Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Microsoft says that IT is "firmly entrenched as a strategic asset" among small to medium businesses
Wednesday, May 06, 2009 by Michael Holley
Microsoft released its annual "SMB Insights Report" last month,
which analyzes two international studies to predict IT-related
trends for the coming year. In addition to providing insight into
how the market is evolving from an IT firm's standpoint, the report
is a great way for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to find
out which opportunities to leverage in 2009.
Microsoft's research asserts that "IT will play a significant
role in shaping how soon and how aggressively the small and midsize
business community reclaims financial stability and becomes a
catalyst to help lead us out of a global recession." Microsoft
predicts a "stronger-than average commitment to IT as a strategic
investment" during the recession. Here's a summary of the key
findings:
- "Strategic IT investments bolster the bottom line" - SMBs can
leverage IT as a cost-cutting tool and means to increase
productivity. Outdated or manual business processes can be a
massive, unnecessary cost that SMBs will no longer tolerate in
times like these.
- "Lower Budgets mean less has to be more" - Microsoft predicts
that virtualization and server consolidation will continue to grow
in popularity as they can add business capabilities while actually
reducing operating simultaneously.
- "Service and responsiveness are key" - As SMBs will be looking
to leverage advanced productivity-increasing tools like mobile and
collaborative technologies, responsive and reliable support will
become crucial to avoiding downtime.
- "Smaller companies will increasingly adopt cloud computing" -
Falling hardware costs, increasingly reliable and robust hosted
solutions, and advanced mobility features are making the cloud
computing model very hard to ignore for SMBs.
- "Better together: SMBs rely on trusted partners" - Microsoft
predicts that SMBs will turn to IT partners more often to help
improve bottom lines. As a reaction, partners (like Switchfast)
will work harder than ever to deliver personalized service and
build a lasting partnership.
The bottom line is that SMBs need to do whatever they can to run
as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, and technology can
be a way to make large strides toward that goal. Feel free to give
us a call if you have questions about any of this, or would like to
evaluate your own tech situation to see if there's cost-saving
potential to be leveraged.
Best,
Michael Holley
Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Consulting
& Support
Rochester
IT Consulting & Support
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