2012: The year of core competencies

January is the month in which I’m obligated to offer my opinion on the coming year and what we will see. For the past few years I’ve had a relatively consistent opinion that cloud will continue to drive growth and displace the more traditional technology providers as they both have less to manage and customers spend less on technology that needs high end management (instead buying consumer devices). I’ve been fairly accurate in that assessment.

This year we will see something different.

This has been brewing for some time.

The major industry trend is the bet on vendor consolidation. While I agree, I don’t believe this will be a major driving force in the world of IT Solution Providers.

I think the major play this year will be the IT Solution Provider consolidation. Lot’s of people are looking to either exit or cash out on what they have built because posting remarkable growth numbers gets more difficult with each passing year once the business matures.

The marketplace is already saturated with events, coaches, experts, speakers, advisors and various groups that do not have an actual tangible product.

So with more people looking to exit the ranks of IT Solution Providers and become mentors to those solution providers… who will be left to actually deliver these solutions to end users?

In my opinion, business owners and managers will start to reverse the trend of outsourcing and will start doing majority of their technology sourcing themselves.

The pressure vendors feel to post ever increasing numbers will fuel acquisitions but also further competition with their partners.

Regardless of which way the economy goes, the spending on technology is going to continue because we’re only going to be using more technology.

What all this really means is that you’ll have to work a lot harder for the dollar but thankfully: your costs will go down.

Now here is the beauty in all this: Everyone is aware of it. So if you have a business model and plan that’s a few years down the road, you’re going to focus on further development of your core competencies and more sales/marketing activity. The distractions over “next big thing” or “paradigm change” or “blue oceans” will quiet down as people look at their cards and go all in.

Looking forward to showing you what we’ve got on deck for 2012. If you haven’t already done so, go sign up for Shockey Monkey at http://www.ShockeyMonkey.com – yes, it’s free.