Our Research confirms that innovation is critical to delivering services excellence and the Recognized Innovator program identifies key technologies and services from our solutions partners that will help you reach your goals.

With the Fall Awards, we focus on the challenges – and opportunities – facing the service and support industry, re-thinking the ideas and approaches to services, how services link to product strategy and how services can deliver new revenue streams. This theme will also be illustrated in Association CEO, J.B. Wood’s opening keynote and upcoming book Complexity Avalanche. The Fall categories are:

• Battling Complexity. Technology complexity has been rapidly increasing and the percentage of members who say the products they support are highly complex has grown from 42% in 2003 to 62% today. Rising complexity affects many areas of service and support operations, and the Recognized Innovators in this category will provide real-world examples of how their technology or services help companies battle complexity.
• Closing the Consumption Gap.  A key challenge stemming from the rise of complexity is the consumption gap, and ultimately the time to realize the benefits and reduce the time to next purchase.  Customers that struggle to overcome rising complexity in products and services are not able to consume their purchases fully, making the repurchase cycle either longer or even nonexistent. The Recognized Innovators in this category will provide real-world examples of how companies are leveraging their technology or services to improve or accelerate consumption by customers.
• Service Economics. The Associations’ Services 50 Study documents the rise of services revenue for large high tech companies, which now represents more than 70% of revenue from software firms and a third of the revenues for hardware firms. While this trend means that service and support enjoys more visibility and influence with company executives and Wall Street analysts, it also means that service executives are eager to identify new sources of revenue. The Recognized Innovators in this category will provide real-world examples of how companies are leveraging their technology or services to generate incremental services revenue.

The winners and finalists will be announced during John Ragsdale’s Monday afternoon keynote and on Tuesday he will lead attendees on two, one-hour tours of the winners’ and finalists’ booths in the Technology Services Expo.