A bright spot uncovered

In the current economy, many companies seem to be hunkering down. Not Adtran.

This week in Huntsville, Ala., the network and enterprise equipment vendor is hosting a group of journalists and analysts — and by hosting I mean paying all expenses — for the sole purpose of shining a bright light on its most recent activities.

There will be news coming out of this trip, but for now it’s embargoed, so I can’t share it. But what I can share this: There is little gloom and doom here in Huntsville. Instead, this engineering-driven company is actually doing some celebrating of sorts, touting its success both in its traditional carrier business lines and in its more recent focus on enterprise gear for small-and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which it distributes through network service providers and value-added resellers (VARs).

In greeting the group, Tom Stanton, CEO of Adtran, admitted his company has tended to keep quiet in the past.

“This is one of our first industry briefings, and because we don’t do things like this, some people think we are secretive,” Stanton said. “There are good and bad things to that kind of reputation. Some people see us as the Death Star of telecom. But we are not secretive. The reality is we are not boastful, and that can be misunderstood. In order to have the impact we’d like to have in some of these industries we are getting into, we need to reach out in a way we haven’t in the past.”

Specifically, Stanton said, Adtran wants more opportunities to tell its SMB story, where the company believes it can very effectively compete with the dominant router player, Cisco. And while many of those new sales will occur with VARs — and Adtran is pumping up its VAR partner list, focusing on IP-focused VARs — service providers also are key partners.

“Our products seem to resonate well with customers,” Stanton said. “If we are involved in the deal, our win rate is close to 70%. The problem is we believe we are involved in 10% of the deals. We have to focus on getting our name recognition out there and getting more actively involved and getting into more of the deals. We have started to push products through carriers to drive name recognition. We have seen phenomenal growth in carrier sales of internetworking products.”

Adtran’s primary advantages over Cisco include total cost of ownership and its quality of pre-sales and post-sales customer support, said Ted Cole, vice president of channel sales. Adtran is so convinced of its advantage that it has reworked its messaging and will be much more aggressive going forward, said Rick Schansman, senior vice president and general manager.

“We are a bunch of engineers, and we like to stand here with our box and talk about feeds and speeds, but it isn’t a very interesting story,” Schansman said. “We spent the last year working on transforming our messaging. Now it’s time to get that out to the customer base. We are getting into customers we couldn’t get into six months ago, and that’s something we want people to know.”