When Does a Company Know it is Providing Value?

When do companies know (I mean, really KNOW) that they are providing value? How about when their customers inquire about personally purchasing stock in the company? That’s exactly what happened during our second Customer Symposium in Paris this week where we had attendees from 12 countries on five continents. With a large number of repeat attendees, overall attendance up 36% from last year, and very positive feedback, we rate the event a great success. Here’s what got customers so excited.

Many of our customers (and readers of this blog) know that Packet Design is on a journey of deepening and broadening our value to network operators. We are doing this by adding new performance analytics and service orchestration to our market-leading strengths in route and traffic analytics. Significantly, we are transitioning from a company that helps customers understand the network to a company that helps them create a self-healing, self-optimizing network that can adapt to changing business demands.

At last year’s Symposium, we outlined our strategic vision and how we were going to achieve it. This year, we demonstrated exactly how Packet Design customers are using our real-time network telemetry, analytics and policy to make intelligent changes. Customers like Neutrona and Orange provided insights into how they use the Packet Design Explorer products to offer innovative solutions to existing business problems and deliver new services to their customers.

When customers realized that the vision is now a reality… that the promise of SDN in the core network is being realized, they were understandably enthusiastic. Their excitement led to several asking about personally purchasing stock in our company. (They can’t, we’re privately held.)

The point, as it relates to how I KNOW we are creating value, is this: It’s one thing as an employee to invest your organization’s money in purchasing tools to assure service delivery across the world’s largest and most complex service provider, enterprise, and government networks. That’s what smart employees at great companies do – they find ways to use valuable tools to their advantage. It is another thing entirely to make individual investments in a company to create personal wealth. That’s what smart investors do – they identify opportunities to profit from spotting value before the rest
of the market catches on to it.