Small Business Tech Tips

The economy is tough right now, and everyone is looking for ways to save money – including us. As you can imagine, we’re very comfortable as a company with testing the latest technology offerings, and we’re particularly open right now to small business IT services that reduce expenses, investments, and travel time.

We’ve found four that have been particularly helpful. All are inexpensive and easy to start using.

1. Use Google Docs and Sites for collaboration

We’ve written about Google Docs and Sites in previous posts, but they’re worth mentioning again. Since Everon starting using these tools in the last several months, I would estimate that we now do about 85% of our document and spreadsheet collaboration online.

This has been a tremendous time saver for us, not to mention a significant productivity booster. I believe that if we had wanted these same collaboration capabilities one year ago, we would have had to invest in a Microsoft Sharepoint Server – which would have cost us a pretty penny.

2. Use VoIP services for long distance calls

More and more people I know are using Skype or similar services to do a bypass of the old telecom companies – and who can blame them? For free or close to it, you can make fairly high quality calls to anywhere around the world.

Now, the argument can definitely be made that there are still quality of service issues with these services, but they are definitely becoming less of a concern. And even if you don’t use them for all of your calls, you can usually bear to use them for internal calls and calls to vendors.

3. Use virtual meeting services and videoconferencing to cut down on travel for meetings

If you have multiple offices in multiple states, travel can quickly become a big line item. When Everon opened its second office in Colorado, we knew we would have to get creative in terms of how we had our meetings how and when we justified travel between the offices, so we’ve been working ever since to get a model that works.

For smaller group calls, we’ve found that GoToMeeting works really well, and allows you to do sharing of your screens, which definitely increases collaboration and group understanding.

For larger calls – we get our whole company on a call every Wednesday – we’ve found that using a conference service from our friends at DSCI, combined with a video chat service from Oovoo is working well. We project the videos from the chat sessions up onto the wall, giving us some sense of being in one office for the meeting.

These services are far from perfect, but they are far less expensive than hopping on a plane every week.

4. Lower capital expenses by purchasing technology as a service (TaaS)

This will be a big opportunity for all of our clients in the coming six months, and is our most exciting development in company history. Imagine no longer having to buy computers, servers or software anymore – instead just getting them on a subscription basis from Everon. This was the original vision for our company, and recent developments in our marketplace now allow us to make it a reality.

An example of this in action today is our Total Data Protection service, which eliminates the need for our clients to buy backup hardware, software, tapes, and services – and delivers a much more reliable service at the same time.

Everon will soon be able to extend this type of offering to your entire network. This will accomplish several things:

1. Our clients will dramatically reduce their upfront investments associated with technology, instead getting access to what they need for a monthly fee
2. Our clients will also see a dramatic reduction in their overall technology spend, as the cost of maintenance will be reduced (our Total Data Protection is much easier to maintain than your three-year-old tape drive!)
3. Our clients will now be able to invest their money in more strategic technology investments as they will have more capital freed up for things like custom application development.

All of these suggestions can lead to more effective management of your expenses – some can generate pretty dramatic savings. Accept the fact that these tools have their limitations, and then give them a shot!

Mike Cooch

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Tags: decreasing expences, economy, saving money

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under Small Business Management Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.