Embracing Change for Driving Business

Miguel Lopes, VP Product Line Management, Dialogic

Embracing innovation

Virtualization, cloud, and other avant-garde technologies have redefined the IT industry. Enterprises, however, face difficulties in embracing these new technologies while building a complete digital strategy. Moreover, these ground-breaking technologies stay fragmented and are yet to be consolidated; and this recurs every time a new technology trend is introduced into the industry. Here, I would like to suggest that today’s leaders should change their mindset, believing in the myth of ‘expensive products being the best’. Today, several options are available for the leaders to implement their strategy. For instance, the open source products are as good as the commercial ones. Leaders should have an open mind and be willing to embrace different business models and utilize the latest technology.

Product Delivery through Partner Ecosystem

As the head of the product line of Dialogic, I ensure that ourproducts address customers’ needs. To this end, we look to build synergy by bringing together the expertise from multiple companies to create a single and comprehensive product. To speak from our own experience, we were requested for a feature that was trending in the market. We built the product in-house, but other companies were specialized on this feature. We, therefore, created a partner ecosystem by collaborating with those specialized companies. Utilizing the cloud technology and the APIs, technologies from different parties within the ecosystem could seamlessly interact which resulted in the desired outcomes that aligned to the customer’s needs. Through this collaborative approach, we could save time and investment while providing the best experience to the customers. Therefore, I recommend the leaders of the organizations always to consider having multiple partnerships to produce favorable results. Even though branding is an essential factor, customer experience must be the priority.

 The era of treating customers as just source of revenue has far gone; today, the customers are treated as partners 

The Right Business Partner

While considering a business partner, there are a few things to be noted. The business model, features required, and the customer experience, all these aspects need to be considered. The other key criteria are to ensure the partner company has the same philosophy as yours. Also, that the partner shares the same value as yours, else it will affect adversely. The right partnership can leapfrog your product to achieve several milestones on a short time frame. Dialogic has witnessed these benefits both internally and in the telecom industry.

Comprehensive Team Involvement

The business leaders should be passionate about taking their company to the next level. To this end, they should have the confidence in the product that they are building. I would suggest the leaders make sure that they involve all the departments while working on a project. The marketing, sales, engineering and all other departments should be involved until the product is delivered to the customer. This involvement makes a difference, as each worker contributes effectively by putting forward their best effort during the process.

Customers as Partners

The era of treating customers as just source of revenue has far gone; today, the customers are treated as partners. From a macro perspective, change in the business approach is inevitable. Hence technologies such as cloud, virtualization, and so on demand an end-to-end hardware and software update within the organization. With technology being frequently updated, adapting to the new environment is a significant challenge faced by most the organizations. Dialogic tackled this problem through innovation and reorganization. We split the company into three divisions, we focus on innovation through the application division, address the telecoms core network requirements using our Telecom Infrastructure division and focus on Hardware requirements using the converged communications division. Each division has its own area of focus but as a whole, it offers an end-to-end solution to address the paradigm shift in customer relationships. Business leaders should take a deep look in their company organization and see how it can be shifted to enhance their relationship with their customers.