After months of writing about practical applications for Web 2.0 technologies and services, I have to admit, I really hate the term because it’s one thing that’s really keeping IT solution providers from exploiting its benefits.

Why not, instead, talk about the essential business processes that things like social networks and blogs really enable? That, to me, is the best way to help VARs and resellers recognize and consider the potential business benefits that these concepts can provide.

Given that smaller VARs are notoriously slow to adopt the very same technology they represent, how do I know your own channel will respond to this mindset? Well, it certainly resonated with the VARs and resellers that attended the two panels about Web 2.0 that I was hired to handle during the Ingram Micro VentureTech Invitational earlier this month. I was asked to handle two workshop sessions there: A presentation that discussed potential practical sales and marketing applications for social networks and blogs, and a panel that explored how some VentureTech members are actually using Web sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn at their companies.

While it’s hard to take notes while you’re presenting, here are a few things that stuck with me. Broadly speaking, they all have something to do with the following concepts: Collaboration, Community and Conversation. You’ll get what I mean in a moment.

1) Social networks will reshape tech recruiting. All of the VARs on my Invitational panel (Heartland Technology Solutions, i-Tech Support and The Lloyd Group) are using social networks to find and vett job candidates. They trust the referrals that they’re getting out of these communities. What’s more, they can do a little discreet research to assess whether or not a potential hire will fit in with their company culture.

2) If you want to really engage with anyone under the age of 30, you need to get savvy about social networks. There have been a few research reports out in the past month that point to the obvious. Forrester Research just released a report that reveals only 10 percent of adults from the age of 18 to 24 DO NOT participate in social networks or blogs. If you want to market to the next generation, you need to consider how to use social networks. Well, this applies in business, too. Want feedback on a new strategy or product? Don’t expect a meeting to uncover everything. Start a wiki or use a more formal collaboration tool like SharePoint to facilitate an online dialogue. Heartland encourages this, primarily among its technical types.

3) Let your employees help create your culture on social networks. Set guidelines, but don’t dictate. In a move that you could definitely call experimental, The Lloyd Group has created several subgroups for its company within Facebook, including one for former employees. Adam Eiseman, the CEO, says this helps his staff feel more connected at a personal level, building more empathy for each person’s individual role and contributions to the company.

4) Blogs could be a great way for VARs to establish their identity. i-Tech Support is one of several VARs that I know who have set up blogs to represent its point of view on topics of the day. i-Tech’s Richard Vaughn, who has championed this effort, says the hardest thing has been to keep up with the updates (you need to update it now, Richard!). But the blog has had the effect of bringing new prospects to his company via search engines. This other link shows you what one VAR peer group is doing with blogging.

What can vendors and distributors do to support these sorts of activities?

Some, such as Ingram, have set up gated communities such as The Zone, which is essentially an online extension of the Invitational events, meant to perpetuate face-to-face conversations that start at its events. Others are facilitating collaboration activities. An example is Partner Exchange, launched in April by Cisco and intended to help solution providers looking for potential business partners from among their peers.

One area where I think immediate adjustments should be made relates to the sorts of marketing activities your company might consider funding.

If you haven’t begun supporting proposals that include non-traditional components related to Web 2.0, maybe it’s time to start doing so. From your standpoint, you may be able to measure the return on your investment. Better yet, why not proactively encourage your partners to get on board, especially as it relates to two areas: supporting better internal collaboration through various Web 2.0 applications and facilitating more effective marketing dialogues and demand generation activities through both blogs and social networks. I’m still thinking this on through, myself.

Got any thoughts to share? Comment on this blog and get the conversation started. You can also visit me on FaceBook or LinkedIn, or email me directly at hclancy@swotmg.com.

There’s nothing like having to give a presentation (a short one at that!) to help synthesize how you feel about a particular market segment. Over the past few weeks, I was really forced to organize my opinions about two topics: Mobility and Web 2.0. More about the latter later. Right now, I’ve got mobility on the brain. Perhaps perhaps because I am so often somewhere other than my “office.”

The fact that the market for client technology is moving from “desktop” to “notebook” is pretty much a given these days. Every one of the high-tech market research firms has data to support the fact that the market has shifted. That means the way mobile technology is being sold needs to shift, too, although many of the top-tier companies in the mobility space still focus mainly on pushing the latest whiz-bang features of their hardware.

A conversation with Matt McManus, the relatively new vice president of channel sales for Fujitsu Computer Systems, who was on my Mobility panel at this month’s Synnex National Conference, helped bring the new sensibility that high-tech vendors and their channel partners should apply when selling mobility into focus. It’s pretty simple: You should represent business solutions.

