Ahead of the game

Notes de l'éditeur

1. The game is always changing for small and midsize organizations as major technology trends continue to transform the business landscape.The move to the cloudThere is a continued move toward greater use of cloud services as more organizations seek to take advantage of the reduced capital costs and major time-savings of using a hosted platform for their IT services on a “pay-as-you-go” service model. According to AMI Research, small and midsize business (SMB) spending on hosted services is growing 24% annually1.Skyrocketing mobile & remote usageFor most SMBs, a mobile and remote workforce has become the norm today. More employees are working from homeand on the road—and using a growing assortment of mobile devices to do this work. It is estimated that 85% of SMBs have employees using smartphones at work2. Tablet use is growing fast—already in use at work by 25% of SMBs2. 43% say they have some portion of their workforce telecommuting2. Mobility creates a number of business benefits with greater speed and improved productivity, but it also create new challenges in supporting multiple devices and securing data.Using data to competeWith an increasingly competitive business environment, SMBs are always seeking new ways to differentiate themselves with customers and stay ahead of the competition. In an AMI Research study, SMBs cited “improving customer experience” as the number one planned activity looking ahead3. Many are recognizing the value of data in helping differentiate their business—for example, by better understanding customer preferences and delivering improved service, or reaching prospects with the right marketing and sales messages. There is useful data everywhere—both inside and outside of the organization. The challenge is making it easy to put that data to use to achieve business goals.Sources:1 AMI WW Market Opportunity Model: 2012-2017. Includes SaaS/IaaS/Related spending, but excludes web hosting.2 AMI WW Market Opportunity Model: 2012-2017 and AMI ICT Tracker survey data Tablet & smartphone penetrations shown as % of all businesses. Mobile workers, telecommuters, BI penetration shown % of PC SMBs.3 AMI ICT Tracking Studies, U.S. SMB Trends & Server Market Insights, March 14, 2013.
2. In response to all these changes, many small and midsize businesses are focused on three key areas:Doing more with less—In today’s business environment, doing “more with less” has become the new normal. To stay ahead of the game, it is imperative to get the most out of every investment. When it comes to your technology investments, this means cutting costs wherever possible and getting the most value out of the products and services you purchase. It means creating a foundation that will grow with your business and set you up for the future.Getting the job done, wherever you are—As the division between our personal and business lives blurs, employees expect to be able to work anywhere—whether on their PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone. SMBs need to enable this mobility, while making sure their data is kept safe. Focusing your efforts to win business—Most businesses recognize that they have a massive amount of useful data in a range of disparate sources, such as customer databases, accounting systems, and product data. But it is often challenging for employees to access the data they need and to put it to use to make sales and better service customers. Those businesses who can use information to their advantage will win customers and keep them.
3. Today’s business environment is always changing. To win, you need to stay ahead of the game:First, be lean & stay lean. Don’t invest a cent more than you need but scale instantly when required. Achieve your business goals while getting the most value from your investments.Next, enable business anywhere. Be faster and bolder than your competition. Empower your employees to work anywhere and make decisions and win in real time. Finally, tap your data goldmine. Leverage all the data you collect to its fullest to know your customers better, target the right opportunities, and win sales.When you’re ahead of the game, you lead!
