Our Thoughts on IT Matters

Keep Posted on Industry News and Events

   

The Un-Official (sales) Technology Cartel is Alive and Well

The fiscal year end is a critical time of year for both suppliers as well as technology buyers, many of whom are in the middle of 2024 budget planning as I type this. Several tech suppliers are wrapping up their fiscal year soon, and will be putting on the full court press to customers and prospects aiming to get as much revenue possible before the book closes on the year. During times of required action (renewals, new purchases, etc.) or duress (audits, M&As), we feel the pressure to get the deals done, and rarely take a step back to view the tech market as a 'federated'' whole, and how that might be impacting your business decisions. ...

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6 Questions With NET(net)'s Microsoft Practice Leader, Scott Braden

Recently we sat down with Scott Braden, NET(net)’s SVP of Value Creation, to chat about his career, his Microsoft experience, working at NET(net) and the industry as a whole. Scott hails proudly from Texas and is a Texas A&M graduate who’s been working in the technology industry for over 30 years, the last fifteen of which have been with NET(net). In fact, Scott just celebrated his fifteenth year this month, so we thought it might be a great time to get his take on all things Microsoft and the tech industry. Question (Dexter Siglin, Chief Operating Officer, NET(net)) Wow, Scott – congratulations on celebrating fifteen years with ...

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Microsoft Still Number One in the Audit Game

The adage goes: "The more things change, the more they stay the same." Although technology moves at a rapid pace, the predatory behavior of software vendors does not really change. Certainly, it works for them as the numbers show: Microsoft net income: $44.2B Oracle net income: $14.1B IBM profit: $5.6B Not coincidentally, these are the top 3 suppliers most likely to audit you according to a recent ITAM study of 465 IT Executives conducted by Flexera. This fact comes as no surprise to us, as we wrote about this in 2019 in an article titled: The Top 10 Audit Crazy Suppliers, where our top 3 mirrored the IT Executive survey exactly. In fact, 9 ...

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Is 'Overspend' Culture Impeding Your Digital Transformation?

Every IT leader reading this now is overspending 30% to 60% on at least one of their strategic suppliers. Unfortunately, many are overspending on several. How can we know this with such confidence? We’ve been seeing it now since 2002 and it’s the very reason we are thriving today. There are several factors that enable this culture of overspend to get traction inside organizations. Much of it is built on the good intentions of IT buyers simply working to execute their business plans with limited resources. Exacerbating the problem however, are the technology goliaths and their downstream ecosystems, who spend vast sums of money to ensure ...

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Top 10 Technology Suppliers to Watch in 2021

Dexter Siglin
Mar. 12,2021 | Software SaaS

Working with our Clients during a time of heightened need has given us a unique perspective on the market with an ability to see the Industry in real time and in practical terms. Being ahead of the market has its advantages in that we can see the ‘up and comers’ emerging; those technology suppliers who are showing up in more Client accounts offering high value solutions with real world application and practical use cases. In our first ever post of its kind, here is our list of the Top 10 Technology Suppliers to Watch in 2021: One: Veeva Category: Life Sciences Data Management Location: Pleasanton, CA By: Steve Zolman Veeva Systems is the ...

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Supplier Profits and 5 Year End Sales Tactics They Use Against You

The end of year mania is underway as sales professionals from some of the largest tech companies on the planet try to capture and fill their Q4 quota. When such a substantial portion of a sales rep’s income rests on their ability to separate company dollars from your budget, it’s no wonder we often witness such unbridled aggression this time of year. It can be personally traumatic for salespeople as they sit in their weekly (sometimes daily) sales meetings with their respective teams, while management tears apart their sales opportunities and deals often in front of their peers with questions like: What is the status of deal x/update on ...

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Twenty-Three (and counting) Free Supplier Offers for Business Use During Covid-19

If you are like me, you have been receiving an avalanche of email notifications from every company you’ve ever done business with letting you know how they are responding to the Covid-19 crisis. Did I really need to know how my auto mechanic is responding to the epidemic? Probably not at the top of my list. However, if you can get through the noise, there have been some legitimate offers to help companies support their teams and customers through the crisis. Most of these offers are in the form of free services and software for an extended period of time (30-60-90 days and more). Below, we’ve compiled a list of twenty-three companies and ...

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Managing IT Spend in a Global Pandemic: Strained Capacity and Reflexive Buying

Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...

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