Hu's Blog

I was out of pocket last week supporting the EBC on the Road in Sweden. Kenneth Chang, who managers our Executive Briefing Centers in Sefton Park, UK and Santa Clara, California, recruits our executives to spend a week doing briefings for companies in locations outside of our EBCs so that we can get closer to our customers and prospects.  This has been helpful for many companies who have had to cut back on their travel expenses.

Unlike other briefing centers that are staffed by dedicated presenters, our EBC briefings are done by product managers and executives who have direct responsibility for the products and solutions that they present. While this is extra work for our product managers, they enjoy taking an hour or two out of their schedule to meet customers, do the briefing, and get direct feedback.  Since EBCs on the Road take the better part of the week, we can’t afford to take too many of the product managers away for that long so Ken recruits HDS executives to cover for the briefings. A briefing for a customer is usually a day and covers 5 or 6 topics.

On this EBC in Sweden the HDS excutives included the SVP of product development and product management as well as his VPs for Hardware and Software. We also had the general Manager for EMEA, as well as the region and country managers.  While many of our executives meet customers on a regular basis, EBC briefings like this enable them to meet many more customers from a particular area and get exposure to a broader spectrum of feedback from operations and architecture to C levels. I believe the customers also enjoyed interacting with executives that they would not normally meet in their geos.  It is difficult to coordinate a week where customers and HDS executives are available at the same time, but Ken plans to do more in the future.

While we were there, Sweden was in the midst of a record freeze and snow fall and trains and subways could not operate. But despite that disruption we had only one or two cancellations. For R&R, Ken took us to the famous Ice Bar in Stockholm, where everything in the bar is made out of ice. It was actually warmer in the Ice Bar at -5 Celsius than it was outside at -20 Celsius.