Tech Marketers, it is time to evaulate your lead nurturing efforts

November 30, 2009

Whether you have a lead nurturing strategy in place or you are about to incorporate this strategy in to your lead generation activities, now is a good time to evaluate your nurturing approach.

A quick recap of the definition of lead nurturing: In a complex sales cycle, nurturing is a relationship-building approach utilizing multiple media to provide relevant information to prospects and engage in an ongoing dialog until qualified prospects are deemed “sales ready.” A smart nurturing strategy shortens the sales cycle and improves return on investment from lead-generation activities, so it is important to reconsider or re-evaluate your nurturing strategy frequently.

If you read about the effectiveness of well thought out lead nurturing efforts, you may have come across data that suggests some lead nurturing programs can yield anywhere from 15% to 200% in additional, new qualified leads.  Close ratios are higher.  Sales pipelines open up and are stronger.  Average sales cycles are shorter.  One company determined that its nurtured prospects bought from 100% to 250% more than those that were not nurtured.  Lastly, many nurtured prospects cited greater overall positive impression of the company.  Bottom line is that a properly planned lead nurture strategy can drive results.

Ardath Albee, a known B2B Marketing Strategist, recently outlined some basic evaluation criteria to evaluate your lead nurturing efforts. These are great thought starters and should be discussed among your team responsible for lead nurturing.

3 steps for evaluation that will help you create a baseline for building an effective nurturing program.

First – About your customers:

  • Who buys from us?
  • Why do they buy from us?
  • What do they need to know to make a purchase decision?
  • Who influences our buyers?
  • What could stop them from choosing to buy?
  • Is one kind of customer more ideal than another? Why?
  • What’s your best foot-in-the-door sale?

Second – Evaluate your prospect database:

  • Who’s in it?
  • Did THEY opt in or did YOU opt them in?
  • How do the prospects in your database match up with what you know about your customers?
  • How are you getting more prospects to opt in?
  • When’s the last time your database heard from you?
  • What topics have they responded to?
  • What’s your opt out rate?

Third – Audit Your Website:

See Ardath’s recent blog post about how to audit your web pages.

  • How much information on your website matches the answers to the questions in the About Your Customers step above?
  • What can be improved?

 

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Marketing your technology to the C-suite

November 24, 2009

“We need to sell up to the C-Suite.” This is the ongoing discussion and challenge  among all marketing folks in technology. The thought that if we can get our message beyond the day-to-day executives that we currently have a relationship with, the sales people will have a better business outcome. Although the C-suite is a very important audience and can certainly influence the purchase decision, as a marketer, you cannot ignore those day-to-day executives. In many cases they have the direct line to the C-suite and can determine if your message is C-suite worthy.

Reality in many cases is that each prospective organization has very different protocols in terms of the C-suite influence. Many CEOs, CIOs and CFOs rely on these day-to-day executives to make smart decisions and at the end of the day they trust their talents. This would then suggest that the C-suite audience is simply going to forward your information right back to the day-to-day folks or perhaps simply discard your message. Worse yet, is if you have not developed your content specific to a C-suite audience you can potentially create a perception of irrelevance among this highly sought after group.

Should you be marketing to the C-suite…I believe yes!. There is still great value in creating awareness and building credibility for your technology solutions among the c-suite audience. But as with all other strategic marketing efforts these C-suite focused activities should be integrated with the rest of your marketing efforts against the day-to-day executives.

If you are looking to penetrate or increase your share of corporate budget and provide long-term value to a company you would be wise to plan your approach both tactically and via content development. Do some homework against each account. Meet with your sales team and map out the authority of the day-to-day executives as well as the influence of the C-suite. Find out how the organization tends to make decisions.  Figure out who is actually involved in the decision-making process. What information do they need? When do they need it? Who are the influencers?

Using this information, develop a content strategy to nurture both the c-suite as well as the day-to-day executive. Have your content developed so you may react appropriately based on response or feedback from these two targets. Every touch point should add value to the conversation and continue to build your credibility.

Keep in mind, you need to prove your worth to those who will immediately benefit: the day-to-day business-unit executives. With the right messaging and ROI, they may take the results directly to the C-suite, which will increase the impact of your C-level messaging. The effectiveness of your messaging to th e c-suite will increase if it is delivered by the very team they trust.

