Six-Month Strategy

Once they have mapped out their goals, Geevaratne said solution providers should map out a six-month strategy plan for how they plan to achieve them.

As part of this strategy, New Signature looked at starting where they were strongest – by leveraging their largest existing customer base, building out practices and partnerships around business intelligence and IoT, and growing organically with an existing analytics practice.

The company planned out a focused effort to fund IoT for six months in a defined segmentation, targeting and positioning with the aim of showing "measurable results."

The key, stressed Geevaratne, was tapping into the company's existing technology offerings, services and customer base. "We leveraged the fact that we had an existing knowledge around technology so we could go to businesses and tell them 'It's not about devices or things – it's really about analytics,'" he said.