Interview with Joe McDevitt, PICMG Vice President of Marketing

By Lance A. Leventhal, Technical Editor

1. What are the key reasons why you chose to take on the job of PICMG’s VP of Marketing?
   
   Any organization – be it a standards body organization (SBO), company, or even a church – typically follows an almost Bell Curve-like pattern of birth, stagnation, and death. If you recognize a stagnation point and make adjustments, the organization can experience a rebirth and renewed growth. I was concerned, as new competitive SBOs appeared with “hard-core” PICMG members in their ranks, that PICMG could be heading toward a stagnation point. I thought new marketing efforts would bring fresh ideas and approaches to help PICMG experience a re-birth. I am constantly struggling with my internal “Idea Man” who has many ideas about how other people should do their jobs, but no inclination to actually do the work. So I decided to run to fight that inclination.
   
   
2. What are the major things you hope to accomplish?
   
   Crush competitive Standards Body Organizations and a few major proprietary systems along the way by increasing “end user” input and participation within PICMG.
   
   
3. What new marketing activities do you plan?
   
   Separating marketing efforts into two generic categories – inbound marketing (working with current customers), and outbound marketing (working with potential customers), I think PICMG should focus more on inbound marketing. PICMG is currently in a period between specification releases. We need to understand why new, competitive SBOs have formed outside PICMG and eliminate the reasons why they didn’t work inside. PICMG, without question, will outlast them, and we can be a repository for their work when they go belly up. In explicit marketing terms, we need to conduct internal surveys, interviews, and advisory panels, with the aims of completing tasks begun by outside groups, closing holes, and healing sore points.
   
   
4. How would you characterize the current state of PICMG marketing efforts?
   
   PICMG’s outbound marketing has always been amazingly good. It could be tweaked for the web search engine world that we live in today, and I plan to do that. With far fewer resources than other SBOs spend, PICMG uses a grassroots effort that gets an exceptional ROI on its outbound marketing. One of my biggest challenges is to maintain that ROI. However, that is only half of the marketing job, and PICMG’s inbound marketing has been non-existent.
   
   
5. What do you think are the most important things that need to be done with regard to marketing the AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA specifications?
   
   I think we have been emphasizing a Total Cost of Ownership message that is, by its nature, difficult to convey. Yes, xTCA has a significant advantage in that area, but the concept has little emotional appeal, particularly in an era of rapid change in which future benefits must be heavily discounted. For example, simply reduce immediate costs with an offer of free chassis hardware and how many people are going to worry about an uncertain long-term future. Who knows what the technological or economic situation will be a few years from now? Surely the current trend is toward “immediate gratification” rather than “scrimp and save”.
   
   We need to point out the hypocrisy of using open source software on closed, proprietary, one-company-driven hardware specifications such as IBM’s BladeCenterT.   TCO is just part of a message that points out that open source software makes the most sense when paired with a modular open standards system developed using the likes of PICMG’s AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA specifications. That message emphasizes PICMG’s openness, low membership cost, equality of membership, and interoperability testing in an Open standards leadership campaign that has analytical and emotional appeal. We can then use AdvancedTCA’s and MicroTCA’s adjacent market penetration where we are also gaining the upper hand against alternative approaches. Finally, it pits a wealth of hypocritical software positioning from the competition against their own hardware in a sort of matter/anti-matter-like marketing engine.
   
   
6. Do you see a need for technology-based marketing groups such as Marketing Committees for AdvancedTCA or MicroTCA? How would these mesh with PICMG’s marketing efforts?
   Yes, I think they co-exist nicely. I want (and must) focus on new and current membership. It would be much more than a full time job if I also had to devote the required time to each individual specification. Ultimately, widely adopted specifications keep PICMG healthy. I applaud those efforts and want to support them anyway I can, because without them, my efforts will ultimately be fruitless.
   
   
7. What are the biggest challenges you see facing AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA?
   
   Cost, cost, and finally cost. I hope that the ATCA Extension Subcommittee can find a way to drive some of the inherent cost out of the system.
   
   
8. Which markets do you think are especially promising for AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA?
   
   I had the privilege or luck to sit next to a CIO of a major hospital a few months ago on a plane. He caught me reading an embedded trade magazine and struck up a conversation about computers. Three hours and several of my questions later, he painted a picture not unlike a Telco Central Office. Increased storage, higher performance needs, and a desire to reduce maintenance complexity with an emphasis on Ethernet/IP-based networking.
   
   Their needs are growing to approach CO-level hardening and availability requirements as the medical NOC sees increased thin client and virtualization usage. Hardening is required because service interruptions can cause patient death and potential monetary damages. Certainly, with the graying of the industrialized world, healthcare is a huge and growing market, and I believe we are only one or two lawsuits and a software start-up or two away from something medical offered on an AdvancedTCA or MicroTCA platform.
   
   
9. What are the most interesting (or most unusual) applications you have seen for AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA?
   
   It would have to be the financial services market. I would have never guessed that guaranteed delivery of highly time-sensitive data would drive high-availability, high-bandwidth types of applications solved best by AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA hardware.
   
   
10. What advice would you give to industry marketing people trying to promote AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA?
    
    We spend so much of our time battling for position within our ecosystem that we don’t have much left for healing the collateral damage internal squabbling causes and telling the combined story of our modular open standards. We are also quick to assume AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA are well known and therefore don’t require re-introductions. We suffer from the curse of knowledge and quickly assume everyone instantly understands terms such as “E-Keying.” We also continually do thinly veiled product pitches that are easily seen through, despite our belief that we are somehow sneakier or smarter than everyone else.
    
    If every PICMG member’s marketing department spent 10% of their effort truly educating customers about not only AdvancedTCA and MicroTCA, but also open standards and our ecosystem, we’d grow the PICMG ecosystem substantially.
    
    
11. How would you describe the current state of the embedded systems business to a top marketing manager who had one minute to devote to the subject? What is the most important point you would want to make?
    
    If he truly only had one minute, I would tell him that a clergyman once told me, “In all my years of ministering to the sick and dying, none has regretted spending too little time at work.” If he had slightly longer, I would tell him that we’ve been in downturns before, and most of us have business models that will survive. A few companies will actually thrive through brilliant M&As and emerge as new powers within our ecosystem, and a few will go to that sweet bye-and-bye. You need to watch the budget, and measure and prove your marketing ROI, because we unfortunately live in a CFO-ruled world. We need to speak the CFOs’ language.

    Joe McDevitt is VP Marketing at PICMG. You can reach him at mcdevitt@picmg.org.