Telecom and IT Had a Baby and They Named It Digital Services

Lorna Garey

I don’t know about you, but before I leave Austin, after we wrap Channel Partners Evolution and SDxE: The Software-Defined Enterprise, I’m heading to Antone’s to hear some blues. Students of McKinley Morganfield, better known as Muddy Waters, debate the deeper meaning behind “The Blues had a baby and they named it Rock & Roll,” from the award-winning 1977 album Hard Again, arguably the crescendo of the post-war blues revival. I like to think Muddy was acknowledging that time and popular taste march on while reminding us that an original riff is rare. Music, like technology and business, is all about mashing up and disrupting what came before.

As Art Wittmann pointed out to me recently, aggressively large digital-service vendors are disrupting the channel as we know it. “Disruption” is what you call it when Amazon goes after the call center market — existing call center providers argue about who’s got the best features. Amazon is going to make a “good enough” service that guts that market. At least that’s its intent.

Our goal when programming education across the Austin shows was pretty simple: Equip attendees to use disruption to succeed in digital-services selling, and to help their customers avoid being “Ubered.” Here, in no particular order except what day they’re on, are my Top 5 sessions to help you do that.

1. Marketing Now: Omnichannel, Digital & Data-Driven with Khali Henderson, senior partner, Buzz Theory Strategies. If your idea of omnichannel marketing is an email followed by a phone call, welcome to 1997. The science of selling has come a long way. Today you need video, social, data analysis, sales alignment, events — all in pursuit of a consistently excellent customer experience.

Why I like it: Have you seen the growth trajectory for video? YouTube has more than 180 million U.S. users who upload 400 hours of video every minute. That’s disruption. Millennial end users and customers want to communicate and consume content visually, on tiny screens. What does that mean for your business?

2. Future of the Channel: The Changing Buying Journey, Hyperspecialization and New Shadow Influencers with Jay McBain, Forrester principal analyst, global channels. Line-of-business executives are increasingly leading technology decisions — in many cases, taking over completely from the IT department. These stakeholders are looking to a new set of hyperspecialized influencers to help them plan, implement and integrate new technology with back-end systems. In this session, we will look at what smart partners are doing to capitalize on these trends.

Why I like it: Jay, a veteran of IBM, Lenovo, Autotask and ChannelEyes, just joined Forrester as principal analyst, global channels. When he says “this might be the most disruptive period in the history of the channel,” that’s worth a listen.

3. New Stack City with John White, VP of product strategy, Expedient; Grant Kirkwood, founder/CTO, Unitas Global; Gerry Le Canu, senior cloud solutions engineer, Rackspace; and Bill Kleyman, CTO, MTM Technologies. Three top CSPs will discuss how and why they chose the platforms on which they run their own private and hybrid cloud infrastructures. We’ll discuss the status of Azure Stack and how it will compare with OpenStack and VMware; explore the hybrid cloud versus multicloud discussion; and touch on new hardware options.

Why I like it: Cloud is the ultimate disruptor, and this is definitely not just for cloud service providers. Microsoft is pushing Azure hard, and every customer will have questions about …