Last Thursday, I was delighted to find myself at Visi‘s Vision 2008 conference. Billed as, “The conference will provide IT managers and business executives the opportunity to hear from technology leaders on the topic of “Technology Innovations That Drive Business”,” it met those objectives and more.
No question it’s always an imperative for leaders to connect up at a venue that’s all about ideas, new ways of thinking about the I.T. status quo, and to consider ways to shift and accelerate those areas where I.T. provides increasingly mission-critical value to the business.
The conference started off with a keynote by Geek Squad founder (and and guy who seems like someone highly reluctant to fit into a corporate suit) Robert Stephens. Without a wireless connection available (either Wifi or 3G), I put my laptop back in my bag and just listened to him. Fortunately, a more highly disciplined journalist was in front of me, Graeme Thickins, and I saw him with (gasp!) a pen and paper feverishly taking notes so I’ll refer you over to Graeme’s post. He really captured the essence of Robert’s talk and it’s worth a read. Suffice to say, Stephens had many great insights for any startup, entrepreneur, or corporate leader…especially in this time of trouble where cutting-to-the-chase and offering up pure and true value and doing so in an attractive and fun way is more important than ever before.
(UPDATE 11/17/08: Visi’s Gary Elfert has posted Robert’s keynote in six parts (due to YouTube size limitations, I presume. You’ll enjoy it).
Attending several of the sessions (e.g., Closed Loop CRM; Innovative and Proven Online Tools to Drive New Business) while also visiting all of the booths and taking a tour of the data center upstairs, the value I received far outweighed any costs in fees, parking and time investment. Like always, it was the people I interacted with that made it such a strong and worthwhile event and I met nearly a dozen people with whom I’ll connect with in the future.
Since I first visited with Visi’s CTO, Jason Baker, back in September and wrote this post, I’ve periodically thought about the company and the people, the challenges they face in a time where computing is increasingly shifting to the cloud and competition is accelerating (especially with unlikely entrants like Amazon Web Services), and I learned something at this event that I wasn’t expecting.
Visi is like Wells Fargo (bear with me on this analogy for a second). As other banks dabbled in areas of finance and subprime loans that got them into huge trouble and drove us to a global economy now in peril, Wells Fargo trod lightly in areas like this that presented too much risk…and are stronger now as a result. They also have continued to bring forth online and other services that more of us want and use (IMHO, their bill pay and other online services are second-to-none…and I’ve used three of their competitors over the last 10 years). As a result, Wells Fargo is viewed by many as a bedrock bank that’ll be one which can be relied upon in risky times.
Same thing with Visi. They’ve stayed out of areas which have become increasingly commoditized (e.g., low end web hosting) or chasing new, but low margin, connectivity business (Visi still acts as a DSL-centric ISP for thousands of customers from years ago) all of which would’ve possibly got them into big trouble. Instead, they’ve stayed focused on those areas where stability, connectivity and performance is critical, all while offering management applications and other services that continue to add value to their customers.
Here’s an example: when we took the data center tour, I asked about the screens visible in their Network Operations Center (NOC). One of them displayed a trendline graph of the bandwidth and latency performance with the four providers they use. I asked a bunch of questions, one of which had to do with how they switch over to a different provider based on costs (many hosting/ISP’s dynamically switch to the lowest cost provider at any given point in time…regardless of the latency any given provider might be experiencing at that time).
Baker made it crystal clear that they always default to the highest performance provider. That sank in for a minute (mainly since he just said it and moved on as if it didn’t mean much), but I realized then that all the things I’d been sensing about the Visi leadership and their people came down to one thing: a drive toward maximizing and optimizing service to the customer and their needs.
Visi could easily flip that around and always choose the lowest cost provider and gain more gross margin, but customer performance and satisfaction would suffer and they ‘get’ it would eventually kill their business and is just the wrong thing to do anyway.
It’s all of those choices that make them like a Wells Fargo, a bank we can depend on in this difficult economic time: which businesses to be in; how to perform for customers; how to do so profitably; and how to bring value (e.g., the Vision 2008 conference) to their customers that goes a step beyond.