3 Tips for IT: Developing a Competitive Business Skill Set

Learn more about SolarWinds

As companies look to maintain a competitive advantage, IT professionals are increasingly being charged with adopting a business-focused mindset. The role of an IT manager is no longer simply ensuring that systems and networks are functioning properly – they now need to be adept at anticipating business needs and having a recommendation on how to address them.

As pressure comes from the C-suite to spend IT dollars wisely, IT professionals may find themselves needing to demonstrate their expertise by identifying and implementing virtualization and cloud tools that best fit their company's needs. Unless IT proactively forms a recommendation, they risk being entirely cut out of the conversation as vendors target business unit leaders directly.

IT professionals must understand where their companies are heading in order to be prepared and stay competitive. Here are some tips on what IT professionals can do to position themselves for success as their role in the organization continues to develop:

1. Stay Agile

IT professionals need to be comfortable interacting with all parts of the business. As their role in an organization moves beyond implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting to performing competitive analysis and issuing recommendations, it is important to stay on top of developments in the industry and what they mean for the business.

IT professionals should be up-to-speed on technologies like virtualization and cloud, which have become game-changers for IT. However not every application is suited for the cloud, and it’s important to have a core understanding of each and be able to make the distinction. Complicated, one-off custom apps may not be suited (or cost efficient) for a move to the cloud, whereas hosting high volume, repeatable apps in the cloud can help with standardization. The key is knowing which environment is appropriate and will best meet the needs of your business.

2. Carefully cultivate partnerships

IT professionals need to identify and collaborate with vendors who are making it easier to adopt features that both enhance virtualization and facilitate the transition to cloud computing.

Start experimenting early and often to understand what works for your organization and what doesn't. This will simplify the process for IT professionals whose companies are looking to move into a cloud infrastructure as you’ll already have a sense of which path to take. Another advantage is that this will demonstrate your ability to develop and manage vital partnerships that provide the right enhancement features for their companies' needs.

There will always be pressure from the C-suite to demonstrate that managing some services externally is both cost-effective and the best course of action for the organization, and understanding and anticipating internal business concerns will help you work with vendor partners to address them.

3. Become a successful business leader, from the server room to the board room

This is the defining piece. IT professionals need to become prominent leaders and advise their companies on the right infrastructure needs to drive the business forward. As I mentioned earlier, knowing which environments and solutions are best suited to your company’s needs and why will help back up your recommendations.

Activities like conducting a competitive analysis vs. other providers will go a long way toward showing business leaders that you are keeping broader business goals like cost savings and efficiency in mind. Skills such as marketing and product management are not only for vendors, they are becoming increasingly important for IT departments whose delivery of IT services is inevitably going to be compared to outside service providers. By being a resource for business unit leaders, IT professionals can demonstrate that they are tuned into business demands and are vital contributors to the organization’s success.

As we all work to adapt to changing roles and changing business climates, keeping the aforementioned tips in mind will help set you on the path to success.

ABOUT Jonathan Reeve

Jonathan Reeve, Senior Director of Product Management, SolarWinds, has built a career integrating hands-on technical development with senior-level strategic management. Having previously served as VP of Product Strategy for Hyper9, Reeve was responsible for the company’s flagship product, Virtual Environment Optimization suite. His experience spans computer networking, systems management and virtualization technologies, helping numerous start-ups and established companies generate market traction. Prior to joining Hyper9, Reeve drove product management for the network management product line at Smarts, which was acquired by EMC in 2005. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Networking from the University of Durham (UK).

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3 Tips for IT: Developing a Competitive Business Skill Set

Learn more about SolarWinds

As companies look to maintain a competitive advantage, IT professionals are increasingly being charged with adopting a business-focused mindset. The role of an IT manager is no longer simply ensuring that systems and networks are functioning properly – they now need to be adept at anticipating business needs and having a recommendation on how to address them.

As pressure comes from the C-suite to spend IT dollars wisely, IT professionals may find themselves needing to demonstrate their expertise by identifying and implementing virtualization and cloud tools that best fit their company's needs. Unless IT proactively forms a recommendation, they risk being entirely cut out of the conversation as vendors target business unit leaders directly.

IT professionals must understand where their companies are heading in order to be prepared and stay competitive. Here are some tips on what IT professionals can do to position themselves for success as their role in the organization continues to develop:

1. Stay Agile

IT professionals need to be comfortable interacting with all parts of the business. As their role in an organization moves beyond implementation, maintenance and troubleshooting to performing competitive analysis and issuing recommendations, it is important to stay on top of developments in the industry and what they mean for the business.

IT professionals should be up-to-speed on technologies like virtualization and cloud, which have become game-changers for IT. However not every application is suited for the cloud, and it’s important to have a core understanding of each and be able to make the distinction. Complicated, one-off custom apps may not be suited (or cost efficient) for a move to the cloud, whereas hosting high volume, repeatable apps in the cloud can help with standardization. The key is knowing which environment is appropriate and will best meet the needs of your business.

2. Carefully cultivate partnerships

IT professionals need to identify and collaborate with vendors who are making it easier to adopt features that both enhance virtualization and facilitate the transition to cloud computing.

Start experimenting early and often to understand what works for your organization and what doesn't. This will simplify the process for IT professionals whose companies are looking to move into a cloud infrastructure as you’ll already have a sense of which path to take. Another advantage is that this will demonstrate your ability to develop and manage vital partnerships that provide the right enhancement features for their companies' needs.

There will always be pressure from the C-suite to demonstrate that managing some services externally is both cost-effective and the best course of action for the organization, and understanding and anticipating internal business concerns will help you work with vendor partners to address them.

3. Become a successful business leader, from the server room to the board room

This is the defining piece. IT professionals need to become prominent leaders and advise their companies on the right infrastructure needs to drive the business forward. As I mentioned earlier, knowing which environments and solutions are best suited to your company’s needs and why will help back up your recommendations.

Activities like conducting a competitive analysis vs. other providers will go a long way toward showing business leaders that you are keeping broader business goals like cost savings and efficiency in mind. Skills such as marketing and product management are not only for vendors, they are becoming increasingly important for IT departments whose delivery of IT services is inevitably going to be compared to outside service providers. By being a resource for business unit leaders, IT professionals can demonstrate that they are tuned into business demands and are vital contributors to the organization’s success.

As we all work to adapt to changing roles and changing business climates, keeping the aforementioned tips in mind will help set you on the path to success.

ABOUT Jonathan Reeve

Jonathan Reeve, Senior Director of Product Management, SolarWinds, has built a career integrating hands-on technical development with senior-level strategic management. Having previously served as VP of Product Strategy for Hyper9, Reeve was responsible for the company’s flagship product, Virtual Environment Optimization suite. His experience spans computer networking, systems management and virtualization technologies, helping numerous start-ups and established companies generate market traction. Prior to joining Hyper9, Reeve drove product management for the network management product line at Smarts, which was acquired by EMC in 2005. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computer Networking from the University of Durham (UK).

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

Observability Is the New Control Plane for Enterprise Transformation

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

When AI Becomes the Corporate OS

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

The $600 Billion Wake Up Call

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Breaking Down Agentic AI Fragmentation and Complexity with Governance

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud Spend Is Rising and Cloud Optimization Is Key to Funding AI and Protecting Margins

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

Building AI Agents That Build Trust

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

AI Deepfakes: Rethinking Trust in the Workplace

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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