Driving Multimillion Dollar Revenues and Sustainable Growth Across Industries!

In the contemporary world of rapid change, businesses face a plethora of challenges that require ceaseless ingenuity and dexterity. The thirst for top-notch products and services is perpetually increasing, and there is greater pressure than ever before to keep up with the competition. If businesses aspire to thrive in such a hostile environment, they must remain open to change and constantly endeavor to enhance their performance.

Analisa Dominic is the driving force behind this endeavor. As a seasoned executive in Product Management and Marketing, she is widely recognized for her expertise in cultivating multimillion-dollar revenues, fostering sustainable expansion, and cementing market dominance across diverse sectors.

Having amassed more than twenty years of proficiency in product innovation, advertising, and commercialization, she proffers an unparalleled amalgamation of acumen and dexterity that has rendered her an esteemed figure in the field. Her mastery in conceptualizing product-oriented marketing and vending schemes, along with advertising drives that infiltrate a plethora of markets and logistical channels, has facilitated a multitude of entities in inaugurating novel products and enhancing product placement.

Analisa’s exceptional perspicacity in marketing is only one aspect that distinguishes her from others. Her motivational leadership style is equally remarkable. She achieves a competitive edge by leveraging multifunctional and multinational teams to recognize and take advantage of business prospects, thereby expanding B2B and B2C markets. Her proficiency in establishing strategic alliances has been pivotal in driving her success, rendering her an esteemed figure in the industry.

Analisa has continuously demonstrated an unequivocal understanding of customer demands and inclinations, which has aided her in developing and delivering cutting-edge solutions that have upended markets and enacted new standards for the industry. She currently serves as CMO of Opengear and has maintained her leadership position by having a deep awareness of emerging technology and market trends. She has been able to benefit customers and promote long-term business success as a result.

In this cover story, we delve deeper into Analisa’s journey, exploring her early years, her successes and challenges, and her vision for the future!

The Technology and Telecommunications Expert

With over 30 years of experience in technology and telecommunications, Analisa currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Marketing at Opengear, where she spearheads the company’s global marketing department. Throughout her career, she has developed a diverse skillset encompassing sales, marketing, product development, and management. A results-driven leader, she is laser-focused on creating innovative and comprehensive go-to-market strategies to boost revenue generation for new and existing product portfolios. Before joining Opengear, she held leadership positions at various technology and telecommunications companies, including Telstra Global, BT Global Services, AT&T, and IBM. She graduated with honors from Rochester Institute of Technology with a Master of Science degree in organizational development.

While pursuing her undergraduate marketing degree at Keuka College in New York, she participated in “Field periods,” which provided her with immersive real-world experience in exchange for academic credit. She had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles spanning multiple industries at a range of organizations, from small businesses to large corporations, which provided her with valuable insight into her preferences and dislikes in the business world. Additionally, her mother was quick to point out that landing a marketing job immediately upon earning her degree would be difficult, suggesting that she consider instead starting with a sales job to get her foot in the door within a company.

Taking her mother’s advice to heart and with her field period experiences in mind, an extensive job search ensued, consisting of her scouring through open postings in her local area and even poring over the yellow pages to look for company names and addresses. In total, she sent out 150 cover letters and resumes, and only IBM and Xerox responded. After interviewing and carefully researching the products and services of both companies, she chose IBM (despite really having no idea what they did during her first interview). As it turned out, this decision paved the way for her career in the tech and telecom sectors.

Revolutionizing Network Resilience

The story behind Opengear’s inception is rooted in its deep commitment to network resilience. Opengear, founded in 2004, is the market leader in the out of band space, ensuring customers have secure remote access to their connected resources. Providing the critical capabilities needed on the first day, the worst day, and every day, 75% of Fortune 500 companies deploy world-class technology solutions. Their Network Resilience Platform enables network engineers to provision, maintain, and troubleshoot infrastructure from anywhere in the world, maximizing uptime and drastically reducing operational costs. Opengear is headquartered in Edison, New Jersey, with research and development operations in Brisbane, Australia, and production facilities in Sandy, Utah.

