Building an IT Brand

Branding is a hot topic – from personal branding (what you relay about yourself through your actions and communications), to branding a company or product (through marketing, public relations, and other avenues). Whether for a person, company, or product, branding is necessary to distinguish from the competition and stand out in the market.

And that certainly applies for the IT marketplace. IT consultants, solution providers, and value added resellers (VARs) need to communicate who they are, how they’re different, and provide their clients with a unique and dependable service. Vertical Systems Reseller recently featured a Q&A with Jonathan Fisher, COO of BrandExtract, on ‘The Key to Brand Recognition’ (full article below). Jonathan discusses the key for solution providers to stay competitive with the big IT companies: “Build a value proposition around the big brand” and show the client how valuable your service is.

One way for IT consultants to brand themselves and create added value is through white label online backup. Online backup resellers can provide their clients all the necessary IT services in a one-stop shop, including 100 percent transparent and reliable backup, under their brand name instead of the online backup company’s name.

This added service saves the client time and money and allows the consultant to charge premium pricing for premium service. And if the competition does not provide branded online backup, then you’re already one step ahead in the market.

Full Q&A from Vertical Systems Reseller:

The Key to Brand Recognition

4/5/2011

By Lisa Terry
Everyone knows it’s important to market their business. But what about branding? As the IT marketplace shifts to one based on services rather than product margins, it’s important for solution providers to emphasize their own brand over their software and hardware partners. VSR talks to a branding expert Jonathan Fisher, chairman and COO of BrandExtract, about how technology companies can build and sustain their brands.

What is branding?
A brand is a person’s perception of a product, service, experience, or organization.

The marketplace has something they want or need, and you have a product or service you want or need to provide. The art of branding is to make those overlap as much as possible. The greater you can align the perception with what the market truly needs, the more compelling. When they are aligned you build loyalty.

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Enabling Disaster Recovery for Enterprise and SMB

A lot of companies out there, especially in the Small and Medium Business space, have absolutely no disaster recovery program in place (up to 40% of Enterprise customers have no validation procedures in place, according to Info Tech Research). So an essential part of any DR go-to-market strategy for the SMB segment (including Enterprise) must include a comprehensive plan for addressing all of the business, communication, and technical processes required for successful deployment of DR Managed Services. Here is some information that we think is useful moving forward:

Essentials Storyboard Enabling Disaster Recovery

The Economist: Big Data On Its Way

We mentioned “Big Data” in a blog post a few days ago, so we would like to point you in the direction of an Economist piece entitled Data, data everywhere. It’s a great run through of the trend, and you walk away with a few solid numbers. What’s the takeaway? Data is a new economic input, on par with labor and capital. New forms of businesses will rise up in the next decade, and their models will rely on information generated by not just desktop computers, but cloud computing platforms, mobile phones, gps sensors, and enumerable other devices that will come to market. We appear to be in the beginning stages, so stay on the lookout.

Special report

A special report on managing information

Data, data everywhere

Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits, says Kenneth Cukier (interviewed here)—but also big headaches

WHEN the Sloan Digital Sky Survey started work in 2000, its telescope in New Mexico collected more data in its first few weeks than had been amassed in the entire history of astronomy. Now, a decade later, its archive contains a whopping 140 terabytes of information. A successor, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, due to come on stream in Chile in 2016, will acquire that quantity of data every five days.

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Pictures and Videos from the Datacenter

We were at the facility this week installing servers, switches, and routers; so we decided to take a few pictures and videos. Here’s a look:

Router lights from XZ Backup on Vimeo.

Datacenter from XZ Backup on Vimeo.