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The Best Enterprise WLAN Product is... |
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Monday, 01 October 2007 |
...not always the market winner. Just ask Apple about the 1980s and 1990s. Ask any startup IT company who built a superior product, but got beat in the market by the bigger, more established competition.
In the WLAN market, there are many players in the Small Office Home Office (SOHO), Small and Medium Business (SMB), and enterprise spaces. All of these players have legitimate products or they would not be able to survive very long, especially in the enterprise space. In the SOHO space, success is largely about buying shelf space so that your product is seen more often than your competitors' product in the BestBuy, OfficeDepot, and Amazon storefronts.
In the SMB and enterprise spaces, it's all about distribution. Not so much the logistics of physically getting your product from manufacturing to warehouse to distributor to reseller to customer as efficiently as possible, but more about the knowledge that your sales channel has about your own product. It's not enough that your SEs and VAR SEs "know wireless" or that they are general IP networking experts. It's not enough that your SEs and VAR SEs know how to install and use your WLAN product.
Your SEs and VAR SEs not only have to know your product inside and out, but they have to know why your product is better than each and every one of your competitors' products. No single provider's WLAN solution can solve every customer need, soyour SEs have to know all the technology behind all the products that are in their market space, so that they can understand where your product fits best, where it fits worst, and where it doesn't fit at all. These SEs have to understand why your product is better, not just the fact that your marketing team believes it's better, than the competition.
Your SEs and your VAR SEs must be the best trained in the industry, period. Microsoft and Cisco learned this lesson a long time ago. Microsoft removed Novell from the networking software market by training and certifying hundreds of thousands of MCSEs. What networking software does an MCSE recommend? Microsoft. Cisco took over the routing market, switching market, and by some accounts the security market through building (or buying) great products and by educating their technical sales channel.
The same paradigm exists today in the enterprise WLAN Market. The best products do not always win, and the most innovative approach does not always win. The winner is the player with the best technical sales channel. According to Dell'Oro Group, the top players in the Enterprise WLAN market are Cisco, Aruba, Motorola, and Meru. All have great enterprise WLAN controller products. But what happens when they meet head-to-head at a customer site, with the customer asking why they should implement one or the other or both?
The analogy that works in my simple brain is this: If you handed me the biggest, baddest, most feature and security rich router in the world, it would make a really nice doorstop. Why? Because I don't have the slightest idea how to use it. Today's high-end enterprise WLAN controllers can do some amazing things, but not without a properly trained administrator or engineer in the driver's seat. Your products' feature sets may impress potential customers, but equipment doesn't buy or sell equipment: people do. Customers build relationships with your account managers (AM) and sales engineers (SE), not with a WLAN controller. A highly skilled SE can take any good product and win a bake-off provided each product in the bakeoff fits the customer's needs.
The best product does not always win. The most thoroughly trained technical channel organization wins.
Dell'Oro Group also predicted that improved security, notebooks with built-in Wi-Fi radios, and the coming boom in mobile VOIP around the office will cause the enterprise wireless LAN market to more than double in revenue by 2009. That's just a year away. Want a piece of that $3.5 billion pie? Invest in your technical sales channel by getting them properly trained. Right now, the most significant and consistent gap we see is the one between each vendor's core design team and its field SEs. The answer is training. Invest in your employees, as well as your technology.
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