Get Ready for the New Millennium: Five Ways to Start

The Internet Revolution has been compared to the Industrial Revolution, spurring sweeping social and economic change. But while the Industrial Revolution took place over the course of several decades, it has taken the Internet only a few short years to spawn fundamental changes in the ways we work, learn, live and play.

According to information from IDC, it took 43 years for radios to gain their first 100 million users, and it took 16 years for personal computers to have 100-million users. The worldwide Web reached 100 million users in just five years, and that number is expected to surpass the half-billion mark by 2003.

It means that both you and your customers are faced with the challenge of how to keep up with a technology and business landscape that is changing at light speed. Customers will need to drastically change their business practices to stay competitive. Companies that don't move quickly to harness the power of the Internet will be overtaken by competitors who leap ahead with e-commerce, e-support and e-learning solutions. The Internet Economy will not allow for the slow and orderly migration of business processes that occurred in previous technology "revolutions." Today, if a business takes three-to-five years to become Internet-ready, its systems will be obsolete by the time they are implemented.

It follows that customers will depend more heavily on their network providers to guide them through the maze of increasingly complex options available to them. This creates vast opportunities for resellers, integrators and consultants who understand their customers' business issues and can move fast enough to deploy appropriate technology solutions.

However, the tsunami of the Internet creates challenge as well as opportunity. Those who can't ride it could well be swept away by it. Many a business will crash to the rocks because it can't navigate the complexities of today's technology and anticipate what these changes might mean for tomorrow. Many a reseller organization will be left behind because it wasn't able to deliver the leading-edge services their customers need in this fast-changing environment.

In the face of these challenges, I'd like to suggest five things you can do as a high-tech channel executive to maximize your organization's chances for success in the new century:
1. Identify and focus on your unique strength to deliver real value to your customers.
2. Specialize in areas where there is a strong and growing customer need.
3. Collaborate with others to deliver complete business solutions to your customers.
4. Invest time and money to ensure your staff is technically excellent.
5. Get ready for New World opportunities.

1. Deliver value by matching your strengths to customers' need
What will customers expect from their network providers in the year 2000 and beyond? They'll want more than someone to sell them network equipment - they'll look for a strategic partner who can deliver a unique value to them and their business.

The first step in delivering value to your customers is to understand their needs, and how they fit in the technology life cycle. Are they early adopters who want to push the limits of "bleeding-edge" technology? Or do they have more mainstream requirements, such as network management, security, or SNA-to-IP migration? Or perhaps they have a mature network infrastructure and are simply looking for low-cost delivery and solid support offerings.

Understand your customers' business problems. It may be that outdated business practices are cutting into their profits. Inefficiencies in their customer-service operation could be harming customer relationships. Or they may be threatened by competitors who have surpassed them in e-commerce.

Next, take the time to identify your organization's unique strengths and weaknesses. Self-examination can be a difficult process, but well worth the effort as you pinpoint strengths you can leverage and gaps that need to be filled.

Finally, map your strengths to your customers' needs. Deploy services that can improve your margin and profitability, while building sustaining customer relationships. If you focus on new technology such as data, voice and video integration, you can shine with customers who are early adopters. Mainstream customers will value your expertise in network planning and design, vertical applications, or in such areas as security or network management. If implementation and support are your strong points, seek out customers with mature networks who will value your operational excellence.

Even if your organization is not on the leading edge of technology, you can ride the Internet wave by finding a niche where you can deliver a unique value to your customers.

2. Focus on an area of specialization

It's becoming harder to be effective as a generalist in the networking channel. Customers have special needs that demand special expertise, and many VARs, integrators and consultants are gaining a competitive edge by focusing their resources on a specific vertical or technology market segment, rather than trying to be "all things to all people."

At Cisco, we've developed a growing list of key technology areas where demand is high and channel partners can differentiate themselves as specialists:

Network management: The same driving forces that make networks so useful for business are the Internet, e-commerce applications, and the convergence of data, voice, and video %E6 are also driving network complexity. Customers need help in managing their increasingly complex and critical network systems, creating a great opportunity for channel partners who can provide it.

Security: As valuable company information and business processes go online, customers need to ensure that their networks are safe from unauthorized access, whether from inside or outside the company. They need the help of a networking partner with specific expertise in designing, selling, installing and supporting solutions to meet their increasingly complex security issues.

SNA/IP integration: More than 70 percent of the world's business information still resides on mainframe computers. Customers need ways to bring this information into their IP networks, integrating their legacy systems with their new Internet business solutions. It's a great opportunity for channel organizations with expertise in both SNA and IP.

WAN: With global internetworking on the increase, a growing number of businesses want to deliver many types of traffic across wide areas over their backbone networks. Network providers who specialize in WAN technology are well positioned to meet the growing demand for complex ATM and Frame Relay WAN switching and data-voice integration solutions.

