TSIA’s most recent book, B4B: How Technology and Big Data Are Reinventing the Customer-Supplier Relationship, provides an overview of what it takes for technology companies to be successful—and profitable—in a cloud world. The emphasis is on shifting from a pure product focus to outcome-based services and value selling. For cloud companies to be successful, one thing is certain: prices are trending down, and tech suppliers must amp up sales volume to compensate.
In order to profitably deliver outcome-based services and drive sales volume, extreme efficiency is required. While overhauls to people and processes are needed, this paper focuses on the technology infrastructure required for extreme automation. Service executives should evaluate current technologies with an eye toward prioritizing investments, particularly in data analytics and automation tools in order to improve margins on every sales and service activity and allow the scale necessary to succeed.