Support Demand Research Delivered
by Bill Rose, SSPA Founder and Executive Director

By now, I hope you’ve heard about our 2005 Support Demand Research series, some of the best research data we’ve ever produced. If your company has our bundled membership, you should have received the “Overview of Enterprise Support Demand 2005” report, the first of the Enterprise Series to be delivered. Other reports to be delivered include:

• “Support and Maintenance Margin Pressure to Increase in 2005”
• “Moving Enterprise Support Toward Total Web Delivery”
• “Drive to Reduce TCO Creates New Opportunities for the Service Organization”

For IT software and hardware vendors, the research validates possibly your worst fears, that support and maintenance contracts and costs will become more important in the buying decision. For you to continue to compete in the markets you serve, not only will you have to have a superior product, you’ll have to offer superior support at a lower comparable price point than your competitors – or risk losing customers.

More specifically, our recent research shows that customer pressure on support and maintenance pricing will not only continue but rise. Customer CIOs will become more sophisticated by looking closely at pricing models and purchasing processes used by other parts of the company in acquiring IT products and services. Customers will also begin to expect support to be more helpful in the customers’ success rather than focusing on fixing bugs in applications. Support organizations will have to become more like professional services or be able to gracefully hand off customers from support to services appropriately.

As vendors continue to support customers via online self-service, they will also have to effectively communicate the value of that service or face challenges in maintaining margins and revenue as customers solve their own problems.

Before you start feeling compressed by these research findings, realize that change also brings opportunities – opportunities to re-organize your support organization to be more efficient, become stronger partners with customers and help them be successful rather than simply helping them to use your product (and improve customer loyalty in the process), and offer more services to reduce customer total cost of support and maintenance. Smart executives will be forced to find ways to take advantage of the coming changes, and the SSPA will be here to help.

If you haven't received your copy of this important research, contact John South, jsouth@thesspa.com or 858-674-5491.

We’re always receptive to member requests for research and guidance. If you have questions or concerns we can help resolve, please contact me, bill.rose@thesspa.com. Thanks.

Sincerely,

Bill Rose
SSPA Founder/Executive Director