Tech Marketing Blog

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.

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.