This entry is almost two weeks late...due to my hectic travel schedule, mostly. On Sept. 30th, Keith Larson and I met with Dennis Gillespie, president of MOST (MTL Open System Technologies) and his colleague, Dave Reynolds, vice president of marketing.
We talked about MTL, and how it has grown from little to larger, now approximately $100 million per year. Through all of this, MTL has maintained its focus as a vendor to OEMs...and has extensive relationships with Honeywell, Invensys, et al.
After the history lesson, the discussion got really interesting. MTL bought what is now MOST several years ago, and Gillespie and Reynolds and I got into a significant discussion about how to market a second tier control system against the Big Six...and even against other second tier vendors.
Obviously, the most useful channel is independent system integrators, and MTL has been an associate member of CSIA for many years.
But here's the thing: Gillespie and Reynolds get it! They understand that system integrators are not a low volume, low discount distributor channel. They understand that working with integrators is, in Nels Tyring's words back when he and I were teaching how to work with integrators to everyone who would listen to us, "getting married."
Gillespie and Reynolds surprised me by saying that they understood that they were going to have to find projects and feed them to the integrators they were interested in working with... and that is a realization that is so unusual among vendor companies that notice should be paid.
I'll be watching MOST carefully to see if they can walk the walk, and I won't be surprised if they do.
Walt
