How ready are you to invest “skin in the game”?

July 22, 2009

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

How ready are you to invest “skin in the game”?

 

Successful companies know that getting to know your customers’ needs, issues, pain points, strengths and weaknesses results in a long term and growing business relationship. Each side demonstrates a willingness to invest time, money and resources into learning more about one another in order to realize the competitive and monetary gains that come as a result of putting your respective “skin in the game”—combining talents and sharing resources, expertise, knowledge.

 

I’m oversimplifying but this is how we at AWR feel about our customers.  You are our partners.  Your success is ultimately our success. We work alongside you to help ensure your success and we are very thankful when you are willing to share it with us and with others in the form of an AWR Customer Success Story, http://web.awrcorp.com/Usa/Success-Stories/  . But this is not what I’m trying to make this week’s blog about. Rather, my intent is to use it to generate a collective nodding of heads before I transfer this thought-thread elsewhere.

 

Pat Hindle of Microwave Journal Magazine shared this Business Week article, with me just after IMS.  The article from June 11^th is titled “Companies Willing to Take Risks in a Recession.”  I read it and wasn’t quite sure what to do with it but then last week, I got it.

 

A few lines from the Business Week article, written by Brian Burnsed, that I liked:

1)“In this unstable environment, managers need to strike the right balance between caution and boldness.”       

2)“The common thread among successful entrepreneurs is that they’re daring to be aggressive rather defensive amid the weak economy.       

3)“Don’t react to what competitors may be doing,” advises Dave McMahon, an associate professor of marketing at Pepperdine University.  “Carve your own niche.”     

 

The actual article itself discussed how this economy is presenting some great merger and acquisition opportunities, but the lines I reference above jumped out at me as being universal truisms.  Perhaps even more so in an unstable economic environment, we all need to find the right balance between caution and boldness to make sure our firms stay afloat, but why in good times should we lose sight of this edge?  Successful companies, and not just entrepreneurs, are those who continually take risks and don’t get too comfortable with their status quo (i.e. market share). 

 

Like customer relationships, marketing partnerships need to find the right balance between caution and boldness.  If neither side is willing to invest skin in the game and take on some risk, how in the world are we going to do something unique, different, intriguing for our mutual customer base??  It’s this thought that has me rejigging the last Business Week quote from Pepperdine and making it my own, “Don’t simply copy cat what competitors may be doing, put skin in the game and figure out how to carve your own niche.  But don’t stop there, follow through and make it happen!”

 

Why is it that some company-to-company partnerships shine and others merely fizzle?  I say it is the same reason that some customer relationships thrive and others don’t: it takes an equal willingness to invest time, resources, talent, expertise, etc. In other words, it takes an equal willingness to put “skin into the game.”

 

I love this phrase.  I use it internally to describe why some marketing relationships are more fruitful and productive than others.  When both partners literally put their “skin or sweat equity” into the relationship, only then will good things materialize.   Take for example AWR’s  announcement earlier this year about a marketing relationship with Anritsu Corporation. 

 

Long before this press release became public, we were fortunate enough to have two customers attend a standard Microwave Office training course in San Jose last summer.  The guys who sat next to one another were bright, energetic engineers—one from Anritsu and one from Marvell.  During a break, the customer from Marvell turned to his Anritsu classmate and said, “Hey, you know what would be great?” 

The guy from Anritsu said, “No, what?”

 

Marvell:  “Well, I have an Anritsu VNA back at my work lab and Microwave Office software in my cube on my PC.”

 

Anritsu: (nod)

 

Marvell:  “So wouldn’t it be ideal if I could have my Microwave Office design software in the lab running on my VNA so I can design and test concurrently, in real time?”

 

Anritsu:  “Yes. Sure. We could probably do it since the Anritsu VNAs are powerful PCs in their own right.”

 

What happened next was the start of “skin in the game” for AWR and Anritsu.  A car full of Anritsu guys (marketers, AEs, management, sales) drove down to LA from San Jose to chat with a room full of AWR folk (marketing, applications, sales, management). 

 

I’ll spare you the details of the relationship building, execution plan, and whatnot, but suffice it to say, neither AWR nor Anritsu were afraid to put their respective skins in the game and strike the right balance between caution and boldness.  This bundling of design software within the test equipment operating software is an industry first, and this was certainly the best of both companies carving out a new niche. 

 

 

If you’ve not paid attention to media coverage on this joint offering, you can find an article here:  http://web.awrcorp.com/Anritsu/VectorStar/ . 

