Computing’s announcement that “Royal Mail seeks suppliers for £750m IT transformation plan” hints at the underlying (and increasingly important)  link between investment in IT and cash availability.

At the start of July, with Mandelson’s plans for part-privatisation abandoned, Royal Mail described its big three issues as “The need for fairer regulation, the need for a resolution to the large and growing legacy pension deficit and flexible and timely access to capital remain as urgent as before.”

Come the end of July, with the funding apparently now available, Royal Mail is looking for suppliers under three separate agreements adding up to around £750m “which will include systems design, build and implementation, as well as the support and hosting of the postal service’s softwareapplications”.

Talking previously about the transformation required at Royal Mail, postal service minister Pat McFadden had said that “given Royal Mail’s falling revenues and limited profits over the next few years, and pensions fund deficit, clearly Royal Mail will not be able to fund this investment alone. Additional capital will be required and this could be hundreds of millions of pounds, in addition to the funding we have already provided.”

The availability of capital is yet another language that marketers need to learn and bear in mind when trying to find a place in buyers’ plans.

April 2nd’s New York Times reported the then-growing rumour that IBM was to buy Sun Microsystems for $7bn. The deal could easily increase IBM’s hold on some key hardware and software markets, especially as regards datacentres. However, reports out late yesterday suggested that the deal had collapsed after Sun’s board ”balked” at reduced offer and IBM withdrew it.

I attended a fascinating presentation last night given by Tom Ilube, the CEO of online identity theft prevention company Garlik. Tom is also the ex-CIO of Egg.

Online identity fraudsters can apparently gather the information they need to steal your identity in 2-3 hours – something that used to take them days. By visiting your Facebook or LinkedIn page, company site, Flickr account and searching the online government archives, fraudsters can now get everything they need to mock up convincing passports, bank statements, utility bills – basically any document that they need to get credit.

When you stop to think about what’s online about you when the information is culled from all sources – your photos, CV, personal information, mother’s maiden name – you start to think differently about how you use the web.

If you, or any of your team, are thinking about starting blogs or exploiting social networking sites either for marketing purposes or personal use, Tom made some great points about protecting yourself online. 

Start by using Google, or better still ZoomInfo or Wink, to search for yourself and see what’s already out there. His major two hints for keeping safe? Never put your personal mobile number or home address on anything. 

There’s a lot more useful info on Tom’s blog and Garlik’s site. I’m off to Google myself…

A fascinating glimpse into the true value of IT has been revealed by the Lehman Brothers’ collapse.

This article from Data Centre Knowledge and this one from Vunet highlight the actual amounts paid for Lehman’s businesses ($250m) versus its property and data centres ($1.45bn) – a similar story when JPMorgan bought Bear Sterns’ assets earlier this year.

Interesting that when cool assessments of the true value of a company are being made, IT’s importance, and the value of data, are at the top of the list. 

I have been reminded once again this week of the need for B2B marketing and sales departments to be more closely aligned.

The “Best of” Harvard Business Review article “Major Sales: Who Really Does the Buying?” is the best $6.50 I’ve spent in a while.

It argues that it’s much harder to identify the real decision-maker in a major B2B sale than you might imagine – and recommends the account team works with marketing to understand buying motives. He adds that this requires a psychologists’s eye – something marketing teams are well placed to offer.

The first page of this article is free to read on HBR’s site from the link above. In reading it, I felt a strong case for further marketing and sales alignment.

Account-based programmes designed to increase revenue from existing customers are already paying dividends. We’ve already seen that IT companies who align their sales and marketing teams benefit from increased revenue per customer and better relationships. It looks like the benefits of taking an account-focused approach to new business development can result in higher bid win rates too.

Ed (name changed to protect the innocent) is responsible for all infrastructure globally for the entire organisation. He has more than 20 years’ experience in the IT sector, having worked in retail banking and for major retail organisations. He shared his thoughts with us recently on the best way for IT companies to market to him:

• I’m interested primarily in content and information that will help me do my job. If you can help solve the problem I’ve been grappling with in the car on the way in to work then I’ll listen to you.
• The strength of the proposition is not always the key determinant here; more important is the timing of the proposition and how relevant it is to me and my priorities.
• Be prompt and to the point. I want information, but I don’t want to spend too long getting it.
• Demonstrate a personal understanding of my business. Show you appreciate my company’s stated corporate direction and its market challenges.
• Make me feel obliged to respond, make the effort by investing time in helping me.
• If you can’t get me directly, the best way in is through a member of my team or my PA.
• I listen a lot to my ‘customers’ in the business, so you can always reach me through them – maybe they will be first people in the company to recognise the issue we have.
• Engage with me on a business level, don’t talk technical.
• Respect my team. If I ask you to deal with someone else there’s a good reason for it.
• Give me great content – sexy channels like podcasts are good, but I’ll only want the content if it’s useful to me
• I want to network with my peers, and hear their stories. Help facilitate that for me.
• My next step needs to be clear – if you’re asking me to do something (from taking a meeting to requesting a document), it needs to be easy for me to do and pitched to sound as valuable as possible.

