Persona messaging

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Next-Gen Factory Networking

How to use this persona messaging to bring the Next-Gen Factory Networking story to the IT and OT audiences.

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Manufacturing business drivers
Buyer types
IT vs. OT buyers

Manufacturing business drivers

Personas

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Buyer types

Personas

Two worlds converging

Digitization and security requirements are driving IT and OT teams to be more interdependent on each other than ever before. While the OT teams are focused on solving problems around availability, product quality, and workforce enablement, IT Teams are focused on network management with automation, assurance, and security.

Two types of buyers

The traditional IT buyer who is responsible for deploying, managing, and securing the company network and increasingly, the industrial network.
The Operational Technology (OT) buyer, or line-of-business buyer, who ensures production continuity, understands business processes, and uses IoT data to improve the bottom line.

You can sell IoT to both buyers, but there is more opportunity in OT:

OT controls the majority of budget, and IoT is an OT-driven, IT-supported sale. If you don’t know your OT buyer, ask IT to introduce you. The best-case scenario is to have OT and IT in the room together while selling so you can address both of their concerns at once, but with OT budgets growing due to high demand for digitization, they should be your focus.

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IT vs. OT buyers

Personas

To successfully sell to OT, you will need to speak their language

OT buyers don’t care about connecting things for the sake of connecting them, they care about solving problems around availability, product quality, and workforce enablement. Instead of trying to sell them on “connecting remote assets to gather real-time data,” focus more on benefits like “the ability to quickly troubleshoot assets that are hard to reach.”

Buyer care abouts in manufacturing

IT buyer:

Network management – automation, performance assurance, and security with common proven tools. Separation between the OT and IT side of the network, or even separate networks as necessary.

OT buyer:

Equipment availability and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). Product quality, and Cybersecurity.

Cisco’s key advantage:

We offer customers the whole package at once – powerful OT functionality with built-in IT security and scalability. Unlike the competition, there is no cobbling together solutions when you buy from Cisco – we make it easy for the customer to deploy, scale, and manage their solution.

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