By Nettie Hartsock
The Challenge:
The HyperTransport Technology Consortium - http://www.hypertransport.org, is charged with managing, licensing and promoting the cutting-edge HyperTransport Technology. The consortium company membership represents a stellar array of leading technology companies including AMD, IBM, Cisco, Sun and Texas Instruments.
What exactly is HyperTransport technology? It is a widely embraced, royalty-fr-ee industry standard processor-to-processor and processor-to-I/O interconnect technology. If you’re still a little fuzzy on what that means, then you’ve already realized the Consortium’s biggest challenge in explaining the technology and its larger business potential.
Mario Cavalli, General Manager for the HyperTransport Technology Consortium, explained, “We are dealing with a technology that is very innovative, novel and exotic. We needed to get a double whammy out of a single document.”
The aim was for the white paper to be well-received and embraced by VPs of marketing and business development as well as VPs of engineering and CTOs, what Cavalli terms the “classic top technical people in the industry.”
“Our challenge was how could we talk about a very innovative, complex, exotic technology without becoming too technical and so detailed that it would end up boring the businesspeople who would get two-thirds of the way through and say, “I’m going to leave this to my technology officer,” explained Cavalli.
The secondary challenge was how to effectively present a compelling comparison between the HTX technology and other offerings in the market arena, and effectively show the winning angle of the Consortium’s technology.
The White Paper Solution:
The paper’s content was meticulously crafted to address both the needs of a technical audience and a general business audience. It delivered in 10 short pages dynamic content and graphics clearly outlining the power of the technology. The paper highlighted the HTX business benefits for manufacturers and detailed the technical advantages over competitive offerings. The paper ended by describing the future possible applications of the technology as “endless.”
“I worked very carefully with Mario’s team to create a message that anyone could understand, while still not talking down to their technical audience,” explained Michael Stelzner, author of the white paper.
The Consortium’s budget was limited and did not have the latitude to leverage the white paper in the many ways that a comparable commercial organization could.
The white paper was initially posted on the Consortium’s website. The posting of the white paper represented what Cavalli termed the “tip of the iceberg” on the home page of the website.
“We worked behind the curtains after the paper was posted and systematically started broadcasting the message through our website and members of the technology consortium,” said Cavalli.
Shortly after the paper’s posting, Cavalli was approached by an editor from the world-renowned EDA Tech Forum - who was exploring the possibility of the Consortium contributing an article on HTX technology.
Cavalli sent the white paper titled, “HTX Connectivity - The Future of High Performance Computing: Direct Low Latency Peripheral-to-CPU Connections” to the editor as a starting point and introduction for how an article might be crafted. (See the full paper here - http://www.hypertransport.org/tech/tech_whitepapers.cfm?m=11 )
The paper was so compelling that the EDA Tech Forum requested to use the full paper for publication. The graphics were reduced for publication, while the content remained as written in the originally online-based white paper.
The Results:
“It exceeded what we thought we could do with one white paper. And I would have never thought initially that this document would have ended up in a super technical publication like EDA Tech Forum,” said Cavalli.
The paper was published online at the EDA Tech Forum site and published in print form and bundled with the leading electrical engineering trade magazine in the world - the EE Times - whose global readership exceeds 150,000.
“This result was very unexpected. And let’s not forget, this is the winning angle of the work. The paper was born essentially to be a business white paper that was then adopted by EDA Tech Forum and distributed with EE Times, which are publications that represent a super technical readership that demand the very smallest of details in technical view,” explained Cavalli.
Cavalli described the white paper’s success as a “double win.”
He continues,” It proves two things: the document succeeded in being a business white paper and also succeeded in satisfying a super-technical readership that does not go for typical business papers. The duality is very unusual and powerful that it worked on both sides.”
The Future:
Cavalli has one piece of advice for businesses aiming to multi-purpose their white papers and land in both an online publication and high-gloss technical magazine.
“Never waste an opportunity of writing a business paper. But why not also aim to conquer a technical audience or vice-versa if you’re writing a technical paper? Many technical people forget that technology itself does not lead anywhere. There are brilliant technologies that did not go anywhere because they did not have the proper business message behind them. If we were to write a technical paper, we would always make sure that there’s a very good balance of business message as well.”
The HyperTransport Technology Consortium plans to continue to introduce several new technologies and released a major update to its HTX technology in April.
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