Company Interview Excerpt
JACK A. BLAESER - CONCORD COMMUNICATIONS INC (CCRD)
Full article published: 12/01/1998
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Mr. Blaeser: Concord is in the business of providing decision support software to information technology executives, from enterprises, telcos and service providers. It is a performance analysis and reporting software package that is installed within a couple of hours and within the same day, we provide color graphic reports that allow business executives to make business decisions. We help the director of information technology make decisions about where and when to expand capacity; to minimize his data communications bill with his carrier without compromising service to his end users; to establish, monitor and document the level of service he's providing to his end users which is a very hot issue currently within the IT community and with the predictive technology, allow them to manage the problems within a network on a proactive basis before they cause the degradation of service with their end users. This is the business we're in. It's a new opportunity. Concord introduced its first product, Network Health, in April of 1995. Before Concord arrived, there were software packages available in the network management and systems management arena, but they were more on the philosophy, 'The network is broken, how do I fix it?' They were real time, troubleshooting tools that were aimed at solving technical problems for the technician. So before we came along, it was treated as a kind of unique technology. Back five, six years ago, the CEOs were happy that e-mail worked. They were thrilled. Now, when we came along, we decided that this was a real financial asset and what the CEO wanted to know now is 'What return did I get on my 100 million, 200 million, 500 million or 1 billion of investment already and why have I invested another 20 million, 40 million, 100 million in IT infrastructure next year, and what return will I get?' And we decided that the asset IT infrastructure had matured to the point where it's executive management needed a decision support package that let them make these business decision in an informed manner. So we introduced the product in April of 1995 and since that time, Concord has accumulated over 850 major accounts, enterprise telcos and service providers who use our product to manage their networks. And in addition, another 800 to 1,000 accounts have purchased our product as a service from service providers. So in a space of three and a half years, we have about 1,500 to 2,000 enterprises who are using our product on a daily basis, to manage their information technology investments. We've also managed to double our sales each year starting in 1996, 1997 and year to date in 1998, we're growing over 100 percent. So we apparently have found a sweet spot in the market where nobody else was providing this type of solution and have so far executed in a reasonable manner to gain a dominant market share in this market space.
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