Cobweb Solutions Blog - The UK's Leading Cloud Provider

The power of partnerships?

One of the things about the current economical crisis poses the issue about how do businesses adjust to being in a tougher climate to firstly steady the ship and secondly put together a plan that sees them through the unsteady period?

I have quite a few friends that are builders (good if you want work done on your house, not so good at polite dinner parties for clean jokes!) and they are feeling the strain on the economy as much as anyone at the moment. I asked one of them how as a small two person company they would still be able to get enough work to pay them both a salary when so many other people are tightening their belts and putting off having work done?

'Simple', he said, we pool resources with other smaller firms and share work between us so that we all get some work to tide us over. That way we can still compete with some of the bigger firms that have the money to ride out the lean spells and we have a good network of people that we know we can trust'.

Now there is nothing revolutionary in what he was saying but out of necessity they have to work together with potential competitors just to survive, and may actively help someone today who will take their business next month, or next year, and they have to trust them. The human need to survive, even in business outweighs the need to make money, or greed. I like that.

So, what's the point I'm making? Do firms go for the knee jerk reaction and lay off staff (normally the most expensive aspect of a business) Do they cut operational costs? Do they downsize the business to a smaller location? Or do they even think about partnering with another company and looking to use that relationship to either offer more to their own customers, or offer their services to their new partners? Is that even considered?

Partnering with the right company can have pretty compelling results. If you don't do it would a competitor of yours? Would they then have that competitive advantage over you?

Cobweb uses it's own partnerships to great effect (I think!) As a smaller company (>150 employees) we have to ensure that we gain the maximum benefits for us customers. Partnering with someone for the sake of it is never going to work. Having some reciprical services and a cultural fit between the two businesses are fundamental to the success of the partnership. I'd be interested in other peoples feedback around this and if you think you can partner with Cobweb or even that we can partner with you then please do contact me.

I think the main point of what I've said above is that we'd be fools to discard the idea without proper consideration.

Mark

 

What’s on the mind of the average Small Business manager in times of financial crisis?

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

Gartner advises firms under 1000 users to outsource

Interesting piece about Gartner advising business to consider Webmail as a viable cost effective alternative. We at Cobweb say - great news - Gartner are endorsing the IT model that we have been delivering since 2001 - but wait a moment, are they seriously suggesting that businesses should use Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail for their mission critical communications medium? Managing mail for over 5000 business customers I think we have a good idea of the needs of the sub 1000 user organization and there are 3 things these customers need great support, great support and great support.

Of course they also need mobility options, Blackberry, Windows mobile, Iphone, also compliant archiving as well as flexible migration scenarios, simple and complex mail routing and an array of other technical features, but, most importantly they need to know that they can access high quality support in way they want to, when they want to.

It is also important to recognise that different roles in any business require different features, deskless workers may or may not need offline working, office users may need interoperability with other office systems such as CRM or ERP solutions. So yes I agree - businesses under 1000 users should not deploy internal mail systems, but, as they outsource - do the due diligence and find a provider that meets their own individual needs, and my guess is that not many of them will opt for Hotmail!

See the Computer Weekly artical here

   

"In-House Out-House" – pain, IT Consultants, migrations and TCO!

Consider this view of "when hosting goes bad" (annotated from SMB Thoughts by Brian Williams and I’ve clarified the odd point)

A ten user environment gets the advice from another solution provider, or kid, that a simple Microsoft Small Business Server with Hosted Exchange services is the perfect solution for their office. So the solution is implemented and for the first 3 months everything is working great; file sharing, automated backup, shadow copy, remote access, mobile sync…you know all the stuff that makes a business tick. Then out of the blue, the Hosted Exchange provider has an outage, the outage lasts a day and a half. OK, no problem just happened once, then a week later another outage, now the client is not happy we need to find another provider. We now get the call and are asked to step in as their new trusted advisor, I now have to give them the bad news.

·         All those shared calendars you have established, those are going to break.   They will need to be shared out again.

