This article from gigaom.com is a case study not only for this mid-sized company, but shows how the rapid changes in technology are benefiting small and mid-sized business in their competition with much bigger competitors.
Precise, the company where author Zohar Gilad works, was spun off from Symantec, a very large tech company using traditional, very large company technology. As a much smaller entity, those tools were no longer cost-effective for Precise.
From the article:
But in our new structure, we needed applications that were scaled down and easier to support. We ditched the world of licensed software and annual commitments to large capital expenses on equipment — the traditional way of doing IT — in favor of cloud, SaaS and virtualization.
Highlighting the transformation for Precise:
Our first priority was to find a solution to support our customers, so we chose Salesforce and NetSuite for the front and back-office solutions. It took a single data analyst a mere five hours to migrate all of our data from SAP to the new systems. For customer support, we chose Drupal and for marketing we chose Marketo — both of which were seamlessly integrated using WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration.
And my favorite, moving away from on-site Microsoft Exchange. In this case Precise went with Google instead of hosted Microsoft mail, but the important point for this article is using hosted services instead of on-site.
Next up, we had to deal with the Microsoft Exchange servers that we’d inherited from Symantec. Microsoft Exchange can be a bear to support with a slim staff, so we opted for Google Mail instead. The e-mail migration took about five days, and later we also moved from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites for collaboration. The cool thing is, employees don’t have to do everything on Google. They can still access their favorite Microsoft Office applications, such as Excel, or use Outlook front-end if they wish.
None of this would have been possible five years ago. The entire business technology landscape has been transformed in that time. The tools that this mid-sized company moved to are the same tools we offer to businesses of almost any size. These tools make small and mid-sized businesses competitive in a way they simply could not be five, even three years ago.
This transformation of business technology continues unabated. It's actually quite difficult for most business to keep up with the change - the larger the organization, the harder it is to remain nimble and execute with the most current technology. It literally changes every day.
While some may find these changes daunting, we find them exhilarating! The rate of change in technology continues to offer possibilities for adapters to leverage and turn into business opportunities, either for a current business, new revenue streams or new businesses. Welcome to the 21st Century!
Visit On-Site Technical Solutions for information on how you can move to Google Apps or other Cloud Computing applications. Call us for all of your network computing and business IT needs. We can also help with your data security and mobile computing. Follow us online below. Call or text me at 1-949-212-2168.
Technorati Tags
No comments:
Post a Comment