Recap of Recent Webinar: Managing for Growth

Did you miss our recent webinar, “Managing For Growth And Change In A Tough Economy”?

If so, you can still watch the full webinar here. Meanwhile, let me give the highlights of some of what you missed 

The goal of the webinar was to outline strategies and tips for growing your business by leveraging information technology.  I was the moderator and one of the speakers. I was joined by two extremely knowledgeable people:

• Chris Peters, End User Product Marketing Manager, Server Product Group – Intel
• Mac McConnell, Global Program Manager, Systems Group at Sun Microsystems

Business Outlook

First we covered the current business and economic environment. Our collective view is that although the economy is still in the midst of a recession, some cracks are starting to emerge in the dark facade. We noted the small signs of improvement here and there. For instance, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has reported that the global recession has stabilized. A number of analysts and economists are now predicting that the recession will bottom out and end in the second half of 2009.

But perhaps the most interesting data point about recovery came from the webinar participants themselves. When asked about their budget expectations for the rest of 2009, 41% of the webinar participants reported that they expected budgets to increase. Compare that to only 18% who expected budgets to be cut. That was mildly surprising to us, given the economic environment we are living through, but also encouraging to see.

No matter what, innovative growth-oriented SMBs know that technology gives leverage and can support and even accelerate growth.  For instance, research by Six Disciplines found that SMB companies strategically using technology outperformed their competitors by 100%.

Strategies and Tips

Among the specific strategies and tips, we discussed:

Setting goals and understanding the challenges you are under. Communicate closely with all the functions in your company, including the Sales Department and Finance, especially during times like these.  You may be in a “no growth” mode but find that it is actually costing money to defer expenditures.  Intel discovered that it could save $19 million (PDF) in its own internal operations, by actually spending money to refresh servers.  Also,  you may be called upon to turn on a dime and gear up quickly to address increased sales growth as the economy opens up again.

Use open source software and existing tools to save money. You can get a software package off the shelf, and customize the software internally to suit your needs.

Using SaaS (software as a service) and cloud computing, avoids having to make large up-front investments for software licenses. It allows SMBs to manage cash flow better.  Also, as many SaaS contracts are month-to-month or short term, you gain flexibility by not being locked in.  However, Mac pointed out that by placing so much reliance on an SaaS vendor, it can have a chilling effect on your ability to switch vendors, in effect giving you less flexibility.

Also discussed were a number of strategic hardware management techniques, including trade-ins, server clustering, virtualization, and the computing performance increases you can gain in your organization.

Chris Peters pointed out the “Server refresh savings estimator.” This is an online tool that enables you to evaluate the benefits of replacing server technology with the latest generation of servers.

One key point was illustrated several times:  by doing a strategic technology refresh, the benefits multiply and spill over beyond just the cost of any hardware itself.   Example:  by consolidating servers, you not only end up with fewer servers that you have to buy, but you also increase computing capacity.  At the same time, it  reduces power consumption, reduces demand on staff time to administer and manage the servers, etc.

Customer Case Studies

Mac and Chris covered 3 customer case studies involved Sun and Intel, showing how SMBs (including one non-profit) had benefited from a strategic approach to technology and had put in place some of the strategies discussed.  The case studies are online:

• Practice-IT, an online training technology provider, utilized VMware and was able to significantly expand its capacity to support increasing workloads without increased cost as the company added new customers.

• NaviSite, a medium-sized hosting company, has 17 data centers around the globe. The company has a large VMware environment and needed to consolidate this environment to save costs while increasing the agility to respond to their customer’s needs.

• Catholic Diocese of Boise, a non-profit providing services and support for 54 parishes, 33 missions and chapels, 14 K–12 schools, a library, and 40 offices, has 38 employees who work at a central administrative office.  They were able to reduce 28 servers down to 4, by implementing Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V to minimize costs and increase server utilization.

There was some livetweeting going on behind the scenes, using the hashtag #MIDMKT. Follow the Twitter discussion  here.

This recap only scratches the surface of what we covered.  To get the full context, all the details, and much more advice, please listen to and watch the full webinar:   “Managing For Growth And Change In A Tough Economy“?

Springtime for SMB IT Purchases?

Spring appears to be arriving after the long winter of the 2008-2009 recession.  If you’re like me, it can’t come soon enough.

Listening to the incessant drum beat of financial crises, stock market dips, lowered company earnings and slashed  budgets, you can easily fall into a mindset that bad news is here to stay.  Relentless bad news creates a climate of fear and uncertainty.  It weighs you down, if you let it.

Luckily, the cycle of bad news leading to worse news is not permanent.  One of the good things — some would say the ONLY good thing — about recessions is that eventually they end.

In the past two weeks we’ve seen a number of positive — although weak and emerging — signals that economic  recovery will start in the second half of 2009.

For instance, the Washington Post reports that the economy is showing signs of stabilizing.  Notice they didn’t say “growing” or even necessarily “improving” — just stabilizing.  But after months of everything seeming to get worse with each passing day, that’s a positive sign.  The article relies in part on the relatively optimistic remarks of Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke in the past week.

In another report, Marketwatch says that the tech outlook is showing signs that recovery may be near.  Although many large publicly-traded tech companies no longer give predictions on their upcoming quarter’s financial results, some executives are making cautiously-positive noises in speaking engagements and remarks to reporters.  Research firm IDC is now predicting that we will see a tech recovery in the second half of 2009.

But to me, perhaps the most encouraging sign of a recovery is the sentiment of business executives themselves.  Do IT decision makers feel optimistic about the near future, even if money is incredibly tight right at this moment?  What are executives planning?   In this context, the condition of the stock market or credit markets is less relevant than the actions we expect to take in our own companies.

One positive sign of executive sentiment comes from IT Retailer CDW.  CDW does a bimonthly survey of IT executives called the CDW IT Monitor. The most recent CDW IT Monitor from April 2009 finds that decision makers in small and mid-size businesses are looking more optimistic about their plans to invest in technology before the end of 2009:

“After more than a year of confidence decline, the first tentative signs of IT growth are appearing. According to the latest CDW IT Monitor, an increasing number of IT decision makers from small and medium-size business sectors anticipate investment in the next six months.

According to the latest survey, 29 percent of small business IT decision makers expect budget increases in the next six months, an increase of seven percentage points from February. Additionally, 18 percent of medium-size business IT decision makers anticipate hiring in the next six months, an increase of six percentage points since February.”

So the headline here is that small and midsize businesses are leading the way with an intention to increase or once again start making IT investments.  In fact, medium size businesses (100-999 employees) may be the most optimistic as this chart from the Monitor shows (notice the uptick in the red line since February):