© 1992 Lawrence I. Charters
Washington Apple Pi Journal, Vol. 14, no. 6, June 1992, pp. 38,43.
An impromptu delegation of Pi members visited Falcon Microsystems’ headquarters in Landover, Maryland on April 29. Tom Witte, WAP volunteer coordinator (that means he coordinates volunteers as well as volunteers to coordinate) made the arrangements. Falcon, which holds Apple’s GSA contract and is the leading supplier of Apple products to the federal government, gave us a tour of their very impressive facility, fed us a sack lunch, and allowed us to talk to their upper management.
For many, the tour was a welcome surprise. Falcon fell victim to some bad press a few years ago when they fired most of their technicians, and their reputation for support to federal customers went down the tubes. Deniz Hardy, Falcon’s Public Relations person, went out of his way to convince us that these times are past, and Falcon is fanatically devoted to providing broad, full service, and expert support to the federal government. While it was irrelevant to the tour, several of us found it interesting that Deniz used to be director of PR for the Washington Bullets, located less than a mile away in the Capital Centre. We couldn’t talk him out of free tickets. Sigh.
In explaining Falcon’s devotion to the federal market, Deniz offered one really interesting quote: [Government contracting is] “a tremendous opportunity fraught with tremendous legalism … based on payment terms longer than you can bear.” This would be funny if it weren’t so painfully true.
Deniz graphed Falcon’s progress over the years, from $19.6 million in sales in 1987 to $170 million in FY92 (which ends, for them, in April). They have grown to ten offices across the nation, plus a “Falcon Dealer Alliance” ofregular Apple dealers which helps them support federal customers in remote locations. Being from the Pacific Northwest, I couldn’t help but notice that Seattle, home of Mighty Microsoft, the MS-DOS Lords, is classed as remote.
In the process of this dramatic rise in sales, Falcon has grown to be Apple’s fifth largest customer, and Falcon’s inside sales department logs 50,000 calls a month. While sales are not profits, especially in this era of razor-thin margins, this is still an impressive figure.
Touring the facility, it is clear Falcon has a passion for order. Wall charts in every department display, graphically, statistics on everything imaginable, from the number of calls received and customer visits made to the number of items shipped, total items billed, the average response time on customer service calls, customer satisfaction, number of shipping errors, and lots of other interesting details. All the charts, naturally, are produced on Macs.
Macs are used everywhere, and every Mac is networked to every other Mac using a combination of
Another concrete example of Falcon’s technical expertise is their publications department. All postcards, brochures, catalogs and flyers mailed out by Falcon are done in house, mostly using Quark XPress. Vividly colored and illustrated, they don’t look like the usual thrown-together publications of most retailers, and reinforce the strong impression that Falcon not only sells Macs, but actually knows how to use them. This is a radical concept that other resellers should try.
In the back of the main building, their network room has a large DEC VAX and several lesser machines, the guts for their various network routers, and extensive telecommunications ports. Once again, their faith in Apple technology is shown through 15 AppleTalk Remote Access ports, allowing salesmen to call up and log on to the company network from their PowerBooks. In a separate building resides the large warehouse, clean, orderly, and filled with all kinds of goodies (double sigh), and the Service Department is one of the largest, neatest, cleanest such operations I’ve ever seen.
In the “goodies per square inch” category, Falcon has a winner in their networking demonstration room in which one of almost every kind of Mac is tied in to a MicroVAX, a MIPS workstation, a Sun SparcStation, a Novell Netware server, and many other pieces of hardware, both onsite and remote, using Ethertalk, LocalTalk, TokenTalk, T-1 lines, and other various flavors of wiring. A hardware cage at the edge of the room allows the various network topographies to be changed on the fly, without unplugging any machines, just by changing some jumpers. Paul Schlosser and I thought it would make an excellent foundation for the Pi’s bulletin board, the TCS, but doubt Falcon will donate it to the Pi. Sigh.
During lunch, President Denny Young went out ofhis way to make us feel wanted, and listened intently as we passed on some observations concerning Falcon’s past performance. He readily admitted that Falcon has some bad impressions to overcome through past mistakes, but believes their performance during the last 18 months or so is second to none. He left everyone convinced that Falcon was definitely SOTA (State Of The Art), and pushing hard to do even better.
He also mentioned that Falcon has “surplus sales” every Thursday from 5p.m.-7p.m., and another on a Saturday morning once a month. For scheduling, call 301-386-8579. Also interesting is the Federal Employee Purchase Program: if you work for Uncle Sam, you can buy anything Falcon sells for the same price the government pays.
As roughly half, if not more, of all Pi