 

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Technology and B2B Marketing Benchmarks for 2010

November 18, 2009

Planning season is continuing to heat up around marketing departments at technology organizations and many of you are looking for insights to justify your planned activities or perhaps inspire some of your upcoming marketing activities. Marketing Sherpa has recently released its annual B2B benchmarking report that I would encourage you to invest in. The report is probably the most comprehensive of its kind and addresses everything from trade shows to outsourcing and lead generation trends. There are several focus areas for technology marketing that may aid your marketing planning development.

I have listed some of the highlights below.

So the good news is that there is a lot of optimism for the upcoming year as many respondents of this study suggest that feel as thought there has been a turning point in the economy and there expectations for their business. This is good news for marketers trying to secure budgets and renew their limited marketing activity from the past two years. As the Marketing Sherpa study suggests, the expectation of better days ahead will mean a change in marketing objectives and the strategies required to achieve them for 2010. Those organizations that have learned to be efficient marketers on a lean budget will apply the lessons learned during these difficult times to become even more effective in the future.

Sales and marketing continue to debate quantity of leads over quality. Of course each of these department have performance measures that create this ever ongoing dialogue. Online search activities have become an ideal solution to balancing lead flow because, in many cases, the spigot can simply be opened or closed to control volume. The more complex challenge is controlling lead quality. This requires a much more strategic approach to optimizing not
only web pages for SEO, but in the case of paid search, carefully aligning the sequence of PPC keywords, ad listings and landing pages.

Tech Buyers are still consuming content at a rigorous pace, so whatever you are planning on doing, ensure you have outlined a smart content development process to feed into the various mead and outlets relied up on by these tech buyers. The chart below outlines the changing use of information resources by technology buyers in the past six months.

Aligning marketing and sales is still essential to creating a productive new business pipeline. As this chart demonstrates, many marketing and sales organizations are collaborating at minimum level by mutually engaging in best practices like defining what a sales-ready lead is – but few are developing a more complete process for sales to hand leads back to marketing for re-engagement and continued nurturing.

The website has also become an extremely efficient platform for integrating and automating the lead generation process. As a result, the role of a company’s website has been elevated from simply a spoke in the marketing mix wheel to the hub of the marketing strategy. While many website capabilities are being managed at a high level, or clients were at least doing a good job of managing them, the report suggests that system integration which enables the flow of leads generated on a website to the CRM system was a weak point.

 

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2010 End user sentiments from Gartner

November 16, 2009

Unable to attend this meeting, I was fortunate enough to have one of our clients pass his notes on from a recent Gartner summit regarding IT end user sentiments. The information was collected by Gartner and reflects the forward thinking of many IT buyers and decision makers for the upcoming 2010 year. Although most of these thoughts are a bit random, I always appreciate the chance to peek inside the mindsets of the tech buyers. I think the pattern here suggests that there is opportunity for tech marketers to identify how their solutions fit within the context of the current conversations.

For tech marketers to take advantage of these opportunities, you must build the content and prove out your solutions as they relate to what is on the it buyers mind.

IT end user sentiments in 2010:

*   6.9m jobs lost since 2008 in the US, and unemployment is still rising.

*   The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever.

*   Healthcare, Utilities and Government will be the first sectors to recover.

*   While the IT industry is on its way to recovery, we expect that by 2012 we will only be at 2008 revenue levels.

*   60% of CEOs surveyed think IT is holding the business back.

*   In 2009 1m servers will have their replacement delayed, which means increased risk to the enterprise.

*   The age of the IT industry’s hardware is increasing because many companies are delaying the purchases of servers, PCs, etc. So we need to plan for increased equipment failure rates.

*   The top 3 focus areas right now are cost management, growth and risk management.

*   Pattern Based Strategies—this is a hot theme, and the most profound of all.  It’s about implementing a framework that seeks models and looks for leading indicators in the marketplace and then exploits them (e.g. CPM, business analytics).

*   What’s the new normal?  Regulatory oversight will increase dramatically because of all the bailouts.

*   There will be a demand for increased accountability and transparency all the time now.

*   Increased scrutiny of IT is a good thing—it gives you more data to work with and forces you to see where IT is contributing.

