Computer Service Business Success and the Need to Focus

Do you own a small business computer service business that needs better marketing results?

Many computer consultants start out thinking the home user, or B2C (Business to Consumer) market is the right place to be; but they quickly realize the difficulty of making a profit as a one-person (maybe two-person) operation catering to the needs of home users.

If you own a computer service business that wants to provide solutions to small businesses, you need to realize that there are a lot of different types of small businesses out there.

#1: Know About Home-Based Businesses and Micro-Small Businesses. A home-based business typically just involves 1-2 computers and an individual. A micro-small business is just one very small step up from that in size, with 5-10 employees and that many or fewer computer systems. If you focus too much on home-based businesses and micro-small businesses, you’ll have a hard time selling a lot of ongoing services agreements. While both types of businesses are technically within the definition of “small business,” they may not be the best clients for your computer service business.

#2: Avoid Targeting Micro-Small and Home-Based Businesses. First off, these kinds of small businesses often have lots of consumer-grade PC’s, which will not be a big help for implementing sophisticated client/server networking solutions. Second, these kinds of small businesses often use pirated software, which will give you major problems when you start to develop long-term technology plans and complex networks. Third, most of these kinds of small businesses will be reluctant, and often unable, to pay for your sophisticated, high-end professional services. Fourth, these kinds of tiny small businesses often believe that IT is not that important to their company, so they don’t need the benefits you are offering. And finally, these kinds of tiny small businesses are usually too small to afford a real, dedicated server and a real client/server network, making your solutions overkill.

#3: Great Computer Service Business Success Resides in Small Businesses with 10 or More PCs. Computer service business owners that target companies with at least 10 PC’s are generally more successful at building strong businesses. At that point, small businesses cannot continue to run peer-to-peer networks. They also cannot afford to wait for volunteers and moonlighters to get around to responding to needs or emergencies. Small businesses services that have 10 or more systems start to get really serious about putting in real client server networks, dependable back-up solutions, reliable power protection and secure firewalls. At this size, small business decision makers usually understand the need for more sophisticated total business solutions.

Source: http://www.itworld.com/channel/58897/computer-service-business-success-and-need-focus

Cost-Savings Key Driver to Green IT in Small Businesses

Vittesh Kalambi, research analyst at Access Market International, says cost-savings is the key driver to small businesses becoming convinced about the positive outcome of Green IT.

While small businesses do not have similar scale as large businesses, they can still go green by choosing EnergyStar rated appliances, low power consuming electronics, blade servers and virtualization technologies, says Kalambi.

Here’s some Green IT initiatives small businesses could take:

– Choose energy-efficient PC. HP and IBM have begun to manufacture low power consuming servers and PCs which utilize roughly 66% of the power requirement of older systems.

– Use power-saving servers such as blade servers which provide the same computing power with much lower power utilization.

– Be more efficient in the use of computing resources. Thin clients, which uses half the energy of desktops, saves space, is easier to secure and could reduce costs due to lower IT management expenses.

– Use basic power management techniques on computers, which can result in substantial energy savings.

– Recycle. Paper waste can be minimized by double-sided printing, reusing single side printed sheets of paper and other methods. For e-waste such as electronic hardware, retailers such BestBuy have e-waste recycling program for consumers and all their stores have recycling centers for cell phones, batteries, PCs, TVs etc.

Microsoft Small Business News & Events

But when I asked him directly, Blossom surprised me by concluding that it wasn’t the consumer side of search Microsoft was going after, but the enterprise. He sees Powerset as a compliment to Microsoft’s purchase of Fast earlier this year. “Powerset offers Microsoft a new leg up in value-add search applications using semantic analysis to extract content related to a topic. It's most useful application is likely to be in enterprise search, where there are going to be many documents with a structure that would feed well into semantic analysis tools.”

Blossom thinks the open web would be a greater challenge for a semantic search tool because it involves interpreting all of the nuances of the different types of online content through a common filtering system, but he also sees potential for this technology in mobile applications using voice-activated response to natural language queries. “Whichever the application,” Blossom says, “being able to answer questions triggered by natural language queries is becoming increasingly important in content services."

But who is director market intelligence at AIIM, and recently finished a study on the effectiveness of enterprise search (described here in my EContent article AIIM Study Finds Enterprise Search Still Lacking) isn’t so sure that natural language query is really all that. “From a “pure” search experience, people can barely be bothered to enter more than 1-3 search terms – what would make us think that users are going to type in fully formed questions as a query?” He points that in fact, most search engines have trained us *not* to enter fully formed questions.

In any event, Keldsen is simply not impressed with this move. “All the acquisitions or investments (such as into Facebook) that Microsoft has made in the consumer-facing, public web search market - as interesting as the techniques that Powerset uses are (Semantic Web, where art thou?) - this is much ado about nothing. It’s one small, subtle capability that is going to take quite some time (if ever) to make a significant impact on this aspect of the MS search business.”

I’m not so sure I agree completely with Keldsen here. I think the semantic web is the next frontier. People didn’t take Web 2.0 very seriously for a long time. Social networking was for teens, but today it’s on everyone lips. I have the feeling the semantic web or Web 3.0 as it’s been called could change the way we interact with web sites, but I do agree that it’s true potential is likely well into the future.

For now, I think Microsoft was wise to be forward-thinking. I’ve written before that Microsoft has always been a company to stand back and watch, then react to trends. In this case, they are getting ahead of the curve, and even if Keldsen is right and it’s well off into the future, I think Microsoft should be applauded for taking an educated risk. After all, what have they got to lose?