blog

We all know that B2B and B2C are totally different animals. What works for selling toilet paper doesn’t really translate to virtual desktop infrastructures. In e-mail marketing, content reigns supreme … which is why we expect corporate blogs to increase in influence through the end of the year and beyond.

According to recent research by MarketingSherpa, 67 percent of B2B marketing professionals use e-mail to deliver “content relevant to segment,” compared to only 61 percent of B2C e-mail marketers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Virtualization is among the hottest technologies in the IT market right now. Even though datacenter penetration is still low, your competitors are pushing it just as hard as you are. There’s no guarantee that you’ll be the first person a CIO or other IT decision maker has spoke with about virtualization, so you need to make sure your message is a bit different — you need to make it pop. The easiest way to do this is to make it about the competition.

In your own market (i.e., among you and your competitors), you’re seeing the importance of virtualization skyrocket. Do the math — this means a lot of IT solution providers are talking to a lot of IT departments. Virtualization is on the move, and a CIO that doesn’t get on board soon enough will be left behind, leaving the entire organization at a disadvantage in the marketplace. A company that lags technologically will have trouble supporting its business users, serving its clients and managing its operations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

But, there are factors that can frustrate the DR/BC sales effort. There’s plenty of competition, making it harder for our voice to be heard and causing sales fatigue to set in among CIOs and other IT decision-makers. Further, the technologies that can have the greatest impact can disrupt IT — and end-user — operations, a situation that many IT departments seek to minimize. So, what’s intuitively an easy sell can become rather complex.

Here are five ways to tip the odds in your favor:

Read the rest of this entry »

The penetration of virtualization technologies is still low, but that only means it has room to grow. By 2014, according to a new report from Citrix, virtualization will dominate IT enterprise savings — and thus the agendas of CIOs. Citrix surveyed more than 700 CIOs from around the world and found that virtualization has led to IT cost savings of 16 percent, and they expect it to hit 27 percent in 2014.

While 31percent of CIOs estimate that 5 percent of their IT budgets or less are dedicated to virtualization technologies, 26 percent of them expect virtualization to account for a quarter of their IT budgets in 2014. The UK is leading the adoption of virtualization, with 27 percent of CIOs rolling out desktop virtualization over the next year and 41 percent planning to extend their use of server virtualization. In the United States, server virtualization adoption is currently only 17 percent.

Read the rest of this entry »

IT buyers are spending more … but they’re looking for a faster and greater return. Virtualization is among the technologies at the top of the list for IT investment right now – given the strong ROI case that it usually entails – along with unified communications and video conferencing.

A new study from IT information service TheInfoPro indicates that 30 percent of IT decision makers are planning to increase technology spending next year, with only 22 percent going in the other direction.

The key is to be able to demonstrate a powerful ROI case with benefits that can be realized quickly. Expect to see high-impacts on the agendas of IT buyers next year … after two years of constrained budget.

Even with 60 million people riding it, there’s still room on the Twitter bandwagon. While you’ll never care about most of these people or anything they have to say, there is a rich exchange of IT ideas occurring on this service. Check out “virtualization,” “cloud computing,” “data security” and “green IT” to see what I mean. And, most of the OEMs have active Twitter presences, including VMWare, Citrix, Cisco and EMC.

So, Twitter has marketing potential: relevant audience, reach and intelligence/analytics (we can help you with this last one). With a touch of common sense, it’s hard to do anything “wrong.” However, it can take some planning to generate a marketing impact you can measure by ROI. The first step is to understand what Twitter isn’t.

Read the rest of this entry »