Vik Malyala - SuperMicro Build Day Live
Transcript
[Music] hey how's it going - Steve Townsend from the CTO advisor you're watching another CTO dulls in conjunction with build a live we're here sponsored by the great folks at Super Micro talking to the VP of FAA field application engineering and business development Vic Vic I'm going to completely butcher your last name but I'm gonna take it try to shout out it anyway Molly Allen you're absolutely right alright so I'm glad that that worked out for us so Vic first off field application engineering let's take
one part of the title and dissect that because that I think that's a title I have not seen in an industry what is fill application engineering so there is obviously industry parlance versus what how its implemented in different companies at Super Micro it is the department that actually bridges the gap between the engineering the sales and the customer mm-hmm very simply put the idea of this organization is to be the trusted adviser for the customer and bring the right technology to them and also be the
voice for the customer in within Super Micro so that the overall business and as the technical engagement with the customer happens seamlessly so one of the titles that I would see an industry that would be compared comparable would be a field CTO where they're out talking to customers but it seems like Super Micro has taken a slightly different approach because your title your organization also includes business development so how does the to kind of complement each other inside a Super Micro it's interesting as so the
idea again here is no matter what are the technology that we are bringing to the customer ultimately this need to solve the for the customers and which in turn translates into business right and the idea again here is when we are already in the center of the business and through technology we are enabling it but ultimately when we are working with our technology partners our customers and our internal engineering and whatnot it all enables in a way a business so I think it kind of merges
these two deep you know kind of functions into one so you're right I mean in a way it's a kind of a field CTO function but as I said you know in our company the way we have defined the rules are like that and just for what it's worth in many companies field applications engineering is part of the sales organization and right here it's actually a different Department altogether and I manage this kind of worldwide the idea again here is we need to have a way
to engage with the customers and customers need to have more than one path to engage with Supermicro the that's the idea behind it so in a way we are enabling the business but technology being the main focus and differentiator there so let's let's talk about that relationship and how it's initiated when I think of a traditional organization that uses kind of the sales overlay approach that would be just you know part of the pre-sales part I'd engage in one of your engineers as an se or
whatever the title would be how do you will fit not being a function of sales how do you actually engage with the customer like where's the entry point in the relationship very good so we need to take a step back to look at like you know how we operate so we can kind of explain why it is formed that way so the company when it started off we started with you know as a building block approach and it's like 25 years ago this is actually our
25th you know here in existence and in the beginning we started making it so called the motherboard which is the heart and center of these systems and that's what we started our business with and in order to get to market it's predominantly sent through distributors because we're a small company only way to reach out is through them as the company started growing and as we scale up in the chain we started working with different system integrators OMS and you know value-added resellers and whatnot and today
when you look at Super Micro we are able to provide the complete system whether it's a turnkey proof-of-concept whatever the way it may be so company has evolved so what happens in this is that depending on the type of customers that you engage with the type of people that need to be worked with from Super Micro is different so when you are talking to a distributor it's the product managers that are typically talking with the distributors and letting them know what products that we have in
addition to sales taking care of a sales function all right when you move into OMS and you know value-added resellers and whatnot it kind of increases our workload in a way so we cannot just think about like moving a I would say pizza box and expect it to just be enabled somehow somewhere what we are looking into the next year where you know what kind of certifications that we need to have what kind of software that need to be installed so the type of engagement with
the customers is increasing so part of the functions that the channel was doing we are assuming that right as we get into a solution segment today it's totally different because what ends up happening is you know customer's point of view they may be using certain environments say for example if somebody is using VMware for a visa and applications and they are quite happy with it but maybe the economies are not working out and they wanted to see if moving to for example KVM is a better
option and there are two ways to do it for them to put the resources and engineering into that and do the entire qual in-house which number one takes the resources away from doing the actual work which should be what they should be focusing on at the same time it takes time also and when we look at you know when they look at companies like Super Micro what we are trying to do is okay you are using certain gear why don't we take that work away from
you we do the certification with VMware we do the certification based on the KVM and now we'll be able to give you some data that you can start you know going and working with that way you don't have to do the entire rework and we are kind of scaling up that's where we are stepping in right in a way sales and FA is kind of work hand in hand right at the business development piece is slightly different because in which case we may not they may
