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Two Anixter Divisions Benefit from Joint Hacienda Location
By Nicole Zaro Stahl Although it has passed the half-century mark, Anixter is a stellar example of the new breed of industrial distributor. Not only has the company segmented its markets into four very focused but diverse business units, but it has also blended three key value-added functions--customized supply chain services, technology expertise, and global reach—into its core competencies. The $6 billion, New York Stock Exchange-listed company has come a long way from the old distribution model of dialing a phone number, placing an order for parts, and giving a shipping address, notes Michelle Allard, Anixter Regional Vice President. “We don’t manufacture anything ourselves, but we have very strong partnering relationships with our customers and suppliers, helping them coordinate projects all over the world. Our Sales engineers help recommend solutions based on the application and then provide advice on choosing the right products or systems. We get the products to the destination, often outside the United States, taking care of customs and duties and taxes. We also know how to package and consolidate products into kits to cut down on costs.” These modern-day capabilities sharpen the competitive edge across all four divisions of the company--Aerospace Hardware, Fasteners, Electrical and Electronic Wire & Cable, and Enterprise Cabling & Security Solutions--the latter two of which have a Hacienda presence. Allard runs the local Enterprise Cabling & Security Solutions operation, which here consists of inside and outside sales representatives, Sales engineers, and customer support staff. Her colleague, Jack Maze, heads up a parallel sales and engineering organization as Senior Vice President for the Electrical/Electronic Wire & Cable division, which recently joined Allard’s group in new quarters at 4464 Willow Road. A total of 85 employees now occupy the 35,000-square-foot suite, which includes a demonstration lab. “It’s much better for us to have both divisions under one roof,” Allard comments about the joint facility. “We provide both network infrastructure and security products as well as Electrical/Electronic Wire & Cable and corresponding services to some of our accounts, which creates a lot more synergy for our business.” While the two groups service a wide swath of northern California, from Marin County to King City, most of their customers are concentrated in Silicon Valley. This proximity makes Hacienda “a great location,” she says, although in many instances the sites being supplied are in far-flung corners of the earth. “Getting products to some of these remote areas can be an intricate process, so we offload these responsibilities for our customers. Being global is very rare in this business, but it is one of our core strengths,” she emphasizes. Still, the two groups do their share of work closer to home. Allard’s division provided many of the network and security cabling systems that are installed in various buildings in the park. “We worked with the end users to help specify their systems, and then sold the systems to their contractors, who performed the installation,” she relates. Corporate headquarters are in Glenview, Ill., a Chicago suburb close to where the Anixter brothers originally founded the company as a reseller of electrical wire and cable back in 1957. For more information on its history and business units, visit www.anixter.com. Elluminate Walks the Walk of Online Learning
By Nicole Zaro Stahl New Hacienda tenant Elluminate is a proving ground for the advantages of its own technology. The company is headquartered in Calgary, where roughly half of its 100-plus workforce--developers, testers, and an accounting department, as well as service and support--is based. The Pleasanton office, at 4305 Hacienda Drive, currently has a total of seven employees, devoted to inside sales. The remainder are dispersed in more than a dozen major cities throughout the United States, and business development/sales people in Europe, Asia, and Latin America give the company a global presence. All are connected by Elluminate Live, the company’s flagship product for “live, online communication, collaboration, and education.” Its hallmarks are “high-quality voice over the Internet, robust interactive functionality, and unique No User Left Behind technology that supports multiple platforms and low-bandwidth connectivity,” according to the Elluminate web site. In layman’s terms, the technology is used to host online meetings, whether for mobile learners, remote classrooms, or mission-critical professional development—any situation where it is desirable to create a culture of collaboration. Elluminate’s major focus is on the education market, explains Carol Sullivan, Director of Global Sales Operations, who oversaw the opening of the Hacienda office in December. Distance learning, or eLearning, is becoming a major force in institutional pedagogy, and Elluminate’s products allow teachers to overcome the limits of geography to reach students all over the world. Tools like a chat function, white boards, and application-sharing enliven the interactive sessions. “Everyone can interact over the Internet at the same time. Students can ask questions and be addressed personally by the teacher,” Sullivan adds. Since its founding in 2000, Elluminate “has served more than 600 million web-collaboration minutes to over 3 million teachers and students located in 185 different countries.” The pace of innovation has hardly slackened. This past April saw the introduction of Elluminate VCS, a “multipoint video collaboration solution” targeted at the education market. The product, primarily software with a customer-premises server, overcomes the drawbacks of existing videoconferencing systems, which can range from high cost and limited scalability to significant hardware and support requirements. “Traditional videoconferencing does not provide the ease of use, interactive tools, data sharing, ad hoc invitations, and easy access needed to facilitate a truly collaborative experience for a wide audience,” Sullivan observes. From an overhead perspective, the server operates “exceptionally well on network speeds less than typical DSL connections” and is compatible with existing legacy infrastructure. “Elluminate VCS can reach more participants in a significantly more convenient and cost-effective way.” Other products in the corporate family include Elluminate Learning Suite, which supports the entire instructional cycle (“what happens before, during, and after a real-time, online session”); and Elluminate VSpaces, which gives users their own virtual office or classroom in which to hold web meetings, with full recording capability. For more information, visit elluminate.com. |
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