My name is John McHugh and I am the General Manager for the Commercial Products business unit here at NETGEAR.
I have recently started an initiative across my organization to change the way we do business. My request of my workforce was to engage with and involve the on-line community as part of the way that we all do our jobs. From marketing to R&D and of course in support, we are all going to look to the community so that we can improve our products, improve how we do business with you and most importantly so that we are more in touch with what the millions of folks who use our products are experiencing day in and day out.
For my part, I have added this area to allow you to raise your inputs, questions or concerns to the highest level of the organization. I can't promise that I will be able to personally handle every request or suggestion, but I will do my best to weigh in on discussions here or try to get them in front of the individuals who can.
I also hope that those of you who regularly visit the community, make this location a regular stopping point. I will be posting perspectives, technology updates and my views on networking and storage hopefully to help you understand a little more about where the market is going and how NETGEAR is leading.
Thanks for visiting our community and I look forward to seeing your contributions,
I have 15 offices in 7 countries across Asia. They are all connected with MPLS along with ExpressRoute into MS O365 ans Azure. I have a CRM for the front office. I have an ERP for the back. I have ITIL tools and monitoring and DevOP and Agile and PM tools for IT.
In the era of cloud storage, cloud apps and enterprise solutions, where does NETGEAR fit in the company strategy?
I am wondering if I shouldn't be turning the backup on it's head. I should be backing down. Copying data down from the cloud and maintaining a copy on premises.. on multiple premises.
I think you have been very slow to see where the company strategy should go. With your external business environment changing rapidly, and your disk products becoming commoditized, you need to find your way. All of these cloud companies can't survive. There will be a mass merging of them in the next few years.
Whatcha gonna do?
Model: RN21244E|ReadyNAS 2120 1U 4- Bay 4x4TB Enterprise Drive
I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time and energy and money to listen and speak to your customers.
I'm a long time customer and fan from the readynas nv+ days and have a variety of netgear equipment from readynas to switches and routers, both from my own personal purchases and from some beta programs.
There are far more experienced and worthy members than I consider myself, and I am glad they will be able to interact with the teams and provide feedback that I hope can be taken to heart and improve products for everyone's benefit.
Communication is a two-way street, otherwise it is just 1 party talking at the other, and I hope this and future events will help provide the necessary feedback to keep Netgear at the top of the game, along with some great insight from those whose get to participate that can be passed along to the community at large.
I can't reveal what we are going to do in the future other than what we are selling or developing right now, I hope you understand I can't reveal the secrets here. Let's say: we have a certain state of mind given our 10 years in network storage. We are capitalizing on a couple of trends: backup is still the #1 application we are targeting. The data hunger does not stop, the amount of data still doubles every 18 months. You could say that cloud backup is a form of backup that is centralized somewhere in a datacenter. As long as that is an SMB datacenter, we either provide hardware for or connectivity to it. We don't play in object storage or SDS yet. But you never know what the future brings....
We also see the emerging market of disk-based archiving/cold storage. Furthermore, we see that our NAS platform is evolving so fast that it is becoming competitive against entry level SAN for server virtualization.
We value our customers and recognise that continuing to innovate to deliver the solutions our customers love is vital to our business. Without our customers such as yourself we would not be here.
There are far more experienced and worthy members than I consider myself, and I am glad they will be able to interact with the teams and provide feedback that I hope can be taken to heart and improve products for everyone's benefit.
Your contribution on the community and in beta tests over the years has been very beneficial. We are looking for a range of views and a good sample of our users. If you miss out this time there will be more opportunities to apply for in the future.
We also have live online chat Q&A events from time to time which are open to everyone.
Communication is a two-way street, otherwise it is just 1 party talking at the other, and I hope this and future events will help provide the necessary feedback to keep Netgear at the top of the game, along with some great insight from those whose get to participate that can be passed along to the community at large.
We plan to share some highlights of the event afterwards on the community.
We recognise that communication is important, but at the same time we do need to keep some things close to our chest. In order to get the best feedback we can we may choose to discuss some things that we're not ready to share with the community as a whole.
Some things will be special for those who participate and others we'd love to have shared with the rest of you.
There are both specific assertions as well as some general questioning about the direction of the NETGEAR commercial business in your posting. Let me try to offer some light on the questions/statements you are making.
First, you can rest assured that the NETGEAR commercial products group is very actively and aggressively managed. My leadership team has hundreds of years of experience in the networking, security and storage markets from over the past two to three decades. This is a rapidly moving and evolving market where the guaranteed formula for failure is to assume that there will be no change.
Our storage solutions embraced the concept of hybrid or cooperative cloud more than 5 years ago and we continue to develop solutions which are uniquely capable of providing the value proposition of on-prem storage with a cloud compliment. We will continue to do this going forward.