*   Bloated apps portfolio is the big pink elephant in the apps space.  Apps are growing at 4-7%/year.

*   Apps portfolio management needs to reduce costs and risks.

*   IT starts with an inventory of apps (you do have one, right??!).

*   Start by assigning a business owner, use data (eg. Cost, utilization and risk) to justify its existence.

*   The “Collective” is a major force out there.  Don’t ignore it or try to control it.  It’s pervasive and galvanizes around the social network and is very influential (e.g. YouTube and Facebook).  You can’t halt it.

*   Whether the company allows it or not, people are doing social networking.

*   Don’t miss the early signals about what’s coming (e.g. Wall Street).

*   Don’t view your strategy as linear—that blinds us to emerging patterns, and that takes a behavioral problem and makes it worse with a systems problem.

*   Finance’s biggest challenge is how to forecast results.

*   Don’t ignore The Collective—it’s something we can’t ignore and it helps with early pattern detection

*   We need a performance measuring system that plans, simulates and forecasts performance at all levels of the organization.

*   Security.  Don’t try to protect yourself as much as possible.  Ask yourself what you will do to protect yourselves and what you won’t do.  You can’t protect against everything.

*   Risk management’s philosophy is to protect against reasonable threats.  Accept risk to perform well.

*   You must have Transparency for the Return to Growth in the new business environment.

*   Like IT, security must measure its impact on the business.

*   If all you focus on is cost, then everything you look at will be an expense.

*   Balance cost, risk and growth to be successful.

 

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Market your technology like a publisher

November 12, 2009

For many years, tech buyers have responded to countless surveys informing us that they are actively involved in exploring information that will help them solve a problem in the early stages of their purchasing cycle. They use this discovery phase of their purchase cycle to identify new solutions, providers and ensure the content of what they find is credible. This discovery takes place across the various web outlets, trade magazines and even document sharing among peers.

In the old days, before the growing influence of web content, trade publications played a major role in proving industry relevant information. With ad spends down, many trade pubs are struggling and some have even closed down. This leaves a potential void in relevant information the tech buyers still seek to scope their upcoming solutions. This is a marketing opportunity for all technology providers. Filling the current and future void by creating the content to ensure your organization remains relevant, credible and has an authoritative voice within your technology space. I am not suggesting that all trade pubs will be out of business, but as a marketer, you have a great opportunity here to connect with various levels of tech buyers if you develop your marketing strategy like a publisher.

Chris Koch, the Director of Research and Thought leadership for ITSMA, recently outlined the publisher process that technology marketers can adopt and utilize to fulfill the demand for relevant content among tech buyers. As he points out having process that simulates a publisher can ensure your content development remains relevant to the buying audience.

  • Identify the target reader. Publications fail if they don’t grasp exactly whom they are trying to reach and why. Marketers need to do a similar kind of segmentation.
  • Create an editorial calendar. As Chris points out every good publication has an editorial calendar. Identifying the reader’s needs, forecasting discussion trends and uncovering the gaps of content you will need to develop are great benefits of putting a calendar together. This calender can initiate numerous content ideas as well as drive some tactical recommendations. Probably the most important piece of the process!
  • Research the reader. Most magazines do annual reader surveys to ask subscribers what they think of the magazine and what could be improved. Through these surveys, they construct archetypes of the typical reader. Marketers can replace offers with survey questions once in a while to help build an understanding of timely issues to drive future content.
  • Interview the players and the experts. Journalists aren’t experts in the fields they cover, but they’re experts at finding those that are. Marketers need to talk to subject matter experts inside the company, influencers outside the company (analysts, academics, bloggers, journalists), and customers. All you need to do is ask questions and the content will flow out of these people.
  • Audit content. When surveying readers, magazines also ask whether readers like specific articles and subject areas covered in the magazine. Marketers need the same feedback from customers and from salespeople. If you don’t have the money to do research, consider adding a review button or comment feature to content.
  • Diversify content. Most magazines are a mixture of long and short, graphic and text-heavy stories. Marketing content needs to be similarly diverse.
  • Cycle through top reader interests. Magazines develop a short list of topic areas that matter most to their readers and hit those topics regularly as part of the issue planning process. Marketers need to develop a similar list as they plan their content calendars.
  • Be timely. Editors always try to leave room in the planning process for the timely, exclusive scoop—the story that identifies an important trend before others do. For marketers, being timely means having content that matches every stage of the buying cycle, so that you have a chance for an “exclusive” at each stage.

