Growth and speed - And conflict
If you are looking for trends from Spring 2007 VON that you’ll likely see carried over at SuperComm 3.0, er, NxtComm, I’d have to say they are growth and speed.
To illustrate growth, one rough benchmark I have is the number of unique press releases we’ve posted in the FOCUS electronic newsletter. For the month of March 2006, we had 376 releases. March 2007 delivered nearly 550 releases, so my rusty math says that’s a 46 percent increase over last year. Some of the increase can be attributed to our continuing popularity in the IP communications industry, but a qualitative look at the news is equally instructive.
Companies are moving beyond their core products and into new lines of business. Aculab rolled out its ApplianX line of 1U plug-and-play appliances in response to a “customer pull” for a product that could be easily configured for voice applications. ApplianX incorporates Aculab’s Prosody technology into a ready-to-go package, saving developers and VARs the hassle and time of integrating boards and boxes. Just add software, and ship. You’ll see everything from an SS7 signaling node to a 3G video gateway. Aculab grows its business, and customers get the benefit of speed.
Sylantro also is following the twin themes of growth and speed. The company announced the Synapps Server, a Web services API platform to go on top of the Synergy platform. Synapps enables carriers and developers to drop development time down to weeks rather than months and enables them to scoot into a number of different applications ranging from on-demand CRM integrations to some FMC capabilities when combined with FirstHand Technologies (www. firsthandtech.com). Carriers want to introduce anywhere from one new service per quarter to one new service per month–racing along, considering they were working at a pace of new service introduction every 18 to 24 months.
Regardless of the sector–hardware, software, or services–everyone is bent upon expanding their product offerings and doing so because of the perceived need for speed to get new offerings into the market.
At the same time, all of these new products are going to have to establish themselves with buyers. In successful cases, they are going to end up displacing existing solutions and causing woe to established vendors. If they aren’t successful, then they’ve spent a lot of money introducing a product that hasn’t gone anywhere.
It’s no coincidence companies are starting to shake up their marketing approaches, bringing in fresh faces, honing their messages, and gearing up to do a lot more to both secure and expand their customer base. They realize they need to get new customers at the same time others are going to aggressively start gunning for their existing customer base.
If you aren’t already gearing up for battle within the next twelve months, consider this your wakeup call.
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