Skip to main content

IT Vendors Seek Change Management Goals

Despite the current economic uncertainty, 72 percent of high technology industry leaders in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe have plans to grow revenue in 2023, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

Furthermore, nearly half of those tech industry leaders believe they will be able to outperform their competition this year, as the upside opportunities for cloud and SaaS vendors continue to grow.

Business Technology Market Development

Gartner conducted a survey in the second half of 2022 to understand how economic turbulence poses challenges to general managers, how confident they are in their ability to achieve their plans, and the measures planned to tackle the uncertainty.

"Outperforming the market through an uncertain market requires an above average ability to execute on revenue ambitions," said Mark McDonald, vice president at Gartner.

Moreover, the Gartner survey results indicate that almost half of the firms (46 percent) do not have a sufficient ability to execute and reliably realize their company's revenue goals.

The survey also found that many technology leaders entered 2023 prepared for a potential recession. That's driving market caution.

Paradoxically many of the actions taken concentrated on reducing costs rather than focusing on growing revenue and market relevance. Therefore, their actions don't always follow their aspirations.

Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts overall information technology (IT) spending will grow by 2.4 percent in 2023, with enterprise IT spending projected to grow by 4.1 percent.

According to the Gartner assessment, the context of IT spending is changing as buyers increasingly value and make investments in 'business outcomes' rather than buying product-based solutions.

"Changes in context challenge the relevance of technology solutions. Lower relevance reduces willingness to pay and renew relationships,"  said McDonald.

Gartner sees relevance as the connection between a provider’s solution and how applicable it is to current customer needs.

That connection exists at every level from the C-level to individual software developers. Without relevance, IT vendor sales cycles extend, and subscription renewals are at greater risk.

Context is a dynamic requiring tech leaders to raise their relevance across three situations -- the now, and whenever context changes in the near term, with the ultimate goal of positioning IT solutions for future growth when economic conditions are more favorable.

"It is up to the IT provider to know when the context changes and to rebuild context through refocusing messaging and repositioning to meet customers where they are," concludes McDonald.

Outlook for Business Technology Applications Growth

That said, I believe we are witnessing the ongoing evolution of IT vendors' go-to-market (GTM) strategy, and it's all due to the shift of projects toward more digital business transformation initiatives.

Furthermore, buyer enablement has superseded sales enablement as the preferred IT vendor GTM approach that's proven to deliver revenue growth results.

I predict that this Change Management trend will accelerate in 2023 as more vendors struggle to maintain profit margins due to outdated marketing policies and rising sales operation costs.

Popular posts from this blog

AI-Driven Data Center Liquid Cooling Demand

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and hyperscale cloud computing is fundamentally reshaping data center infrastructure, and liquid cooling is emerging as an indispensable solution. As traditional air-cooled systems reach their physical limits, the IT industry is under pressure to adopt more efficient thermal management strategies to meet growing demands, while complying with stringent environmental regulations. Liquid Cooling Market Development The latest ABI Research analysis reveals momentum in liquid cooling adoption. Installations are forecast to quadruple between 2023 and 2030. The market will reach $3.7 billion in value by the decade's end, with a CAGR of 22 percent. The urgency behind these numbers becomes clear when examining energy metrics: liquid cooling systems demonstrate 40 percent greater energy efficiency when compared to conventional air-cooling architectures, while simultaneously enabling ~300-500 percent increases in computational density per rac...