Valley Of Death And Technology Adoption

During the workshop, it occurred to me that the technology adoption cycle discussed by Geoffrey A. Moore in his classic high-tech marketing book "Crossing the Chasm" may be a useful tool that solution providers can use to develop profitable technology adoption strategies.

The technology adoption cycle can be visualized as a bell-shaped curve, in which the X-axis represents the four types of technology adopter organizations, which can be classified as early adopters, pragmatists, conservatives and laggards.

The Y-axis represents the market penetration of a technology. It is estimated that, for a given technology, early adopters represent 16 percent of the market penetration; pragmatists represent 34 percent; conservatives account for 34 percent and laggards make up 16 percent.

The chasm represents the market transition from technology-oriented, early-adopter organizations to the mainstream, pragmatist organizations. A number of vendors and OEMs change their marketing messages during the chasm.

Into this cycle, I would like to introduce a concept called the Valley of Death, which occurs somewhere in the pragmatist's arena. For solution providers and VARs, when a technology crosses the Valley of Death, it converts from being "niche and profitable" to "commodity and marginally profitable."

During this conversion period, solution providers should change their technology adoption strategies by converting their focus for the technology from primary to secondary. If such strategies are not adopted, VARs may fall into the Valley of Death and lose their margins, focus and viability.

To avoid such situations, VARs should constantly evaluate the latest technologies by attending conferences and map those technologies onto the technology adoption cycle as they move from early adopters to laggards. Once a technology crosses the Valley of Death, VARs should change their focus and make the technology secondary to their operations, or abandon it and leave it to the commodity resellers.

Based on my observations from XChange '07, I feel technologies such as virtualization, service-oriented architecture and data/voice/video convergence are far from the front door of the Valley of Death, and VARs should definitely evaluate these technologies.

Has Patel is the ceo of Infologic, a solution provider in newport beach, Calif. What's on your mind? Send letters to Jennifer Hagendorf Follett, assistant news editor, at jfollett@cmp.com.