Enterasys CEO takes over

Most technology CEOs get excited about taking a company public; Enterasys' new CEO Michael Fabiaschi sees going private as an equally interesting opportunity. Fabiaschi comes to Enterasys after private equity firm The Gores Group bought the vendor in 2005 and took it private. He recently sat down with Network World Senior Editor Phil Hochmuth to talk about his new job, and what's next for the company that is the last vestige of Cabletron still in operation independently.

What are your impressions of Enterasys after your short time on the job as CEO?

One week into this, I'd say that I'm blown away by the technology, the intellectual property, the people. This company has been through some difficult times, and we've retained all of the things you have to retain: that is, we have great customer relationships, great people, and great products and a great road map. We have over 600 patents. I have this fundamental belief that sales is a process; it's not a department. And that great companies basically treat sales as its own separate company, and they treat every customer interaction as an opportunity to really make the customer feel special.

We have perhaps been a little more product-centric; now I want us to be more customer-centric. It's one thing to have the product, but you have to make sure that people know how to market it. So they have to articulate why it's different and better and explain to customers how to use our products and take advantage of them. The most interesting thing that happens in technology today is that a company comes out with a technology that [has a lot of features], but if you look at their customer base, most of the customers only use [a few of the features]. It's not only coming out with product - it's the training, documentation and best practices that go along with it. How one company uses it is totally different than how someone else might use it. Learning should be empirical. These things should come from the installed base. Thought leadership should occur in the field. If someone does something with the product that's interesting and unique. I believe you should find a way to bring it back and spread it out to as many people as you can.

How is it different taking over a hardware-focused company, coming from the software world, where you were once CEO of Aprisma, Enterasys' former management software arm, and most recently, a vice president at CA?

The thing about software, you really have no constraints. You can reinvent a software company, if you wanted to, and do something totally different tomorrow. Whereas in the hardware business, you're basically tooled up - even if you do your own manufacturing. You gear your whole company around a certain product set. So you don't have the flexibility to change your business priorities as much as you could in the software business. Having said that, the whole idea of selling solutions is almost identical. People don't buy a networking solution today without knowing what the road map is. They don't buy a switch from you today just based on what you have today. They want to know you'll be around two years from now or four years from now. They want to have the kind of relationship with you where they give you input into your products going forward. So those things are all very similar. Those are things where Enterasys can really be different, as a smaller $350 million company; I can take the time to meet with people in customer meetings, with customers who are saying what they want to have. Customers love to be sitting across from the CEO.