VMworld US is a few weeks behind us, VMworld Europe is in our sights and HP Discover will provide plenty of news to finish off the year.  The stream of tech industry news keeps coming with lots of buzzwords, but also lots of real change.  I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the data center and the tech industry –  “Where is this path taking us?”

Regular readers of my blog will know that my focus is on the go-to-market (GTM) approach used by leading technology companies to connect their products to customers.  GTM encompasses corporate strategy, product marketing, specialties within marketing, sales, sales engineering, consulting, channels of all types – and all sorts of “operations” from sales ops to channel ops to professional services packaging and delivery.  All of these pieces are required to “Build a Bridge” between your offerings and your customers.

As we’ve discussed, the current “best practices” in many of these areas leave a lot to be desired. These practices reflect what worked when the leading vendors sold hardware and the channel sold and implemented hardware.  Of course, that has not been true for a long time, but that does not seem to keep tech companies from trotting out the same approach to GTM…

As the industry changes and the approach to the data center changes, the levers that drive GTM success also change – which is why I keep ruminating on the current path of the industry, and its impact on GTM. I covered some of the background on my perspective on the evolution of data center technologies – particularly the dramatic changes brought on on by VMware and virtualization.  Those posts were part of a 3-part series, and are a good starting point in connecting the dots backward, so we can extend them forward to the future…

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