Paul Wiefels
- Author of The Chasm Companion: Implementing Effective Marketing Strategies for High Technology Companies (HarperCollins, 2002)
- Representative clients include: Adobe, Affymetrix, AppDynamics, Brocade Communications, Citrix, Intel, Kofax, Pricer, Qmatic, Symantec, Verisign.
- All 7 Best Practices
- Pre-Meeting Discovery Process
- One-on-One Call with Expert
- Meeting Summary Report
- Post-Meeting Engagement
Bringing Technology Products, Services and Companies to Market
Key Trends
- Reengineering every critical customer process to a mobile device on someone’s person will be key in keeping companies and brands relevant.
There are over 115 million smartphone users in the U.S alone and we can expect this number to grow globally. This signals a sift from systems of record to systems of engagement. Expect investments in systems of engagement to create new opportunities while investments in systems of record will be largely static or low-growth. Companies that are still focused on systems of record need to find a way to connect with consumers in an entirely new way to find new avenues for growth. Connecting customers to technology in simple, user friendly ways is the next wave of technology investment.
- The move to Software-as-a-Service and the related development and use of cloud computing resources will alter the nature of information technology.
Computing is becoming virtualized. This is a permanent sea change which is creating new winners and endangering current incumbents. It is an especially important change for tech companies themselves, since start-ups will not need large capital investments to own their own IT resources. This change alters the cost of entry for technology companies.
- Security concerns will continue unabated – in fact, expect them to multiply.
Security worries over data access and usage, dissemination, criminal acts, and hostile intent by bad actors, etc. has never been higher. These threats are likely to increase in frequency and impact with the growth of virtualized IT. This problem will not be solved by one industry, technology, or government fiat.
- In the rapidly maturing biotech pace, the cost of sequencing genes is effectively approaching zero.
So-called personalized medicine will be available to many as early as 2020. However, expect infrastructure deficits, government policies, the miasma of health insurance regulations, and patient care inefficiencies may significantly retard this important development.
- Most so-called “green technologies” are longer-term plays than expected.
These technologies require significantly more investment over a much longer period of time than was estimated even a few years ago. Some if not many of the applications of these technologies will fail in the marketplace absent massive investment and/or subsidization. These technologies are an unfortunate case of too little, for too few, for too much of an investment.