“Understanding IT infrastructure more makes everyone around you happy!” This is our motto. Why? If the Japanese support forum participants acquire good IT knowledge around/through EMC products, they can fix minor issues immediately and address major issues quickly with the help of EMC support engineers. Customers and partners can use IT as a “real” infrastructure such as telephone, electricity, and water. Companies can focus on their main business with stable/reliable cutting-edge IT infrastructure.
This is what we are aiming at – boosting your business. The reality, however, is not that simple. One big problem is, there are relatively few IT specialists who form a good community in Japan. There are some reasons for this, including that many Japanese companies are running their businesses based on a lifetime employment. Job rotation is very common since Japanese (big) companies usually try to have more generalists than specialists. Seniority systems put more value on employees who are good at in-house politics than on specialists. These tendencies hinder bringing specialists up in Japan.
Another problem is Japanese tend to be hesitate to communicate online. Probably some people disagree with it. They would say that “Japanese generate the second largest Twitter traffic in the world.” Yes, it is true. However, that heavy social traffic is not necessarily business related. This is one reason why Facebook is popular in Japan but LinkedIn is not. All popular communities in Japan, such as 2-channel, mixi, Yahoo-Chiebukuro, etc., are primarily focused on non-business matters/topics.
I’d like to introduce you to the Japanese support forum on the EMC Community Network (ECN) which has been growing strongly over the last eight consecutive quarters. We had around 90K page views and 308 questions in Q3 2014. There are, of course, several reasons why we are doing pretty well (more on this in my next post). All I can say is that I knew there were a lot of great people with forward-thinking minds in Japan and that our community would catch on someday! We really enjoy connecting with our customers and partners in the Japanese community and growing together. One good example is as follows. The Q3 wordcloud shows a huge “ありがとう “ (means “Thank you”) with other popular words such as Information, Data, Disks, File, Server, System, LUN, etc.
We believe the Japanese support forum is very important in the 3rd platform era. From a customer’s point of view, products and services of the 3rd platform are simple and easy-to-use. However, if we see them from support engineer’s point of view, we can see the opposite landscape. Lots of the 2nd platform products are covered up in virtualization/software-defined services in the 3rd platform. Since components of the 3rd platform are so complicated, if a trouble occurs, we wouldn’t even know where to start troubleshooting without really good IT infrastructure engineers! We hope lots of users participate in the Japanese support forum and thank all of our great IT infrastructure engineers who assist our users with their expertise every day, and who play outstanding roles in the 3rd platform era.
Yutaro Uehara
IT Social Engagement
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ueharaus
