By Eric Lefebvre, Chief Technology Officer at Sovos.
Many technology vendors will make all sorts of promises and claim to have miracle solutions for your business needs. However, it’s important not to be swayed by vendor promises. Instead, it is critical to have a set of standards and criteria for the tech your business uses and needs. This will guarantee that you are making the right purchases from the right vendor.
If you’re seeking a reliable partner, you should validate four core pillars of a vendors’ solution: reliability, scalability, security, and experience. By taking this precautionary measure, you’ll be able to identify the perfect match.
Reliability is key
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 2021 set the record for the highest percentage of people working from home. With this quick shift to remote working throughout the pandemic and with little time to prepare, many businesses faced the sudden challenge of creating and developing digital adoption strategies in order to simply stay afloat during this period of change. Paired with the increasing consumerisation of technology and the always-on/always-available culture, IT teams need to ensure that the technology solutions they provide need to work all the time, with minimal disruption.
Being able to depend on your technology partner’s expertise to support your company and help keep up with these unprecedented changes is a key factor in building a successful business relationship. Technology is always evolving, and businesses should be able to place total trust in their tech partner to handle any back-end tech issues. Having a reliable partner ensures that businesses won’t lag behind as these market changes occur.
Scalability support
As the online market expands, many businesses are evolving or implementing digital solutions to capitalise on this growth. Businesses that are experiencing rapid growth and expansion in the market should not be hindered by a lack of experience or involvement in technology.
When searching for a technology partner, it is important to find one that will propel your company forwards in every way, especially digital transformation. For instance, Renolon reported that, on average 93.79% of businesses use social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and others to reach their markets. With the rapidly changing needs of businesses and their consumers in today’s market, it’s important to ask if your vendor partner is prepared to support a sudden increase in sales volume, should your business experience an unanticipated response to a media campaign – even something as random as an influencer promoting your product/services on Tik Tok. This is not an uncommon occurrence and businesses can experience exponential growth as a result of these reasons.
The right partner, committed to supporting the expansion of your services, products, and reach into the digital space, will enable your business to reach its goals and objectives as quickly as possible.
Secure systems
Security is inevitably a key consideration when entering a partnership with a technology vendor because they will be responsible for preserving a business’ functionality. It’s vital to assess your partner’s security posture, given that your sensitive business and customer data will be vulnerable to exposure on systems and networks that are beyond your control. Choosing the right partner should give you peace of mind as they will do their utmost to keep you safe from cyberattacks, hackers and data leaks, which will ultimately protect your reputation.
You should be able to trust your technology partner with all the information they need to improve your business. Your partner should be keeping up with your business in every sense, including minimising security threats in the digital space. Providing secure IT solutions and services to your organisation is essential for a successful partnership.
The people and the tech make up experience
Effective technological support is an important part of any business operation, and it’s something that you should be able to count on your provider to commit to. In the search of a partner, it’s essential to understand what level of tech support they can provide. Evaluating this will help to determine if they’re the right fit for your business and if they can meet your business needs.
What’s more, when partnering with a provider that takes the people factor into account, you can be sure that employees and customers will have a positive experience with your business. This, in turn, leads to improved morale, loyalty, and retention. According to a survey conducted by Partner Path, solution providers ranked the ‘People Pillar’ as the most important factor when considering any partner experience.
A first-class experience affords easy access to various business solutions, imparts the domain expertise and knowledge required to make the convoluted appear effortless, and provides products that are so intuitive that guidance is scarcely needed. Technology companies such as Stripe, Square and Uber cemented their widespread reputation outside of their target market, simply because of their user-friendly nature.
All in all, the right technology partner can help improve and scale your business in many ways – they can help shorten your sales processes, improve customer and employee experience, and better meet user needs.
Turning the tide with the right tech partner
Essentially, like any partnership, it all comes down to trust. So, keep in mind those key components listed above – reliability, scalability, security, and experience – and you’ll be able to find yourself a trustworthy IT partner.
Of course, the right tech partner will be different for every business. But, it’s crucial to ensure your potential partner can deliver on these crucial areas that are specific to your organisation’s needs to build trust and create a successful partnership. A business / vendor relationship is only as strong as the trust between them.
