Blacknight has been broadening its portfolio from a focus on shared hosting and the Irish developers market to also serve the SME market across Europe as a one-stop shop for web services, with new offerings like DIY marketing tools from rankingCoach, which it launched last year.

How easy or profitable it will be for the company to address the European market going forward was made less certain by the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, also known as Brexit, on June 23.

Companies in the UK trying to keep up with changes to their legal obligations, for instance from newly minted EU laws governing data protection and other matters, will have to be confident in their local markets to make new investments while the details of Brexit are worked out.

Google opened its second data center in Dublin just ahead of the referendum.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: VentraIP Grabs 4,000 Hosting Customers as Part of Servers Australia Deal

The deal will give Vocus a fiber backhaul network that covers 17,000 kilometers and connects capital cities in Australia to remote and regional areas, according to the statement. The company will also gain the NWCS project to build a 2,000 kilometer submarine cable from Darwin to Port Hedland that will service the mining and offshore oil and gas industries in Western Australia, and a 4,600-kilometer submarine cable project connecting Singapore, Jakarta and Perth.

The deal continues a wave of consolidation by Australia’s second-tier telecommunications providers as they try to compete with Telstra Corp., the largest mobile company. Last year, Vocus agreed to buy fiber-optics carrier Amcom Telecommunications Ltd. and also took control of rival M2 Group Ltd. in a A$1.93 billion deal.

Nextgen Networks is controlled by Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, while CIMIC, formerly known as Leighton Holdings Ltd., owns 29 percent.

Source: TheWHIR

Adapt to a World Where Buyers Control All

Disruptive forces such as search engines, social mobile, mobile devices, cloud computing, and selective consumption have totally turned the traditional sales and marketing playbook on its head. People are tired of being interrupted by obnoxious sales and marketing ploys and have fought back by adopting tools and habits that put them in the driver’s seat. Caller ID, spam blockers, DVRs, and satellite radio, for example, all scratch the same itch for control over unwanted marketing.

As these techniques spilled over from B2C (business to consumer) to B2B (business to business), CEOs, sales directors, and marketing directors of hosting, cloud, managed, and colo providers have had to confront a painful reality: they no longer hold all the cards and no longer control most of the sales cycle.

So pervasive is this lack of control that as much as 70 percent of the decision-making process and in some cases even more, is over before influencers and decision makers are ready for a sales conversation.

How to Get Found Earlier in the Hosting and Cloud Buyer’s Journey

To survive and thrive in this environment, it’s critical to get found by your ideal clients early, often, and in the right context.

Here are six of the biggest revenue eating mistakes companies make:

1. Investing your entire budget on one small piece of the puzzle

To be effective, your revenue strategy should take into account differentiation, traffic generation, lead generation, sales cycle acceleration, and retention. All too often, hosting, cloud, managed, and colo providers only pursue a “point” strategy in isolation such as search optimization (SEO) or pay per click advertising (PPC). As an analogy, think about someone building a fantasy baseball team that blows their entire payroll on a single pitcher and catcher; there are virtually no funds left to invest in the other 23 players on the team that are needed to compete.

2. Not establishing goals

It’s nearly impossible to know if you’re making progress if you don’t know where you’re going. All too often, IT providers chase after vanity metrics (Likes, Followers, etc.) and an ego-driven agenda with no regard whatsoever to more relevant goals such as client acquisition, revenue growth, sales cycle acceleration, or profit margin improvement.

3. Treating all prospects the same

How many CIOs do you know that have the same priorities and worries as sales directors? What would happen if you tried to plan a breakfast seminar or webinar that appealed to both groups? Ten years ago, it might’ve been acceptable to lump everyone’s content strategy into vague categories such as “small business.”

Today there’s simply way too many things competing for your prospects’ highly-fragmented attention. Semi-relevant won’t cut it when you only have two or three seconds to convince a website visitor to stick around and not back-button out of your website

4. Keeping sales, marketing, and services in silos

Ten years ago, it was no big problem if your sales team trash-talked your marketing team for doing “arts and crafts projects” or playing with company swag. Or conversely, if your marketing team stereotyped your sales team as a bunch of spoiled, lazy, overpaid, egomaniacs.

In today’s competitive marketplace where getting found early is critical for earning a seat at the table, these silos and toxic beliefs need to disappear and be replaced by much more productive sales and marketing alignment.

5. Ignoring promotion and distribution

Too many IT providers write a piece of content, hit the publish button, auto-announce it to a few social profiles, and move on to their next priority. Huge mistake. Without promotion and distribution, even the most remarkable content will usually fail to reach its most receptive audience.

