hand in hand

‘We want people who will not just listen to what the customer is saying, but ask themselves why they're saying it.’
— Jeff Kiel

That seems to be Kiel's view. A veteran of Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies) and Cascade Communications (long since consumed by Ascend, which was consumed in its turn by Lucent), Kiel has worked in large and small companies. He says his product marketing people get along with the engineers because, for the most part, they are engineers. He recruits product marketing managers who are engineers, but who have somehow managed to acquire “market savvy.”

“We want people who will not just listen to what the customer is saying, but ask themselves why they're saying it,” he says.

Sycamore executives say their entire company is open to communications with customers. An engineer in a customer company who has a question about a Sycamore product can call his engineering colleague in Chelmsford without the marketing manager pitching a hissy fit. Bureaucracy is death, they say, and without mentioning any names, they look meaningfully in the direction of their larger competitors.

At least one customer confirms this. Justin Frame, lead Sonet test and certification engineer at Williams Communications, deals with Sycamore and other vendors just about every day. The wholesale long-distance carrier has just finished building out a 33,000 route-mile fiber optic network serving 125 markets in North America. Frame says he can call colleagues in Chelmsford at any time but rarely does.

“Normally, I talk straight to their systems engineer, and they also have a sales manager on site [at Williams headquarters in Tulsa, Okla.],” Frame says.

Sycamore really is that open, Nicoll says, but he also suggests that there is nothing sinister or militantly incompetent in using a specialist to manage communications between customers and engineers — so long as that person isn't a control freak. On the whole, however, a little filtering in a large company is not a bad thing, Nicoll says.

“You certainly don't want your engineering staff getting off track in talking to customers, and talking about areas which will take [the engineers] off the development plan or distract them from doing their work,” Nicoll says. “These guys are developing next generation products, so the more time they spend in meetings, the less time they spend doing their core work.”

Sycamore, he says, has managed to keep its engineers on task while allowing its customers access to the engineers. Larger companies such as Lucent or Cisco may have people who are not quite so steeped in technology and whose entire function is to make sure their customers talk to the right people among their technical colleagues. That way, he says, engineers who don't need to be taken offline to talk to customers don't have to be.

At Williams, Frame says most of the smaller vendors he deals with operate as Sycamore does. Larger ones, however, usually expect customers with questions to talk to their local representative, whatever his or her title may be. “But they get you in touch with the right person right away,” Frame says.

Sycamore also works with the concept of the right person. Kiel's product marketing people are part of business units, each of which corresponds to a product line — core switching, core networking, optical edge, transport and central engineering. In each business unit, Kiel says, product marketing people sit next to the engineers as products are being developed. Each product marketer is responsible for a release from concept to shipment.

“Development cycles are nine to 12 months from concept to shipping,” he says. “So when you kick off a project you've got to know, ‘I'm going to build this, I'm not going to build that, and here's exactly why.’”

This refrain — that there is less and less time to do whatever you're going to do, and tremendous pressure to be right — is common in the sector, according to Nicoll.

Denny Bilter, senior director of marketing at Ciena, Sycamore's direct competitor, sings it, too. “It's important to get it right,” Bilter says. “Things change so quickly that, if you make the wrong decision, you may miss out on that entire generation of product.”

With so much pressure to be right, the more brains on the task, the better, and if they're customer brains, so much the better still. Sycamore, Ciena and all their competitors claim to be about customers and their needs, not about technology.

“When the company was founded, the idea was to solve big problems for service provider customers,” says Anita Brearton, vice president of corporate marketing for Sycamore. “It was not founded on the notion of developing way-cool technology for technology's sake.”

As a case in point, Brearton points to Sycamore's relationship with Williams. Williams offers wavelength services and is one of the first wholesale carriers to do so. Brearton says her marketing people worked with Sycamore and Williams engineers to develop that service.

For Ciena, Sprint is the original carrier customer. Bilter says that when Ciena was developing the MultiWave 1600 (the first 16-channel DWDM device) in 1994 and 1995, its engineers met each week either in person or on the phone. This gave Sprint — and, by extension, similar carriers — profound influence over the development process for that product.

Ciena forms engineers and marketers into teams devoted to particular customers, Bilter says. Those teams are often in the same cities and sometimes in the same buildings as their customers, and customers have open access to Ciena's people. But Ciena does do some filtering — perhaps because its target market is more weighted toward large carriers than Sycamore's is.

Not every carrier gets the kind of influence over a product that Sprint had in the mid-1990s. “Typically, you want to pick one or two large accounts where you feel they'd really have a lot of impact [on development] and work with them,” Bilter says.

At Sycamore, there are external marketers, which are marketing professionals who work with their counterparts in customer companies to develop new markets for new services built on Sycamore's products. They talk to analysts, to end users and to customers. But their conversations are more varied than those product marketing people may have with their customers.

Corporate marketing people “meet with service providers, but they have to meet with more than one group in each service provider,” Brearton says. “Somebody who runs the network has different pain points than somebody who's trying to create new services. The worst thing [marketers] can do is ask what technology [customers] want, because chances are they know what the problem is, but they don't know what technology will solve it.”

Sycamore's external marketers charge real money for helping their customers market their services. But with money tight, especially for the small competitive carriers that make up an increasing proportion of Sycamore's customer base, do any customers tell Sycamore to leave the optical switch space and keep its marketing expertise to itself?

“No, amazingly, they don't,” Brearton says. “I don't think we anticipated at all how powerful it would be to help customers position themselves.”

Sycamore, Ciena, their competitors and customers are making up the optical networking industry as they go along, and some of their marketers help to shape it.

Last year, for example, Sycamore, its competitors and customers all realized that there was no real definition for “optical dial-tone” — that is, where a router dials into an optical network to demand bandwidth.

Scott Larson, senior director of marketing for strategic programs at Sycamore, worked with his own company's engineers and those of his customers and competitors to help devise a standard. That proposed standard, optical domain service interconnect (ODSI) is threading its way through the various standards bodies now.

“Clearly, this was very technical,” Larson says. “The idea was to accelerate definition, to test it, and then to take it to the standards groups. This year is the initial field trial for some functionality, and in 2002 we'll start to see it in the networks. ODSI effort was launched Jan. 8, 2000, got proposal done in a year, which we did.”

Larson himself, though he hobnobs with lots of techies, is trained as a Japanese language specialist, so technology is not his bag. But marketing strategy is, and Sycamore's marketing strategy would be much more chancy without this standards effort.

Nicoll says that dynamic tension between marketers and engineers is part of business life, and probably always will be. But Sycamore executives say their engineers all understand what their company is about.

“This is not an engineering company,” Kiel says. “It's a sales- and marketing-driven company. Every now and then, you have an engineer who comes from a different kind of environment. They may have some learning to do about how decisions are made.”

Headquarters: Chelmsford, Mass.
Top officers: Desh Deshpande, founder and chairman; Daniel Smith, president and CEO; Frances Jewels, chief financial officer; Richard Barry, founder and chief technology officer
Number of employees: 1000
Date founded: February 1998
Focus: Intelligent optical networking
Stock high/low: $199.5 in March 2000; $21.5 in February 2001
Date of IPO: October 1999
Annual revenues: $198.1 million for FY2000, up from $11.3 million for FY1999