not even be having that business to start with or a sales engagement as we come across the customer requirements and we start talking to these customers and once we feel that there is a good business opportunity and a reason to engage with them directly or indirectly then we work and engage a sales into that so let's let's talk taxonomy a little bit because Supermicro with the distribution back background can be a little bit confusing from the outside to look in so as I think about legacy
Supermicro the motherboard company and I buy the product do distributors and not communicate directly with Supermicro I'd have a impression today of what a customer is what he just described to me now is what I would traditionally consider a customer so can you talk about like the difference between partner and om and end-user customer and how your organization interacts with all three okay great so if you take a look at a am as a customer om typically ends up rebranding the product will not eventually could
not bear a suit micro brand name on it but the way we need to be working with om is typically it takes like several months to even a year or sometimes even longer than that to work with them to take a product refine it and modify it customize it whatever it may be needed depending on the type of application and once it is done the same product will be I would say deployed you know again and again right over the next few years so this is
the appliance model as in user customer I'll buy an appliance I might get support directly from that your om customer right I get support from that and you guys on the backend work out any hardware related which software integration the branding the boxing and whole nine yards we take care of right but the customer will never see supermicro name anywhere right right that's the whole idea so we do work with these customers you know one of the names that is already public is like Nutanix right
if you take a look take a look at a neutronics appliance today and you kind of peel it open it's a Super Micro underneath that but you know I'm only talking about that because it's a public knowledge right but you know in that angle we will be working with it sales and an FA and we also have so-called an OEM product manager right these are the three important and and of course on the post sale side of it there is a program management and other functions
but these are the three that will be the primary interface with the OEM customer whereas if you're looking at we call it an end user you know say for example and if it is Intel or Morgan Stanley I mean you know I'm just talking about certain broad categories under our end users right you know then the super mikro brand-name retains number one - in which case an OEM product manager is not needed because it's not specific to a specific product it is to do with a
customer that is trying to use Super Micro product in their environment that is based on different applications that they are trying to run on so I think there's an interesting angle that talked to Patrick Wayne earlier mm-hmm the strategy about your capability to work with directly with within this region customers who come up with an idea and they want to execute on an engineering ideal and they can talk to you guys directly have meetings whiteboard there seems to be an angle if I'm a enterprise customer
and I see the super macro inside of my HCI solution today and I think to myself you know what I can do that I can take Visa nor some other storage provider and build a data center full of this stuff how do you work that type of opportunity with a customer functionality is one thing second is optimization so for my workload am I getting the right performance from this box right at the end of the day that's all matters it doesn't matter whether it is running
the VMware or anything for them the problem that they are trying to solve so what we end up doing in this case is number one if a customer is already have been using certain solution we want to understand within that is there anything that we can do to make the user experience better is there anything that we can do of course I understand the problem right if they're saying like no ok I like this from this particular solution but it's costing a lot right so what
do we do cost optimization it's not about just dropping the price it's about sizing the platform in the right way and be able to look at into the data center environment and say if we are able to make certain changes for example running the data center at a higher temperature that way you are able to reduce you know the air-conditioning part of it or be able to provide a solution that easily extends the life cycle support so that way they don't need to change every two
years it may be three or four or five years so we need to be at we need to look at what their problem is what they are trying to solve and sometimes they may not even know and sometimes we don't know well the whole engagement that's where the whiteboarding comes into picture we look at it it's not about going and designing a brand new thing it's about giving them a solution from our building block approach where we can easily size it properly and get them a
solution that actually meets their requirement yes all like you guys all use the term but I'm saying you gotta do value added building blocks where you can take the basic components every one from an engineering on up to an executive compute storage networking not not very difficult to even grow we use the term card resource optimized for this and then you come in and you help me take those building blocks put that where you guys have 40% more than 40% of organizations are engineers I can
tap into those resources and solution a hardware platform that better leverages my software and and for all intents and purposes as much as I want to as a customer kind of do what an OEM wouldn't do I can do it as much as that or as little of that optimize my alarm absolutely it's about the independent software vendor is V collaboration and certification and be able to provide a that a proof of concept or a turnkey solution or anything in between so they got really enjoyed
the conversation looking forward to future innovations and if you want to find you know the super technical details of what Vic has discussed today go to build a live.com to watch the content from the build day event to build a live event where they take a big twin and built visa and it's really interesting content until the next CTO does talk to you online the CTO of either calm or on twitter at CTO advisor