 

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Tech Marketers: Reach the Influencer with Video

November 10, 2009

One of the most difficult challenges technology marketers face is reaching the influencers of a technology purchase. In most cases, technology marketers have a house file or have purchased a list identifying a key contact at the prospective company. But as we all know, there are multiple persons within an organization involved in purchasing large technology solutions. Reaching these “other” folks has proven difficult for many marketers.

One solution to reach the important influencers in an organization is to utilize video to create a more viral approach beyond the one or two email addresses or contact information you may have. Whether you embed video in your emails or post it on a site and link back to it in your email, the video is a great vehicle to create conversation. Of course, you need to ensure that embedded videos are sized correctly so you do not hamper the delivery with an enormous file size.

Video content can be developed to drill down to a technology solution benefit and communicate in an engaging manner. If your technology solutions have more complexity to them, break up the content into more concise parts and use them in a series. As long as you create relevant content addressing business issues, your video can have potential pass along value, with the ultimate goal of reaching those individuals beyond your original contact information.

Your sales team can follow-up sales calls with an embedded video in their email with language to encourage forwarding this or the link to additional colleagues within their organization. Back end tracking can capture viewers information and allow your sales team to follow-up with any new contacts.

 

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Tech Marketers: CIOs Planning for Positive 2010

November 6, 2009

The year 2010 is looking positive for the industry as CIOs forecast their budgets and spend levels. This provides some positive news after a very difficult 2009.

The challenge for tech marketers is to ensure you have strong market presence to ensure your credibility against your tech solutions. I have suggested in previous posts that a fully integrated marketing communications plan with relevant content and messaging will be necessary for many technology companies to once again gain mind share. Let’s face it, many technology companies reduced their marketing spending last year (rightfully so) causing a much-needed dedicated effort towards rebuilding their market presence within their respective space. Now is the time to get aggressive.

Based on a recent CIO IT Economic Impact survey conducted by CIO.com to gauge how current economic conditions are impacting IT spending plans, 257 tech purchasing participants forecast very encouraging signs for the upcoming year. Some of the highlights include:

Over 70% of IT budgets will either Increase or stay the same

Question:   Will your overall IT budget increase, decrease or remain the same in the next 12 months compared to the past 12 months?

moneyspend40% Increase

34% Remain the same

26% decrease

Spending Increasing Across all Product Categories
Question: What areas will your budget increase in the next 12 months compared to the past12 months?

Picture1

New Project Spending on the Rise

Question: In the next 12 months, what percent of your total IT budget do you anticipate will be devoted to operations & maintenance related projects versus new?

budgetchart

33% Increase IT Salaries and 32% Increase Headcount in the Coming Year
staffcuts

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2009 Data Center Purchasing Trends Tech Marketers Should Know

November 3, 2009

If you are marketing your technology solutions into the data center, 2009 was a tough year. A recent report by Searchdatacenter.com surveyed 920 technology decision makers between June and September of 2009 and focused on the target’s purchase intentions.  The results confirm how the market has been reacting to the various financial pressures of the economy with the majority of respondents reporting that their data center budgets were either flat or decreased.

In my opinion, some of the highlights of the report suggest the data center as we know it today may look very different in the near future (3-4 years) as cloud computing options become more feasible. Of course, the health of these data centers are a critical component to marketing technology solutions. So understanding what the tech buyers are thinking may add value to your marketing planning, message development and content relevance.

The IT shops buying server hardware are geared towards enhancing  virtualization deployments

For IT shops that are actually spending on new servers, they’re doing so as part of server virtualization deployments. For the past few years, the top three responses to the question “What are the top three drivers for purchasing new servers?” have been: 1) Normal demand for increased capacity, 2) end of lease/life of the servers, and 3) new applications. Last year a few respondents wrote in “Virtualization” as a driver.

This year it has become the No. 1 factor for those buying servers. Nearly half the respondents said they planned to purchase hardware to enhance virtualization deployments.

Blade spending is down
13% plan to reduce blade spending. In both 2008 and this year’s survey, the same percentage of respondents don’t use blades (40%). So the reduction in blade server spending comes from respondents who spent on these servers last year.

