Here at Cobweb we are as attuned to the world of the Small Business as anyone can be – after all we are one, not the smallest admittedly but, at 70 people we have to manage the same issues as everyone else.
The world of the Small business is a mixed and varied one, we have some customers who are busier than ever, market dynamics dictate that there will always be some winners in a downturn but, what about the rest who have to deal with the realities of a prolonged global downturn. Obviously the first and most important consideration I would guess is cash, cash flow, raising cash for expansion or investment in the business, collecting it in from debtors and trying to get the best terms from suppliers, the old adage “cash is king” is even more important in hard times.
The second one for me is Risk, choosing the right customers who will end up paying, choosing the right suppliers, who are there for the long term, making the right buying decisions and managing employment risk.
Third in my list is business efficiency, from marketing operations though to improving whatever the output of whatever it is you business produces, efficiency of staff, processes and tools, sounds easy but we all know it’s not...
I like to think that Cobweb plays it part in helping to manage these difficult activities through the services it offers to small and medium businesses. We have invested huge amounts over the last 3-4 years to be the best at what we do making the choice an obvious one when a business decides to throw off the shackles of managing expensive in-house, non strategic IT services such as email, file sharing, customer management and data backups. Improving employee and process efficiency by using Enterprise class tools is a no brainer, but when you realise there is NO upfront capital investment and your monthly charges scale down as well as up because you only pay for what you use, it seems crazy that any business under 200 employees would consider going down the route of consult-buy-build-consult-manage-improve-consult-consult-consult when those consulting billable hours just keep coming, and if you are managing IT yourself what is the hidden cost of your time or downtime?
And risk using a managed service? just use a provider who has been around for a while (Cobweb established 1996) and, most importantly is making profits that can be reinvested in better services, is externally audited preferably to ISO27001 standard, and runs a on premise UK based 24/7 365 service support centre. As a clue there is only one provider who fits these criteria!
Hang onto your cash – don’t buy servers and licensing – Pay as you use
Don’t take risks – Choose you partners carefully
Efficiency – Give you employees the best and then expect the best
I apologise if this post seems a little like an advert for Cobweb’s services I guess it is....
Mark
Certainly in our case it was the reduction in risk that was the biggest factor. When we originally looked at the costs, on a three year basis it was on a par with internal hosting. However that was before the addition of the MessageLabs service, and also based on fairly optimistic predictions of support overhead.
Our email downtime is now next to zero, and the administration effort absolutely trivial. Compared to the regular headaches I had supporting and ageing Exchange infrastructure plus the additional capital costs for servers and support systems, Cobweb has been a great success for us.
Another plus point you can add is resilience. Our email system is now decoupled from the office IT infrastructure, so in a major site-wide disaster at least the email infrastructure stays online and accessible from users' home PCs independently of the office IT.
Posted by: Nik | September 22, 2008 at 01:44 PM