Savvius has been on a growth curve over the last two years that most people would dream of. In this interview. Larry Zulch, President and CEO of Savvius, spoke to Comms Business about their growth and why Digital Transformation (DX) starts with the Network.
Comms Business Magazine (CBM): Why is network performance so important to DX?
Larry Zulch (LZ): The networks in communications have become more important than ever. We’ve been talking to a lot of our customers in the UK about their digital transformation strategies and their dependence on networks, but also being able to depend on their networks and the performance. This is a critical area for all of us.
Networks are more vital than ever and digital transformation is entirely dependent on them. Our customers realise this so they are rapidly investing in those networks to ensure they enhance or maintain customer experience.
When we talk to customers we are always looking at where we are meeting their needs but more importantly where we are not meeting their needs. Our latest version 12 of our software will address a lot of the issues customers are facing with our omni-monitoring applications like Spotlight which give real time visibility across the entire network.
When people are having a great experience with their applications it means the network is working. When they are having a problem with their applications they often assume the problem is with the network, which may be true or not. However, what we do is identify the application issue by drilling into that specific application. That might be a SaaS product like Office 365 or something else. We want to answer questions like ‘What kind of experience are people across my organisation having with Citrix?’ for example. People want a network view of their application experiences and that’s what we do.
CBM: What’s the opportunity for Channel?
LZ: For Channel, they are able to provide some value added services and gives them the opportunity to interact with customers and tailor a product to meet their needs. There is also application identification and determination of quality in their customer’s environment. In my experience often Channel partners don’t want to get too deep into professional services, although some do. They do want to be able to configure a product for a customer so it makes it particularly useful to them, they can provide some extra expertise in that area.
We are really trying to get away from that single product sell world. Traditionally we have done that very well but people are no longer into buying products, we tackling this by now going down the solution sell route. We go in and show how we can be part of an overall solution and not just network monitoring and network troubleshooting. We use our technology to sweat the assets of whatever the customer has already purchased. When we are part of that bigger solution sell we become much more relevant.
A lot of new partners we are recruiting will have already sold a security product or an aggregation product into a customer. We are allowing their salespeople to go back into their customers and cross sell. They already have the relationships, we are just giving them something else to plug into that environment.
CBM: How is this approach working for you?
LZ: We have been altering our go to market strategy globally to go exclusively 100% through Channel. We aren’t far away from that goal but there is still work to be done. Growth in Savvius has been great but specifically in EMEA we have seen exceptional growth, we saw 200% last year and we are expecting another 200% this year on top of that.
Nuvola is one of our EMEA wide distributor and we have several others across EMEA. Nuvola are our primary distie in the UK too. Every distributor will claim to be a value add and when you are in our position you really need a distributor which will help you to scale and realise that potential. We have some new partners in the UK who are already showing growth particularly in the financial and telco sectors.