We’re very excited over here at Xuropa as the global reach of the community is growing rapidly. We’re getting members sign up from all over the world.
Here is the top ten list of countries:
- United States
- India
- France
- UK
- Israel
- Germany
- Canada
- Lithuania
- Netherlands
- Singapore
What started out as intuition is proving to be accurate in our statistics. Specifically, India continues to rise as an electronic design powerhouse and is hungry for information, tools and training.
This situation will continue to become more pronounced as we move forward. According to an article in Machine Design - India has about 3,500 engineering colleges that graduate over 450,000 engineers every year.
As a technology provider this poses a significant business challenge, especially given this period of tightening budgets. Vendors need to get products in front of engineers if they want to be included in the next generation of chip or system design. Even though many of the engineering teams in India are subsidiaries of European or US companies, you cannot rely on “natural proliferation” through a company. So the paradox stands - how to engage a global user-base without investing in a global physical presence.
The Good News
Setting up remote offices in India is not really an option for many companies. And flying applications engineers out every month is equally untenable over the long term. Fortunately, we’ve moved into a different era of engagement. While it certainly helps to meet a prospective user face-to-face, and for many relationships it is essential, it is no longer necessary to all phases of the process. For years India has been doing business remotely leveraging the web. Now technology vendors elsewhere in the world need to capitalize on this cultural reality.
Of course, the adoption process has not changed. Users in India still need to be taken through the same steps:
- Introduction
- Demonstration
- General Technical Training
- Application Specific Training
- Evaluation
There are separate online services available that can help with the first one or two steps of this process (such as LinkedIn or Webex), but these are point tools and not a complete solution. They don’t provide a single environment that enables you to go through these steps. Importantly, they do not provide an environment where a potential user can take themselves through these steps.
Fortunately, this is where the Xuropa Platform can be leveraged. For example, a Xuropa Online Lab is used to carry out steps 1 through 4 (and also quite a bit of 5). Within the Online Lab you have all the tools to manage and carry out technology introductions, demonstrations and hands-on training without any downloads or installs for the user. Users can even do this themselves while your applications engineer is offline (getting some valuable sleep in between fighting fires!). Importantly though, the Online Lab provides the information and tools to enable your technical support staff to follow up after the fact using data taken from the lab session run remotely. Which is useful considering 4:00pm in Mumbai is 2:30am in California!
As Thomas Friedman said, “The World is Flat” and we need to engage.
This is what we do - we enable you to connect your technology with the engineers that will use it.
Posted under business, industry, marketing
This post was written by James Colgan on November 13, 2008
