CompTIA’s Annual Member Meeting at the Fairmont Chicago Millennium Park last week featured Power Talk Unplugged; a free-form session in which attendees gathered at tables to discuss topics developed by the association or submitted by members at registration and voted on throughout the event. These were casually moderated and not officially documented in order to encourage a free-flowing dialogue between members and staff.
The topic at one table was, “What will the channel look like in 2022?” Attendees posited that warehouses will go away; that the industry is becoming more about services than products you ship. One attendee termed this, “The Uber model.” Another asserted, “Amazon’s going to take over the world but then collapse because they’ve gotten complacent.” CompTIA vice president Annette Taber asserted, “We are going to see an unprecedented flip in the way we look at the channel. It will change to a ground-up approach with end-users making the decisions.”
The topic at another table was Internet of Things; specifically short-term and long-term plays in this new market. One attendee described how he has his IoT system in his home set up so that it knows how close his phone and car are to his house and makes adjustments in terms of temperature and security settings when he returns home. He said there’s a tremendous opportunity here for SMBs to build systems like that. “People just haven’t dreamed it up yet.” The table agreed; pointing out that the new generation is so used to tech that it will come up with “crazy duh ideas.” Another attendee said this event was really the first time he’d heard a group of solution providers actively talking about hiring business analysists, which is what’s needed for IoT, because right now providers in that space are mainly at retail and wait for customers to request or dream up systems.
CompTIA’s Chris Phillips said it best by adding, “The biggest resistance to IoT is in the stupid name IoT.”
The topic at another table was, exit strategies; how SMBs plan to retire or move on when the opportunity to merge, acquire or sell their business comes along. One attendee said she phrases a potential deal as, “Would you like to buy my clients?” Another described a carefully orchestrated stock deal as a way of making a comfortable arrangement to sell, perhaps to an employee who wants to buy a company. One attendee said, “Always be ready to sell. You never know when that deal’s going to come along. You get that letter of intent, you may just have 30 days."