A simple rule of thumb: half the resources on content creation and half the resources on content promotion and distribution

6. Not showing up early enough to earn trusted advisor status

If your sales team and executives feel like they’re constantly losing out on deals because the prospect’s mind was already made up, you’re probably absent from most of the buyer’s journey. If you’re getting backed into the corner and forced to slash prices and destroy your margins, again you’re probably not getting found early enough, by the right influencers and decision makers, in the right context.

Now that you know about these six mistakes, what can you do to proactively address these issues, differentiate your company from the competition, and grow revenue profitably?

Learn the answers to these questions and more by attending my session at HostingCon Global 2016 on “How Hosting, Cloud, Managed, and Colo Service Providers Use Inbound to Differentiate and Grow Revenue” on Wednesday, July 27, 2016 at 11:00 am (Central) in room 206 of the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

Joshua Feinberg is Vice President and Co-Founder of SP Home Run, Inc. — which helps hosting, cloud, managed services, and data center providers grow their leads, client base, revenue, and profitability.

To find out how your sales, marketing, and revenue growth strategy stacks up, schedule a complimentary consultation with Joshua Feinberg.

Source: TheWHIR

READ MORE: Cisco Expands Cloud and Hyperconverged Infrastructure Play

“As enterprises are retooling themselves and increasingly building their futures in the cloud, security has not only become a top business priority, it is now universally demanded by businesses and individuals alike, as a necessity to keep their cloud applications, their data, and their businesses safe,” CloudLock co-founder and CEO Gil Zimmerman said. “The ability to protect all of those assets in the cloud now has a name, Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB).”

According to Gartner, CASB solutions will go from five percent penetration in 2015 to over 85 percent by 2020. Zimmerman said that when CloudLock started talking to Cisco about potential opportunities to collaborate it realized how much the companies had in common:

“We share the same vision on the future of security that focuses on a platform that scales to any size, provides immediate value, is simple to manage and leverage, and is easily extensible through APIs. We also realized that by joining forces, we could accelerate the execution of our vision with greater investments in research and development, the CloudLock CyberLab, partner enablement, and global reach which is far greater than we could have ever achieved on our own. Customers will experience new capabilities and offerings that the combined Cisco Security offerings bring, unparalleled in the industry. On all fronts, the customer experience will only improve, even with the bar already set so high.”

In a FAQ page about the deal, CloudLock said the deal will not impact existing partners, but it will work to “enable and leverage the amazing partner network Cisco has already created.”

The deal comes shortly after Cisco acquired CliQr to add its application-defined cloud orchestration platform.

Source: TheWHIR

A CIO survey released by Nomura in March showed that security and cloud computing are among the biggest drivers of IT spending increases.

“Cloud computing enables businesses to invest more time in innovation and less time managing IT infrastructure,” Ben Matheson, Alert Logic CMO said in a statement. “In the same way, many businesses are finding that supplementing or outsourcing their security operations with cloud security vendors that offer cloud-native technologies and fully managed services is an increasingly strategic option.”

More than half (53 percent) of companies surveyed have their own in-house security operations center (SOC). The challenges most often faced by those companies bringing security operations in-house are managing security content such as signatures and whitelists, and identifying multi-vector attacks, at 44 percent each, respectively. High costs were cited by 41 percent, followed by a trio of skills-related challenges: “building out threat intelligence skills” (40 percent); making sense of data (33 percent); and staffing the SOC (33 percent).

Both business and technical skills are necessary to support a SOC, according to the study, and a number of items from each set of skills were identified, led on the business side by risk management expertise (46 percent), and on the technical side by network security (42 percent), just ahead of virtualization and cloud infrastructure experience, threat intelligence and analytics, and application/infrastructure security.

Four out of five respondents said they would seek help from a security expert for threat intelligence anaylsis, public cloud security, security operations, network security, and data privacy and compliance.

Security is becoming less of an obstacle to public cloud adoption, according to a study released earlier this month by HyTrust. Combined with the challenges of one-strategy-fits-all security operations and finding the right skills, this may be a reflection of confidence that the security solutions are out there, rather than what they actually are.

Source: TheWHIR

SEE ALSO: 5 Cybersecurity Stories You Need to Know Now, June 27

If I wanted to use that Wi-Fi connection to reach the outside world, though, things deteriorated pretty quickly. I could search on Bing, but not Google. Sometimes my Bloomberg e-mail functioned OK, but Gmail never did. Evernote worked, Dropbox didn’t. And if I wanted to check Facebook or Twitter, or read something on a Western news site, or — God forbid — watch a show on Netflix, I was completely out of luck.

Such are the workings of the Great Firewall — the Chinese government’s way of keeping the free-for-all of the internet within bounds it finds comfortable. For most people in China, I get the sense that the firewall seldom interferes with their shopping and gaming and digital socializing. For Chinese internet companies, it may even be a net positive, providing a defense against the colonization by U.S.-based internet giants that has been experienced in most of the rest of the world.

