Uber, Beer and Keysight

On a recent Uber ride in Colorado Springs, my driver was a retiree of Anheuser-Busch, who recently started his Uber career mostly for the social aspects of the job. With pride, he talked about the start of his career at Anheuser-Busch as a truck driver, delivering beer to local restaurants and working up the ladder and becoming a sales and office manager. He benefited from the national introduction of Bud Light in the 1980s, which is now one of the best-selling beer brands in the world.

As usual I was looking for connection points and similarities to our industry, particularly in the sales organization. On Keysight Investor day, Senior Vice President of Global Sales, Mark Wallace, outlined three areas that triggered me to strike up the following beer-to-high-tech commonalities:

  1. Direct and indirect sales model: Keysight has more than 650 channel resellers and solution partners to reach every single engineer who could benefit from our test equipment, solutions, and services. My Uber driver emphasized the importance of scalability by selling to 7-Eleven stores around the city, touching customers who might not be touched through their traditional channels.
  2. Deep customer connections: Just as our retiree knew each and every restaurant, convenience store, and even military base in town, our 2700 Keysight customer-facing and customer-support resources foster deep customer relationships on a daily basis, serving more than 32,000 customers in 100 countries around the world.
  3. Innovation is a constant requirement no matter which industry we’re talking about. According to Forbes magazine, the number one beer trend of 2018 is “better beer.” While classic domestic beers, such as Bud, Miller and Coors still dominate but are declining, other styles of craft beer, India Pale Ale (IPAs) or wheat beers are rising in popularity. Correlating this to electronic test and measurement, we see market segmentation as well. What was good enough twenty years ago is no longer sufficient as demands for better quality and sophisticated needs rise. Keysight welcomes a similar challenge. To drastically simplify, our solutions might well be the IPAs and our traditional products are the Buds, Millers and Coors of this world. Our classic products and hardware are still very central and core to our customer’s success. Our deep understanding on market trends, participation in standards bodies and hundreds of customer engagements all come together in workflow solutions, layering software and hardware while assisting our customers with their productivity and cost challenges.
    • As an example, just recently Keysight and Qualcomm Technologies, have achieved 2 Gbps LTE download data speeds using Keysight’s 5G Protocol R&D Toolset solution and Qualcomm Technologies’ mobile test device. The 5G protocol test solution, a part of Keysight’s suite of Network Emulation Solutions is the only seamless radio frequency (RF) and protocol workflow approach that enables chipset and device manufacturers to efficiently develop and test the latest 4G and evolving 5G standards in a single solution.
    • ​Or, as seen at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) in March, Innolight, a global leader in high-speed optical transceivers, uses a wide array of Keysight solutions in the development of their 400G OSFP 2xFR4 and LR8, 400G QSFP-DD FR4 and SR8 transceivers for 400G PAM4 data center applications.

These are just two examples of Keysight solutions. Whether you innovate designs as a 5G device manufacturer, an LTE service provider, or a car manufacturer, Keysight helps you to get there faster while creating, optimizing, and monitoring with more confidence.

I hope you enjoyed this Uber detour with some beer tasting of domestic classics, IPAs and craft beers. Prost!

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