• Is it the vendors of the big hardware that will sit behind all the major data crunching and back office processes?
• Is it the manufacturers of the desktop hardware and customer terminals that may comprise the most visible part of the deal for anyone who walks casually around the customer’s premises?
• Is it the specialists who develop the key applications that will enable the mission-critical, competitive processes to run smoothly?
• Is it the resellers and distributors who source all of the above and arrange the supply to the customer?
• Is it the consultants and integrators, who provide all the value-added services and pull the threads together, and will oversee the successful implementation for years to come?

The answer of course is: all of them.

Some build that value indirectly, by marketing rather than sales activity, generating early interest in, and desire for, a brand or underlying technology solution. In this way an enterprise may incline early on that it wants IBM servers and it wants to run on Linux rather than Windows. Those thoughts, which it is up to the competitors to shift during the sales process, are either the result of personal experience or of somebody getting key messages successfully into the decision-maker’s field of vision over the long-term.

Some of the specialised or component players build value by more direct sales activity, but not necessarily to the end customer. Rather, their sales effort is trained on the potential winner of the prime contract – often a systems integrator or IT services house – which is bidding for the overall project implementation and management. But of course somebody also had to build value in the customer's mind for those components. Which part of the supply chain takes on that responsibility is – early on – a subject for negotiation between the links in that chain.

As the question of who builds value becomes more complex, so the need for each part of the value chain to work together increases, so the messages must be aligned and so the skills of those concerned with value creation must improve.