Five Lessons on Repositioning a Technology Company’s Brand
What do you do when your market and customer priorities are shifting? How do you evolve your brand to a new market category that’s aligned with customer priorities?
That’s the situation oXya faced back in 2017–2018. We provide managed cloud services and hosting for mission-critical SAP systems and additional workloads used by enterprises. Back then, the prevailing models in the market were on-premises hosting or a private cloud — models on which our entire business was based, and we excelled at it.
oXya leadership believed our market would start shifting towards the public cloud. They saw other workloads and services start migrating to public clouds, and realized it’s a matter of time until that trend would also reach mission-critical workloads such as SAP, that we were handling. Back then we had just one or two new customers running their SAP systems on public clouds. Barely anyone knew of our public cloud capabilities — not our hundreds of enterprise customers, and certainly not prospects nor the general SAP market.
Fast forward 4 years, to Summer of 2021, and oXya manages SAP systems on public clouds for tens of enterprises around the world, including huge brand names. These SAP systems are running on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and even on the Alibaba Cloud.
Few weeks ago, in July 2021, oXya was chosen by Google Cloud as their 2020 Global Partner of the Year, in the SAP Specialization category. It was heart warming to read what Snehanshu Shah, Managing Director for SAP at Google Cloud, had to say about us. That award and the compliments were two strong feedbacks telling us we’re on the right track in our brand repositioning efforts.
Our goal has always been to position oXya as a leader in running SAP and other mission-critical workloads, on whatever platform that is best for the customer — be it a public cloud, a private cloud, or a hybrid option. We aspire to be recognized as an independent, unbiased consulting partner offering each customer the best solution for them, based on their specific needs. We couldn’t have achieved that goal if no one considered us when it came to public clouds. We had to fix that.
It takes significant efforts to evolve a company’s brand. Here are my lessons from the process we’ve been going through in the last few years.
- Visionary leadership
First step in brand repositioning: realize the need. Such realization often comes from management. oXya leadership realized early on what was coming. The senior executive leading that effort thought the market would start shifting towards public clouds, and estimated the shift would accelerate over time. He was right.
He told me another important thing — our own customers didn’t realize we had been building public cloud capabilities and expertise. We needed to change that and fast, both internally with existing customers, as well as externally towards prospects and the market. It was critical for our company’s future.
2. Involve the team
Marketing can evolve a brand’s positioning, but not in a void. Repositioning won’t happen if there’s no business substance to back it up. Hence, when talking about “the team”, I’m referring to the entire oXya team — technical experts, delivery teams, sales, alliances, and of course also marketing.
The effort included all departments and many employees. Technical experts and delivery teams underwent training and earned new certificates from various public clouds. Alliances and Sales worked on building the relationships with public cloud providers, uncovering new opportunities, building joint go-to-market programs, and developing and selling new services. Marketing also did many things; I’ll get to that below. Public clouds differ from one another, and we needed to master all the major ones — not a small feat. We did it. The combined effort started bearing fruit, we won new customers, and each win helped build and strengthen our new positioning.
3. Leverage your partners
Entering a new market is challenging. Partners can play a major role and support your efforts. In our case, these were first and foremost the public clouds themselves, who were eager to convince SAP customers to migrate their workloads to the public cloud. These mission-critical workloads are considered very luxurious, not to mention they involve famous brand names.
We also leveraged a few friendly system integrators, collaborating with them on deals that brought some early adopting customers to the public cloud. That wasn’t an easy task. SAP is one of the most critical IT system for any organization running it. Back 3–4 years ago, it wasn’t easy to convince IT decision makers that the public cloud was a safe, good option for their mission-critical systems. It’s much easier today, after numerous companies have taken that route. We were honored to lead some of the early migrations to the public cloud, gaining the trust of customers, public clouds, system integrators, SAP itself, and other partners.
4. Marketing’s role
Up to now we’ve discussed what everyone else did. As marketers, we looked for every opportunity to support the business and promote our growing public clouds expertise and experience. That included creating and distributing various types of content — white papers, case studies, webinars and more. We also made sure to include aspects of our new positioning in every customer facing opportunity we participated in, such as leading tradeshows in our industry (SAP SAPPHIRE, SAP TechEd). We’ve also collaborated with any partner who would support our efforts.
Being big believers in our customers, we leveraged each and every customer willing to share their story publicly. We created customer case studies with Microsoft and with Google Cloud; invited other customers to speak at tradeshows and in front of user groups; and more. In essence, we leveraged any opportunity to be out there, speak about our customers and share technical expertise and best practices with listeners. This included both online and in-person activities (the latter was pre-covid, of course). I’ll leave the marketing strategy and tactics to a separate blog in the future.
5. Never-ending process
The Google award is by no means the end of the road. Rather, it’s an important indicator showing us we’re on the right path. There have been additional indicators along the way, telling us we’re in the right direction. Brand repositioning is a never-ending process that requires constant fine-tuning, updating goals and going after them. There are still many goals to reach, customers to win, and for our company to continue providing the great service to our customers that we are known for. Never a dull moment.
