In addition to these benefits, the process of off-loading caching, connections, and SSL processing, APV significantly reduces server overhead by 40% or more.

In addition to the APV, Sunil also provided his perspectives on two other new products:

Robert Durand, the PR Director at LifeSize , myself and Thomas Fenady, the Director of IT for Activision participated in a panel discussion around the adoption and use of HD video conferencing equipment and services to improve business.

Robert introduced us, and I presented these charts describing the business benefits and attributes of the new video conferencing experience. Interestingly, virtually all participants in the presentation (about 60 people) admitted having participated in classic ISDN-based video conference within the past five years. 

Thomas' presentation was terrific. He told the story of Activision's experience with HD video conferencing from LifeSize. The business is facing enormous pressures to accelerate franchise game cycles from once every two years to every year. He described a number of applications within their co-development, executive review and software QA cycles that showed how HD video conferencing changed the business process and contributed significantly to the accelerated development cycle.

Nortel pushed hard on 'green ethernet switching' against the market leader in enterprise switching. They had ads in the show guide claiming up to 50% lower energy consumption over the equivalent Cisco switching product.

The badge insert invited conference attendees to calculate their Cisco Energy Tax. Even NetworkWorld picked up a story that a school district stopped processing a $2 million order because of the claim.

Begin green pays. [See The Power of Green report.] Proving green pays too. 

And in the booth they had signage and a booth pod with an XL spreadsheet to compare box to box and typical power consumption to bring it all back to cost of ownership.

I've always been a big fan of using changing market dynamics (people really care about climate change and about the high cost of energy) to change the industry priorities and redefine the performance features for a product category - especially when the market place is so big and so dominated by one player (Cisco).

The Energy Tax Calculator tells a clear story validated by third party testing by the folks at Tolly Group. I would expect Nortel will push this point as far and as hard as they can. Sort of like the Pepsi Taste Challenge in the mid-1980s. 

Cisco may choose to ignore it. Respond in kind (a la Coke Classic) or figure out how to improve it. Nevertheless, it will take time for Cisco to respond which should give Nortel plenty of time to pick up market share, customers and much needed revenues. To become the equivalent of the Pepsi Taste Challenge, Nortel needs to tell this story as often as possible. It's not about spending millions on TV ads, but about making the testing pervasive. Like poking your opponent with a stick in the eye, this kind of campaign can go a long ways.

Sadly, I was not able to see their campaign on the Nortel website and hope that it will get there soon.  

In a poll conducted in February and March 2008, visitors to Brockmann.com showed that most managers are in the same office as the employee. 16% were CEOs, and only 25% had managers in a different location.

Many times I've heard the mantra that most employees do not work in the head office, which given the shape of US business I would definitely agree. However, most employees also have their boss nearby. 

REPORT. An account is required to download this report. Learn the process here.

This report reviews the fundamentals of encouraging a change in business user behavior. 

Basic observations from the Energy Camp at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas showed that companies exhibit many attributes that suggest that:

• Companies do not measure travel or carbon dioxide production
• There is no accountability for business travel
• Few organizations train employees how to solve problems in groups

Five best practices are reviewed and recommended to amend employee behavior in large and mid-sized enterprises.

Other reports related to this topic include Executives Guide and Critical Success Factors.