Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
Johnny Hatch,
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612.395.9000
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“DOING MORE with less” is the refrain we hear across the Twin Cities. Budgets are getting tighter, but 2009 business goals remain unchanged.
Regardless of the state of the economy, management is tasked with growing a business and I.T. is playing an ever-increasing role in achieving that objective. How do you effectively balance investment in information technology with cost-cutting initiatives?
1. Software-as-a-service. SalesForce.com, Microsoft Exchange, WebEx: what do these products have in common? They can all be consumed in a hosted/software-as-a-service model.
In a traditional model, your company purchases a server and software licenses and then builds, configures and maintains an application or I.T. system in-house. That requires spending money up front and investing time and resources in managing and maintaining your purchased system.
By migrating to a hosted application such as SalesForce.com for customer relationship management, hosted Microsoft Exchange for e-mail or WebEx for online presentations, your company pays for these services as you consume them. In addition, you push the burden of managing and maintaining these systems onto the service provider rather than your staff. (Anyone who has patched, updated and managed Exchange 2003 themselves has probably felt this burden.)
Further cost savings can be had in the upgrade process. Rather than shelling out for a license of the latest software version as it’s released, many service providers include incremental upgrades of applications or will upgrade you to the latest version of an application as part of your monthlycost.
2. Virtual office/telecommute: In his book “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman gives an example of how Jet Blue airline saves money by hiring reservation agents who work from their homes. There are an abundance of tech tools that allow for online voice and video conferencing that can save companies money by reducing the footprint of their office.
Some small businesses may forego office space altogether and operate virtually, by utilizing software such as Skype and GoToMeeting.com.
3. Open source: Depending on your level of comfort using applications with little support (which means you’ll have to read through the forums on the Internet, for example), there are many free and open source ality of Microsoft Office and is also compatible with Microsoft Office files.
4. Colocation: Servers and other networking gear require a special environment to run efficiently. For starters, you need a climate-controlled room that regulates temperature and humidity, uninterruptable power supplies and generators to regulate spikes in voltage and keep things running if the power goes out, and multiple paths to the Internet for redundancy.
Unfortunately, building out your own data center can be capital-intensive and benefits greatly from economies of scale, something small businesses can’t achieve. Even larger businesses may not be able to justify their own data center. Instead, you can leverage the infrastructure of a colocation provider. Colocation provides a way for all businesses to have access to infrastructure at a fraction of the price of building it themselves.
5. Virtualize: Virtualization technologies like VMware, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and Citrix XenServer are hot right now. Running in a virtual environment can cut down the number of servers your business must run, reduce the time it takes to provision a new system and centralize management of all your systems so as to save time and money.
6. Smart phones: Get a Palm Treo, a Blackberry Storm or an iPhone. While some business people do get addicted to their “crackberries,” smart phones can save time and increase your access to information anywhere without lugging around a laptop.
7. Managed services: What does the cost of down time mean for you and your business? With a good monitoring package or service, many I.T. issues can be identified before viruses, malware, spam and hack attacks and other misfortunes occur.
Check out applications and services from N-Able, for example. For great free alternatives try Nagios and http://mon.itor.us.
The cost for managed services is both predictable (the accounting folks like this) and will often outweigh the hard and soft costs of reacting and recovering from a disaster.
8. Repurpose old desktops: Instead of getting rid of old desktop computers, consider these s.
9. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP): You now have a number of options for making calls via VoIP, ranging from desktop applications like Skype, open source PBX systems like Asterisk (load it on a repurposed desktop to test it), to commercial options from your local telephone or cable company. Using VoIP can be a great strategy to gain more features/functionality for less money and save on long distance costs.
10. Storage Area Network/Network Attached Storage: We’re told that we live in the information age and a growing percentage of that information is digital. Do you have a plan to effectively store, back up, and manage all your information? Investing in a Storage Area Network (SAN) or a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device can help with information sprawl.
Having a centralized location where all of your data is kept will lower the cost to manage and back up data.
Just because financial times are tough and the global economy is soft doesn’t mean that Minnesota businesses can’t thrive and accomplish their objectives. With savvy use of new technology, you can do more with less.