If you were to boil down the hundreds of different innovative threads we are following, you will come with with the fact that we are consistently trying to provide our customers with the most advanced and flexible technology with an innovative user experience. We do have customers who turn "the backup on it's head" and combined centralized image management with distributed copies. We also allow our storage devices to be paired with common cloud storage solutions to replicate that model as well.
We are currently in the process of refreshing our storage line with new models, new capacities and new form factors. Obviously we don't believe the concept of on prem storage is going away anytime soon, but we do agree that we need to evolve the number of architectural models we support.
It's been almost 20 years since I did set up my very first computer network. For that reason I bought a kit with two NICs, two cables and a hub. Yes, it was a hub, not a switch, running at 100MBits... 😉 Guess what brand that kit was. Right, it was Netgear. Ever since then I was buying and recommending Netgear products of different categories. Even nowadays my private home is equipet with quite a lot of Netgear devices, mainly from the professional/commercial product line.
Being one of those guys not just accepting problems and bugs I had the chance to make a serious experience regarding Netgear products, their quality and the support. In the following I would like to give you a short overview of what I think should be reviewed. I think this would be a great benefit for both, people using Netgear products as well as Netgear itself.
Non-first-buyers. I know that Netgear provides its support only to the origin buyer of their devices and to be honest, okay. Fair enough. But here is one thing you might consider thinking about. If I got a Netgear device and I'm not the origin buyer, what happens if I find a bug? Of course I would love to see to get it fixed. And of course this is something I guess Netgear would, or better, should be interessted in as well. Unfortunately I have almost no chance to get that bug reported. In fact, the only thing I can think of right now is to start a thread here in the forum. I think it would be really cool if those guys could also e.g. open a bug report or something like that.
Feedback/Feature Requests I, myself, have been in the situation where I wanted to provide some feedback towards the product management for a couple of switches. Of course I was highly confident that this feedback would be very valuable for them. Unfortunatly I had to figure out that the feedback provided using the my.netgear.com ticketing tool is being first viewed by developers. At least this is what I was told to happen by the support guys. Being a product manager in the IT myself I know that this is something that really never ever should happen. Never let the developer review and rank feedback/feature requests on the product level. First of all they just have a different view and second, how will the product management know about this feedback if development doesn't like it? Which - by the way - is exactly what happend to me.
Thanks for the thoughtful message and input on opportunities for improvement.
Diving right in to the inputs you raised, our enhanced commitment to this community is exactly how we are trying to address the issues you are raising. I know that all of my PLMs are reading and responding to input and questions raised by the folks in the community. I also know that my R&D and QA folks are watching the issues which customer bring up with the products. You can rest assured that we are looking for significant problems which may point to an underlying defect and especially where we see a trend of several customers reporting the same sort of issue. We obviously do this without a concern for what the "support" status of the customer is.
To that last point, while my support team also monitors and periodically takes action based on what we see being posted in the community, we do not believe that the community is a replacement for someone who wants to have regular support or advanced services for their networking and storage devices.
Thank you very much for taking the time to write this anser. I love to see that you take care about what's getting added to this form. I also understood that it will make sence to use this forum to report problems, bugs and also post feature/improvement requests. Honestly, this is not what I was used to think about the Netgear forum so far. All the more I really like to see things changing I highly appreciate that.
Re: Provide feedback on NETGEAR commercial products
John,
Just wanted to provide some feedback on a recent purchase of a WAC720. Unfortunately, the product is not ready for business use. The web-based GUI is very limited in the options available, and the Business Support desk will not provide any support beyond the GUI.
Something as simple as understanding the Output Power definitions of "Full", "Half", "Quarter", etc. is far too difficult for Netgear support.
and the Telephone based support: case number 27740512
No one can seem to tell me what those words translate to in dBm or mW.
According the the Commercial support person, they do not provide any support for command-line configuration, and there is no option in the GUI to increase transmit power (a feature that is available in the GUI of a competitor's WAP). When I asked the Commercial support person how to increase the transmit power, they told me it could not be done.
Thus, I have no choice but to return the WAC720 as it does not provide the coverage that I need (at 35' distance) at whatever transmit power is "Full", and as a Commercial product, it is not supported by Netgear for command line configuration.
Re: Provide feedback on NETGEAR commercial products
DoubleK,
Thank you for taking the time to provide your feedback on the WAC720. We are sorry to hear that it does not meet your expectations of a Commercial product. In developing the Standalone mode of the AP (use without a Controller), we focus on simplicity and ease of use in the GUI as opposed to CLI approach. This same simplification approach led to our design of the simplified power level scheme. For a person at your level of expertise we have over simplified in this regard.
On your original stream we have now provided the tables that map our simplified power level scheme to TX power readings in dBm per your request. We have also provided some tips for improving range. Hopefully this provides the data you are after and you can successfully use the product to meet your needs.
