Date: November 20, 2003

I have many ideas flashing in my mind from time to time, whether in the office or at home. Those ideas, which however is difficult to talk to other people, may sound humble or great; but they are different views or perspectives from my respected sales representative (John Wellwood) with whom I work as a team to expand Sun's business among various customers; anyhow I should write them down for my future reference. Let me start this initiative with the topic on Sun Services.

I discussed with John about the issue of the recent Sun Services support contract with Allstream. It is a struggling process because we have been taking whatsoever long time to put the Sun servers and storage arrays under appropriate support contract. John thought that it was not just right business practice of Allstream, which I don't absolutely agree. I think we would also bear certain responsibility as well. John could not draw a conclusion based on one conversation with the customer or perception from his talk with Sun internal people.

Ask yourself how often you see or talk to the customer. I believe that each member of sales team should have regular communication with our fellow customers. We'd rather understand the pain of the customers. Being sympathetic, we should be part of the customer solution instead of blaming the customer.

A few months ago, a division of Allstream started using Sun Services directly, while the others still consider having spare parts as the break-and-fix strategy. No one doubts that service is the critical. It makes business sense to the customer, since they can receive the world class support in a timely manner; it does good to our sales team as well, because the happy customer can bring business for us.

Here I am talking about a particular division of Allstream, Advanced Enterprise Solutions (AES), which provides hosting services to their customers. I started engaging this division via the Dexit project. Allstream has acquired a few Sun servers and storage arrays such as V480s, Sun Fire 280s, StorEdge 3310s , etc. to provide services to the end user Dexit, which in turn provides financial services to many other customers. As you can imagine, this is a missional critical environment and Services Level Agreement (SLA) has been enforced between Allstream and Dexit.

The AES division has the mindset of Personal Computer business model. This division does not rely on Sun Services, and many individuals believe that it would be logical to store spare parts on site. Unfortunately there was no support contract placed at the very beginning phase of the project, though I spoke aloud about the necessity of the support contract.

The project moved forward quickly, and problems started to come around. Disk failures came after the array battery problems. Each time when there was a problem, while insisting the importance of the support contract, I coordinated the Sun Services and got it fixed promptly. Consequently, AES also realized that it was a must to have Sun support contract. Thus I brokered up the communication between AES and our services representative.

Murphy's law exists everywhere. Not everyone of AES has the same wavelength to have Sun support contract. Furthermore, according to what I heard from Allstream, our Services representative did not have a clear communication with them about the context of the support contract such as the support terms and coverage, which also created certain delay to the customer. That's why I think Sun (as the overall entity) bears the responsibility as well. It creates the urgency to have close communication at all levels of Sun sales team.

There are certain areas that we could not control such as the internal politics of the customer; moreover, we could not dictate the business model of the customer. But I firmly believe that it is not necessary to complain about our customer's business practice, instead we can and we should do more from our side.

Obviously from the sales representative (aka. account manager) perspective, John doesn't necessarily have to address any specific services issue, but the account manager should bear the responsibility to have biweekly (or at least monthly) conversation with the key customer contacts about what's going on. In the past, whenever there was a crisis, we acted responsively and such that we have gained the trust from the customer. This is a great advantage for Sun. Again, if the account manager could not have regular communication with the customer, even I keep communication at the technical level, how can we capitalize our invesetments?

Through regular communication, the account manager would understand more about the customer's situation, then there would be no blame to the customer. Besides, the account engineer (myself) has been working from the technical side, then all parties can work together to create the kind of synergy of the intimate relationship with the customers. No doubt, we can do more businesses with the customers.

Honglin Su

2003-11-20T22:14:57