Not that long ago, business meant opening the door to your customers with a friendly smile. Now, it’s all about e-tailing, e-commerce and e-business.

Whether you sell toys, lease property, build houses or paint pictures, IT plays a vital, practical role in every business. Your customers are no longer known by name. They are anonymous; expecting to be served in real-time, all the time. Your competitors used to be miles away, but are now everywhere. Customer loyalty, satisfaction and your “edge” is no longer a result of your friendly demeanor, but a combination of servers and systems. Scary isn’t it?

Keeping up with technology is not only complicated, but very expensive.
In 2009, 78% of IT costs were spent maintaining and managing existing systems. This means that only 22% is used to keep up with the ever-changing technology expectations of your customers.

Why?

IT laptops and desktops, or servers and web-sites, are like children; requiring constant attention to keep them happy. Large corporations spend around 2% of revenue on teams to monitor, support and resolve IT issues. However, when it comes to small and medium business (SMB), this figure is closer to 8%. Even more worrying is that 85% of SMBs do not have any in-house IT and pay thousands to “mobile-techies” to fix simple issues.

IT can be simplified by using this 90/10 rule – 90% of issues can be resolved without any down-time to your business ... the other 10% will usually result in the need to purchase something new. Heard this before? No? That’s not surprising as “mobile-techies” love SMBs and personal visits at a handsome hourly rate.

Solution?

Well that’s simple ... do what the big guys do – outsource. You focus on what you and your business does best and make your IT work for you ... it’s as easy as 1 - 2 - 3.

1 – Find a provider to manage and maintain your IT remotely, providing on-site support only when necessary;

2 – Utilise their expertise to streamline your business processes, their buying power to reduce spend on new systems and their in-house “geeks” to keep your systems happy;

3 – Save around 60% on all your technology spending for as little as
a cup of coffee per day, per system.

By Dinitha Subasinghe
ds3 – Partnership in IT
www.ds3.com.au