'24 Consolidation

As I position myself two months into the year, I've been considering new methods of approaching opportunities with clients. Within the current enterprise climate it's quite apparent operational costs and justification for renewals is top of mind. That said, focusing on automation and AI enabled features for faster MTTR and event consolidation are two of the most important topics currently. Solutions which provide not only 3rd party ecosystem support but are also cloud agnostic only help accelerate growth while cutting down spend. The visibility into operational optimization continues to be a blind spot for most corporations. Initial return on investment when it comes to solutions down selected for PoV/PoC is very much fueling the current climate. We all want to justify spend at the end of the day. Whether that's a control checkbox or functional coverage... It should be reflected as a key area within any aaS pitch process. The proof is always in the pudding, metrics and engagement examples including concrete evidence of what/how/why an offering provides value much like services is often a pivotal point when it comes to comprehension for all parties involved. I'd argue that automation and speed at which something can reach operational maturity in terms of adoption is also equally as important.

From a human guardrail perspective, it's more critical than ever to be impressed by what you choose to present and propose to your organization. There's plenty of repeated solutions out there and as a result 75% lack enterprise support in terms of maturity. A common trend is for some opensource solution to move to selling licenses prior to having a truly mature way to track usage and tackle reporting features. Another has been the rush to market in terms of development, plenty of providers jump the gun before having fully developed API integration and documentation to support. 2024 will be the year the majority of these solutions either prove themselves worthy or fall by the wayside. As economic conditions continue to tighten, there's now more pressure than ever to outperform in every facet of technology. That said, I believe we'll see a continued push towards uniformity and platform plays which offer rich feature sets in terms of functional coverage. Those who's been established as market leaders within their craft will continue to expand and grow even further into the enterprise landscape and SMBs alike. It's quite apparent with the lack of manpower AI is targetting to suplement that companies no longer wish to eat operational cost beta testing products they've paid a pretty penny for.