Large Enough to Succeed, Small Enough to Care – The Hughes Approach to Enterprise Solutions
I often get asked, “What does Hughes do?” How do you answer that question when Hughes has such a strong history of innovation, technical leadership, and service delivery over a broad range of markets?
We provide the solutions our customers need to connect their remote sites securely to the internet or their headquarters. Our portfolio includes a broad assortment of connectivity options from over 400 partners; we tailor solutions from market-leading partners like Fortinet, Meraki, and HP for security, Wi-Fi, and Voice over IP (VoIP); and we provide digital signage and training solutions utilizing our own software. This allows us to connect people located everywhere from remote sites to urban centers to airplanes at 30,000 feet traveling at 500+ MPH. With that set of capabilities, there are very few business networking requirements that we cannot find a way to satisfy. And most importantly, all that technology is supported and turned into services by professional, customer-focused sales, program management, network engineering, and operations teams.
During my career, I have seen the market transition from products-based to service and experience-based—and the same goes for Hughes. That transition has been driven by a couple of trends.
From Product to Service and Beyond
The first trend is that vendors have rapidly accelerated the capabilities of their products to align with customer requirements, resulting in most products meeting the customer needs, and technical differentiation being much harder to maintain. However, when you can differentiate based on service quality – like we do at Hughes -- that’s when the magic happens. Our long-term customers have universally praised Hughes for treating them like partners and doing whatever it takes to contribute to their success.
Keeping Pace with Change
The second trend is that the pace of change has rapidly increased. Instead of fighting to stay in front of all the technology, the Hughes team has instead focused on using our engineering talent to augment the available technology and tools to wrap the service with customizations and software that improve the customer experience through the lifecycle of a project. This is reflected in our considerable investment in AIOps and data science to be preemptive in addressing performance impacting events and to enable faster resolution by improving the triage capabilities during outages.
Large Enough to Succeed, Small Enough to Care
At our recent Hughes User Group event, I had the opportunity to sit down with a wide range of customers and get their honest feedback about Hughes solutions and how we can help alleviate their pain points. That’s part of our secret sauce – not just our proven history in delivering and operating large networks, but our commitment to offering tailored solutions, personal interactions and continuous innovation.
I have had the privilege of being part of the Enterprise team for more than twenty-five years. During that time, the capabilities and mission of the team have expanded greatly, but, in answering the question, “What does Hughes do?” it all comes down to: “We have been securely and reliably connecting businesses with their employees and customers for more than 50 years.”