Or better yet, take a look at this IMS-produced video that shows Anritsu and AWR talking about the advantages of the two company’s products combined, as well as an actual demo of the MWO software running on the Anritsu VectorStar VNA. www.awr.tv (Again, we balanced caution and risk to produce this on the show floor and to even bring it to you on AWR pioneered AWR.TV)

 

This is just one of many AWR partnership stories I’ve amassed in my storytelling repertoire since joining AWR two years ago.  What’s your story for putting skin in the game and doing something unique as a result?   While this marketing relationship may not be “engineering” in the sense that you all are used to thinking, it is “engineering” of a relationship/ partnership in order to deliver something new, unique and valuable to our mutual customers.  

 

 

Anticipating the Future

July 14, 2009

 


Mike Heimlich is currently product marketing director for AWR's Microwave Office® and Signal Integrity Design Suite™ product lines and responsible for university programs. Prior to joining AWR, he was an engineer with Watkins-Johnson, Pacific Monolithics, and M/A-COM. In 1996 he co-founded Smartlynx, whose interoperability technology forms the basis for AWR's PCB flow integrations. Mike authors numerous technical articles on high-frequency designs, multi-domain signal integrity analysis, and design tool interoperability. His current research interests include design flow analysis and modeling. Mike holds a PhD from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).
www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Mike a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

Well, Sherry’s blog set me off again…..not in the sense that I was jealous of her spur-of-the-moment holiday in the Mediterranean.  I was thinking about how ubiquitous smartphones and 3G technology have become.  Mind you, I’m not a Luddite and, as an engineer, you would think that because my work enables so much change in other people’s lives that I too would embrace the latest tech trends as an early-adopter.  Instead, I prefer to wait for the technology to mature, age a bit like fine wine, so you can separate the “Beta” from the “VHS”.  And not that I need a clear winner as I’m perfectly happy with a world of iPhones and Blackberry’s (although, we do need a support group to help SOME people put them down when they are on vacation).   But let’s face it:  3G technology is reshaping what we do with mobile technology.

Underlying the explosion are advances in wireless circuits and systems.  Early mobile phones and pagers were testimonies to manufacturer’s purchasing departments - with a shopping list that rivaled the space shuttle.  Like most stories in consumer electronics, the establishment of mobile telecommunications as a consumer success story was followed by a drive to lower cost led by integration and miniaturization.  Wireless circuit designers saw specifications move from discrete components to single function MMICS and then to multifunction MMICs as GSM/EDGE and CDMA handsets became as inexpensive and indispensible as ballpoint pens.  3G, mobile telecomm/computing fusion, and “greener” power consumption have pushed front-ends from MMICs to modules.

I remember back in 2004 visiting more than a few suppliers to the handset manufacturers.  While it was clear that the path to their future success was in the direction of module design, there was a good deal of fear and loathing in what was on the horizon.  Some thought that “module design” was going to mean just integrating some MMICs and passives on a low layer count PCB using a PCB layout tool.  Other’s thought it was a super-MMIC in a QFN  package with a  handful of SMD caps.  Still others sought to combine several IC technologies to optimize performance by a “best in class” approach.  Needless to say, it was not clear how, as an EDA supplier, we were going to meet this diverse set of visions for the future of handset component design.

What excited me was the concept of an industry that was supposed to be dying on the vine actually reinventing itself.  I’ve had past co-workers move from GaAs MMIC design wholesale over to silicon saying that it was inevitable as CMOS dimensions got smaller; I even catch myself stealing a line from one of my wiser engineer elders that “GaAs is the material of the future and always will be” giving that world’s gallium would be quickly depleted if it had to replace silicon over night.  Others left analog frontend design altogether to develop software defined radios based on DSP speeds approaching wireless carrier frequencies.  But here were people with cutting edge design requirements embracing front end analog design and non-silicon technologies (at least in part) as the path forward for years to come.

At AWR, I have to say, there were just as many internal opinions as could be found in the industry we were supporting.  Do we focus on the physical design challenges of module design?  For some, the mantra, was the system level….design at the system level!  Others wanted to focus on the simulation challenges and how do you ensure 3G performance at the circuit level.  Still others saw EM as the bottleneck.   I remember taking all this and putting it into a presentation to propose a cooperative effort at a few of the major component vendors as a basis for establishing a “next generation” module design system.    Almost universally, I was met with an interesting reaction.  It wasn’t skepticism about AWR’s ability to deliver such a solution but rather a lack of certainty as to the path forward.  It was Beta versus VHS all over again.  Or was it GSM vs W-CDMA?

Much to the credit of AWR’s leadership, we actually moved forward on nearly all the approaches.  Physical design was beefed up to handle the inclusion of multiple IC technologies simultaneously, including silicon with GaAs or even GaAs on silicon, along with the PCB substrate and the package.  System simulation flowed up to algorithm development through analog impairments (for budgeting, frequency planning, and performance like EVM or BER) down to circuit design and back up again.  Simulation capacity was increased by orders of magnitude and was extended to include single-schematic driven linear, nonlinear steady-state, and transient simulations, as well as LVS/DRC verification.   Verification was also made possible with breakthrough advances in EM and how it integrates to the circuit design flow as a whole. 