READ MORE: Baidu Creates Own Indexes to Paint Picture of China’s Economy

For foreigners visiting or living in China, or for Chinese citizens trying to maintain business or personal relationships outside the country, it’s a different story. This isn’t my first visit to China, but it’s the first when I’ve tried to keep doing my job while here, and I can testify that the Great Firewall is a gigantic pain. Lots of China-based businesspeople I’ve talked to report similar aggravation.

There are workarounds. Virtual private networks that connect users directly to servers outside the country are a necessity for those aiming to remain connected to the outside world. But while the VPN I subscribe to has worked — slowly — about a third of the time at my hotel in Tianjin, it’s been completely blocked at the World Economic Forum meeting.

Cellular data networks are another option for visitors. It’s easy for Chinese mobile operators to tell which users are from other countries, so non-Chinese smartphones are allowed to bypass the firewall. But cellular is slower and can be expensive. Also, the fact that Chinese cellular operators can easily identify foreigners isn’t necessarily good news; some people buy phones just for China and discard them when they leave because they’re worried about inadvertently downloading spyware.

In past years, the World Economic Forum was allowed to bypass the Great Firewall and give participants at its summer Davos meetings unfettered internet access. But with the continuing tightening of control under President Xi Jinping, and lots of Chinese citizens at the meetings, that’s apparently no longer an option.

This is pretty remarkable, when you think about it. The Annual Meeting of the New Champions, now in its 10th year, is one of China’s biggest opportunities to showcase the country to the global elite. Yet the government is now perfectly willing to deny that global elite access to Google.

This strikes me as a useful indication of how China’s current leadership sees its relationship with the rest of the world. It wants to participate in globalization, but to do so entirely on its own terms. If that means it’s a place where it’s really difficult for outsiders to do business and live their lives, well, tough.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Source: TheWHIR

The law has been presented as a response to the bombing of a Russian passenger jet over Egypt in October, the Guardian reports, and includes provisions requiring individuals to warn authorities of plans by others to commit crimes, which some are calling a throwback Soviet repression.

Snowden took to Twitter over the weekend to denounce the “Big Brother law,” saying it will cost money and liberty “without improving safety,” and urging Russian President Vladimir Putin not to sign it into law. He also suggested it could require a “tiny 50Gbps ISP” to set up and run around 100PB of storage to comply.

Russia’s new Big Brother law is an unworkable, unjustifiable violation of rights that should never be signed. https://t.co/HNsYmRaxR3

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) June 25, 2016

Russian telecommunication companies have responded critically. The founder of Russian instant messaging service Telegram told a Russian newspaper that “Telegram does not provide data and encryption keys to third parties, including governments,” RT reports. A company refusing to assist in decryption can be fined up to a million rubles ($15,000) under the proposed law.

Russia’s largest mobile phone operators, including MTS, MegaFon, VympelCom and Tele2, sent a joint letter to the head of the Russian Federation Council (or upper assembly) Valentina Matvienko, protesting the law, the Moscow Times reports via newspaper Kommersant. The letter called the measures “technically and economically impractical.” MTS estimated its cost of storage at 2.2 trillion rubles ($33.8 billion), and several of the companies claimed they would cease to be profitable, depriving the Russian government of billions of rubles in tax revenue.

They also pointed out that such mass storage creates a data breach risk, which they argued could threaten national security.

Operating in Russia already poses some unique challenges to technology companies, including data storage laws that led Apple to lease data center space in the country in September.

Snowden was revealed in March as the target of an investigation which resulted in the closure of email provider Lavabit in 2013.

Source: TheWHIR

At this point, anything goes. Scotland wants to stay in the EU even if it means leaving the UK and standing on its own; similar voices are coming from North Ireland. To make matters worse many people who voted to leave now want to reverse their votes. In fact, there are over three million petitions already signed to hold a new referendum over the same decision. David Cameron (current UK Prime Minister) said that as an advocate of the “stay camp” he no longer feels he is the right person to lead UK into a future outside of the European Union and announced his resignation.

The UK government still has a way out of the decision to leave Europe and the coming days/weeks/months will determine what will actually happen. Right now anything is possible as there is no legally binding obligation just yet. While the EU heads are getting impatient already and want some clarity on final UK’s decision, the country has been put before a life-altering decision. From the possibility of splitting UK and going from Great Britain to Little England and possible repercussions from the EU side limiting UK’s ability to trade with the “continent” as a show of strength and a lesson for any other EU members entertaining similar idea of bailing, to losing powerful seat at the EU council, the consequences behind UK’s final decision could be felt by more than one generation.

