COVER STORY – QUIXANT
What does being a great supplier to the gaming industry mean?
By Duncan Faithfull, EVP, Gaming Business Leader and CCO, Quixant. T
he word ‘partnership’ is used far too often by organisations who aim to position their service provision as superior, and is commonly perceived to be more valued than their customers would say that it is. Often those promoting the value of
partnerships like to put ‘strategic’ in front of it to reinforce how important and inherent they are to their customers’ product delivery. Being a partner becomes a throwaway line used in marketing collateral designed to make potential customers see the supplier as more than a supplier, when actually being a great supplier is a brilliant thing, and often exactly what customers are looking for. So, what defines being a partner as opposed to being a
great supplier? At Quixant, we believe that partnership is about seeking to achieve common and shared goals based on our customers’ overall objectives in the gaming market, and their drive to deliver the ultimate player experience, and
“We believe that partnership is about seeking to achieve common and shared goals based on our
customers’ overall objectives in the gaming market”
that part of being a partner is being a brilliant supplier. What is the point of pretending that we have a role in the delivery of our customer’s strategic objectives if we don’t do our core activities at the required standard? The ’Pandemic years’ show this theory perfectly. During
that time when our market was largely closed, and supply chains were crippled by component shortages and shipping disruption, our role became largely focused on the delivery of our market leading Gaming hardware platforms. Ensuring that our customers could build their products safe in the knowledge that the critical components which drive their games were available became our main driver, and this involved re-engineering many of our products multiple times as components came in and out of availability. At the same time, we also had to create financial solutions
for some customers to help them through challenging financial times. This is where the partnership comes in – not only did we continue to supply the Gaming hardware platforms to these ‘partners’, but we also had open, honest, and difficult discussions about how we could help use the strength of our balance sheet to take short term financial pressure off them, knowing that this would lead to a stronger future together. During the pandemic, AMD, a key component supplier to our industry chose to ‘de-prioritise the gaming industry’ and made some of their key graphics products end-of-life. This gave several of our ‘partners’ (yes, the ‘P’ word is appropriate here) a very small runway into a new provider at a time when their businesses were already under pressure. Working together, we focussed on the shared objective of new product introduction and delivered long-term solutions in line with their cabinet strategies. This sentence underplays
32 APRIL 2023
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