10 business insights I learned at kickoff
Robert Hollier
ABM expert. Substantial experience and expertise in understanding and navigating enterprise buying behaviors when it comes to complex high-value strategic purchase decisions.
Here’s 10 insights into what's going on that I learned last week at Itec’s 2-day kickoff:
- Hybrid mail delivers immediate cost savings even if you’re sending comparatively modest volumes of outbound mail. Wake up and smell the postage costs.
2. Ransomware attacks are not just confined to large companies. SMBs are starting to experience them too – although quite a few cling to the belief that “it couldn’t happen here.” A key insight is that while some ransomware attacks are targeted, the majority of them are random. The size of the target is not relevant.
3. Take note, HR officers. Many organisations struggle with contract management – they don’t have adequate visibility of what’s in place, leading to potential compliance and risk issues. It’s an area ripe for automation.
4. 3D printing is about to get much more affordable.
5. ICR is a new (to me) acronym that sits alongside OCR – that’s Intelligent Character Recognition versus Optical Character Recognition. In a nutshell, ICR learns styles of handwriting and enables a new category of smarter business applications.
6. UK companies are still spending too much on processing customer invoices. PWC estimates the average cost at £13 per invoice.
7. Mitel new MiCloud Office goes way beyond “just a phone system” and makes it easy and affordable for SMBs to make their workforce more agile to compete with much larger organisations.
8. Franking machines may soon be a thing of the past. For example, Kyocera’s Post Now app lets you potentially de-commission your franking machine.
9. There’s an old saying that people buy from people – in other words, personal relationships matter. In the same way, when it comes to IT support, evidence suggests organisations much prefer to speak to a real human voice, ideally in an office and ideally available 7 days a week.
10. Last but not least, Itec is full of smart, energised people. Now I get to see why Itec has such a great reputation for customer service and support. So thanks to everyone at the event last week.