IT Services Marketing » Positioning

Niche is nice. Very nice.

30 June 2011

You must have read about the latest acquisitions in the IT services market. As large companies swallow up smaller companies (in some cases, the smaller one is trying to digest a large acquisition), or a slew of small companies consolidate, some trends emerge that should influence your services positioning: Acquisitions raise the barrier to entry: [...]

Some reasons Mark doesn’t know of

24 April 2011

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In an awesome post at TechCrunch, Mark Suster writes about the travails of services companies attempting to build products. He raises very good points about margins, sales cycles, VC funding processes, and ease of doing business. Over the years, the services businesses have become more aggressive in their product-building plans for some reasons Mark may [...]

Navel-gazing and your IT business

22 April 2011

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Over the past few years, working with IT services providers, software product companies (ISVs), and staffing companies has been a rewarding experience for all of us at Purplepatch. Though very different in each case (services and products), there are some lessons from product firms we found useful in applying to services firms. Products need services: [...]

More feathers but one hat

27 April 2009

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Amid the current economic downturn, it can be tempting for service providers to accept any opportunity that comes their way, even if it involves stretching beyond their core competencies. Big mistake. While we still endorse diversification as ‘the mantra’ to capitalize on market inefficiencies, the company’s positioning and service capabilities carry much more weight. Though [...]

Crisis? You mean opportunities?

14 April 2009

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At a time when traditional technology service providers are struggling to co-exist with the competitive SaaS and cloud computing market, innovation still remains the nucleus of any success story. Though the timing may seem inappropriate, given the harsh economic realities all over the world, we believe maintaining status quo would be the biggest folly technology [...]

Satyam Scandal: A wake-up call for India

22 January 2009

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The Satyam fiasco has emerged at a time when India is struggling to sustain its glory as the IT outsourcing industry darling. As mentioned in a previous post ‘Is India’s position jeopardized in the outsourcing game?’: Such countries as China, Vietnam, Philippines, Russia, Poland and other in Eastern Europe can give India a run for [...]

Our company is different…but let us conform

25 November 2008

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I run a marketing communication firm where we help numerous IT Services firms with their positioning to go-to-market evolution. Often, we hear the firms begin their pitch with a slide on “How we are different…” and have 3 bullet points that almost unfailingly appear: - We provide end-to-end services and solutions - We have onsite, [...]

Is India’s position jeopardized in the outsourcing game?

16 October 2008

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Until recently, the results of a Google search on tech outsourcing destinations would have comprised of India, India and only India. But that may not be the case anymore. According to a report “How technology sectors grow: Benchmarking IT industry competitiveness 2008” by the Economist Intelligence Unit such countries as China, Vietnam, Philippines, Russia, Poland [...]

Soup-to-nuts [Part 3]

2 June 2008

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Readers from the IT services industry will surely recognize the patterns in the course of a cold-call: the listener on the other end of the line does not react for most part of the pitch conversation, and suddenly perks up when he or she hears or sees a project detail, case study, or success story. [...]

Soup-to-nuts [Part 2]

30 May 2008

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What you are reading so far may sound contrarian to all the market feeds on the optimistic state of the IT services market, India’s growth potential in becoming a technology hub and so on. All of them maybe true and mostly have merit through market data support—of the past years of growth, evolution, and maturity. [...]