The Worldwide IT spend (hardware, software and telecom) is projected to total $3.5 trillion in 2017, a 2.7 percent increase from 2016, according to Gartner, Inc. Though according to a Channel Partners and 451 Research Global Channel Survey, 45% of partners lack the personnel resources to sell outside the U.S.

Failure paves the road to success. The best way to learn is to make mistakes and build off them to ensure they’re not repeated. While this is true, not enough is said about lessons learned from others’ mistakes. Case in point, there is much partners can take away from Amazon’s public cloud outage last month.

As mobile technologies continue to emerge and evolve, businesses will invest more in mobility. According to Citrix, 71 percent of enterprises currently regard internal mobility as a top priority. That should come to no surprise when seeing the benefit it can bring to both employees and employers. Among many other perks, mobility enables employees to access critical apps and data remotely, allowing them to be productive when out of the office.

How to talk your many customers' languages.

With each new year comes new technologies and business opportunities to capitalize on. As we reflect on an exciting and successful 2016, we remind ourselves how we can better serve you, our partners, in 2017. The following is an internal memo that was sent out across TBI. Please know, we make every effort to do right by you and always have our partners’ businesses best interests at heart.

The fast-paced technology landscape is ever changing, and as product sets continue to narrow and end users become more connected than ever before, it’s crucial to understand where the market is headed. Based off what we saw in 2016, here are common business challenges and solutions worth addressing with your customers at the beginning of next year. These range from easy-to-sell products that lead to greater sales to emerging technologies that will spark interest and truly add value.

This article was originally published on Business Solutions.

Every industry is being affected by the convergence of technology in the marketplace as offerings broaden and shift to delivery as a service. According to Harvard Business Review, “IT-Driven innovation is reshaping industries and redrawing the lines of competitive rivalry.” Technology companies are rapidly expanding their portfolios through R&D or acquisition to provide new services to their clients. Facebook is developing Messenger to become its search platform. Google is architecting a fiber connectivity network. Dell bought EMC to create an end-to-end hardware and software powerhouse. Similarly, convergence is driving the VAR industry as telecom companies incorporate leading routing and security services into their connectivity offerings and now cloud service providers market solutions directly to the end client.

Businesses depend on a solid network infrastructure. Every department within an organization relies on that infrastructure. A mismanaged network impacts almost everything from customer communication, data storage and retrieval and data analysis to collaboration and network security. Ultimately, data could be lost, productivity could lag, orders could stall and customer satisfaction could wane - all hurting the business’ bottom line.