I’m still thinking about some of the presentations from the first day of The Executive Connection Summit in Scottsdale over a week ago. There’s an article in this issue that offers more insights into what went on at the Summit, but the words of Kevin Gilroy, senior vice president, SAP Global Indirect Channels, set the tone for the event. “In the last 25 years I’ve never seen a period of time when there is this much opportunity and this much danger. There is enormous opportunity for people to create enormous amounts of wealth and for careers to sky rocket, and tremendous risks for companies to fade out, scale down, and be sold at unfavorable multiples.”
The opportunities and danger are the result of what he described as an “inflection point.” That inflection point will affect businesses and the various channels within the IT industry. He pointed out that over the past 30 years there’s been a number of inflection points. Typically when that happens, 40 percent of the suppliers, VARs, dealers, resellers, ISVs will go the wrong way—down. Another 40 percent will make minor adjustments and survive.
“Growth will flatten out, profits will hang on or be under pressure, but they’ll survive, and they’ll be at the conference two years from now, five years from now, hanging on,” opined Gilroy.
The remaining 20 percent will take advantage of these inflection points and thrive.
In case you haven’t noticed, we’re at an inflection point today, one that Gilroy describes this as an epic point in time in our industry. “And I say ‘our industry’ because it’s colliding together, the traditional print industry with the IT industry,” explained Gilroy. “You have the dynamics of the cloud crashing in with the dynamics of Big Data, mobility, social, and what wraps around all this are the millennials that are now either running small businesses, but at a minimum influencing small businesses.”
If one doesn’t understand the dynamics of millennials combined with the dynamics of these technologies, then you’re on the wrong side of the inflection point, Gilroy added.
He further emphasized that this confluence of technology and social changes are driving next generation businesses. “What we see in next generation businesses are people that adopt technology at an extremely fast rate. They don’t always want everything on paper; they want it on their handheld device. They want it at their house, they don’t watch television, they build brand socially, they work differently, they work at home, and they use these technologies and consume these technologies differently than we’ve ever seen. That’s not buzz words or tag lines, it’s absolutely real. We’re seeing this dynamic around the world. The question becomes, if you agree with my premise that we are at this inflection point, are your businesses on track to be the next-generation business or memory lane?”
A portion of Gilroy’s presentation was devoted to SAP and FORZA and while that tied into his earlier comments, there was no doubt that his ruminations on inflection points resonated with the audience and ought to be particularly relevant to readers of The Week in Imaging and ENX.
So, what are you going to do to leverage the current inflection points in your business and ensure you’re among that 20 percent that thrives, or at worse, among the 40 percent that continues to hang on?
I don’t know specifically what we’re going to do here with The Week in Imaging and ENX just yet, but the wheels are turning fast and furiously.
Thanks for reading.
