What you need to know about selling to state and local in 2017

Eliminating data center management will be key for state and local government in 2017.

By Rachel Eckert, consultant

The state and local government IT landscape is ever-changing as it grapples with shrinking budgets and expanding responsibilities. But there’s one overarching trend tech companies selling to the state and local market can profit from in 2017: shrinking technology portfolios.

Eliminating technology from state and local government doesn’t sound like it would bode well for industry, but if government tech organizations focus on more long-term and strategic IT efforts, they’ll shift the balance away from maintaining their technology portfolios and more towards innovating. That means they’ll be looking for companies for that maintenance help – read “outsourcing.”

Outsourcing has its share of positives and negatives but in general it provides an excellent cost-saving avenue for IT organizations. Not everything can be outsourced or even should be, but routine operations and maintenance of systems is a perfect venue for outsourcing, and that’s just what’s at the top of many IT organizations’ lists. Here are a few areas where IT organizations will use outsourcing for cost-savings:

• Eliminating data center management
• Removing on-premise data storage
• Limiting in-house data maintenance
• Shifting development of small applications
• Managing passwords

By helping IT organizations with a variety of outsourcing, from data center management to making it easy for citizens to create applications using public data, technology companies can provide a much-needed boost to IT organization productivity.

Did you hear our latest State & Local market briefing? Catch an on-demand recording here. And contact immixGroup’s industry-leading Market Intelligence team today to learn about programs and contacts that have a pressing need for your IT solution.