Current affairs can help boost profits
Barrie Desmond recommends using today's news agenda to ramp up your sales opportunities
I've long held the view that the volume of news articles on a specific tech subject is inversely proportional to the amount being sold. The more that's written, the less is being sold (it's certainly true that some companies are most desperate to appear in the press when they're not doing so well - Ed).
Today the cloud is a good example. There has been lots of commentary but very little commerce.
I recall when the latest IT trend was application service provision (ASP). Millions of pounds were invested in the great ASP adventure. NetStore, among others, was founded entirely on the premise, and hardly a day passed without somebody spouting off about how we were all going to adopt this new service model.
We all know where that ended up: a post-dot com tragedy in which many people got burned.
But with users, rather than the business or its IT department driving technology adoption, I'm starting to eat my own words and think differently.
In fact, I do now contend that news and trends can spur on the adoption of technology and related services. We are now moving into a new era of IT – I shall call it humanITy – where humans are driving IT, and therein lies a new channel opportunity.
Today, with the real-time generation, we have a desire for immediate gratification.
American comedian Steven Wright once reportedly said: "The early bird gets the worm – but it's the second mouse that gets the cheese." But I believe that perhaps in the era of humanITy, making the first move can now bring dividends for resellers if they are agile, open-minded and quick thinking.
As cyber-crime appears more in the headlines, and with politicians and ministers getting in on the act, I suggest resellers take advantage and take this news to their customers. Discuss and develop opportunities around such issues, because behind the headlines there is often a much wider opportunity and relevance to their own business success.
Of course, big headline stories can desensitise customers and VARs alike, or the former may believe they're not "big enough" to become a target of cyber-crime. But this risks a big fail.
For every headline about a large corporate victim, there are hundreds or even thousands of unreported cases where irreparable damage has been done, to both mid and large sized enterprises.
Security through obscurity is no longer an option. It won't protect you from a brute force attack, such as distributed denial of service (DDoS). Banks, government departments and even large media groups have all been victimised. And we are seeing intense interest across horizontal markets.
Many fall to low-level diversionary attacks that occupy security teams while more dangerous malware and spyware is injected elsewhere, lying dormant until instructed to do whatever damage it was designed for.
This year was supposed to be the year that CIOs furthered their BYOD strategies. But I fear that while we're in the era of humanITy, many have missed that particular boat and have failed to take advantage of the news agenda yet again. How many have only paid lip service to BYOD? And how many enjoyed a first-mover advantage?
We're now beyond BYOD. Users are not only bringing their own devices to work but their own applications and call plans with different mobile operators and global Wi-Fi consolidators such as Boingo and iPass. This can open up core opportunities around storage, networking, virtualisation, automation, security and applications.
OK, some trends will continue to result in white elephants, but VARs could do worse than joining in debates around current trends in the news, which could help highlight current issues for their customers, and then be the first mouse in line to get the cheese. If you don't, the second mouse is ready and waiting to eat your lunch.
Barrie Desmond is director of marketing and global accounts at Exclusive Networks Group