UBM Tech Channel CEO Faletra: Solution Providers Must Target Chief Marketing Officers

"The reality is line of business and CMOs have budget," said Faletra in his annual XChange Solution Provider conference state of the market keynote address. "Where there is budget, you can extract dollars. They are somebody you want to get to know."

The amount of information technology spending by CMOs is expected to more than double from $38 billion in 2012 to $80 billion in 2015, according to UBM Tech Channel. And, some analysts are predicting that CMOs translating big data analytics into customers' solutions will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017.

[Related: Four Steps To The Cloud: Start By Firing Your Sales Team ]

In the enterprise market, there has been a 9 percent growth in line of business as decision makers, according to the UBM Tech Channel data. In the midmarket, 6 percent more lines of business are acting as decision makers, according to UBM Tech Channel.

"There are just more points of entry to key decision makers in every level of the market today," said Faletra. "It used to be you only sold to IT, and potentially IT reported up into the CFO. So, you were in the CFO office. But, the reality of it is there is budget in more places today."

The CMO/line of business IT purchasing phenomenon comes with more solution providers aggressively moving to the progressive sales model offering both off-premise cloud solutions and on-premise traditional IT solutions to provide a hybrid private/public cloud model.

The percentage of solution providers going to market with a progressive model delivering both on-premise and pure cloud IT solutions has jumped from 62 percent in 2011 to 71 percent in 2013, said Faletra.

During that same period, the number of solution providers going to market as transformative solution providers with a pure cloud business model has dropped from 20 percent in 2011 to 18 percent in 2013, said Faletra.

The drop in the transformative cloud partner model is a result of partners simply "following the money," said Faletra. "The real money is still in that progressive space, which is a bit of a hybrid. It's partners that can do on-premise, one-off business but can also help customers figure out cloud strategy. Progressive is really where you want to be."

PUBLISHED MARCH 11, 2013