In a few weeks’ time, I’ll be interviewing one of the UK’s leading ICT analysts, Richard Holway. Known by the FT as the “wise grey owl” of tech, and previously Group Marketing Director of Hoskyns (now Capgemini), I’ll be asking Richard about his views on the future of the enterprise tech industry, and what that means for how marketers should be adapting their strategies and plans.
It promises to be a fascinating set of insights. If you have a question you’d like me to put to Richard, please write it in the comments field of this post.
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Having seen Richard’s view that spending growth in IT will be based around cloud propositions, my questions would be about how he sees that shifting the sales and marketing needs of IT players.
Does it finally mean that decisions will be taken by users rather than IT? (there are lots of stories about salesforce.com in this way, but suprisingly little evidence of it when you get to the large enterprise space) What would the knock-on effect be? (You can’t imagine one salesperson convincing 1,000 users in an organisaton – wouldn’t it mean a bigger role for marketing?)
All the talk of ‘the cloud’ must surely be confusing to buyers – with different IT suppliers taking up a range of potential positions. How does Richard think that buyers are going to make sense of this all? What can suppliers do to help?
I take the cloud point – but I’d be interested in some views that look beyond the short-mid term. If cloud is all about how you access IT, is there potential for even bigger developments in hardware devices that will take us all by suprise and drive new areas of growth? (mind-reading PCs for example, or RFID tags that change with time…)
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