Voice: The convergence of data and voice networks offers one of the greatest opportunities available to network suppliers in the coming century-an opportunity that will grow from $65 billion today to more than $1.3 trillion in 2003, according to Forrester Research. As described later in this article, specializing in such areas as voice access, voice applications and IP telephony can put you on the crest of this wave.

Of course, there are many other areas of potential specialization. You may choose to focus on a growing vertical market, or a specific niche within a technology area. The important thing is to choose an area that is emergent or growing, where you already have some expertise. Then develop and focus your expertise to truly differentiate your business.

3. Partner with others

Having a specific market or technology focus is a great way to differentiate yourself, but you may be concerned that you'll miss out on opportunities that fall outside of your core competency. In the new century, complexity will drive you to focus, but customers will drive you to provide complete solutions. Collaborating with other companies can bring you the best of both worlds. You get to shine in the area of your strength, while participating in broader markets than you would be able to serve on your own.

For example, as companies bring more of their operations online, they will typically look to channel partners who focus on large-scale business applications and e-commerce solutions, rather than networking hardware. However, they may find that once they implement these solutions, their networks stumble under the additional load. This is a perfect scenario for collaboration. It presents a tremendous opportunity for resellers and integrators who focus on business applications to partner with those in the networking channel who understand the requirements of these large-scale network applications.

By joining together early in the sale and deployment cycle, you can jointly recommend a network architecture that will maximize the application's performance. Leveraging one another's strengths in this way will result in a superior network application solution, a satisfied customer, and possible repeat business for both partners.

4. Invest in technical readiness

As you focus on an area of specialization, part of the process will be to develop your staff's technical expertise in that area. In the new century, people with technical excellence will perhaps be the most scarce of all high-tech resources.

Your business can rise or fall on the expertise of your technical and sales staff. Up until recently, perhaps it's been enough for a sales person to recommend the right switch or router to carry the customer's projected volume of network traffic. And perhaps customers have only expected your technical support staff to quickly troubleshoot the network when it goes down. But in light of the growing complexity of the Internet Economy, customers will increasingly look to your staff to help them anticipate and solve their business problems by designing and deploying networks that meet both their present and future needs. They will need experts in specific areas of technology to guide them to the solutions that make sense for their businesses. And if your staff can't provide the consultative approach they need, they'll look for someone who can.

Prepare for tomorrow by investing today in technical excellence. With more than 80 percent of Internet traffic flowing over Cisco equipment, a great place to start is by hiring or developing a staff of Cisco-certified sales and technical professionals, including Cisco Certified Internetworking Experts (CCIEs) and a variety of other network design and support certification levels. A CCIE has achieved the most highly respected technical career certification in the industry, and is well prepared to meet current networking requirements as well as staying on top of new technology through regular technical updates from Cisco. Cisco also offers career specializations to help develop your staff's expertise in specific technologies. All of these certifications and specializataions can tangibly add to the value your organization delivers to your customers.

5. Get ready for the New World

Finally, and perhaps most important, get ready for the opportunities that will explode when today's voice networks are overtaken by an IP data network infrastructure.

At Cisco, we believe that the switched circuit technology that carries most voice traffic today is obsolete. The "New World" of data and voice communications will seamlessly integrate Internet technology with high-speed optical fibers, cable, and wireless systems to carry voice and data everywhere. Massive amounts of data will move through this new pipeline, as people routinely send and receive video e-mails, view movies on demand, and teleconference with colleagues, friends and relatives around the world. Voice calls will ride free on top of this enormous data highway, and our grandchildren will wonder why we ever paid extra for "long distance."

You can get ready to profit from these vast New World opportunities by investing time and resources now to get up to speed in the segment of your choice in this trillion-dollar-plus market. A good strategy is to align yourself with a vendor such as Cisco, that demonstrates a clear strategy for helping to create this New World, and with practical training programs to help you get ready. Specialize in voice access, or IP/telephony, or focus on developing the voice applications that will ignite demand for this New World technology. By anticipating the future, you can profit from it.

Face the future with confidence

The changes of next century promise unimagined opportunity and inestimable risk. But nothing magic happened at midnight on December 31, 1999 to spur the unfolding of these changes. The process has already begun, and it's likely that you've already taken many of the steps suggested above to prepare for it.

There's no new wisdom for the new millennium. The keys to success in the future are based on many of the time-tested principles that have worked in the past: Understand your customer's needs, and either develop your strengths or partner with others to meet those needs. Invest in your people. Anticipate the next wave of technology and carve out the niche where you can excel and profit.

And finally, face the future with confidence and a sense of humor. We don't know what's coming, but we know it will be fun!

This article first appeared in CompTIA Computing Channels, winter, 1999