Thursday, December 09, 2010
It’s the Data that Matters the Most
On Tuesday, we hosted Debbie Kish, a member of Gartner’s carrier network infrastructure research team for a strategy session, which included a tour of our warehouse here in Portsmouth. We added warehousing capabilities as a value-added service a number of years ago in response to clients seeking assistance with managing vast amounts of excess material. Walking between the floor-to-ceiling racks of equipment originating from so many different vendors and geographies, it was easy to demonstrate why asset intelligence has become so valuable. Our warehouse is pretty big – covering about 2 acres – but it’s dwarfed in comparison to those maintained by large regional and global telecom companies. In a managed services scenario, the responsibility for knowing where assets are located and their condition, for example, or critical attributes like part compatibility and aliases rests squarely on the shoulders of the OEM. As part of our discussion, we demo’d Re:source Lifecycle Management and talked at length about how asset intelligence can be used as a competitive differentiator in hotly-contested multi-vendor services deals. With price quickly becoming a commodity in these deals, separating the winners from the losers is boiling down to who can generate the most value for the client. Demonstrating that you possess the ability to maximize the revenue potential of multi-vendor material can put you one step ahead of the competition.
