How to Thrive in a Changing IT Services Market

Mike Shonholz

By Mike Shonholz, Chief Revenue Officer, ARG Inc.

With new applications and solutions hitting the market at an accelerated rate, businesses face more technology choices than ever before.

This is creating massive opportunities and challenges for customers and solution providers. As such, providers need to position themselves to guide customers through thousands of technology options, and help them make the right decisions to solve business problems and support strategic goals.

The fact is no business can keep up with the constant stream of technologies entering the market today without help. Even providers need resources and focus to develop depth of expertise to support customers in such a dynamic, crowded technology marketplace.

Make the Move to ‘As a Service’

Service-based models are responsible of the abundance of technologies available today. For example, solutions that would have been cost-prohibitive for all but enterprise businesses in the past now are easily accessible on a subscription basis. From collaboration tools to advanced business applications, just about any type of technology is now available as a service.

And while it may have seemed service-based models would squeeze out solution providers, the reality is customers can’t handle all these choices on their own. They don’t have the expertise to map technology solutions to business needs, something that’s going to become even more prevalent as Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence applications come online.

The evolution of unified communications and now workstream collaboration creates yet another opportunity. The convergence of text, voice, email, online chat, video and document management applications can deliver a multichannel experience, but these technologies aren’t without challenges. Solution providers can help their customers navigate the things they need to consider, such as governance and compliance as they migrate to an omnichannel world.

Meanwhile, the explosion of cyberthreats has also been a significant development. Cybersecurity is the biggest concern for most companies. As a solution provider, if you can’t help protect your customers, it will get harder and harder to win business.

Develop More Depth

These developments have also changed how providers deliver services. You need depth of engineering, consulting and overall expertise to help customers make good business decisions. IT remains the entry point for most customer deals, but you can’t stop there – you will do yourself a disservice if you focus only on IT needs and fail to connect the dots to business value realization.

As a solution provider, you can show customers how spending a little more now will translate to greater value in the future. One example is how the integrations, features and functionality available today can directly impact their efficiency, customer experience and revenue targets. With many of the newer technologies not widely deployed, this is an opportunity to help our clients differentiate themselves in their markets and find considerable competitive advantage.

Also, you need to protect your customers. Everybody talks about moving to the cloud, but that shouldn’t happen until …