pmi in the news

MAY 2022: Digital transformation and a talented remote workforce helped launch PMI into the ideal position to help small to mid-sized software vendors take advantage of the opportunities present in today’s marketplace.

Chattanooga-based global technology marketing agency Perri Marketing, Inc. has recently announced significant growth throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, adding three new marketing professionals to their team and additional technology clients to their portfolio.

This growth comes at a time when many small businesses have experienced challenging economic conditions due to the pandemic and have had difficulty hiring the right marketing team members to succeed in their missions. Businesses outsourced their marketing to PMI in a Marketing as a Service (MaaS) model, much as one would outsource HR or IT services.

Much of this success PMI president and CEO Tony Perri credits to the mass digital transformation companies around the world have undergone during Covid-19, learning how to deliver the same quality products and services, but with a newly positioned remote workforce.

Many companies have experienced significant learning curves in transitioning to a remote workforce, but PMI was already a team of remote workers, and Perri said he believes this agility helped his company not only weather the pandemic storm but also thrive in it.

Recently the company has added three new resources to its team, who are located in Chattanooga, and the Atlanta and Asheville regions. Jamie Hood, creative director, Nichole Abruzzise, project manager and quality assurance lead, and Alex Perri, journalist and copywriter, to help meet the demand for digital marketing services these new clients will need.

Hood comes with a long background of tech marketing experience and is an award-winning copywriter, creative director, multi-faceted communications professional, and musician. He brings more than 30 years of experience to the company and is a welcome addition to help the team execute marketing and communications strategies for PMI’s global suite of clients.

Abruzzise is a communications graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she studied TV production and has made her career managing projects and events across multiple industries. She has experience working across the world, in locations that include Australia, California, New York, and many more, and has been integral in the growth of PMI’s client list with her careful eye for detail and client-focused approach to project management technologies.

Alex Perri is Tony Perri’s daughter and has worked intermittently for PMI since 2018 as a copywriter crafting content for technology clients. As a journalist, she understands the inside workings of press relations, and brings to the company a reporter’s knack for storytelling and becoming an expert in all kinds of subject matter on a tight turnaround.

With these additions, the elder Perri said he is ready to take on more opportunities from software clients who are perfectly positioned to leverage outsourced marketing as a service and present their products to Fortune 1000 enterprises while reevaluating positioning their products towards solutions for modern business problems in data management, cyber security, and data governance in an ever-growing climate of regulations.

“I believe people are seizing opportunities, especially small software vendors. I’m seeing people wanting to engage more, wanting to spend more budget, wanting to be more proactive about their budgets,” Perri said.

And with a growing team of marketing professionals, PMI is ready to help small and mid-sized software vendors jump on the opportunities present in today’s marketplace.

APRIL 2022: Chattanooga-based SMB owner recognized as a thought-leader in the worldwide technical community, demonstrating exceptional expertise and contribution in helping others derive greater value from IBM software, solutions, and services.

Small MarTech business owner Tony Perri was recently named  Z , one of only a handful of IBM z/OS computer champions worldwide. Perri is the president and Chief Marketing Officer of Perri Marketing Inc., a technology marketing agency with clients around the world, and has more than 10 years helping small to mid-sized software vendors (SSVs) compete with large multi-national software corporations in the marketplace, with an office located on the North Shore in Chattanooga, Tennessee. 

IBM reviewed nearly 1,700 nominations this year, and selected just 778 IBM Champions for 2022, from 55 countries, 9% of which earned champion status in IBM Z .

“IBM wants evangelists that are known in the marketplace. It’s a lot more powerful if you have an advocate talking about the things you do, compared to the same information coming from your company’s mouth. There’s power in a third party validating you, and I think that’s what part of the IBM Champions group is,” Perri said.

Perri has nearly 15 years of experience working with IBM’s Z platform and was nominated by Reg Harbeck, another IBM Z Champion with more than 30 years of experience as a mainframer in the industry.

Harbeck is chief strategist at Mainframe Analytics Ltd and has recently partnered with Perri and two other leaders in the enterprise tech industry, Charles Mills and Randy Siegel, to found Santa Rosa Software, LLC, an SSV building mobile software solutions for the mainframe.

“I have known and worked with Tony for a number of years, and even interviewed him for my TechTalk Enterprise podcast. He has a rare set of skills, experiences, and attitudes that bring the IBM Z mainframe technology and ecosystem together with people-centric and business-quality results,” Harbeck said. “His contributions to this context have been significant and varied. As I was (and continue to be) the first IBM Champion for Z in Canada, I know most of the IBM Champions for Z in the U.S. and many worldwide, and I realized that he fits right in, so I encouraged and nominated him for this recognition. And I was happy to see that IBM did indeed recognize him for this designation.”