4. In today’s business environment, doing “more with less” has become the new normal. To stay ahead of the game, it is imperative to get the most out of every investment. When it comes to your technology investments, this means cuttings costs wherever possible and not spending a cent more than you need. The challenge is that growing your business usually results in the need to invest in technology infrastructure, like servers that deliver files, applications, and data to your workers. As we’ll explore here, new technology areas like virtualization and the cloud help to solve this problem by enabling you to reduce or eliminate up-front costs—and to more easily grow your IT services as needed to support your business growth. Here are three key ways to get ahead of the game by cutting costs and getting the most out of your IT investments:With the advanced servers available today, you need to make sure you’re taking full advantage of your investment in server hardware. You can use virtualization to run more apps on the same server and save on hardware and maintenance costs. And there’s no need to pay more to virtualize—it’s included in Windows Server 2012 at no extra cost.Once you virtualize, you are opening the door to a wide range of potential business benefits. One example is in the area of disaster recovery—making sure systems are back online quickly in the case of unexpected events, like fire, a break-in, or flood. With a disaster recovery solution, you can have greater peace of mind, knowing that you’re open for business—evenif disaster strikes.Another key area is data storage. With the explosion of data in the workplace, your employees need to know they have plenty of space to store a wide range of file types—from documents, to spreadsheets, to photos and videos. Now you can get as much storage you need, when you need it, without spending a fortune.
5. Today, as the division between our personal and business lives blurs, more people are working outside the office. For example, people want the freedom to work at home when the kids are home from school sick—or to quickly review a document on their phones while they wait to board a flight. While on a customer visit, access to current and accurate information can make the difference between winning and losing a sale. To keep up with the speed of business today, employees need access to business applications wherever they go. Workers today expect to have flexibility in where and when they work—so much so that this can be a differentiator in attracting and retaining the best people. Increased mobile and remote work creates challenges, though. Many people do work on their personal mobile devices, which can cause management headaches and security risks. As a small or midsize business, you need to provide a secure, reliable remote connection to your applications without spending a lot of money, and without taking up all your IT staff’s time. Here are three ways to provide your employees with the freedom to do business anywhere they need to be—and have greater peace of mind from a platform that helps protect your data:Employees are doing their work on a growing range of mobile devices today. With a whole new range of exciting new Windows 8 PCs and mobile devices, you can provide them a consistent platform and work experience across PCs and devices, while offering a broad choice from a wide choice of brands. Remote access is a common scenario today as more employees work at home and on the road. Many of them need to access applications that reside on-site, like accounting or CRM systems. However, data security is concern, especially if laptops and mobile devices that contain sensitive company data go missing. With technology included in Windows Server 2012, you can offer employees easy remote access to on-site applications with the peace of mind that your company data stays on the server,not on the laptop or device.Today’s businesses need fast access to their latest documents and tools from anywhere. For example, mobile access to the latest sales proposal can make the difference in winning the deal.Now, you can empower your employees to respond to customers faster with mobile access to the latestdocuments and information—and a full suite of productivity tools—using Office 365.
6. Today, we are in the midst of a data explosion.A massive amount of new data is generated daily from a range of sources, including websites, social media, and mobile device usage. Most businesses are sitting on a goldmine of data right in their own organizations, including customer information, accounting systems, and product profitability data.Those businesses who can use information to their advantage will win. There is a real opportunity to put data to use to make better, faster decisions, to focus on the right opportunities, and to win more business. But it is often challenging to access data—let alone to analyze it and generate business insights. Often data is in disparate departmental silos around the company—or on employees’ laptops. Your employees need an easy way to view data from a single source. And they need easy tools to analyze it, visualize it, and generate new insights to drive the business forward—without needing to learn new skills and software.You shouldn’t have to be a data analyst to get the information you need and use it to run your business more effectively. With the right tools, you can put data to use in your organization to focus your efforts on the most profitable opportunities and get the competitive edge you need to win more sales. Here are three ways you can put your goldmine of data to work for you:Most businesses today recognize that their data can be a valuable asset. However, it’s often distributed in disparate systems across their organization, making it difficult to get access to it. Now you can make it easy to find, combine, and explore data from multiple sources, all from Microsoft Excel.Even when businesses can access their data, they need tools that make it easy to get insight from that data to achieve their business goals. You can make data your differentiator with easy dashboards, reports, and visualizations using familiar tools.For many successful businesses, collaboration is a key factor in gaining new insights and making better decisions. We can deliver tools that enable you to share insights and work together around data to make faster, better-informed decisions—so that others in the organization can access your work and build on it.
