Over the last few weeks I have been traveling throughout Australia and New Zealand visiting our customers, many of whom are in the Movie, Gaming and VFX business sectors. I’ll see some of them again next week in Las Vegas at the NAB show where we can catch up with many of our North American, European and Australasian customers in one place. For the last few years we have been having a dinner party at NAB so we can catch up with our customers and they can catch up with old friends while discussing common business and technology issues.
As we sit down to dinner there are always a few new folks joining us, and we introduce them to everyone and tell them how we met and then we start to see who knows who. Usually it turns out that it is a very small world; even with people living and working on other continents they’ve often heard of each other, met each other on various web sites or share common friends.
As the appetizers are finished, drinks refreshed and dinner served, our conversation is usually taken up by war stories of our customers dealing with vendor issues and laughter about how things can go so bad, so quickly, because of miscommunication of vendor support policies. It often seems that our competitors put revenue before relationships and so they lose their customer’s trust. In the storage business if you can’t trust your supplier in the short term are you going to trust them with your archival storage for the long term? Our customers tell us that frankly they want a long term storage partner that will work with them in their business cycle, and not a storage and support vendor who is looking to increase revenue by artificially shortening their equipment’s life cycle or ending software support.
As we finish our main course and review the dessert menu, the conversation turns to plans for the rest of the year and interesting projects and technologies that we have run into at the show. There are always a couple of really cool new things that most of us will be drawn to, and as we chat about how we can integrate them into our Network infrastructure we are enjoying our dessert and the last of our drinks, before we say good night and promise to catch up again next year.
We always have a great time, and really appreciate our guests joining us at our dinner parties. After more than 20 years in the ever changing world of high tech, we know that long term, trusting business relationships are the most valuable assets of our company. We’ll be hosting dinners like this at other trade shows this year and we hope you will join us. If you want to join us at NAB just let us know so we can add you to our reservation. We hope to see you there!
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