Following up on remarks made at a media and analyst event in early November, IP infrastructure and applications solutions providerGENBAND formally launched the GENVelocity™ Marketing Assistance Program. The program is designed to enable a broad spectrum of GENBAND (News - Alert) ecosystem participants — resellers, partners and large enterprise customers — to leverage GENBAND’s expertise in planning, marketing, training and deploying products across differentiated service offerings.

It is worth repeating here what GENBAND CEO Charlie Vogt (News - Alert) said at the event: “Ultimately success is going to be on owning the customer.” However, owning the customer in a world that has undergone a value inversion — the value of a physical attachment to a network has decreased as fast or faster than the value of the applications and services that run over it — is a challenge of almost Herculean proportions not just for service providers but for every part of the value chain.

Enter GENVelocity

According to the company, GENVelocity is designed to:

• Decrease time-to-market for revenue-generating GENBAND-based solutions
• Llower resource costs by providing consulting services and self-service marketing tools that span the GENGBAND’s A2™ Communications Application Server, S3™ Session Border Controller and the C15™ Compact Softswitch products portfolio.

In the press release that introduced the new marketing program Mehmet Balos (News - Alert), Chief Marketing Officer at GENBAND states that:

“As we usher in a host of new revenue generating features and benefits through IP transformation, it is essential to simultaneously arm our customers with the tools required for the rapid adoption and use of these groundbreaking new capabilities… The GENVelocity Marketing Assistance program reduces introduction costs by leveraging collateral, sales aids, toolkits and marketing materials while speeding time to revenue through lead generation, joint selling and segmentation.” 

Back in the 1980’s Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) had a famous (some would say infamous, given how competitors used it to turn the tables on them) slogan, “We Do Chicken Right.”  The point was a not so subtle message that if you want a compelling chicken eating experience why not go to a place that specializes in preparing chicken dishes. The same can be said in virtually any market, i.e., with so much choice, why not go with those who can be trusted to consistently produce great results.  

The GENVelocity progam — enabling GENBAND customers to mitigate the costs and work cycles of valuable resources spent on a host of marketing materials (collateral, videos, business cases, training, etc.) — is a way to let GENBAND customers do chicken right. Making it easy is a prime objective. As the announcement says about GENVelocity, “It offers non-chargeable, self-service items that customers can easily download and rebrand using common desktop applications and also provides fee-based services for sales training, sales engineering training, consulting and professional services.”

At the end of the day, it all ultimately does come back to the need to own the customer.  Focusing the best resources possible on their areas of expertise for each of the moving parts in an ecosystem clearly seems to be the prudent path to ensure not just quality customer experiences but ones that create differentiated and sustainable value.

Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel, France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.