Telecom is still broken. Ordering a 1GB Internet port in a Lit building has turned from a 2 week turn up to a 100-day pain in the ass.
In cable news, you get a site survey done supposedly before quoting. You get the quote; give it to the customer who says Yes. You get paperwork; customer signs paperwork. Then three days after the paperwork is submitted, the site survey comes back. "Subject: Construction required. Comments: A site survey was completed that determine there is a total construction cost of $71,972 for construction to bring service. Your organization can pay the contribution of $69,687 or we can amend the contract to 36 months and increase total MRC to $2,400." Mind you , that $2400 per month is for cable broadband - 150x10. This happens TOO often. It makes no sense to me at all.
There are new acronyms to know in Security. According to 451 Research, "Managed security services (MSS) is an emerging sector of the security and managed services market. As new security threats evolve, many organizations find they lack the expertise to protect against increasingly complex attacks and meet compliance requirements. Security is one of the IT functions that can be managed by a service provider." MSS providers are MSSPs. If the MSSP develops and delivers security technologies and services, it is a security service technology provider (SSTP). If the MSSP focuses on delivering security services, but does not develop their own technology, then these MSSPs are "pure play". There are also Hybrids that mix the two. Fun, right?
Businesses buy a lot of software. Office365, Google for Work, email and web hosting just being the start. CRM, UC, conferencing, digital marketing technology, Business Intelligence (BI), Virtualization, Data Storage and Database and ERP. 451 Research survey suggests that spending will be up for software in 2017.
"SAN-based Storage (67%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Arrays (59%) are currently the most widely used storage systems by companies, followed by Backup/Recovery Software and Disk Backup Appliances (44%)," according to 451 Research. "Respondents were asked which storage systems and related products, including upgrades/refreshes, they plan to purchase in 2017, and SAN-based Storage Arrays (48%) tops the list, followed by Third-party Cloud Storage Services (34%) and Network Attached Storage (NAS) Array (34%)."
This leads me to suggest that you ask your customers about software and storage. There is money to be made there and you are leaving it on the table.
