Longer Sales Cycles in WAN Optimization
I am going to do my best here to avoid casting too many stones, but this just amuses me. Six quarters ago I started in this role. A new director on my team was leading a product launch for a technology we call Wide-Area Acceleration Services, or WAAS for short. It was a promising technology but I was a bit circumspect for a variety of reasons- sales channel, who do we sell it to, how do I get our own sales force excited about it, and one very strong competitor in Riverbed.
Mark, and the General Manager for this product, George Kurian, turned me around over the course of the next four quarters by working to with the support of over 1000 customers for WAAS, integrating it into our branch office routers, and showing an aggressive roadmap that has been consistently delivered to.
Two quarters into my ‘WAAS-experience’ Riverbed decided to mention that they are winning 98 out of 105 deals, and touting that there would be two memorable IPOs in the past decade, Riverbed and Google. Ya gotta love the hype factor here, but there is nothing that infuriates a sales organization and catalyzes them like tactless rhetoric with poorly substantiated claims.
So yesterday I got twp pieces of almost simultaneous enlightening news. Not only is the company I once viewed as a competitor about equal with us in market share (20.2% for them, 20.0% for us according to a leading analyst firm), they also had to pre-announce their miss on their earnings for this quarter. That’s really gotta hurt.
The best part for me, almost the ‘sport’ in the entire thing, is that January was challenging month in the market, the roughest we’ve seen in a while. When we reported our earnings for our Q2, ending at the end of January it included this rough month. Many point-product vendors though have a January to March quarter though and are just now reporting on what we talked about a couple of months ago. Maybe our ‘weird’ fiscal quarters do have a benefit after all!
So while our competitions bemoans, lengthening sales cycles, enterprise softness, etc I have to raise the question- “While you used to claim 98% win rate and no competition, could the equality in market share really be more an indication that you are simply not seeing all the opportunity and be a sales coverage issue, or simply that there is now a more superior product and solution in the market? Or was the 98% just bluster and hype designed to ‘pump up the volume’ so to speak?”
While I guess I grew into this market initially trying to figure out how to outflank a competitor, as we gained momentum, crossed significant product milestones, and have moved more and more to an integrated solution I guess I don’t see Riverbed as a competitor now but more as a niche player that will always help keep us on our toes but no real threat.
Next week, we’ll talk about how to take on and out another has-been….
dg
Posted by Douglas Gourlay at 08:19AM PST
Shawn V. Apr 8, 2008
Who’s the other “has-been”? Packeteer? I am personally lost in the WAAS solution because of the lack of product documentation: Cisco sales knows nothing about it when I call, links on the WAAS site fail, and there is a total lack of deployment guides on the Cisco site. Compare this to Packeteer, and indeed Riverbed (to a less extent), and WAAS is a non-starter to anybody without a trained Cisco rep willing & able (i.e. paid on your contract team) to help integrate the solution. Therefore, unless you can prove otherwise, we’re going to go with Packeteer for our WAN Optimization needs