A Fast Solution

"Randy … Looks great. Thanks a lot for your help. I really appreciate it. I look forward to working with you again."

-- Director Storage Product Marketing, SeaChange International

With customers like Verizon and Comcast, my client, SeaChange International is the largest provider of play-to-air and video-on-demand technology to broadcasters and cable operators worldwide. It sells the two things these customers need most — quality of service and efficient storage. Consumers today want a big selection of content and they want flawless picture and sound.

SeaChange International’s marketing problem is that other technology providers make similar claims -- and cite all kinds of benchmarks to back them up. Of course, SeaChange has its own benchmarks. But it has something going for it that its competitors don’t -- in addition to benchmarks; it has a better technology argument. If you can simply (and fast) say how the technology works, it pretty much sells itself.

A great example is this pair of solution briefs -- one for broadcasters and one for cable operators -- on its FAST architecture. FAST stands for flash assisted storage technology, an acronym I suggested.

The need was to explain a VOD-optimized storage architecture in four to six pages. The solution was showing how two features that often work in opposition to each other — speed and reliability — now build off the same technical insight.

A lot of technology companies have the same problem as SeaChange. They’ve got genuinely smarter technology. But customers don’t give them much time to explain why it’s smarter or why that even matters. When you assign a project like this to a writer, it’s not just the writer that needs to work faster. The words do too.