What’s Trending for the IT Channel in 2014?

Here are the top five trends the IT channel needs to focus on in 2014

2013 represented another exciting period of change in APAC's IT industry. A host of new, innovative technologies - including cloud, big data, and mobility platforms - entered the marketplace in force, unlocking significant business opportunities for enterprises across the region and empowering staff to work in new, creative ways. This year, many organizations in APAC have sought to transform their businesses, restructuring their IT platforms to cope with today's global online business and IT demands. This change represents a huge opportunity for the sales channel to step up from being IT sellers, to valued IT consultants guiding clients on their journeys. No external consultant understands the IT stack quite like the sales channel and this expertise is an invaluable tool as businesses adopt increasingly complex IT solutions addressing their business needs.

As we prepare to embark on another exciting year of IT evolution, the most successful sales executives in the IT industry will be focusing on these five core opportunities in 2014:

Selling the business solution, not the IT solution - Today, organizations need to sell IT platforms that address business needs. Having the right IT roadmap is increasingly important for businesses, and partners will be successful selling IT by ensuring their offerings align with clients' current and future organisational objectives, rather than focusing solely on the technical specifications of a product. While this might sound obvious, access to information and opinions online has meant that today's IT solution buyer is more savvy than ever before and is often well educated around technologies they feel might benefit them well ahead of a sales call. Therefore, creating that business value linkage - even stepping outside of your comfort zone - and calling on line of business owners (where budgets, increasingly often, now reside) is fundamental.

Mobile Security - As businesses in APAC come to terms with increasing numbers of BYOD and a range of mobile enterprise apps there will be a heightened need for mobile security in 2014. The IT channel can consult with clients to overcome the challenges and complexity of delivering a mobile strategy in the workplace, and those that do will realise both revenue and partnership gains within their relationships.

Delivering Anything as a Service - In efforts to drive down costs and simplify IT infrastructures, businesses are increasingly looking to adopt service based offerings. While IDC predicts that growth in the desktop virtualization market will significantly outstrip that of the IT market as a whole in 2014, desktop-as-a-service, as a subset of the desktop virtualization market, will outstrip even those expectations and grow at a compound annual growth rate of 72.9% (from $13.8m to $123.3m in 2017) over the next four years. As such, DaaS - along with similar service based offerings - will be high on customers' list of priorities moving forward.

Vendor Collaboration - Customers seek high-performing IT solutions that integrate seamlessly with the rest of their IT infrastructure. To reduce complexity and time to value across both technology and costs, vendors are increasingly establishing strategic alliances to partner their solutions. The channel can look to take advantage of these simplified and consolidated offerings, by educating clients about the benefits of bundled solutions that support their network.

Get Social - As IT decision making power shifts throughout the enterprise, the channel should look to extend their customer relationships beyond their existing CTO/ IT manager relationships. The channel can look to utilise old-fashioned face-to-face networking at industry events and one-on-one meet and greets. But before engaging in face-to-face opportunities, the savviest sellers will be looking to mine the powerful sales data available online through social networking sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Quora and Facebook, as well as tapping into online industry conversations on blogs and online forums.

With businesses across APAC investing deeply in their IT platforms to be competitive, 2014 represents a promising time of opportunity for the channel, powered by new technology solutions and new sales tools. Focusing on your customers' business objectives - instead of just their IT challenges - will ensure you are well placed to grab your share of the large revenue chunks available next year, while positioning yourself at the forefront of technological innovation.

Phil Dean Jones

The author is senior director, channel sales and partner development,

Citrix APAC