How to get hired by a US company

Despite the lightning rise of IT companies in India, China and other, more developed countries, Silicon Valley still produces the lion’s share of industry leaders.

One day every Australian IT professional will consider working for a promising US start-up that wants to open a branch in Australia. The challenge will be knowing whether it will turn out to be the next Google and an outstanding success or the next SCO, bound for bankruptcy.

Charlie Cote is country manager for Australia and New Zealand for Fortinet, an all-in-one security software company specialising in Unified Threat Management (UTM). An American who moved here six years ago to live with his Australian wife, Cote said the most important step in choosing a new employer is to research the market, the products and the company history thoroughly.

“You would want to get an understanding of their commitment to the local market and what they have done to break into the local market previously. Look at past history; if they’d had anyone out here in the past; do research as to what happened, were they successful? Do they have any customers?

“First and foremost, the IT individual will do research on the product they are looking to sell. You need to understand and believe in what you are selling.”

The work culture at a US company can be markedly different to Australia. Americans work more unpaid hours overtime, and it is common practice to have just two weeks of holidays, not four. Are Americans really that overworked?

“Unfortunately it’s so true. You should see the guys who work for me, they think I am a freak because they put in for their holidays, four weeks out of the year, and I’m like, ‘what the hell are you doing taking another holiday?’

“The work ethic in the US is still a bit different than here, but the guys who I have are true Aussies, they definitely enjoy their holiday time, but work their butts off when they are with me. It’s a good team.”

Cote leads by example, American style. When in Sydney he’s at the office by 7am and tries to leave by 4.30pm, goes home for dinner with his two infants and wife, and then gets back online to the US at night. The early starts give him the chance to communicate with the US, and in theory he takes an early mark, “but often sometimes it doesn’t really happen.”

Cote began his IT career in 1994 after several years of school teaching, which he left to find a more lucrative industry. His first employer was Cabletron Systems, one of the early entrants in the networking industry and the progenitor of enterprise networker Enterasys Networks and Riverstone Networks, now a part of Alcatel-Lucent.

Cote was lucky with the network company as it gave new employees a fully paid, four-week training program of school lectures about the industry, the OSI networking layer, switching and routing. “It was incredible.”

Cote has seen nothing like that training program since, and wonders whether it would even be possible in today’s competitive environment. “It’s a very expensive endeavour, [but] that’s essentially where I was able to kickstart my career in IT tech 15 years ago. Have I seen that since? Not to the depth that Cabletron had done it.”

Fortinet runs a new-hire boot camp for three days almost every month, which Cote said is the best training effort he’s witnessed since his Cabletron days.

During his stint “smiling and dialling” in sales with Cabletron, Cote earned a trip to Australia in 1995 to work in Frenchs Forest for six months, where he met his future wife.

Back in the US, Cote worked briefly for a systems integrator, then Bay Networks, later to become part of Nortel. In 1998 he signed up with Extreme Networks as the first sales rep on the east coast of the US.

Four years later, life with Extreme was getting stale, but then he was offered the prospect of rebuilding its Australian operations, which seemed like a good idea to his missus. “Extreme was out here prior to me coming out, but had a few false starts. I felt confident that I was able to stabilise it, rebuild it. I left Extreme 15 months ago.”

Both Extreme and Fortinet found it tough to establish toeholds in Australia. What were they doing wrong?

“I think sometimes US organisations would put an investment in place and give it three to six months, and if it didn’t come to fruition or see some success, they’d pull out. That’s what creates the false starts.

“Extreme faced some other challenges in their own right, where they are in a market that is very, very commoditised. Unless you actually have the market share, like a Cisco in Australia, it’s very difficult to provide differentiation. And Extreme just would not invest properly into this region.”

Luckily, Cote could count on four years of relationships at Extreme’s head office in the US, a critical advantage.

“If you don’t have those relationships that you can leverage to pull people out strategically to meetings, it is challenging to break into those relationships.”

That’s a good point for those wanting to build local presences for US companies – or IT companies from anywhere else. Without support and understanding from head office, life is much tougher. Nothing ensures that support more than a good working relationship with your superiors at HQ.

Cote said it’s common for US companies to first test the Australian market through distributors, but this only gets a company so far.

“I think that does work to a certain point, but then there needs to be people on the street. The Extremes and Fortinets of the world absolutely need infrastructure in place in countries such as Australia to ensure you have contacts with users, contacts to be able to build the channel. You really need somebody who has local relationships who can open doors.”

Cote claims he doubled Extreme’s business in three years, but admits it was from a low base. Still, a reported 8-12 per cent market share is not bad when it’s in a highly commoditised sector and your competitors include Cisco, D-Link and Netgear, among others.

When a friend told him about the opening at Fortinet, which also had several false starts at an Australian presence, Cote went for it. But not before doing a lot of research on the product and organisation. Cote saw the opportunity within the product portfolio for key differentiation, and that the space was not yet completely commoditised. “There’s a huge value-add that Fortinet can bring to organisations.”

The challenges facing the security vendor when Cote came on board were more personnel-related. “I think it was a combination of a few different things but the lack of the right people in place for success [was the most important], bar none. We just didn’t hire the correct people.”

He reports directly to the US for his eight-person team of sales and engineering, based in offices in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland.

“The marketing effort, the commitment from corporate, the empowerment that we have locally, has enabled us locally to built a significant presence in Australia and New Zealand in the last 12 months,” said Cote.

Fortinet’s advantage is that commoditisation has not yet levelled the security space, at least not for UTM products, a Fortinet specialty.

Cote explains that UTM has a quick return on investment and a lower total cost of ownership. He points to a recent win in Victoria with Holmesglen TAFE, which wanted to upgrade firewalls running on an outsourced managed service, and to maintain server balancing and RAID shaping.

Fortinet was able to supply all these requirements within one appliance, reducing network complexity and cost. Cote estimates it saved the TAFE $1 million over three years.

Recent fronts opening up in security, such as social networking sites and peer-to-peer file sharing, pose an interesting conundrum. Security software that bans access to these services means employees can’t access potentially useful business applications, such as professional networking tool Linked In. Companies wanting to attract younger employees might allow limited access at certain times of the day.

Fortinet’s content management software can open up certain websites within specific time frames, say between 8am and 9am, 12pm and 1pm, and 4pm until 5pm.

Likewise with file sharing, Fortinet can throttle down the size of files so company bandwidth isn’t consumed by a handful of sharers.

But back to the cultural divide. Does Cote think Australia turning into America, at least by business standards?

He definitely sees a shift. “I came here in 2002 and long gone are the three-hour lunches – the three, four, five beers at lunch.”

Not everyone at Fortinet is starting work at 7am. Cote said it’s not about working long hours, but working smarter and virtually – until I point out he does a minimum nine-hour day plus work from home in the evening.

And then there’s the travel – Cote was about to fly to management meetings in the US for a week, and had spent two weeks in March on an international seven-city roadshow with HP Procurve. Cote claims working from home in the morning or afternoon redresses the balance, and family time is important for his team members, too.

“I’m a strong believer in work hard, play hard. I really believe that family time is very important and if you have challenges at home with your family, then you’re not going to be productive at work. Even though I work longer hours and don’t take as many holidays as some on my team, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to let them take holidays.”