Alan Wilensky consults for technology innovators fighting for their place at the table. The B2B market servicing the SME supply chain (EDI, BPM), is undergoing a complete upheaval due to PE backed consolidation. A mutant breed of B2Bi behemoths have emerged from willfully naive capital investments, creating freakish, outsized techno laggards - a new type of entity that comprises the worst traits of the pre merged entities - such a phenomenon deserves special scrutiny by the Business Schools and our nation's regulators.

The remedy to the toxic PE driven rollups is the pure innovation brought by independent thinkers, as it has always been since the Antitrust Era of the AT&T's hegemony over telephone, long distance, carrier capital equipment, and your mama's favorite corset.

Pure innovation in the Enterprise Software as a Service sector, in B2Bi, is stirring up a "Fresh Verticals" renaissance, i.e., an SME centric market that always needs enterprise systems and services, but could never afford what they are pining for - absolutely real, agile, robust, affordable enterprise class services that are delivered on-demand.

The vendors that cater to these Fresh Verticals are in the Vanguard of B2Bi, and are destined to dominate the B2B cloud services market - via their pure innovation.

For companies delivering solutions to these Fresh Technical B2Bi Verticals, standard marketing, brainless advertising, and numb PR Speak campaigns never works; Overturning the heavy booted incumbents requires new methods. Your product managers, and consulting analysts accomplish this new age market evangelism by working from the ground up, identifying key partners, bringing the clients to you - by speaking the truth, and working within the vortices of roiling industry change. It's that simple: speak the truth about your innovation.

Mr. Wilensky started his early career as a technical tradesman, working hands-on with complex industrial, broadcast, consumer and telecom equipment. He later created the first interactive CD-ROM technical manuals to market, and accidentally became a strategic product analyst during the tech boom of the 2000's, when old teleconferencing was crumbling, just as old world B2B, EDI etc is now dying of internal inertia.

The lessons learned about a market leader's fall into the laggard quadrant, and how the innovators steal their thunder, came from that seminal era.