Next Stop: The Land of Down Under

In one week, you can catch Finisar’s Simon Poole as a plenary speaker at the Australian Conference on Optical Fibre Technology (ACOFT) – set to occur November 30 – December 3 in Adelaide, South Australia. The session will take place at The University of Adelaide on Tuesday, December 1st at 9:35a.m. ACDT. Simon will share his thoughts on what the future holds for photonics-based technologies, the lessons to be learned from the technological and economic changes over the past couple of decades and engage in some crystal-ball gazing about what might happen over the next 10 years. Simon has been a regular presenter at conferences around the world over the past two decades and this presentation will be 22 years, almost to the day, since Simon’s first ACOFT paper when, as a newly-minted PhD, he gave an invited paper on Rare-earth doped fibres and EDFAs at ACOFT’87 in the wonderfully-named Surfers Paradise. Check back on “Out of His Depth” (coming soon) to hear more from Adelaide.

Finisar Welcomes You at SuperComputing 2009

Next week Finisar will eagerly join the SuperComputing 2009 coterie in beautiful Portland, Oregon. Now in its 22nd year, SC09 is the premier conference and exhibition on high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. With more than 11,000 expected attendees, it is an industry event not to be missed.

While there will be much to do at SC09, I whole heartedly invite you to join the Finisar Welcome Reception at our booth #1812 from 7-9pm on Monday, November 16th. There will be plenty of refreshments and great conversation to go around, not to mention a special drawing for an iPOD.

During the exhibition, we especially look forward to sharing with you the latest technology developments and booth demonstrations of our cable family including Laserwire® for 10GbE, Quadwire™ for 40GbE and InfiniBand QDR, and C.wire™ for 100GbE and InfiniBand QDR.

On Wednesday, November 18th, 5:30pm to 7:00pm, be sure to join me at the Birds-of-a-Feather Session on Solving Interconnect Bottle Necks with Optical Technologies. Hosted by Marek Tlalka of Luxtera, this exciting topic will discuss the demands for bandwidth intensive services and explore distinct approaches in solving this bottleneck problem.

On Thursday, November 19th at 1:30pm, be sure to stop by Mellanox booth #1301 for my presentation on the “Convergence of cabling options in InfiniBand and Ethernet environments”.

See you at the show!

Navigating Ravines: A day in the life of a marketing guy

As a marketing guy, I get to do many exciting things. One of the most interesting is deciding on which new products to develop – a very challenging task. I’ve come up with the analogy below to hopefully describe what this is like.

Scenario #1: If you are walking down the street and see a twenty dollar bill on the sidewalk with no one around to claim it, what would you do?

OK, that was easy. So, let’s make this a bit more difficult…

Scenario #2: If you are walking down the street and see a twenty dollar bill but the money is in a ravine below, which you would need to climb down to get, what would you do?
The answer may depend on:
(a) how deep the ravine is; and
(b) how hard the ravine is to climb down.

Analogy to Marketing: Marketeers see the world scattered with twenty dollar bills in ravines. The trick is to choose which opportunities to go after (i.e. which ravines to climb down).

Scenario #3: If you are walking down the street and see a twenty dollar bill but…
• The money is in a ravine below you which you would need to climb down to get.
• And you are not certain that it is a twenty dollar bill (it could be a one dollar bill or a fifty dollar bill). It is too far away to be able to see the bill to know for sure.
• And you see 3 other people at the top of the ravine near you who are also looking at the money trying to assess whether to climb down and get it.

…what would you do?

The answer may depend on:
(a) how deep the ravine is; and
(b) how hard the ravine is to climb down; and
(c) how certain you are of the amount the bill is worth; and
(d) how certain you are that you can get to the bill before the others.

Analogy to Marketing: Marketeers must deal with considerable uncertainty in their business. Very often it is difficult to judge how big an opportunity is upfront.

Scenario #4: If you are walking down the street and see several twenty dollar bills but:
• The money is in a ravine below which you need to climb down to get.
• You are not certain that they are twenty dollar bills (they may be one dollar bills or fifty dollar bills or a combination). It is too far away to be able to see the bills to know for sure.
• You see 3 other people trying to assess whether to climb down and get the money.
• Each person has a particular challenge to get to the bill from where they are standing. Some have long gently slopped paths, others have short steep paths.
• Some have repelling gear, some have boots, some are barefoot, etc.
• Some people already seem to have a head start.

…what do you do?

The answer may depend on:
(a) how deep the ravine is; and
(b) how hard the ravine is to climb down; and
(c) how certain you are of the amount the bills are worth; and
(d) whether or not you believe you can get to the ravine in time to harvest enough bills before your competitors can.

Analogy to Marketing: Marketing is difficult! There are many variables to trade-off in making good marketing decisions.