Tech benefits to market in a down economy

Some technologies are simply made to market during a recession. Their benefits speak to business managers’ primary concerns: lowering capital and operating expenditures. Virtualization is a prime example. Server virtualization reduces hardware requirements, which translates to lower cooling and maintenance costs.

Your technology may offer equally important — but less obvious — benefits. If you don’t call them out in your marketing materials, potential buyers won’t know about them. Here are some cost-cutting benefits that might apply to your solution and should be highlighted in your white papers and case studies:

• Ease of administration/management — Like everyone else, IT organizations are expected to do more with less. This means they can’t afford to higher someone with a specialized skill set. Nor can they afford to send personnel away for days to learn how to use your technology. Highlight your technology’s ease of use and moderate learning curve. If you offer training via webcast, highlight that, too.
• Centralization — Centralizing otherwise disparate technologies under one roof not only gets rid of standalone devices and their associated overhead but can provide IT staffs with an integrated view of the infrastructure to enable smarter business decisions.
• Optimization — Does your technology make it possible for organizations to get more out of their infrastructure without throwing more money at it? Think, for example, of thin provisioning or bandwidth optimization, which allow organizations to get more out of their existing storage and bandwidth, respectively, without costly upgrades.
• Business enablement — Organizations are increasingly treating IT as a service that helps meet business objectives. The techie researching your product may be sold on the technical specifications, but if you can help him/her tie it to business objectives, you’re helping him/her sell it up the chain of command.

The importance of lowering expenses in a down economy is fairly obvious, which makes it all the more important for you to call out how your technology can help IT organizations achieve those goals.  — Crystal Bedell, Freelance Technology Writer and Content Developer