According to the report, more IT managers have discovered the hidden cost of blades. “Many computer rooms just don’t have enough cooling for a rack of blades.” “In scale-out versus scale-up [with virtualization], respondents think scaling up [to a larger server] is just a better solution at this time.”

This may be the first sign of change in the data center environment, I am curious to what others may think.  See the full article for more info on this tepid blade server spending.

Windows rules the OS landscape
Windows Server 2008 saw a significant increase in general installations – from 23% to 45% – to the No. 2 spot behind Windows Server 2003.

The rest of the lineup stayed the same: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, followed by the Unixes: Solaris, HP-UX and AIX, respectively.

But when we asked about mission-critical workloads, Windows 2003 stayed in the No. 1 position, Windows 2008 dropped back in the pack, and Red Hat Linux jumped to No. 2. The three Unix variants stayed in the middle, but the combined Unix footprint is double the Linux market share on mission-critical applications, and it’s nearly as large as Windows Server 2003.

The survey showed a decline in the number of shops considering or using Linux. In response to the question, “Does your company use or plan to evaluate Linux on servers this year?”, 54% said ‘no’ last year; 60% said ‘no’ this year. Despite tight budgets and a down economy, Linux adoption declined rather than grew. And, in fact, respondents may view Linux adoption as risky in tough times.

More than a quarter (27%) of respondents said they would not dump Windows for Linux, versus 34% this year. The results seem to indicate that the Linux-to-Windows migration is over.

Reducing data center power is a key issue
According to the survey, data center power consumption is getting more important. The percentage of folks who said this was a major concern increased from 48% to 55% this year. While these numbers are unsurprising given the downturn in the economy and high energy costs, what is surprising is that the behavior concerning power consumption has begun to change: There was a major increase in the number of respondents whose business unit actually pays the power bill, from 37% to 53%.

28% of survey respondents don’t know whether their power bill has increased or decreased. For the respondents who are paying attention, a majority see major increases in the power bill for their data centers. 44% have seen an increase, and 19% say the increase is greater than 10%.

30% of respondents have implemented Hot-aisle/cold aisle containment (the practice of sealing hot aisles and cold aisles in a data center) and an additional 15% plan to next year.

Server virtualization spending continues, but at a sober rate
Virtualization budgets shrank only slightly. Last year 56% of respondents planned to increase spending on virtualization, and only 2% planned a decrease. This year 54% still plan to increase spending.

Click here for the complete Data Center Decisions 2009 survey results.

 

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10 strategic technologies for 2010

October 30, 2009

Smart technology marketing plans must be developed toward being relevant with the top industry issues in mind. Based on the latest Gartner symposium, cost optimization will reign in 2010 within the technology industry. CIOs have their work cut our for them as they ponder various solutions to make their enterprise more agile and elastic.  Other focus areas will include cloud computing (which will move from the discussion phase to small pilots), and process optimization around enterprise applications (ERP, customer relationship management, supply chain management) that will allow organizations to get more out of these investments.

As Marketers, your content should be developed to demonstrate how your technology solutions will integrate with these needs.

Gartner also identified the top 10 strategic technologies that will be within the mindset of tech buyers and CIOs throughout the upcoming year. The list focuses on technologies that have the “potential for significant impact on the enterprise during the next three years.” Here is the list:

1. Cloud computing. Organizations should think about how to approach the cloud in terms of using cloud services, developing cloud-based applications and implementing private cloud computing environments.

2. Advanced analytics. Real-time data analysis will enable fraud detection on one hand and prediction and simulation on the other, as organizations use data to look ahead.

3. Client computing. Enterprises need to develop a five- to eight-year client computing roadmap before making near-term decisions such as whether or how to upgrade client hardware or move to Windows 7. The progression of desktop virtualization technology and the range of devices available make this an important analysis. “Build a strategic client computing roadmap bringing all issues and devices together, or you will be following vendor roadmaps,” Cearley said.

4. IT for green. The “green” concept has moved beyond energy-efficient data centers to using IT to enable green throughout the enterprise. For example, an organization could use IT to analyze and optimize shipping of goods.

