- Crawford Beveridge CBE, Executive Vice-President, Sun Microsystems
Part 2
As an Executive Vice President at Sun Microsystems, Crawford Beveridge, knows very well the importance of competing on a global field and protecting the company’s interests in such high-growth countries like China and India. However, he also recognizes the vast opportunities that exist in his native Scotland, where he served as head of Scottish Enterprise for eight years.
In Part 2 of a two-part interview with 2in10 Ltd Chairman Alastair Balfour, Crawford talks about the importance of a company’s IP, networking and energizing the ‘birth rate’ of companies in Scotland.
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You know the Scottish scene better than most. What are the technologies or companies that you think can do well here?
There are a lot of good fledgling companies here. Leaving out life sciences and even energy, there are a lot of good things going on in Scotland. Companies like Wolfson are obvious examples, but there are lot of good businesses that are starting to spin out of the universities. One of the most gratifying things of the past ten years is that the universities are starting to get serious about the commercialisation process.
What, in particular, do you see as Scotland’s strong areas of technology, apart from the obvious one of software?
I think we do microprocessors very well, and some of the speckled computing stuff that is coming out of Edinburgh University is very relevant.
What scale does a Scottish company have to achieve to get Sun’s attention?
We’ll pick stuff up from a pretty early stage. If they have a really good technology and a sound customer proposition, and of course the IP side is clean, then the size is much less important to us. We have bought companies from 15 people up to 7,000 people. For instance, a while back we bought a company in Trondheim (Norway) that at the time had only 18 people. They’re still there today.
What sorts of requirements are placed on a company entering Sun’s partner programme? Presumably it’s not ‘business as usual’?
No it’s not. In legal terms the company then looks at Sun as a prime contractor. There are a whole bunch of issues around IP that we have to solve, a whole bunch of issues around who makes money out of this, and a lot of commitments about the way we treat customers – that you’ll ship stuff on time, that quality is right and so on, as it is Sun that will be blamed for any problems as we bought the partner to the table.
Do you advise management teams on how they should structure in order to meet this new level of commitment?
We haven’t done a lot in that respect, but we do expose them to how Sun does business so there is probably a lot of learning by osmosis as it were.
We only have the one real international technology success story in Scotland, in Wolfson Microelectronics. Do you feel we have enough potential to grow a real IT sector?
Successful economies grow by churning hundreds of companies, which is why we need to grow our business birth rate. But, there is a tremendous amount of intellectual property in Scotland, and the more we can tease that out into companies, the more Wolfsons we are likely to get.
You know Scotland better than most international technology managers. Are you encouraged by what you observe here?
I am encouraged. There is a lot of good technology and a lot of people are serious about growing significant businesses.
We do need to develop more of a critical mass of focus around Product and Channel marketing issues. How could the Scottish Executive, Scottish Enterprise help?
People tend to learn from their peer group. All we need here, I believe, is a little seed money from Scottish Enterprise, or the Executive, to get the ball rolling, to encourage people who have had this epiphany experience to congregate together and share their experiences, and talk about what else we could do in Scotland to promote this whole issue.
At the end of the day though, the proof of this particular pudding has to be found in people building larger businesses and making more money.
That’s exactly right. And people need to be patient. It took Wolfson a long long time to make the breakthrough but now they’re on a roll. I’m confident that they are going to become a really big company.
They made the real breakthrough when they bought two Silicon Valley people on to their board in preparation for the flotation. They ensured that the company had proper product and channel processes in place.
I think that’s a really important issue. Start-up companies here should really consider getting a US person on their board early so that (a) they have networks, (b) they truly understand this whole area of product marketing, and (c) they are connected in to VCs in the US. This is all needed to help get into the US market on a proper basis, which most technology companies want to do, partly for the experience and partly because that is where a lot of the decisions are made about future technologies and products.
You are likely to have to connect with someone in the US in the major companies to be really successful. Just starting cold and on your own is a really hard thing to do, whereas doing it through someone else’s networks will save a phenomenal amount of time and money. I know it’s expensive and it takes a lot of time to do, but the GlobalScot network is as good a place to start as any. There are hundreds of this type of people out there and many are just looking for excuses to come back to Scotland.
You have said that in about a year or so you would like to be able to spend more time back here, perhaps working with some companies. Is that still on your radar?
It is. I’m very fortunate in that the job I do doesn’t always have to be done from California. I’m already starting to spend significant chunks of time working out of Scotland and going where I need to do. Brussels is very handy; it’s the same distance to places like China, India and South Africa. That gives me a little spare time to try and help out where I can.
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Click here for Part 1 of the interview.
