Duncan Chapple has an interesting post on a coming technology recession "In April we'll be relaunching a January 2002 course, on communicating through a recession, that I never thought I'd have to run through again. While a recession may not unfold on a global scale, many analysts and buyers are tipping over into a recession mindset."
Ooh, does January 2002 bring back bad memories. I was fighting to keep our marketplace/software company alive. Nuclear winter.
This time around my view is the recession for "utility technology spend" already began a year ago. It will get deeper if the global economy slows down. Larger, more established vendors make up most of the utility spend, and will fight gravity hard. I can see fear in many of the sales folks, but in many cases their corporate executives still live in the past and the premiums.
While Duncan can coach you on how to work with analysts in a recession, I think the best sales and marketing folks will take the battle to their management. Vendors with much more realistic pricing and margins may actually gain market share through a recession. Others will watch SaaS, third party maintenance, offshore, virtual compute, IP telephony and other options get that market share.
While recessions make buyers cheap, they also make them risk averse (as I found out in the last recession). It also dries up capital amazingly fast. Very unfair to innovative startups...but now is the time to fatten the bank account, and also sharpen the value proposition to buyers.
Overall, if a recession helps change the utility/innovation spend ratio in IT budgets from 7 to 1 to 6 to 2 or 5 to 3...I would say let's welcome it...
Thanks for mentioning the post!
We have also run our Recession course as a webinar. If any readers would like to see the slides from that, then drop me an email.
Best wishes,
Duncan.
Posted by: Duncan Chapple | April 20, 2007 at 01:16 PM