7. Full case study at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Office-365/Healthcare-Australia/OFFICE-365-A-SMARTER-OFFICE-COLLABORATION-PLATFORM-FOR-LESS/710000002254Healthcare Australia had let its IT systems fall a little by the wayside. With a legacy infrastructure that included a ten-year-old email system, newly appointed CIO Mark Botros felt it was time for an upgrade. The company deployed Microsoft Office 365 integrated with Lync and SharePoint as a total office collaboration platform, supported by Windows Intune.
8. Full case study at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-System-Center-Virtual-Machine-Manager-2008/OTRUM/TV-Solutions-Provider-Reduces-Costs-by-Virtualizing-Its-Server-Environment/4000006145OTRUM provides interactive television solutions and content to the hospitality industry, including large hotel chains.Many of OTRUM’s physical servers were aging and needed replacement. To spend less on purchasing and maintaining physical servers and to reduce the cost of power and cooling at its two data centers, OTRUM wanted to expand virtualization technology in its server environment. The company thought it needed VMware to virtualize. But Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner OfficeTeam, OTRUM learned that virtualization software was included in its licenses for Windows Server. With Hyper-V virtualization technology built-in to Windows Server 2012, OTRUM could efficiently deploy, scale, and manage a virtualized server infrastructure. By running several virtual servers on one physical machine, OTRUM reduced the size of its physical infrastructure by 50 percent, saving 65 percent on hardware and maintenance costs.
9. Full case study at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Case_Study_Detail.aspx?casestudyid=710000001326For EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffeured Services, technology has always been a competitive differentiator. But when it decided to license its dispatch and reservation systems software to other companies, it suddenly became a hosting provider and needed more sophisticated data center capabilities and lower IT costs. EmpireCLS decided to upgrade its servers to the Windows Server 2012 operating system to take advantage of improvements in networking, availability, remote access, and other areas. With these new features, EmpireCLS can provision hosting customers faster, deliver high availability at lower costs, and continue to reduce operating costs while growing the business. In fact, EmpireCLS has reduced IT costs by 30 percent during a period when the business grew 30 percent. With a more efficient virtual desktop environment, EmpireCLS has improved compute performance by 300 percent.
10. Full case study at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Windows-Server-2012-Datacenter/Law-Offices-of-Aaron-I.-Katsman-P.C/New-York-Law-Firm-Avoids-Disaster-During-Hurricane-by-Using-Failover-System/710000001728During Hurricane Sandy the New York Law Offices of Aaron I. Katsman, P.C. continued to operate, even after losing power. The hurricane knocked out power to the firm’s offices and the homes of many employees. But employees who weren’t as severely affected and still had power at home logged on to their applications and continued to work. The firm says that instead of losing a week’s worth of business, with Windows Server 2012, they were back up and running within 20 minutes.
11. Full case study at http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/Microsoft-Office-365/Au-Pair-Link/Agency-Grows-Rapidly-Improves-Decision-Making-and-Collaboration-with-Cloud/710000000902Au Pair Link is New Zealand’s leading and largest au pair agency; it's the largest agency in Australasia, and is among the top 5% of au pair agencies in the world. The company has more than 30 full- and part-time employees and places approximately one thousand au pairs with host families in New Zealand and internationally. Au Pair Link needed online services that would provide document management and collaboration capabilities, while keeping pace with its rapid growth.One of the reasons Au Pair Link chose Office 365 is to provide its users with 25 GB mailboxes, allowing the company to back up all communications with customers, and ensuring that even if a staff member leaves the company, the historical information will still be there for reference. They also wanted SharePoint Online for document management. The company now relies heavily on this as an intranet for posting documents, announcements, and custom datasheets.
12. Use this slide to suggest appropriate next steps, such as an assessment of business needs. Communicate what you want the audience or potential customer to do. Be specific and thoughtful and make it as easy as possible to say “yes”. Visithttp://aka.ms/AheadoftheGame for more information.