·         All those public folders you setup, those will need to be re-established along with permissions. We’ll need to export those public folders to .PST and re-import.

·         You use the auto-complete function in Outlook as your address book/contact list…that’s a fantastic Office feature, will need to migrate those .nk2 files

·         We’ll need to export all the Outlook profiles to .PST then re-import under the new provider

·         We’ll need to resetup Mobile phone sync, best to wipe the phone and start clean.    Just need to change the ActiveSync settings

·         As you can see while SaaS has some great benefits it can quickly turn ugly. The above example was just Hosted Exchange I can’t even imagine the CRM migration process.

So if you begin offering SaaS you better inform your client of the migration or exit strategy if they decide later they don’t like the solution or decide to move to an in-house solution.

This is an interesting post and provokes some discussion.  Clearly Brian is someone who’s picked up the pieces more than once!   The real cause of this issue is not the incorrect choice of solution for a critical function, but the quality of the solution you choose.   Of course, you can move to a disastrously unreliable in-house solution too!

He’s a US IT provider and I think this issue is becoming more common in the US with online services and the lowering cost, more competitive market and new entrants.  The entry of new, small, poorly financed and /or inexperienced service providers into the hosting market is becoming an issue and may be starting to damage the name of the industry too.   Clearly we don’t want this to become too much of an issue – even Microsoft need to be careful that their entrance into the market with Microsoft Online Services has a positive benefit for all, and they are working very hard with their partners to ensure this.

So, how do you chose a provider that doesn’t have multiple 1-day+ outages?

Look for experience & track record, scalability and resilience, accreditations and partnerships, inspect the hardware and storage vendors they use, look their company history and finances. It’s also worth bearing in mind that a service provider who’s core business is hosting will be more committed to service delivery that one who’s core business lies elsewhere.

As the hosting market matures even more, the reliability of the supplier (or even the internal systems) will improve on average all round. So the difference between good and bad hosters in terms of reliability will reduce.

Of the problems on the original post above, I believe these can be similar or worse with an in-house solution further down the line. The “bad news” Brian has to give the client is actually just time and money to them – they are paying the IT consultant to fix the issue, they aren’t actually importing their public folders or sync’ing the address book themselves!

Here the client is just spending $$$ on the migration away from a hosted solution – have they considered the TCO of in-house solution… will they spend this much again every few months/years applying Service Packs, upgrading to Exchange 12, buying more licenses, upgrading storage or performance, or installing an archive solution. A bit of pain migrating in/out between service providers isn’t that bad really, it’s not like you’re doing this every 6 months – our average customer lifetime is ~3-years and increases every month.

With Exchange and CRM – the solution isn’t to have an easy in/easy-out process, it’s to find a reliable, robust and resilient solution which balances the total costs and provides the right level of service for your business.   Find this, either in-house, from a service provider, or from Microsoft Online, and you’ve got a trusted solution for life!

thanks, Dan

Iphone

Much to the horror of our technical guys I sucummed to the marketing hype and purchased an phone. The in-store experience was a little confusing as I was told I would have to wait for a SIM card to be delivered by post, so imagine my excitement when during the sign up processm I received a confirmation text from O2. Yes, the sign up experience was every bit as slick as you would expect and the touch screen interface is the best I have used so far. But my real aim was to see how it stacked up against our Hosted Exchange service. I have used a number of Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices and I know that the functionally would not be as good. So what you get is synchronization of calender and contacts to your Outlook client via Itunes and mailbox access through something called IMAP.  My main concern was getting all my contacts on to the device, and this worked very well, I have not managed to get my diary across yet but I sure its me not the phone. Email works and synchronizes well and whilst it is not as good as Active sync its effective. So overall hI am happy, especially as the Bluetooth works in my car, Should you get one use as a business tool? there are probably better devices out there, but as a cool multi purpose device that does your email as well then, you could do worse.

Have a Happy Holiday and keep checking back 2008 is going to be a busy year for Cobweb...

Mark