In 2019, Opengear was acquired by Digi International. Bound by shared values and goals, the two companies are committed to providing customers with the finest products, software, and services to meet the demands of mission-critical networks. Today, Opengear is actively building a bridge to the future, empowering its customers to recognize that redundancy and resilience are not interchangeable but complementary. Moreover, as the need for agile and resilient networks continues to accelerate due to factors like hybrid work, fluctuating traffic patterns, more hardware needing to be managed remotely, rarely used apps becoming commonplace, etc., they serve as the ultimate allies for overwhelmed network professionals attempting to overcome persistent challenges.

Rise to Reliability and Longevity

Analisa strives daily to help position Opengear as a reliable resource to their partners, customers, and prospective customers and an organization they can count on for the long term, especially in light of worsening network outages and lengthening Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR). To accomplish this, she has developed a comprehensive global marketing plan and worked tirelessly to solidify the link between marketing, sales, and product. She has meticulously crafted and presented optimized budgets to her leadership team, which she holds responsible for delivering a positive return on investment. Additionally, her leadership role has given her the privilege of delivering several keynote speeches at prominent industry events, discussing, among other things, marketing strategies and the power of partnerships, which boost Opengear’s public profile and generate brand awareness.

Band Technology and Failover

Opengear has been a torchbearer in the progression of console servers, starting with simple terminal servers and developing centralized management software, embedded 4G-LTE cellular access, and advanced automation capabilities. This evolution has culminated in its Network Resilience Platform, which enables organizations to keep their networks online at all times with secure remote access to connected devices independent of the production network. This ensures business continuity, decreases downtime, and reduces costs. Powered by Lighthouse Software, the Network Resilience Platform is equipped with Opengear’s unique Smart Out of Band technology, failover to cellular, and automation, which enable the highest levels of business continuity.

Encompassing the Network Resilience Platform is a full range of advanced console servers, purpose-built with input from hundreds of engineers. Their future-focused platform is designed to meet the organization’s evolving needs. Their customer-led innovation has allowed them to ensure their products, including the OM1200, OM2200, and CM8100, deliver value throughout the network life cycle. All of its products were designed to work alongside Lighthouse Software. The compact OM1200 appliance is built for secure, edge deployments and merges the access of Smart Out of Band with the flexibility of automation tools. It provides presence and proximity at every location, which supports emerging requirements in network management and automation.

The OM2200 Console Server is configured for data centers and high-density locations, providing a separate, secure management plane that supports advanced automation applications and streamlines key actions within the automation workflow. Additionally, the OM2200 and OM1200 are capable of running Docker containers and Python scripts to help make secure Day One provisioning possible.

The CM8100, their latest console manager for data centers and business networks, provides up to 96 serial ports, enterprise-grade security using the TPM 2.0 module, and independent monitoring through dual power supplies. This console server gives their customers greater agility and efficiency, allowing them to host containerized applications across any platform or automation tool. The CM8100’s innovative design requires less power and cooling without sacrificing performance, lowering the total cost of ownership while increasing reliability.

Lighthouse Software Lighthouse serves as the centralized and secure portal for the Opengear platform. It simplifies remote access. As the starting point, Lighthouse provides a unified display to deploy, manage, and remediate Opengear appliances and other physical and virtual connected resources. By utilizing its comprehensive platform, network teams are fully prepared for the first day, the worst day, and every day in between.

Unparalleled Control and Security

Opengear empowers its customers to manage and secure critical network components remotely through its Lighthouse Software, which permits access to network devices via connected console servers at each site. An API-driven platform, Lighthouse Software allows users to manage and secure the most critical remote network components—from anywhere. When implemented across a distributed enterprise with data centers and edge locations, their solution essentially functions as the command center of the overall Network Resilience Platform, independent of the production network. Unlike manual methods that can result in data integrity and efficiency issues, Lighthouse enables centralized provisioning, delivers a source of truth, and brings scale.

Opengear’s Lighthouse Software Solution brings efficiency to everyday operations, helping their clients manage and view their status and data for an end-to-end administration and configuration tasks. It also assists its customers when deploying on the first day by enrolling and provisioning nodes in a secure and streamlined way. And, when things go awry on the worst day, their solution expedites access to a catalog of connected endpoints for audit, restoration, and operation management.

