Guest Blog: Graham Wood, Director at iTrinegy, shares experiences of how iTrinegy, which recently won a prestigious Queen's Award for Enterprise: International Trade 2021, is growing its exports around the world.
Established in 2006 in Hertfordshire, Itrinegy Ltd is a world leader in Networked Application Risk Management, giving peace of mind to all organisations deploying networked applications. iTrinegy's Software Defined Test Networks (Network Emulation) technology provides organisations with a way to create real-world network conditions in which to analyse, predict and verify application performance before deploying applications into potentially challenging network environments.
Our technology has broad applicability across almost all business sectors, but principally all larger organisations, government and military deploying applications over challenging networks. Over the last three years overseas sales have grown by 89% and the percentage exported has risen to 71%. The company's current top five export markets are: USA, Australia, Germany, Japan and the UAE.
One of the biggest challenges when doing business around the world is to be mindful of the local culture as it can save you valuable time and prevent potential embarrassment. For example, we learnt fairly early on that in Japan it's critical to have a local partner to represent you, as business is very much about the personal relationship. Another surprise was that some of the marketing tools like LinkedIn, that we use in North America and Europe are not widely adopted in Japan where instead Facebook is more widely used.
When planning campaigns for different regions, always be aware that just because it may be a good time for you doesn't mean that it's a good time for them. Organising a webinar for the North American market in early July would be a waste of time as many people take time off! In summary, always be aware of the culture in a particular region, their values and how people make decisions as it can really save you time and cost.
Information Technology has been far more resilient than many other industries in 2020/21 and this is reflected in our performance at iTrinegy, for which we are very thankful. The pandemic has created a shift towards virtual implementations of our software and we have also offered temporary virtual licenses to our existing physical appliance customers to help out, a move that has generated a lot of goodwill.
Although we are fundamentally a software company, we supply a significant amount of our technology preloaded on physical appliances and we are seeing some isolated issues exporting these physical units into Europe since Brexit, despite all the correct paperwork. However, hopefully that will be a short-term issue.
To read more about iTrinegy, please visit their LinkedIN and Twitter.
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