SeeByte

CASE STUDY: CHANGING YOUR DNA CAN TREBLE YOUR SALES

SeeByte Ltd was founded in 2001 in Edinburgh, Scotland with the aim of bringing to market technologies designed at the world-class Ocean Systems Laboratory of Heriot-Watt University. OSL has a reputation of global excellence and is consulted by the world’s leading operators in the offshore, military and transportation sectors. Founding CEO Professor David Lane had a vision to radically improve underwater operations by combining streams of sensor-derived data from remote operated assets and create a “single integrated picture” to deliver situational awareness across some of the world’s most extreme locations. In other words SeeByte’s software enables un-manned submarines to ‘see’ where they are, identify what is around them and act accordingly.

Originally focused on serving individual customers, Seebyte provided bespoke solutions to complex problems in both military and sub-sea oil markets. Its SeeTrack system has seen active service in recent major conflicts and performed with flying colours. SeeByte now employs 25 people and has achieved its first successful licensed product deployments including US Navy Special Clearance Team One and the Royal New Zealand Navy.

But the company had always recognised it needed to become better at developing products to meet actual market needs, rather than following the traditional path of designing and building one-off projects. It also needed to find faster routes to market capable of delivering volume sales of its software licences, to optimise the huge latent potential of its technology. Scottish Enterprise Edinburgh and Lothians, which has been a consistent supporter of SeeByte, put the company forward for this Programme, and it was accepted.

Solution:

2in10 began work on delivering the Product and Channel training early in 2006 to the company’s senior management team including Prof. Lane and CFO Stuart Genet. Two prospective product managers were identified to go through the training and then undertake two-week immersion placements at US operations of SUN Microsystems, organised with the support of Globalscot Crawford Beveridge, SUN Executive Vice-President and former Chief Executive of Scottish Enterprise. They were Alastair Cormack, SeeByte Military PM, and Ioseba Tena, SeeTrack Offshore PM. Ioseba visited Sun’s Santa Clara head office, and Alastair its Austin, Texas based Identity Management division

Implementation:

2in10’s first step was to determine SeeByte’s priorities. These were identified as:

• Help the company switch strategic focus from projects to product

• make the journey to serving markets rather than individual customers
• Technically to move from bespoke development to scaleable, market-ready products
• Develop positioning and messaging based on well-researched market requirements
• Re-orientate the company structure and resources around market requirements

In addition to the Product and Channel training, 2in10 proposed a number of structural changes to the company’s organization to enable it to achieve this radical shift in strategy and focus. These included the creation of a Marketing Department and the identification of two engineering managers to switch roles to become Product Managers – Alastair and Ioseba. In addition a Sales Department was established and the previously all-encompassing technical function was reshaped into an Engineering Department. A separate CTO role was created for Yvan Petillot, a co-founder of the company and its technical visionary, and a VP Engineering was appointed.

The process of creating Market Requirement Documents (MRDs), a commit register from engineering and Product Roadmaps were installed. A Channel Strategy was created for both of the company’s major verticals: this rapidly resulted in early channel sales into the NZ Navy.

Meanwhile through their placements at SUN, Alastair Cormack and Ioseba Tena underwent intensive exposure to the daily life of product management in a major market-focused corporation. In particular Alastair worked closely with Anthony Medeiros, SUN’s senior director of Global Channel Strategy, which he found to be a hugely energizing experience.

Benefits:

Prof Lane says that the programme has achieved nothing less than the transformation of SeeByte into a successful market-focused company with rapidly accelerating sales. “This project has changed our lives. We now have a genuine market focus in our positioning, customer selection, training and targets. The business has been completely reorganized with a Product and Channel focus. And we are fully committed to using MRDs as that is where the gold-dust lies in defining products that the market truly needs.”

Prof Lane revealed that at the end of 2006, SeeByte was already $2m ahead on its planned sales pipeline for 2007 including its first major channel order from the Royal New Zealand Navy. “We got this because we now have MRDs and a proper market focus. That is absolutely fabulous and we couldn’t have achieved it without having gone through this programme.”

And for Alastair Cormack, he described as ‘priceless’ the time he spent with SUN in California. “It brought massive benefits to the company and to myself, being able to work with people who do Product Management as their day job. One of the key resources I brought back was a ‘Return on Investment Tool’ which SUN provide to their prospective customers so that they can work out for themselves the prospective benefits from using a SUN product. That is a powerful selling instrument.”

Both Prof Lane and Alastair Cormack believe that this programme has been so powerful for them that it should be made available to other high-potential Scottish ICT product companies. “It would make a huge difference to the performance of our IT sector,” says Prof Lane.

For more details download the Step-Change Programme document (PDF)