Large server company Fujitsu partnered with Brocade to bring high performance networking blade to its blade server chassis. So, they needed market positioning and messaging for the new offering.  And for a strong foundation, the project had a competitive analysis and internal interviews. In the end, there were 2 deliverables – an internal positioning and messaging document and a white paper based on it. The client liked the project so much that they wanted the white paper to a WaveLength branded paper to distribute at their upcoming user conferences.

We like this project as an example of our ability to learn technical details of highly-engineered products.

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Standing Out in a Mature, Crowded Market

Fujitsu is the market leader in Japan with strong sales in Europe. But they needed to better compete against a new, aggressive entrant in the server market, Fujitsu partnered with Brocade. Using a Brocade’s switch in its product would improve network performance thereby enabling it to better compete. This new packaged product needed positioning and messaging to communicate benefits, so Fujitsu could retain market share.

Competitive Analysis + Internal Interviews for Strong Positioning and Messaging

1. Created a matrix of competitive products to understand “feeds and speeds” or capacity of all product components, storage, compute, and networking performance. We also researched sales channels, messaging and sales spins.
2. Conducted 10 interviews with product managers and sales engineers from both partners
3. Developed positioning and messaging aimed at data center engineering top managers and business decision-makers.

Combining forces, Fujitsu and Brocade is fundamentally different than competitors because it is the most energy efficient, highest memory density chassis with two-layer networking. This means it offers superior performance, flexibility, and ease of deployment and management. Our message was simple: The best performing blade servers begin with the best performing networks.

The clients liked the results so much that our final deliverable, a white paper on the data center solution, was branded as a WaveLength paper.