Management Motivations: Handling hyperscale deployments and fragmented customer demands

Management Motivations is a new series of articles by Quectel’s senior executives that explores their management styles, approaches to the challenges of further developing the company and what drives them to lead and succeed.

Doron Zhang, COO:

No 2: Handling hyperscale deployments and fragmented customer demands

The IoT market is hugely diverse with so many differences between customers, regions, the technologies used and the products and things that are connected. To serve these variations, you can’t be like any other standard service company. For them, as scale increases the operating costs don’t go up, but we sell hardware in multiple different versions in order to meet our varying customers’ needs.

This does not worry me since I regard it as simply a challenge for us to address. For example, we can work to find good ways to sell our products to everyone in the market and ensure we can scale up rapidly when customers’ projects take off. Our goal is to be able to serve all types of customers in all regions, across all applications.

We therefore have to be flexible to meet everyone’s needs and this is a central part of Quectel’s philosophy. From the very beginning, we have had an excellent understanding of our goals. We have grown step by step from small scale to very large scale and during this journey, our top-level engineers have always been thinking about how to optimize the company – across the entire range of modules.

Part of our challenge is maintaining quality as the volumes grow and balancing that with the requirements of customers. For example, some projects require an extremely high-quality solution with a short lead time and a very critical quality control process.  Other organizations might have different requirements and we can address these too because we ensure we have the flexibility to serve all the different types of customers.

What I really like about Quectel is that we have the ability to continuously improve ourselves day-after-day. It’s not as if this challenge of large volumes and market fragmentation has suddenly emerged. We’ve seen it coming and set out strategies and built the company to have the flexibility to be ready to meet our customers’ needs. That means we’re ready to support customers’ smaller deployments but also to be the supplier of choice for customers who are hitting hyperscale deployment volumes. For us there’s no upper or lower limit in terms of serving customers, we just work harder to find a way to ensure we can deliver an effective solution that meets the diverse needs of our wide range of customers.

Look out for my next blog in this series: “Keep focused on end users, customers and real-world deployments”