behind the towers

Bringing Gary Bowen on-board as the Vice President, Sales & Marketing, proved to be a seminal milestone in Wellfleet’s evolution as a leading player in the router market. He had come from Masscomp, a Westford, MA based manufacturer of engineering workstations that competed with products from Apollo Computer, Sun Microsystems, and Digital Equipment. 

Gary had hired Dick Eyestone as a National Account Manager for Masscomp, and in the spring of 1991, Gary asked Dick to come to Wellfleet to manage the Southern Region. Dick lived in North Carolina and was interested but he first wanted to meet with Wellfleet’s Vice President, US Sales, Paul Sylvia. Paul happened to be traveling to Washington, D.C. around that time, so Dick flew up to meet him. After their meeting, Paul made a verbal offer to Dick as he was “pleasantly surprised” by Dick. Dick took the verbal offer as binding, and proceeded to make two new hires before he had even received his official offer letter from Wellfleet!

Dick quickly realized that Wellfleet’s products were the best for customers who valued reliability, scalability and performance over the number of boxes to check on a list of features. This meant that the most likely prospects for him to direct the sales team toward were utilities, banks, and other enterprise customers who were adopting a client-server computing model. Closing those customers quickly became a race between two horses – Wellfleet and Cisco.

Whichever company was first through the door of a prospective customer was able to set the agenda. If a Wellfleet sales rep was asked the question “Do you support routing of Banyan Vines traffic?” it was evident that the Cisco sales rep had already been there. Wellfleet did not offer routing software for Banyan Vines, and had no plans to do so. If routing Banyan Vines traffic was a firm customer requirement, we were wasting our time with any further discussion.

After about a year, Dick realized that Wellfleet was winning router deals and not encountering Cisco. Dick undertook an extensive analysis of Wellfleet’s prospects, categorizing each one by revenue, employee count, etc. He started with the Fortune 1000 and discovered that most of the companies that he investigated had not made a commitment to either Cisco or Wellfleet. Much of the enterprise market for routers was apparently still up for grabs. The result of Dick’s analysis was to staff several new sales teams to blanket the Southern Region. Ironic, considering that Cisco’s CEO, John Chambers, was raised in Charleston, West Virginia, and considered himself a Southerner.

In one instance, Dick asked the CIO of Georgia Pacific, one of the world’s largest producers of packaging and building products, “Are you going to give us a fair shake or do you want me to give you a low-ball quote so you can beat Cisco down on price?” The CIO, who had recently left Disney, was stunned. He replied, “I have never heard anything like that come out of the mouth of a sales rep before. I really appreciate your directness!”

At North Carolina National Bank – later, NationsBank, which subsequently merged with Bank of America – a network engineer named Chuck Robbins was engaged in a similar evaluation of Cisco and Wellfleet routers. He came to the same conclusion as many others – Wellfleet offered superior reliability, scalability and performance –  and recommended that NCNB standardize on Wellfleet routers. Additionally, Robbins approached the sales rep, Bob Boone, about coming to work for Wellfleet. Dick interviewed him, hired him, then Robbins proceeded to win the account at Wachovia. Robbins stayed on as the NCNB account manager, and afterward, NCNB thought the world of Wellfleet’s sales and system engineering team.

Today, Chuck Robbins is the Chair, and Chief Executive Officer of Cisco.

Ron Murphy followed a similar path from Bell South to Wellfleet. While with Bell South, Ron stated that they did not believe in the future of IBM’s SNA model. Bell South was convinced that the future of computing was embodied in the client-server model. The client-server model envisioned workstations and personal computers providing desktop computing resources while servers were purpose-built, centralized platforms for shared storage, all connected through high-speed networks. The missing piece, to Ron and Bell South, was the router. Given the critical role that high-performance networking played in this model, reliability, scalability and performance were the most important attributes of the router to Bell South. And other enterprises like them.

Leveraging their experience with Masscomp in selling the client-server model to corporate America, Gary and Dick delivered a powerful and convincing message to Wellfleet’s router prospects.

Dick’s estimated that Wellfleet had 75% market share of the Fortune 1000 in the South. “We didn’t call on universities or research labs unless they called us. We won nearly every utility in the South except South Carolina Electric and Gas.”

Several years later, when NCNB were planning to merge with Bank of America, Cisco’s CEO John Chambers, called the CEO of NCNB and stated that Cisco wanted to deposit $10M in his bank, but shouldn’t NCNB become a Cisco customer first? After the subsequent “rip and replace” had taken place, most of the NCNB system engineers became Wellfleet employees. You win some, but…you can still lose ‘em later.

Nonetheless, approximately 30% of Wellfleet’s revenue came out of the southern region in the early 90’s. Bell South alone supplied $15-20M of revenue to Wellfleet each year, all of the routers being deployed in Bell South’s internal data network.

Typically, winning a Fortune 250 company in the South meant that Wellfleet’s revenue breakdown would be roughly 20% in year 1, 50% in year 2, and 30% in year 3. The sales cycle required an average of six months, divided into three phases – phase 1, first contact to start of an internal product evaluation; phase 2, product evaluation start to finish; phase 3, evaluation completed to first purchase order.

After Bay Networks was formed from the merger of SynOptics and Wellfleet in mid-1994, a tsunami of management changes ensued owing to the failure to plan for “life after the merger” prior to the closing of the merged companies. Sales projections proved to be wildly optimistic. Wall Street was disappointed. And so were the investors.

Dick moved to California in early 1995 to manage all of Bay’s U.S. sales operations. After eighteen months of attempting to make the merger work in his new role, the friction between Dick and the West Coast management team became too great. Lloyd Carney, who took over as the company’s COO in charge of the enterprise business, told Dick, “If you walk, all of the old Wellfleet guys are going to leave”. The company needed someone to spearhead a family of new network security products, so Dick agreed to serve as the network security visionary, moving his family back to North Carolina.

Bay had lost a pioneer in the development of the router business in the American South. It was a portent of things to come.