Over the last few weeks I have been traveling thought Australia and New Zealand visiting our customers, many of whom are in the Movie, Gaming and VFX business sectors. I’ll see some of them again next week in Las Vegas at the NAB show where we can catch up with many of our North American, European and Australasian customers in one place. For the last few years we have been having a dinner party at NAB so we can catch up with our customers and they can catch up with old friends while discussing common business and technology issues.
As we sit down to dinner there are always a few new folks
joining us, and we introduce them to everyone and tell them how we met and then
we start to see who knows who. Usually it turns out that it is a very small
world; even with people living and working on other continents they’ve often
heard of each other, met each other on various web sites or share common
friends.
As the appetizers are finished, drinks refreshed and dinner
served, our conversation is usually taken up by war stories of our customers
dealing with vendor issues and laughter about how things can go so bad, so
quickly, because of miscommunication of vendor support policies. It often seems that our competitors put
revenue before relationships and so they lose their customer’s trust. In the
storage business if you can’t trust your supplier in the short term are you
going to trust them with your archival storage for the long term? Our customers tell us that frankly they want
a long term storage partner that will work with them in their business cycle,
and not a storage and support vendor who is looking to increase revenue by artificially
shortening their equipment’s life cycle or ending software support.
As we finish our main course and review the dessert menu,
the conversation turns to plans for the rest of the year and interesting
projects and technologies that we have run into at the show. There are always a
couple of really cool new things that most of us will be drawn to, and as we
chat about how we can integrate them into our Network infrastructure we are
enjoying our dessert and the last of our drinks, before we say good night and promise
to catch up again next year.
We always have a great time, and really appreciate our
guests joining us at our dinner parties.
After more than 20 years in the ever changing world of high tech, we know
that long term, trusting business relationships are the most valuable assets of
our company. We’ll be hosting dinners like this at other trade shows this year
and we hope you will join us. If you want to join us at NAB just let us know so
we can add you to our reservation. We hope to see you there!
