Commoditization Commode

What makes you or your company unique? What services or products do you provide that are really different? Have you added products and services just because the other guy has them? What makes you stand out from the herd?

I have noticed a trend in the IT Services/Managed Services space that I find disturbing. Not disturbing like childhood obesity, disturbing like we are making it harder for the consumer to tell us apart. It is a bad case of the me toos… You do that? Me too! You sell that? Me too! You have a widget? Me too!

http://www.zazzle.com/i_hate_thinking_me_too_postcard-239189165718421518

I understand that imitation is the highest form of flattery and if something is working for one vendor in the industry, it should work for another, however... If you are adding a marketing plan, Facebook page, Google+ page, Pinterest, training, or anything else because the other guy is doing it, you need to stop, take a breath, and make a good business decision for your own business.

Maybe following the herd leaders isn’t the right thing to do, and maybe is. They may have discovered the tried and proven path to market. If so, still try and be unique. Do not become a commodity. When you buy milk, do you always buy the same brand? 2%, organic, in a paper carton, but whose? I don’t generally care, and that is their fault for not making me care, or telling me why their milk is better and worth the extra 45 cents a gallon.

So what is the real issue here? Money. It is easy to extract higher profit from a client when you wrap products and services together is an easy to pay subscription model. Unless, brand X seems just like yours and it is 15% less… Once you are perceived as a commodity you will be shopped.

This is the huge trend in IT Services and the rush of products moving into the cloud only makes it easier. Bad news, all the major players are spending millions marketing their solution to your clients via mass media. Your solution is being compared to what they think Microsoft, Cisco, Apple and Google can offer them, how are you different? Better? You better have an answer when your prospects ask you.

Don’t allow you and your company to be flushed with the other companies acting like commodities out there. Know your clients, know your products, know your services, know your costs, and know your uniqueness.

Waving Goodbye

It is time to wave goodbye to Google Wave. Some of you must have tried Google Wave. When Google Wave came out I was really excited about the concept and possibilities. Combining and integrating multiple communication streams into a single thread. Google wave is shut down now and will power off the servers April 30^th. So why did it die?

Good question. My opinion is it was ahead of its time and all the connectors weren’t there to make it work as it needed to. In business, and in our personnel lives we need a Google Wave like function. You send an email to a coworker, he IMs another coworker, who texts a customer to post on the Facebook page asking other customers to Tweet with the hash tag #WTH and you would like to see all of this activity in one connected thread, because it is.

Google integrated some of this into Google+ by letting you make one post and notify additional people who are not on the platform by email. I hope the reverse the funnel and allow us have a single aggregated stream to read everything we care about, Email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, 4Square, LinkedIn, Etc.

The Web was always about information. The biggest challenge in the early days was finding what you wanted. Today’s challenge is filtering out too much data and making the logical connections between linked data. We are going to hear more and more about this with the push of “big data” into the SMB channel. A small business can have huge data, and as more data like medical records gets digitized, linking and finding this data may need Google Wave like technology.

So I waving goodbye to Google Wave, welcome Google+ with open arms and look down the road to more data and more tools do deal with the “big data”.

Miner 49er…

Two really interesting stories that are more connected that you might think.

The first was Google admitting to circumventing the security of the Safari browser when it was set to prohibit websites from using tracking cookies. You can find that story here.

The second was in Forbes talking about how retailer Target was able to identify that a teenage girl was pregnant before her father was able to know. That story is here.

Both stories have one common theme. Data Mining. Whether it is mining the data from store purchases and using that data to generate more sales, or mining the data from internet searches to generate better searches and ad revenue, it is still data mining.

So this data mining doesn’t have to be evil or even a breach of privacy. If you want to see who Google thinks you are, go here. This is some of the data they use to provide suggestions and ads to you. I can tell you I think this is much more helpful that the old way ads used to be put on search portals or in the results.

We all want great customer support. We all want our computers and websites to read our minds. We all want this to happen without sharing any data. We are all dreaming, and Google can tell us about what with about an 80% accuracy…

Paper, Plastic, or Private?

Does your local supermarket offer a discount card? You know, swipe your card and get a discount on your pork and beans. Do you know what the supermarket does with your card swipe? Makes money, that’s what.

They take that data about the shopping cart full of food fun you just bought, yes even those items, and build a database based on certain demographic data about you and your family. They then sell or trade that data to the food producers and distributers.

So have you read about the change in Google’s privacy statement? You can read it here. They are going to do the same thing as your grocery store. Collect data and sell it. Really what they have been doing. By tracking what you do, they make your searches more relevant. Sharing this data with advertisers should make your ads more relevant.

So do you want paper, plastic, or private?

New Year New Post

This is my first post of the new year, even though it is the 4th day of the month. What does that mean? I’ve been damn busy. Most of you know I took a new position at the end of 2011, let me tell you a little more about that and how it fits my predictions for 2012.

2011 worked out the way I saw it, more cannibalization, more competition, more mergers, less profit. None of those issues were caused by the big guys. Microsoft didn’t screw the MSP with 365, Google didn’t put you out of business with a Chromebook, Dell didn’t sell to all your customers. The MSPs need to look in the mirror to see the problem. Too much setting prices without knowing costs.

So my predictions for 2012? Some of these trends will continue, especially in Mergers and acquisitions. Small guys want to get big, big guys want to get bigger, customer wants it cheaper. Security will go to the front of the new trends, especially in the mobility segment. MDM will get pushed hard by vendors, and not add as much true network security as we need.

So why am I so busy? The position I took with Bradford Networks is growing our partner base in the MSP and SMB space for our Bradford.cloud SaaS NAC offering. The interest has been more than we can keep up with, and we are not even out in the channel yet.

The ability to help partners add and deliver enterprise grade NAC to their clients put Bradford on the leading edge of the mobility security concerns. These are concerns that current solutions cannot meet.

So feel free to contact me if you believe you need to add NAC security to your offerings, and add to my workload.