Comm J Market Notes
#53, March 2008
What Japanese Customers Want - 1
People ask me what Japanese customers want. Besides the obvious things like long-term business relations with people who speak Japanese, there are a few requirements worth noting.
#1 - In the network area, customers want redundancy. This is the case not only for carriers, but for any enterprise larger than a SoHo.
Western system vendors coming to Japan often expect an ROI-based redundancy approach, in which customers analyze the probability of failure at each link, and implement a total solution that provides high uptime spec at an affordable cost.
In Japan, it's much simpler. You install two units of each network device with redundant cabling. You duplicate your external communication lines either through 2 fibers with different routing, or 1 fiber and a backup by copper, wireless, etc.
Higher cost? Yes. But, you assure a high reliability operation that is always up.
What Japanese Customers Want #2 – stay tuned next time