I have been doing some work recently to try to segment the UK technology market in order to help identify suitable target companies for my clients. In the process of this I have built a database which, as of writing, runs to over 9,100 companies and over 4,000 unique companies. Preparing this information has taken many hours but now incremental increases to the data are relatively simple to do.
I thought it might be helpful to share some my methodology with you as it might be helpful with your own market segmentation analysis.
The first step is to collect and collate a relevant range of technology partnership lists. These are essentially list of resellers or implementation partners for the range of technology partners relevant to your company. It is worth collecting the full range of data that can be gathered as this allows further selection and in-depth analysis in due course. An example of this is the different partnership levels that might apply to one channel.
It might be helpful to show a worked example. I have selected five technologies: Juniper, Cisco, HP, Microsoft and VMWare. Taken on their own, the pie graphs below demonstrate some of the granular information and the share each has as part of the larger database. This information on its own does not help very much.
What is more interesting is to identify the companies with more than one competence and to see the nature of the distribution of technology skills between competing companies. This looks like this. There are 4,105 unique companies in this data set, of which 1,532 are not relevant to the analysis presented.
From this information we can now start to drill down and begin to prepare a short list. As I routinely collect geographic information on companies, it will be possible to map these to an interactive map of the UK to further remove unsuitable geographic outliers.
The next step is to refine the analysis by selecting only certain types of partners. In the diagram below, I have selected VMWare VIP Enterprise partners, only Cisco Gold partners, only MS Cloud Service partners. The other HP and Juniper partners remain the same. The effect is to reduce the number of companies that will need to be screened.
This is clearly only the start of the screening process. However, adding additional partner lists to the database is a simply and non-time consuming process. Once added, more and more relevant analysis can be conducted.
I believe that this can also help with the formulation of strategy as the technology gaps in the market are readily visible and while not all of them make sense, opportunities might be revealed.
It is also possible to take very extensive information on one particular partner channel, Microsoft is the best example, and to compare and contrast the nature, shape and composition of their channel specialisations and industry foci.
If you would like to know more about how I segment the market and if you think this might be helpful to you, please contact me directly, jbdcolley[at]aol[dot]com. If you like this post please retweet
