Recently I attended a briefing held by Dell Australia that focused on services and small to medium businesses and the impact of the economic downturn. Dell in Australia defines a small to medium business (SMB) being from 3 to 500 employees. Dell sent out a survey asking them about the challenges they face as a result of the current economic conditions. The survey consisted of responses from about 200 organizations with 80% of those being companies with less than 100 employees.
The respondents said that the most significant challenges to their businesses were seen as maintaining the quality of customer service, retaining and growing customers, keeping revenues stable and cash flow. The things that are less important include financing business expansion and keeping up with current trends. It is this last point that I found of most interest.
The Dell survey revealed that the overwhelming majority (90%) of people responsible for IT operations and purchasing decisions are company employees. The survey didn’t say whether these were dedicated or part-time resources, but it is probably fair to assume that many are people doing this part-time. The IT marketplace is full of technologies and acronyms and can be very daunting to someone who has only a part-time interest in the subject, whilst they concentrate on running a business. It would seem that the sheer complexity of the issues and topics is an inhibitor to innovation for smaller companies.
But you don’t need to be a subject matter expert to make savings!
There have been great strides made in server performance and the reduction in power consumption, combined with the compaction of the processing footprint with the introduction of multi-core processors allows you to put more grunt into smaller packages. So, the simple act of replacing a server just a few years old, one that is just about to run out of warranty for example, can have a big impact on your costs. It’s the same logic that we all use with mobile (cell) phones. So why treat servers any different? In fact, imagine if your phone bill would go down when you got a new phone too. With servers that is what can happen, only your running cost reductions are not airtime minutes, but power consumption. Food for thought.
IDEAS offers the Server CAR tool to help users better quantify savings they can make when looking to swap out old servers for new. The Server CAR was also recently awarded the AIIA’s iAWARDS 2009 New South Wales State Winner in the Sustainability and Green IT category.
Gary Burgess
Senior Vice President, Research & Operations
Often we forget the little guy, the SMB, in our discussions of the comings and goings of the Internet marketing industry. Sure there are times like this when a report surfaces talking about their issues and concerns but, for the most part, we like to talk about big brands and how they do the Internet marketing thing well or not so well.
www.onlineuniversalwork.com
Posted by: Charles brooks | December 18, 2009 at 12:43 AM