In any line of business, having a deep understanding of your market is crucial for success. It’s no different for businesses operating in the tech channel. By understanding what the most used types of technology are, what technologies work well together and what technologies can bring the most value to businesses, channel firms can position themselves competitively within the market.
As part of our research for the ‘Tech Impact ’19: How technology is used by the UK’s fastest growing businesses’ report, we delved into the categories of technology that are used in the UK and the extent to which they were. (If you’re interested in finding out how we used our platform to do this, we’re happy to field any questions, but we appreciate most of you will just be interested in the data, so we won’t go into that here!)
The data
By analysing the technologies used by 600,000 companies across the UK, we were able to determine that they can be grouped into 34 different categories. We won’t list all of them here, but they cover things like Collaboration, Design & Publishing, HR Management, Project Management and Search Engines.
Of course, there are more niche categories (we’re looking at you Financial Analytical Applications…) and they can present opportunities of their own depending on how well served they are as markets. For the benefit of this article, though, we’re looking at the types of technology that are most used by UK companies and the opportunities they present for channel businesses.
The most used technologies across UK companies are as follows:
- Operating Systems & Computing Languages (73.9%)
- Software – Other (60.3%)
- Marketing Performance Measurement (58.7%)
- Web & Portal Technology (51.8%)
- Server Technologies (Software) (48.4%)
- Search Engines (35.1%)
- Cloud Infrastructure Computing (34.3%)
- Productivity Solutions (33.5%)
- Network Management (Software) (28.2%)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) (26.9%)
The trends
What’s notable here is the continued rise of the Cloud Infrastructure Computing and IaaS categories, joining Web & Portal Technology as growing cloud-based categories that are amongst the most used technologies. This rise of cloud delivery models is, of course, driving the decline of technology infrastructure sales – and, subsequently, a tranche of channel work.
What this means for traditional channel businesses is not that they need to be looking for a new line of work, but that they need to get closer to the business function to be able to drive growth. That means having greater knowledge of the business function and how the application can align with business processes.
Taking digital agencies, for example, sales of on-premise Marketing Performance Measurement software are naturally falling as cloud sales rise. But agencies still need such software to measure the success of their campaigns and, the more optimally they can employ it, the more competitive they are.
The upshot
As such, there is an opportunity for channel firms to align with the business needs of digital agencies by helping them to make the most of their Marketing Performance Measurement software. What’s more, vendors are not only recognising this, but also that they alone cannot necessarily deliver meet the sales and support demand, leading many to offer reselling programmes as they seek to exploit emerging markets.
Increasingly, channel partners need to be able to drive business conversations and value directly to the business function or risk collapse – and to do that effectively they need to target niche application areas or vertical industries.
If you’d like to see more data about what technologies are used by UK businesses and the UK’s fastest growing businesses, you can download the Tech Impact ’19 report from our website.