What came out of this was not so much four or five new flows based on the 2004 visits.  Certainly, the requests of each of the customer groups were satisfied, and I have no doubt that they were satisfied, at least in part, by their input being addressed and returned as enhanced functionality.  The best part for me of the whole exercise was the emergence of module design.  Sure, people had been talking about designing modules with interconnected MMICs since the 1980’s, but here was design of the module being done as the module—trading off MMIC performance at the transistor or passive component level across die and in the package—and not as a lab bench exercise in post-design hardware integration.  The concurrent design of  the whole module, not just the circuit simulation or the MMICs or the layout, has become a reality and the path forward.

So how are you designing modules?  Has your design process been a success story of like VHS over Beta?  Are you still “duking it out” with a great war story?  Maybe it’s more like GSM/Edge and W-CDMA and a 3G success story.

Thoughts on the Wireless Revolution... from Vacationland

July 1, 2009

Sherry Hess is vice president of marketing at AWR, bringing with her more than 15 years of EDA experience in domestic and international sales, marketing, support, and managerial expertise. For the majority of her career Sherry served in various positions at Ansoft Corporation including director of European operations and later as vice president of marketing. Before joining Ansoft, Sherry spent two years with Intel Corporation, where she worked in the ASIC Group and developed relationships with companies such as Bell Northern Research and Northern Telecom. Sherry holds a BSEE and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA. www.awrcorp.com.

To comment or ask Sherry a question, use the comment link at the bottom of the entry.

Gosh, what happened to June?  IMS came and went and for AWR it was very successful, so I opted to take a spur of the moment vacation to the Mediterranean Sea.  On the flight over, I bought Business Week, Time, etc. for "blog" inspiration.  Once there, I read the Herald Tribune and my Blackberry for more inspiration.  I asked friends for thoughts, ideas, ...anything, but nothing grabbed me.  Maybe I need more exciting friends?  My vacation came and went, and there I was on the return flight, still thinking....huh, what shall I write about...energy harvesting and scavenging?  I am intrigued by that concept but not sure the microwave/RF community shares my passion:-) Open-access and the quagmire of EDA databases offered by vendors...snooze-fest!  3D glasses and my MWJ video interview?  But then it hit me, as I was walking through the front door of my home back in Manhattan Beach--I'll write about what I did on my vacation!  

Maybe the prior blog about Professor Zoya and her students had me in the mood, I'm not quite sure, but if you're buying the tie-in, good!  Ok, so what did I do on my vacation?  Well, let's see.  I sat around on my butt a lot either pool side or beach side but that's not the point. What I did do was notice all the ways that the wireless revolution has changed my life and everyone else's...even on vacation.

Upon landing in Europe, it was the GPS to the rescue to guide me to my final destination.  What did we all do before GPS?  And even along the route, the tollway was high-tech with EZPass (or the EU equivalent) and smart cards for payment.   At the hotel, I opted not to use the alarm on my Blackberry to wake me but even sitting around the pool, more than half the people were checking their Blackberries, iPhones and even laptop/netbook computers.   The beach wasn't any different and dare I say, sailboats too.  In the old days I would have spent a small fortune to put through overseas calls to my kids every night and sent postcards via snail mail (which would have arrived after my return). Now Blackberry to the rescue for emails and sms text to kids so I'm in constant touch. For tourist photo taking, mp3 playing, newspaper headline reading, horoscope checking, whatever I wanted to do, it seemed like my Blackberry could do it, instantly.   On the beach, at the pool, in the gym, in the room, at dinner, out dancing, ....no matter where or when, I was not alone with my wireless lifeline.  

I'm not advocating Blackberry over iPhones or other devices, I have an iPhone too.  But I digress. The point I want to share springs from an article that came across my desk just the other day:  Apples's iPhone 3GS Costs $178.96 to Manufacture  http://www.cellular-news.com/story/38186.php (and the list of parts comes from a who's who of our industry)  After having a quick read of it and making note of the "RF & Microwave" suppliers like Broadcom, Infineon and TriQuint, I smiled. It made me realize just how fitting AWR's tagline of 'Advancing the wireless revolution' truly is.  Whether you are an AWR customer, employee or friend, I know you share our passion for embracing the wireless revolution at work or play or even on vacation like me:-) This vacation really brought home to me how exciting it is to be a part of an industry that has had such a dramatic global impact on our ability to communicate and stay in touch.

Has anyone else out there had an "ah-ha" moment lately about the RF/microwave role in changing the world? Share your thoughts with us, or even just your summer vacation stories. Let's have some fun this summer!