This post was written by Meru’s new Senior Vice President Ram Appalaraju. He joined us recently to elevate Meru into that rarified air shared by companies that are built to last. Welcome Ram! We’re happy to have you!
Why Meru?
People generally make one of the hardest decisions when switching jobs. The decision often has several criteria including career direction, confidence to succeed, belief in company strategy, market dynamics, competitive environment, etc. etc. And yes, there is a list of personal reasons as well. I am amongst those who recently made a decision to join Meru Networks’ executive team.
I have been in high technology marketing for over 25 years, being part of large and smaller, public and private, and innovative and mainstream companies. There are several key factors that contributed my decision to join Meru and I’d like to share that process with you here on Signal2Noise.
Career wise, amongst the roles I’ve had, I enjoyed the challenge of bringing innovative solutions into mainstream markets. What impressed me most about Meru is genuine innovation, passionate customers, and a team of some of the smartest people I ever worked with. Particularly I was impressed not only with this team’s unique focus on what it takes to achieve superior end user experience and understanding of market and customer needs, but also has passion, creativity, and vision with which they are responding to those needs.
As a career marketer, I was looking for an opportunity that has the potential of positively impacting broad range of audiences:
Customers, Partners, Analysts, Press and Sales force.
In my experience most companies (even good ones) only impress a subset of these audiences. My recent few days certainly validated that Meru has positively impacted this audience and has the potential to raise the bar even higher.
As for my first impression, well, let me share what I gathered as customers’ impression of Meru solutions. Some of the customers’ feedback I have received has been stunningly positive. The best kudos a complicated technology can receive is when customers appreciate and value simplicity derived from it. That is exactly feedback I have been receiving from some of the Meru customers. So when I double click on the customers’ definition of simplicity, typical answer I’m getting is “…Meru wireless solutions has all the behaviors of wire.. and more….” or even “we put it in and it just worked so we didn’t touch it!”. So quite simply the feedback I have received has been all about positive end user experiences.
So if I net it out, why Meru for me? Smart people, great marketing opportunity, passionate and happy customers. A great position to be in to start with!
Let the ride begin!