Clearly, Fujitsu has a vested interest in saying this since it’s a company that has focused on selling business solutions around its portable technology pretty much since Day One. Fact is, the value proposition that some of its form factors, tablet computers as an example, is only readily apparent when there is a specific software application involved. More often than not, that software has some sort of industry-specific or vertical bent.

It won’t surprise you to hear that healthcare and educaton are two specific segments where Fujitsu’s roughly 1,500 partners are finding traction, according to McManus. The success of Fujitsu’s healthcare VARs, in particular, is very closely tied to application developers such as Misys, which sells an application for running physician’s offices. Incidentally, Misys sells tis application both in a licenses form and as a service, which brings another twist to the whole mobility discussion. Notebooks and handhelds are really terrific clients for software as a service, giving the mobile worker a whole lot of flexibility. Bottom line, Fujitsu is more than ever pushing its VARs to think about address business processes with technology, not just about providing a notebook and a printer and some software.

In that vein, here are five principles that I think will drive the impending shift in the mobility marketplace (in no particular order other than that imposed by the randomness of my brain).

1. Think role-specific. Forrester Research released some data earlier this year indicating that somewhere around 20 percent of most people employed by midsize or enterprise companies are away from their desk at least 20 percent of the time. The definition of “road warrior is changing,” which means the sorts of applications a mobile worker needs is likewise changing. Mobile solutions won’t just be about simple productivity applications but also about access to business process applications as well as those that might be specific to a particular vertical.
2. Help manage the mess. One great example surrounds all the different wireless communications methods a typical person might use. I, for example, am sometimes in the SWOT Management offices, often at home, and occasionally in Starbucks, an airport lounge or some other place enabled with Wi-Fi. I’m fairly adept at making things work, but I often wonder whether or not there’s a less expensive way to keep wirelessly connected. Plus, managing my different profiles doesn’t always work, and not just because I am prone to forgetting log-ins and passwords. I’ll bet there are many, many people like me out there. You and your partners should develop services to help them.
3. Remember security, and protect data/information/intellectual property accordingly. With notebook thefts and losses on the rise, options like whole-disk encryption not only give your customers peace of mind, they will cover them as far as the privacy compliance police go. A mobile solution might also include a specific back-up policy or service.
4. Keep things in sync. “Aaaaargh. Where is that file? Drat, it’s back in the office.” Enough said.
5. Remember the work/life balance. For most of us, the blur between the professional and personal is blurring. More and more, you will see companies invest in notebooks that take into account their employees’ lives outside the office: whether that’s through mandating specific security measures, defining service and maintenance policies for both home and office, and/or offering support for the simpler things, like the ability to watch DVDs for a little down-time on long-haul trips.The other factor here is handheld devices, especially smart phones. Their usage will increase dramatically over the next five years, according to Forrester, yet they continue to sneak in through non-corporate procurement channels and few companies have comprehensive policies for managing or supporting them.

If you think you don’t have enough insight into what your high-tech channel partners are doing on your behalf, you are not alone. Almost three-quarters of those recently surveyed by Aberdeen Research said they lack visibility into partner performance and 84 percent are considering investments in channel management over the next 12 to 24 months.

These are two of the findings cited in Aberdeen’s report, Channel Sales: Renaissance in Channel Management. And here’s where I need to make the obligatory disclosure that this study was underwritten, in part, by SWOT Management Group subsidiary Channeltivity, which sells a partner information management application that’s offered up in SaaS form. So, I’ll stick to citing the basic facts of the study, and I’ll leave the assumption-making to you.

I should note, then, that when channel managers talk about wanting visibility, more often than note, they’re talking about wanting to know what deals a partner is working as well as which leads they are following up on. At least according to Aberdeen. Those organizations that the research house considered best-in-class, as an example, report that they are using partner relationship management applications (89 percent), lead referral systems (59 percent) or lead tracking tools (55 percent) to keep tabs on the activities of their VARs and resellers.

Personally speaking, I think there should be a whole lot more to a partner-vendor relationship than simple pipeline check. Better profiling, in my opinion, is the best place to start. Chances are, you can get your partners selling more for you if you understand what else they are selling. Visibility always seems way too product-oriented for me, but I’ve always been kind of naïve that way. Anyway, if you’re trying to get a better handle on your own priorities, you might want to read the report, which can be found at this link.

You might also want to revisit the results of the Forrester Research study that I blogged about a couple weeks back, as it provides a sense of what else is on your peers’s minds.