Cloud money

IT buyers need reflief from the pressure to spend

The channel has a vital role in controlling wasted IT spend, says Billy MacInnes
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Image: Shutterstock/Dennis

1 June 2023

Many of you will be well aware of the all-too familiar charge that the IT industry is guilty of hyping customers into buying new technology they don’t really need. It’s something that’s been said many a time over many years. No surprise really when the IT industry is on the bleeding edge, innovating, revolutionising, redefining, paradigm-shifting, you get the idea.

It is easy to be dismissive of complaints that vendors are trying to drive customers too far too fast but there was a startling statistic in a recent report from Pure Storage that suggested there may well be some substance to them. In the report, entitled IT Leader Insights: The State of IT Modernization Priorities and Challenges Amid Economic Headwinds, it emerged that 90% of buyers at companies with more than 500 employees had bought technology their infrastructure could not support.

A few things come to mind. Let’s start with: why are they doing that? Are they unaware of the technical capabilities of their infrastructure? That’s possible, although it does beg the question of whether that’s through their own ignorance or because they weren’t sufficiently informed about its capabilities by the companies that helped put it together.

You’d hope that most companies would have a basic understanding of the capabilities and limitations of their infrastructure given that it is pretty much foundational to their business. If they’re muddled or confused about it, whose fault is that? Possibly, as they have added to the infrastructure, amended it, replaced and updated elements, important information and knowledge has been buried under the layers and accretions of technology. Details have got lost along the way.

Possibly, too, the people selling elements of that infrastructure have only a passing knowledge of the other parts, either because they are concentrated on their own area of expertise or because the customer has kept them to their own silo as much as possible.

It’s also possible customers are buying technology in the belief it will run on their infrastructure because the person selling that technology gave them the impression it does but either doesn’t know whether it will or doesn’t care. You’d hope not but there’s an argument to be made that if customers don’t know what their infrastructure can support, how on earth can the person selling them technology be supposed to know any better?

Pressure

There is one pretty large caveat from the same report, however, which is that 62% of buyers felt pressured all the time or often to make decisions on purchasing technology without exploring the consequences of these decisions in the longer term. When you look at that figure, you can begin to understand why so many buy technology their infrastructure can’t support. That pressure may come from within the company or from without (vendors, for example) but it’s leading to some pretty bad and, you might suspect, costly decisions.

While the report focused on larger companies, I think the situation might be similar for their smaller counterparts. It’s difficult to see why it would be any different.

Given the current state of play, this is where I can see a role for channel partners as potential heroes riding to the rescue. While they are not exactly ‘neutral’ because of their relationships with particular vendors, they are likely to have a wider perspective than a vendor would. Some of them may even have relationships with customers that endure beyond changes in vendors, giving them a broader understanding of the underlying infrastructure.

It may well be that customers don’t think of consulting partners before making particular technology purchases but if their partners are in a position to provide advice, they should definitely take it. After all, where’s the harm? And if it helps to ease the pressure, all the better.

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