Competitive Advantage
Sparks explores the challenges of defining and maintaining a competitive advantage with three talented business leaders:
- Judson B. Althoff, Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide Alliances & Channels
- Jamie Moldafsky, EVP, Sales, Marketing, Strategy & Customer Management, Wells Fargo Home Equity Group
- Brendan F. Reidy, President & Chief Executive Officer, Clarus Systems
Highlights
“Competitive advantage is best summed up as the ability to please customers better, faster, and more efficiently than anyone else.”
Judson B. Althoff
Read the full interview with Judson B. Althoff.
“To create a competitive advantage … figure out how to leverage [something you have] and make it uniquely sustainable. Our competitive advantage is that we are a cross‐selling machine.”
Jamie Moldafsky
Read the full interview with Jamie Moldafsky.
“We view our competitive advantage as our people, our market knowledge, and even our financing. Firms that lose their competitive advantage are those that become inwardly focused.”
Brendan F. Reidy
Read the full interview with Brendan F. Reidy.
Competitive Advantage: Brendan Reidy
Brendan Reidy
Brendan Reidy is a seasoned software and telecommunications executive.
Prior to joining Clarus, he was a Venture Partner and Entrepreneur in Residence for private equity firm Trident Capital. Mr. Reidy held senior executive positions at Qwest Communications International/US WEST, Litton Integrated Automation, and Software Alliance Corporation. He serves on the boards of eGistics, Inc. and Aran Technologies.
Mr. Reidy holds an A.B. from Stanford University and an M.B.A. from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
What is your definition of competitive advantage?
Some people think of competitive advantage as one thing – like having a patent. I look at it more holistically, as something you have to work at across the entire entity. Clarus Systems is an IP communications company. Our competitive advantage is our expertise and thought leadership in delivering voice over a data infrastructure – VOIP – at high levels of reliability.
That’s important because people have adapted to low levels of reliability across the entire value chain of data applications but for voice, there is a legacy of extremely high levels of reliability. If a CEO comes to work in the morning and his laptop isn’t working, he calls IT and they tell him to reboot. If he comes in and his phone isn’t working, he doesn’t call IT. He calls his chief counsel. Clarus is very sensitive to our customers’ and their end users’ need for extraordinarily high levels of uptime.
We’ve built a competitive advantage around understanding voice and data very well to meet customer demands. This includes our people. With the exception of our CFO, every vice president at Clarus has both a voice and data background. So, we view our competitive advantage holistically as our people, our market knowledge, and even our financing.
How has this competitive advantage driven growth for your company?
Our customers rely on us to combine the best technologies from the worlds of data and voice. We grow and enable our customers to grow by using our expertise to help them achieve the converged networks they need for their organizations.