Testimonials
I found Fanny to be knowledgeable, thorough and objective in her technology evaluation efforts. She was responsive to aggressive schedules and produced high quality deliverables that proved extremely useful to both my engineering and marketing teams. — Tandhoni Rao, Ph.D.
Founder and VP Product Strategy
Radiospire Networks (2005-2008)
Product Advocacy Services
Product advocacy consists of formulating and delivering the message about the product’s benefits and competitive advantages. For wireless products and solutions, advocacy typically involves:
- Developing white papers explaining the product benefits
- Writing articles for mainstream industry publications on topics relating to the product offering
- Delivering presentations at industry conferences
- Patenting the key innovations so as to raise the barrier for competition
- Running and publishing competitive performance tests that demonstrate the product’s edge Influencing industry standards so as to create a competitive advantage for the product
In the data communications market even the best products have little chance of success unless they are standards-compliant. The challenge is getting to market ahead of competing companies all ostensibly working together, but actually hoping to influence the emerging standard to gain competitive advantage. Smart companies develop their product in parallel with the standard and advocate their approach for inclusion in the standard. This is a tough job that requires strong technical, diplomatic and missionary skills – all coordinated and focused on the goal of getting the best possible standards-based product to market ahead of others in the race.
Fanny Mlinarsky, octoScope’s founder, has a track record of doing advocacy successfully at Azimuth Systems and at Scope Communications. The challenges at Scope were multifold as the company was tiny and under-resourced. Nevertheless, through Matlab simulations, white papers, presentations and test events, Fanny influenced the multi-billion dollar cabling market to test twisted pair cabling beyond 100 MHz thereby advocating the unique architecture of the WireScope. Her papers on ATM channel requirements are still being referenced today in the cabling industry and her work was instrumental in successfully selling the company to HP/Agilent. For Azimuth, Fanny was able to start a working group dedicated to defining test methodologies for 802.11 products. Prior to her efforts with 802.11T, a test group has never existed under IEEE 802. She directed the development of the 802.11T draft to include controlled test architecture that is the foundation of the Azimuth architecture. This effort helped make Azimuth the de facto industry standard for wireless range and channel emulation testing.