The Lighthouse Software Solution comes in two editions, Lighthouse Enterprise, and Lighthouse Enterprise: Automation Edition.

Ready-made for everyday use, they equipped Lighthouse Enterprise with multi-instance capabilities, providing the resiliency and redundancy necessary for evolving networks, plus the presence and proximity engineers need to control their network devices via a central hub.

Some key features of Lighthouse Enterprise include:

Scalability: They designed Lighthouse with growth in mind, whether clients have only a few nodes or are running “At-scale” in enterprise or hyper-scale environments.

High Availability: Lighthouse can run multiple instances, permitting load balancing and redundancy.

Security: Added security and controls with integrated authentication via SAML and AAA systems.

IP Access: It provides centralized, secure access to remote IP networks that are reachable by nodes.

As the more advanced version of Lighthouse Enterprise, Lighthouse Enterprise: Automation Edition provides a more advanced, feature-rich version. It is the first out of band management software solution to include automation and provisioning capabilities and secure provisioning, giving users complete visibility and future-proof management capabilities across their entire networks. The added functionality of this advanced offering helps customers effortlessly browse resources on their remote management network without additional software. Note, Lighthouse Enterprise: Automation Edition contains all of the features of Lighthouse Enterprise but adds Automation Gateway and Secure Provisioning for every node.

Overcoming the Challenge

During a conversation about the obstacles she encountered when presenting the new budget to her leadership team, she explained that the main difficulty was linking all marketing efforts to a particular business goal. This required guaranteeing that every aspect of the marketing plan was aligned with and contributed to at least one business objective within the company’s overall strategy.

Minimize Downtime and Protect

While console servers continue to evolve, the tasks of the network engineer remain relatively unchanged. They are, however, being asked to do more with less. Economic uncertainty has resulted in leaner IT budgets, forcing network professionals to continue to secure and remediate network issues, but with far less support than prior. Opengear helps network engineers minimize downtime and protect SLAs by providing engineers with the ability to securely and remotely access their networks while also enabling setup, configuration, day-to-day management, and remediation during failures. This approach is helping move the needle toward automation initiatives since their Smart Out of Band Network has the power to run such advanced tools.

The cost of downtime is severe when it comes to network failures. On average, the cost of an outage is $100,000. Failures don’t just result in monetary repercussions; they can also blemish a business’ reputation, so mitigating this risk and ensuring business continuity is paramount, especially in today’s era where efficiency is king. Having said that, they all know that outages are a part of life for IT professionals. It’s not so much a matter of “If” as “When” a remote site will lose connectivity. Opengear’s Failover to Cellular solutions reduces downtime by restoring WAN connectivity without manual intervention. This means that even during an outage, organizations have the critical bandwidth needed for operations to continue without being impacted. Above all else, this technology helps networks remain up and running, keeping costly downtime to an absolute minimum. In tandem with out of band management, automation helps mitigate the threat of costly network failures altogether, substantially reducing technician time and limiting the number of SLA non-compliance payouts.

Network Solutions and Six Sigma Training

Opengear is synonymous with its longstanding reputation for optimizing operational efficiency. As the 4th Industrial Revolution marches forward, technologies such as 5G, the Internet of Things (IoT), and automation are continuously getting implemented in manufacturing. Yet not one of these technologies works proficiently without a resilient network. Opengear solutions are deployed by some of the world’s biggest manufacturing companies, allowing these organizations to enjoy full visibility of their networks. They’re also easy to manage and scalable, providing the necessary network resilience for manufacturers to operate smoothly.

Opengear currently does extensive training in Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing practices, which are methodologies that are designed to improve manufacturing processes and increase efficiency. They have several six-sigma lack and green belts and hold training sessions for all manufacturing and manufacturing support personnel.

These methodologies can improve manufacturing in several ways. For example, they can help to:

Reduce waste: Both Six Sigma and Lean Manufacturing aim to eliminate waste in the production process, resulting in a more efficient and sustainable operation.