5. Reshaping the data center. A flexible “pod” model, where data center sections can be independently heated, cooled and powered, allows the organization to light up new sections only when needed.

6. Social computing. Organizations need to examine the use of social media by both internal and external constituents and figure out how to govern it. Social network analysis can be used both to detect fraud and to change business processes to boost internal efficiency.

7. Security — activity monitoring. As targeted attacks rise and cloud computing adds complexity, organizations need to identify a longer-term plan for how all of their security technologies come together. Security incident and event management devices, for example, are one approach that is becoming mainstream.

8. Flash memory. This technology, made ubiquitous by popular USB sticks, is a faster, although more expensive, storage alternative. Price drops mean it will offer a “new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers,” Gartner said.

9. Virtualization for availability. Live migration technology such as VMware Inc.’s VMotion will enable the use of virtualization for high performance, possibly displacing failover cluster software and even fault-tolerant hardware.

10. Mobile applications. Mobile is at a tipping point, given the proliferation of handheld devices and their power and storage.

If you think this list is accurate or believe that there is a technology that is missing, I would love to hear from you.

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Top five IT channel lessons for the quarter

October 28, 2009

We all know the channel partners out there can be a critical component to the success our marketing efforts in the technology industry. Certainly, they have been loyal to your efforts over the years and have voiced their thoughts regarding the type of support and credibility needed to move your solutions into the end users enterprises.

As you continue to plan your 2010 activities, i thought i would share some recent channel feedback as comprised by the SearchITChannel.com Advisory Board. These are some of the key discussions about various topics the channels have been discussing, and it is a nice peek into their mindsets about various tech trends. Some insights may be useful for your message development or perhaps will create more opportunities to further measure the feasibility of your marketing plans.

Overall, VARs remain extremely cautious on public cloud computing and are obsessed with which vendor giants will remain standing after more expected M&A activity.

1: Fear the cloud: VARs said they spend a lot of time educating customers about when and if public cloud computing will really meet their needs. Vendor hype aside, board members said public cloud scenarios run counter to HIPAA and other compliance regulations.

The rule of thumb seems to be: Unless you, the customer,  control the data–encrypted across the wire and in storage–and you control physical access to the servers and storage, you will not be in compliance.

Well-publicized outages, including the recent Microsoft-T-mobile Sidekick personal data loss, should be a reality check for customers, said George Brown, president of Database Solutions. Customers and the VARs supporting them need to know where what liability issues are involved in cloud-based solutions

Make no mistake: They are all for co-location and other plans to defray costs, but when it comes to regulation, shared infrastructure remains a no-no.

2:  While you’re at it, fear Google: Google’s push into business apps should “make everyone nervous,” said Kevin McDonald, executive vice president of Alvaka Networks.

It’s difficult to tell how serious Google is in its myriad projects. “I see them putting up all sorts of windmills, and Microsoft is out there tilting at them all,” McDonald said. In that, Google is doing to Microsoft what Microsoft used to do to every other software maker: Distract competitors with promised but distant releases of software that will do everything better, faster, cheaper.

3: Watch Cisco like a hawk: The consensus is that the network hardware kingpin is the company to watch when it comes to future acquisitions and forays into new businesses. It is viewed as a competitive threat by many VARs. “I’m a lot more concerned about what John Chambers is up to than with whatever the Microsoft CEO is doing,” said one board member.

Several panelists said there is probably truth in the oft-revived rumor about Cisco buying EMC.

4: Keep your eye on M&A: Cisco isn’t the only potential suitor for EMC. Other VARs said Microsoft or HP could also do that deal even though Microsoft isn’t much in the way of a hardware company and HP has already bought LeftHand Networks and licenses a lot of other storage.

Brocade appears up for grabs, thanks to a recent Wall Street Journal story citing an unnamed source (probably the investment banker who really, really wants that deal to happen.)

One panelist said Chinese telcom giant Huawei, which tried and failed to buy 3Com, might also be a suitor for Brocade.

5: Don’t equate small with easy:

There is often an inverse relationship between the size of a customer and that customer’s need for IT help. In other words, don’t mistake a small shop with small technology needs. Companies with under 25 people often require the most handholding.

The customer who buys a $1,600 system usually takes up many times the service calls as a larger customer, said  Jill Steinberg, president of Value Computing, Inc.

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