Driven by the philosophy of the company, “maximum value for the customer” Sandeep Vij Vice President Marketing, Xilinx outlines the marketing strategy of this programmable logic company.

Xilinx is one of the fastest growing companies in the Programmable Logic Devices segment of the Semiconductor industry, with over 50 percent market share in 2004, according to Gartner. Gartner forecasts the PLD market to grow to $4.5 billion in 2006, $5.2 billion in 2007 and $6.3 billion in 2008.

As an advanced technology company, Xilinx uses a specific model to drive their framework of selling high, wide and deep. “The fundamental model I use is the AKA model. Awareness, knowledge and adoption,” declares Vij.

In the semiconductor world Vij recognizes not only the need for promotion of the brand but also the utility and value of the product.

Leveraging both traditional and the new generation media, Vij considers creating awareness for a broad spectrum of customers to create sustainable value and credibility.

In such an effort to accelerate customer time-to knowledge and adoption, Vij pioneered Terabit Networking forum, Home Networking Industry forum, and Programmable World that provide a platform for learning and understanding.

“One of the things I pay most attention to is not only what people think of our products, but what people think of the company in how it presents those, I look very closely into credibility,” says Vij.

The forum held every18 months is a place where experts from different companies amalgamate homegrown technologies and present solutions for a particular sector getting traction in the market. “Ours is a technical product, and nobody will use our product unless they know how to use it! So we teach people on what they can do with the silicon,” he says.

While Xilinx invests significantly in learning, the forum provides the foundation to understand the capacity of the silicon. “Xilinx spends a considerable portion in teaching people,” he says.

After the knowledge phase tapers off, the marketing goal comes into play to ensure that the earlier phase culminates into an accelerated adoption phase. Vij says, “Adoption is primarily the realm of the sales organization, what marketing can do is accelerate the adoption by pre-packaging, and segmenting appropriately the application in customer base and make it very easy for the customer to go through the adoption process.”

The tough adoption phase is made less steep by providing design kits, diagrams, instructional DVD’s, all in a layman’s language. These kits are intended to help the customer customize the PLD himself.

It is at the level of adoption that the framework to help sell high, wide and deep germinates. Selling high means reaching out to as many customers as possible. “There is very low incremental R&D and very high leverage.

The ROI is very high,” he confirms.
Vij emphasizes on executive level engagements for many key customers, when selling product-to-product, socket-to-socket or design-to-design. “We sell company to company, for that we need to sell high,” he says. Xilinx has programs in place for this very purpose.
Sell deeper into key customers he says. Vij illustrates “For customers using logic, you want to sell them high speed DSP, with better processing capability.” Here he brings in his emphasis on credibility. “Your customers must view you as a credible supplier, you talk their language, understand these technologies well,” he says.

Involving and internalizing the customer in the process of developing supply chains for that customer and even determine how to get higher-level system architecture engagements.