When you’re trying to sell a solution, there’s not much more compelling you can say than that it’s used most by the fastest growing businesses. In other words: fast-growing companies believe this drives growth, or it’s driving the growth of fast-growing companies.

As part of our ‘Tech Impact ’19’ report, we looked at precisely which technologies are used the most by the UK’s fastest growing businesses compared to other businesses. Not only is this useful information for businesses looking to accelerate growth, but it’s useful information for channel businesses looking to capitalise on that.

To get the data, we compared the tech used by 600,000 business across the UK against the Sunday Times’ Fast Track 100 list. Once we disregard the tech categories that are used by less than 5% of businesses, we’re left with the following top 15 categories.

From a channel perspective, some of these categories are more pertinent that others. The Email (inc. Collaboration and Instant Messaging) and Social Media System categories, for example, are obviously ones that are not typically served by channel distribution. Of course, different types of technology are also best addressed by different segments of channel partner: Marketing Performance Management and eCommerce through digital agencies, for example, and IaaS through managed service providers and cloud integrators.

Another thing to note is that, while business growth increasingly necessitates that some types of technology are adopted, other types of technology are adopted to a greater extent to drive growth. With these things in mind, we can pick out which categories are the most compelling from a channel sales perspective.

Not only is BI & Visualisation Software the most used tech category by the fastest growing businesses compared to other businesses, it is also the archetypal driver of growth. Notwithstanding competitivity in the market itself, channel firms operating in this area have a compelling proposition. When we do drill down into the market, we can see a good spread of businesses – and businesses with partner programmes too – but that’s an upcoming blog post in itself.

Among the other high placing technologies, our research suggests that Application Development & Management is more a category that helps to consolidate high sales in post-growth businesses rather than drive sales growth, given its prevalence among businesses with more employees.

The EBS category, meanwhile, is a driver of growth, but is also dominated by Microsoft. In short, there are options there and a potentially strong position, but the choice of vendors is limited.

If you’d like to look at more of what channel technologies are most used by the fastest growing businesses, you can download the Tech Impact ’19 report from our website.