Though the bulk of Perri’s career has been focused on the marketing side of the technology space, Perri said his understanding of the technologies he helps sell is what sets his business apart from other marketing services agencies.

This article originally appeared in the Chattanooga Times Free Press, January 1, 2019 by Dave Flessner Copyright © 2021

In the growth of nearly all small businesses — and especially small software vendors — there comes a point when the founder needs to reach out beyond his or her network connections or personal referrals to attract more customers. But hiring a full-time marketing director that both fits the culture and the budget of a startup is often too costly, risky or difficult for a small business.

Tony Perri, a veteran marketing executive and entrepreneur himself in the software industry, offers a solution very similar to the Software as a Service or “on-demand software.” Perri’s clients often offer their customers. Instead of hosting the software services for other companies as SaaS providers do, Perri hosts marketing services for clients. For a monthly fee, Perri and his 10 contract employees offer a variety of marketing, web design, copy writing, PR and trade show expertise along with teaching clients how to effectively employ CRM (customer relationship management) software and other services.

“We function like an outsourced software marketing department for technology companies,” Perri says. “For my clients, I am their chief marketing officer, working directly for the CEO or chief revenue officer. We can deliver a team of marketing and PR assets for a fraction of the cost of hiring and training even just two marketing people, who may or may not stick around. It’s like procuring a marketing department as a service, instead of building an entire department, which takes months, sometimes years.”

Perri says most software companies are started by either a developer or a salesperson who lack the marketing skills to scale up the company beyond their own contacts and connections. “At some point, they need to develop the marketing solutions to sustain the growth of their businesses,” Perri says. “That’s where we can help.”

Perri worked as a business journalist, strategic marketer and CRM (customer relationship management) specialist before becoming the marketing director of the global software company Allen Systems Group (ASG) Inc. in Naples, Florida. When that job ended 10 years ago, Perri decided to take his two decades of experience and create his own firm, Perri Marketing.

Perri’s first customer, CorreLog Inc., founded by another former ASG manager in Naples, quickly grew with Perri’s help into a leading security information and event management software or SIEM company that was acquired by BMC, a major IT management firm in 2018,

After a brief stint in Naples, Perri moved his company to Chattanooga when his daughter got a college athletics scholarship at Brevard College near Asheville, North Carolina, and Perri was looking for a way to be closer to where she played her games. Since Perri is from Mobile, Alabama, and his wife is from Monticello, Illinois, Perri saw Chattanooga as an attractive city midway between all three of those locations. With high-speed Gigabit-per-second internet links and a lower cost of living than bigger Southeastern cities, Perri quickly found a home in “Gig city.”

“Chattanooga’s Gig service is bringing more tech companies here and it’s a nice size, affordable city that seems really interested in helping small businesses grow and thrive,” Perri says. He has only one client so far in Chattanooga, although he is looking for and expects more.

Perri, who recently moved his company into the Hamilton County INCubator, devotes a few hours per week as mentor to local entrepreneurs engaged with The Company Lab’s GIGTANK, a 12-week accelerator program for startups. Most of Chattanooga’s startups he works with are still below the size needed to hire Perri Marketing, which so far has got most of its business from clients across the country. He even has one from France, the coding and quality control company Infotel, which is expanding in the United States.

“A typical PR agency can write an interesting story, but they can’t translate technology into business language that drives prospects’ calls to action,” Perri says. “We start with understanding the business objectives as related to the technology, build a strategic vision of marketing, then provide targeted content and marketing automation with analytics to measure effectiveness.”

Perri has expertise in cyber security, and good percentage of his clients make security software. Perri is yearly speaker with SHARE.org‘s national conferences on topics related to cybersecurity. conference about the effect on North American companies of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. This regulation, which went into effect in May 2018, is creating a domino effect in the U.S., with state legislation leaving American company executives, particularly chief marketing officers, trying to figure out how to navigate these new laws.  He has also presented at an American Marketing Association Atlanta event about how marketers collect consumer data while guarding privacy. Perri has also served as co-founder for three software start-ups — AR Advocates (analyst relations consulting for software vendors), Vallum Software (a network management software vendor), and his latest venture, Santa Rosa Software (a software vendor focused on mobile apps for the mainframe).