Improve quality: By identifying and eliminating defects and errors, Six Sigma can improve the quality of the final product. Similarly, Lean Manufacturing can reduce variability and improve process control, resulting in better quality.

Increase efficiency: By streamlining processes and eliminating waste, manufacturing operations can become more efficient, reducing lead times and increasing throughput.

Boost productivity: By empowering employees to take ownership of their work and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives, productivity can be increased as well. Overall, these are powerful tools that can help manufacturing organizations improve their operations, reduce costs, and stay competitive in a rapidly changing market.

Edge Computing

The tech industry is always focused on progression, and this also applies to data center environments. As the number of IoT devices increases, organizations are prioritizing their network infrastructure at remote sites. This trend is expected to continue as more devices are deployed, leading enterprises to add more critical applications at edge sites to keep up with high demand. Despite the growth in computing at the edge, businesses still require the speed, performance, and efficiency found in data centers. Enterprises around the world rely on Opengear’s Smart Out of Band capabilities to provide resilient backup connectivity for devices in distributed data centers. The Network Resilience Platform ensures business continuity for both physical and virtual network resources.

The proliferation of IoT devices has led to a shift in focus for organizations toward network infrastructure at remote sites. This trend is expected to continue as market growth is forecasted to reach $9 billion by 2024. To match the resilience, scalability, and availability of data centers, organizations require a smart and efficient solution.

Opengear’s Smart Out of Band is the perfect answer to this need. The combination of Smart Out of Band and Failover to Cellular provides the most resilient backup connection to remote networks, ensuring continuous access to infrastructure and business continuity for mission-critical applications. Smart Out of Band adds intelligence to the edge, making it ideal for managing infrastructure at multiple sites. Failover to cellular guarantees uninterrupted availability with the help of 4G LTE.

Lighthouse Software serves as the central hub for all remote sites. It mitigates the possibility of small-scale errors turning into large disruptions and reduces the likelihood of human error. Opengear’s talented and diverse team is continuously working on designing, building, and delivering Smart Out of Band solutions. This dedication gives their customers peace of mind every day.

Sales to Marketing to Product

For Analisa, it all comes down to experience. Her career path has seen her transition from sales to marketing, then from marketing to product, and finally back to marketing. Each time, she had to alter her approach to her work, whether it was adjusting to new KPIs, audiences, or goals—you name it. Through these changes, she gained a holistic understanding of how to sell, create, produce, and manage a product, make sales calls, and execute marketing strategies that supported sales.

Additionally, she learned the steps necessary to take a product from conception to market, including managing operations, pricing, and training. She has excelled at strengthening the bond between sales and marketing by being in tune with the various intricacies of the product development process as well as having a firm understanding of what it’s like to “Carry a bag” and be held accountable for hefty quotas.

When it comes to empowering her team, one of the most rewarding responsibilities of her role is inspiring them to be bold in coming up with new ways to boost revenues. She likes to remind her team of an anecdote from earlier in her career. Back in the days of snail mail demand generation, she worked for a major tech company, and – attempting to create an impact and stand out from the competition –she utilized a hot pink physical mailer to promote a major product announcement. The idea was, of course, that an ordinary, plain white envelope would get overlooked, so surely a pink one would stand out. This mail campaign was for a company with a blue color scheme, so you can imagine the apprehension that crept in when upper management caught wind! In the end, her hot pink mailer resulted in the highest attendance at a single product launch event in the decade she was at the company. From that point forward, she was encouraged to share her big, bold ideas. That’s what she tries to instill in her team; it’s crucial to have someone supporting you, to take risks, and sometimes to seek forgiveness.

Creating Marketing Strategies

Analisa intends to develop marketing strategies and plans that align with its business objectives. This involves making sure that all leaders comprehend the significance of their organization and the worth it provides on a daily basis. It also necessitates a thorough comprehension of customers’ preferences, purchasing habits, communication preferences, and current marketing trends. In addition, it’s important to focus on potential areas for expansion, closely monitor the competition, and strive to stay ahead of them.