Keeping up with the rapid changes in IT world and B2B at the same time is a big challenge. But many successful lead generation campaigns owe much to their timing. So for those interested in producing great marketing to generate leads at an enterprise level, it’s key to have access to the latest thinking on B2B as well as the latest news on IT. Here’s a manageable list of some of the best blogs around for keeping posted on both.

I’d recommend pulling all these and other favourite resources onto your desktop using a free RSS reader like NewsGator.

The FT’s Tech blog http://Blogs.ft.com/techblog
Computer Weekly’s Making IT Happen blog
http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/cio-making-it-happen-blog/
Paul Dunay’s blog http://buzzmarketingfortech.blogspot.com
Brian Carroll’s blog http://blog.startwithalead.com/
Chris Brogan’s blog http://www.chrisbrogan.com
The Enterprise Irreguars Blog www.enterpriseirregulars.com
Forrester’s Marketing blog http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/
The Marketing Pilgrim blog http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/
David Meerman Scott’s blog http://www.webinknow.com/
Micropersuasion blog http://www.micropersuasion.com
Nicholas Carr’s blog http://www.roughtype.com
The B2B International blog http://b2binternational.com/b2b-blog/

Today Google launched Chrome, its new beta browser. Chrome is designed specifically to run applications rather than just display pages. As such, it’s ideal for running SaaS applications such as salesforce.com, sugar crm, SAP BusinessByDesign, Oracle CRM OnDemand etc.

Nicholas G Carr on his blog today argues that “the real goal of Chrome, embedded in [its] open-source code, is to upgrade the capabilities of all browsers so that they can better support (and eventually disappear behind) the applications.” The web as a computing platform continues its relentless march.

As SaaS gains increasing popularity, the way businesses are buying applications is changing. SaaS apps are proving easier and quicker to buy. The average business unit head is very comfortable with the web – it doesn’t hold the fear and pain of “going through IT” to get something done. If you can sign up for FT.com to get your news with the company credit card – why not a CRM tool too?

But the fact/illusion that you can simply “sign up over the internet” is having real impact on the decision-making cycles B2B marketers are used to. Sales cycles are shorter, traditional due diligence is being shortcut. Many more decisions are being made on the basis of politics, ambition, emotion and frustration. Often IT is being left out of SaaS purchase processes entirely.

Nick Booth’s article last week for Computer Weekly highlights a study by Gartner research which showed that 75% of all SaaS is bought by business unit managers, rather than IT managers. Gartner warns CIOs to get involved in the decision-making, saying: “It’s happening in your organisation anyway, whether you like it or not.”

All this adds up to interesting times ahead for B2B marketers. If browser technology is evolving to make applications easier to run and access to the latest software is a click away, what does that mean for our marketing efforts? Should we look to the publishing world or the gaming world for models? Is the SaaS subscriber model bringing a “throwaway” culture to organisational IT buying?

IT decision-making power is shifting rapidly, and the perception of organisational IT is changing with it. Take a good look at what it means for your programmes.

I recently interviewed the marketing director at one of the UK’s largest systems integrators about her views on the marketing she receives. Her “most memorable” was a mailing containing a box of tissues and the headline “crying into your sales forecast?”.

She couldn’t remember who sent it, why, or what they were selling. She recalled it – for all the wrong reasons – and no-one got an appointment or a sale out of it.

These attention-grabbing techniques are often agency-inspired. They happen when agencies can’t or don’t understand the proposition. ”But it got a 57% recall rate” shrieks the agency. “Yes, but did it generate any leads?” we should ask! The recipient is a real person with real challenges. They want information to help them do their jobs better, not balloons, trowels or tissues.

The same is even truer online. People vote with their feet. If the content is interesting and useful, it grows legs. If it doesn’t, it dies.

A derth of good, relevant, valuable and honest content has been the B2B marketing world’s challenge for decades. For years buyers have been asking for “warts and all” stories but few companies have the stomach to provide them. (It’s why shows like Top Gear are so successful in B2C – they tell it like it is with a strong opinion and bags of personality.) But is a change on the horizon for B2B? Is the web 2.0 phenomenon finally forcing B2B marketers to change their ways?

Consider whether you would rather read a private diary from someone actually using the multi-million pound software product you are considering purchasing, or a corporate brochure describing its features? The brochure will probably be skimmed through but you can imagine the diary getting read thoroughly. As increased truth and interaction is being demanded by web 2.0, a new era is dawning for B2B marcomms functions.

Going from decades of broadcasting brochureware to something more akin to crafting diaries and narratives (and being prepared for a good amount of criticism along the way) is going to require quite a shift for the traditional B2B marketing department.

The upside is war stories, honesty, interest, more pull-able and usable content. It’s what buyers have been screaming for. The trade-off is less editorial control and a necessity that the content-generators themeselves are better informed and involved in their products’ or services’ world.