into a single entity and asked that we start working together. It took us about three months to figure what this would look like, but by January 2009 a new Channel/ Regional Sales Director was hired and his message was clear: 7. The reseller channel is here to stay 8. You will be compensated for Reseller business 9. Go help them be successful The writing was on the wall, MSC is fully committed to a hybrid-reseller business model in “The Americas”, it plans to grow the Channel, and changes will be made to make that happen. From my interactions with the then current MSC Resellers in the Western region, my prior experience at MSC and working as a reseller for a competing solution, an opportunity was being presented. Why not create a company that will become a “model” reseller and work with customers and MSC to figure out what exactly it should look like. June 8, 2010. Happy Anniversary. Tribal is one year old. It is hard to believe that one year had already past, and even harder to believe that the recession was still lingering. According to all reports, the recession had ended about a year ago, but according to my experience the economy was far from picking up and growing Tribal was getting harder. Also after having a stellar first year, the expectations
were high and the pressure to perform was even higher. In effort to exceed expectations and continue to grow I began looking for complimentary products to the MSC suite of tools. At the time that Tribal started there were quite a few resellers that represented both MSC Software and competing solutions. That never made sense to me and seemed to be unfair to the customers and to MSC. The reason being is that a customer deserves to get good advice and great support when choosing a product. In the case of offering competing solutions a reseller is rarely in the position to provide both, and in many cases cannot do either properly. I decided that what Tribal should do is look to see what MSC customers could use that perhaps wasn’t a primary focus of MSC’s at the time as a way to truly add value to both relationships. While at the same time see if there is a good way to create synergy between the solutions. The analogy I used was creating the mortar between the two bricks. If Tribal could properly integrate the solutions in a way that would make the customers more productive it would be a winwin-win situation. We haven’t mastered this area yet, but are constantly looking for ways to make this happen. One of our first attempts is integrating MSC’s Adams multibody dynamics solution with National Instruments LabVIEW®, and a product we fondly call ALVI (Adams LabView Integration), allowing people to manipulate the Adams model from within the LabVIEW® GUI. We are still in
the process of looking for funding sources to continue development. If you are interested, please let us know.
Tribal Engineering LLC, is constantly growing and adapting to market challenges, and adding value to its customers and business partners. u