To effectively lead a team, you must acknowledge and value the unique abilities and limitations of each member. It is crucial to offer them the assistance they need to improve their skills and give them space to develop and explore new possibilities. Furthermore, it is important to have faith in their abilities both now and in the future. Encourage independence and opportunities for learning, and foster an environment of trust. Always remain genuine and open with your team. Remember that teamwork and diversity are essential, and team members must be dedicated to achieving excellence while maintaining honesty and respect toward each other and the organization.

Perfectionism and Personal Life as a Leader

Achieving success requires a significant investment of time and effort. As you climb the ranks, you acquire more responsibilities and must continuously learn from both successes and failures. Your ultimate objective should be to position yourself as a dedicated and competent individual whom others can rely on to deliver results. Nevertheless, it’s important to be mindful of the dangers of perfectionism. A leader’s effectiveness is partly determined by their willingness to take responsibility for errors, which are inevitable. Being able to recognize and correct mistakes is vital to achieving future success.

Ensuring a proper balance between work and personal life is crucial. It’s essential to keep them separate. Most importantly, you need to believe in your capabilities and stand up for yourself. Remember, no one else will do it for you. As a leader, it’s vital to offer your team numerous opportunities to learn and develop. However, it’s equally important to allow them to make mistakes and learn from them. By supporting your team in this manner, you are laying the groundwork for a successful and growth-oriented team of executives in the future.

Surviving the Digital Age

The evolution of customer expectations, market pressures, and organizational goals is driving the process of digital transformation across various industries. It is widely understood that establishing new networks and ecosystems, which lead to new business models, is crucial for future growth. However, digital transformation requires a connected ecosystem, as disruptions in the network may render applications useless and negatively impact the organization and its customers. As new applications are added, there is an increased likelihood of network strain and outages, making always-on access even more critical. During the strategy phase, primary consideration should be given to accessing mission-critical applications during a disruption, which is where Opengear can be of assistance.

The impact of a network disruption on revenue, customer experience, and brand reputation has already been extensively discussed. As the backbone of an organization, the network supports all aspects of infrastructure. To stay operational and competitive during digital transformation, businesses need Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform. This platform provides Smart Out of Band management and secure, remote access to critical resources on the First Day, Worst Day, and Every Day. With Failover to Cellular technology, Opengear’s Network Resilience Platform ensures sufficient bandwidth for critical processes to continue operating at all times.

It is important for organizations to be prepared for any possible scenario. They are aware that modern businesses are required to accomplish more with fewer resources, whether due to limited budgets or a shortage of personnel to address site provisioning or facility-wide issues across the globe. However, digital transformation remains an essential component for staying competitive despite the ever-changing demands of customers, market pressures, and unpredictable supply chains, regardless of the industry. Therefore, as their customers expand their networks and operations through digital transformation, organizations are committed to supporting them throughout the network lifecycle, delivering value on a daily basis.

Earned Recognition and Awards

“Opengear is the saving grace for us. They are the only way for them to access its critical devices during an outage.” – John Hargraves, Network and Voice Services Team Lead, ABB.

“We have achieved the goals we set for the project. We no longer need media converters, and now, with Opengear’s Resilience Gateways, we have a solution that provides us with high-end functionalities. The network is more resilient than before, thanks to the alternative access path. We can access it remotely, which was a big advantage, especially during the pandemic. In addition, we can integrate other devices into the OOB management using the various interfaces.” – Jens Aßmann, Head of Department at ZIMT (Center for Information and Media Technology), the University of Siegen.

“We like Opengear because it is a resilient and performant solution that can be trusted to do the critical job it does. It is not a hacky solution. The Opengear platform is a real professional-grade solution that does not make assumptions about how we want to work.” – Tyler Ament, Solution Architect at Coldsmoke Networks.

2021 Cloud Computing Backup and Disaster Recovery Award.

2021 IoT Evolution Product of the Year Award.

2020 Network Computing Awards Hardware Product of the Year – Finalist.

2017 Network Computing Awards Network Project of the Year – Private Sector.

2017 IoT Evolution Product of the Year.

2016 IT World Awards – Silver.