If you are trying to work out how to best pitch IT solutions to new prospects, you should understand business. Increasingly this means understanding where prospects’ workers are based and how that affects their practices.

There is surprising variation even within industry sectors.
Three things affect the distribution of workers. First, there is the physical structure of the company, such as where it is located and the number of branches.

Most businesses are still organised around a single headquarters with a number of smaller branches.

Beyond are those workers that spend their time outside these locations.

For some, such as salespeople, this has always been their modus operandi, but technology increases their efficiency.
For others, the technology itself allows them to work outside the office, such as home workers and employees enabled to keep up with email on the move.

The third factor that is boosting the prevalence of distributed working is the degree to which external workers are integrated into business processes.

Consequently, more organisations are allowing customers, suppliers and partners access to their internal IT systems.

Take all three factors together ­ branch offices, mobile employees and external workers ­ and you get a view of how distributed a given business is.

Networking solutions
Quocirca’s recent report, The Distributed Business Index (DBI), quantifies comparison between different industry sectors and individual organisations.

Overall, financial services organisations are the most distributed.

But even within financial services, on a scale ranging from one (where the organisation has no distributed workers) to 30 (where the company has lots of mobile workers in different locations), there is a range of 20 points.

So pitching advanced networking solutions is going to have more impact the higher the DBI of a particular organisation.
Technology itself does not necessarily drive distributed working. There are plenty of IT workers in low DBI firms, many of them with laptops and other mobile devices.

What makes a distributed business work is the degree to which it embraces distributed business processes successfully and enables them with good technology.

The opportunity here is to help businesses improve the platform for supporting distributed working, which is in effect their IP network.

For some this means fundamentals such as facilitating higher bandwidth broadband connections for small branches and home workers or more functional mobile devices for those in the field.

Others will already have the basics in place. The challenge then is to get more out of the existing network. This may require network acceleration technology at both the server and personal device level.

Only once the underlying network platform is fast and reliable enough can real value be delivered ­ a double whammy for resellers with the right product portfolio and prospects who aspire to make more from the distributed working phenomenon.

Quocirca’s report, the Distributed Business Index, is free to CRN readers at www.quocirca.com/pages/analysis/reports/
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