A Study about Brocade
Business Trigger: New Business Model Brocade started out in the networking industry leveraging their core expertise in storage and selling their products through OEMs. This meant that Brocade had a single, direct route for their sales, support, and marketing functions and an indirect go-to-market strategy that didn’t include much engagement with the customer marketplace. That changed when the company acquired a networking company called Foundry, which sold their products through a direct sales force. With this acquisition, Brocade went from being a provider of storage networking products to a provider of end-to-end networking solutions (Ethernet–IP–Storage) with multiple routes to market.
Solution Focus: Get Closer to the Customer Developing a direct sales force and becoming an end-to-end network provider was a huge transition for the company, one that required a significant transformation in their go-to-market strategy and internal business processes. The questions they asked themselves were, “How do we scale our sales, support, and marketing organizations? How do we do more with the same infrastructure while providing the excellent customer service direct sales requires?”Externally, the standard expectation was that a solutions provider would have an online social presence. Internally, an online customer community would have a number of benefits. It would give functional organizations a venue to market new products, facilitate self-support, and discuss certification processes. keep reading…