Threats of sudden changes to UK government, splitting the country, and the possibility of having less than favorable position to trade with the European Union (which accounts for 16.5 percent of the world’s imports and exports) has had immediate impact on global markets as it brought uncertainty not just to UK, but also to the EU altogether. Such fears of financial and political uncertainty has sent a shockwave across financial markets dropping British Pound exchange rates to a 30 year low and increased volatility on global stock exchanges. Several credit rating agencies stripped the EU from its AAA ratings due to “weakened predictability, stability, and effectiveness of UK policymaking”.

Europe

Does whether Brexit will happen or not make Europe less attractive as a single market? I don’t believe it does. Although UK is a significant player within the EU it’s just one of the 28 countries which make up the EU; there are other countries like Switzerland and Norway which have free trade agreements with the EU. Europe and the United States have very similar GDP, around €18.9 trillion for the EU and €18.3 trillion for the U.S. at the end of 2015. So while a British exit would impact these numbers it will not make nor break Europe’s attractiveness as a single trading market next to the U.S. or China. Europe is and will remain a very attractive market to foreign businesses looking for exponential growth outside of their current geographical region because access to any large single market is key for an “easy” international expansion.

Companies that want to expand to Europe need to understand that Europe’s resiliency is not built on a single country, and while businesses that opted to HQ in UK might face some unexpected challenges, there are way more than one way to shine a penny. While even the shadow of a Brexit brought a scare to the financial markets, business in Europe will continue as usual even in the somewhat unusual circumstances.

Lessons learned

Some UK citizens are learning some new facts after they have already cast their votes and came to new conclusions. Looking from technological perspective businesses do not need to take the hard way nor do they need to learn everything from their own mistakes. Trading in regional and global economy for a lot of companies has become a digital business and while some businesses try to change and adapt to the digitalization era others undergo transformations and take lead.

Agility is key in today’s shifting markets and understanding technological solutions in order to leverage them for competitive advantage is more important than ever because business environments change continuously; from different customer needs to behavioral patterns and commoditized technology access allowing market disruptions on a whim.

Companies that already operate internationally or have global ambitions need to focus on what’s important for their core business and limit their risks through partnerships. Although this is not possible for all companies or verticals no company should be investing into technology that is not their core business and is already globally available as commodity.

Whether accessing Europe or the U.S. markets from abroad finding partners that can support your business locally limits your risks and lowers your investments, not to mention that it makes you a lot more resistant to some of the hazards like regulatory changes. This rings especially true for tech companies which tend to operate internationally and just recently had to deal with the invalidation of Safe Harbor agreement. The Brexit scenario will add further to the confusion and will certainly not make matters any easier in short or mid-term perspective.

Yet despite all these obstacles the internet and cloud industry growth has been skyrocketing and even in uncertain times the prediction is that businesses will spend slightly less on Information Technology (IT) this year, we are still talking about a $3.49 trillion market for 2016, according to Gartners forecasts, with $22.4 billion going this year into IaaS expenditures.

After all changing a data center or cloud services location when it’s being used as a service is relatively “easy”, rather than having to pack-up, migrate and sell off facilities. Partnership with IaaS and Managed Services Providers (MSPs) is a way to avoid many predicaments from technology, legal, and market perspectives. Companies that offer IT as a service in general are much more versatile in dealing with local regulatory challenges.

Business as usual

The results of the UK’s referendum were rather unexpected and while Brexit is not a fact yet, it is clear that even a threat of a threat can have a massive impact on the markets and that business environment can literally change overnight. There is nothing that businesses fear more than uncertainty and lack of stability.

There is a lesson to be learned here over the design for failure. Being at the very least somewhat ready for sudden market shifts and political changes impacting trade and economic stability is an important part of becoming future-proof and should be incorporated into every company strategy. In the digital era and information driven economy this is much easier than ever before. Leveraging access to Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Software-as-a-Service, Network-as-a-Service, and in general commoditized IT is a part of becoming agile as a company.

Bottom line: uncertainty and change is a part of life and business (now more than ever) and even though you cannot foresee everything nor avoid all risks you can certainly plan for uncertainty and unexpected changes by staying lean, mean, and agile as a business. In order to achieve that find a trustworthy and experienced partner who will assist you in your business ventures.

As the English would say, “Keep Calm and Carry On” …just make sure to do your due diligence.

About the Author
Martin Wielomski is a Manager of Business Development for the EMEA region for PhoenixNAP Global IT Services. He has years of experience in the Information Technology and Hosting industries and specializes in strategy development and international business, sales leadership and product management. He also writes for several international IT oriented magazines and blogs and advises about technology, management, customer relations, sales and international business expansion while leveraging human connection potential in his corporate strategies. Martin believes in lifelong learning and leadership through engagement, while maintaining realistic and down to earth people approach. He can be reached at: linkedin.com/in/martinwielomski

Source: TheWHIR