I have worked in the High Tech industry for more than a decade in marketing, communications, consulting and business development roles. The most consistent trend that I’ve observed while serving in these positions is the shift in the reseller and integrator environments, in terms of brand equity, mission and sales focus, to the IT business solution.

In the new millennium, small, medium and large business enterprises have de-emphasized the value of purchasing technologies as commodities. Today, vertical end-users and CFO’s are more often final arbiters on technology purchases, forcing reseller channels to retrench their client outreach. This puts critical business issues (CBIs) at the forefront instead of bits, bytes and service cost reductions alone. Solving real business problems, in terms of how a client raises their shareholder value, how they interface with their customers, how they comply with regulations, how they reduce real estate burden costs by virtualizing technologies, etc., gets the power-sponsor to respond and sign a deal.

My current firm, Mitra Creative, supports the marketing needs of a number of reseller, integrator and custom software development company clients. We are building new branding, communications, salesforce automation and digital/print advertising and promotional solutions every day that respond to the needs of high tech companies to sell to business end-users. We will delineate these trends and some of the solutions that Mitra Creative and others have devised to respond to the current requirements of tech marketing and business development in coming entries. Stay tuned!