Managed and Cloud Services help Cross the Chasm

I just finished Geoffrey Moores "Dealing with Darwin" - I have to say a really great book providing a very thorough way of thinking about different types of innovation available to a company as they products mature through the technology adoption lifecycle.

As I was looking at this lifecycle I was thinking how a enterprise or SMBs purchase criteria would change across that lifecycle as the product or services moved from appealing to Innovators and Early Adopters across the chasm to the Early and Late Majority (also known as Main street) and eventually the Laggards. Each type of organization will have different criteria when selecting technologies and therefore vendors need to create different value propositions depending on where their product or service is in the lifecycle.

How does this apply to out tasking and managed and cloud services ? I suggest that early, pre chasm, adopters buy technology on feature / function - these are the kind of guys that say - lets put up a wireless LAN environment this weekend and "Have a go" - but as the technology matures the issue of manageability and reliability becomes an increasingly prevalent buying criteria - so much so that I see Main street buyers putting "Manageability" as a more important buying criteria than Feature / Function. It doesn't matter how sexy the technology is - if I can't manage it then I don't want.

And herein lies the reason why technology vendors need to enable the managed service provider - having a slew of MSPs out there supporting your technology is a very scalable means to overcome the mature buyers concerns and a way to lubricate and speed the way to Main street buyers ... and mainstreet is where the big bucks are.