In the final part of our series, Microsoft's Brett Roberts looks at how to set an IT strategy for difficult economic times.
KEY POINTS:
You don't have to know much about technology to understand that it moves at a rapid pace. As soon as you've got your head around the latest revolution in business technology there tends to be a replacement ready and waiting. The pace of innovation can be be wildering. It can also complicate your technology decision-making processes.
This speed of change is well intentioned. It's driven by a desire to improve business value - to make business technology work better for business. Technology must make sense on the balance sheet.
There's been a seismic shift in the direction of business technology over the past few years; responding to the rise of the internet and web-based commerce, improvements in server and storage technology and better, faster broadband to connect everything together. At the same time, businesses' desire for reduced overheads, more efficient use of resources and smarter, more flexible pricing models has increased.
As IT becomes more important to the resilience of your business in a tougher economic climate, it's worth being aware of some of the more significant developments. Here are four trends to keep in mind:
* Virtualisation, mentioned in a previous article, is a way to optimise your back room IT set up and generate cost savings and efficiency.
*The concept is simple enough: many businesses run a server to support each discrete software application (for example, an email server, payroll system, customer database or a file server). Trouble is, few servers run at anywhere near their available capacity, creating a good deal of redundancy, all the while incurring real estate, support and services costs.
Virtualisation software makes it possible to run more than one software application on a single server in order to optimise usage of expensive hardware resources, trimming your IT budget and reducing your carbon footprint at the same time.
* Cloud computing is the name put to a fast emerging trend, whereby your business software is hosted in massive data centres away from your premises and accessed via the internet.
This recalls the early days of IT and big box mainframes and terminals, except the mainframe is now a data centre containing perhaps thousands of servers and the terminal is a PC or server located within your company.
This model will eventually adapt to your computing, storage and data traffic requirements on the fly promising a "pay-as-you-go" future.
These same data centres will also allow web-based businesses to grow rapidly without investing in expensive hardware and physical infrastructure.
* Software as a service is a sibling of cloud computing and is software that you can purchase as a utility-type service; as opposed to buying a licence and loading on your own PC or server. Xero is a successful local example, where you can subscribe to its online accounting system that integrates with the banks and other institutions, taking care of all the security and technical maintenance for you for a monthly fee.
Software as a service, also referred to as SaaS, forms part of a future vision for IT that Microsoft calls Software + Services. In the future, you're likely to want a mix of web-based software (services) and on-premises applications (software). The mix will depend on your business and how you can best stretch your IT dollar.
The great thing about the Software + Services model is that it can handle changes to legislation, company policy and technology requirements.
* Unified Communications and collaboration software are the future stars of business IT. Unified Communications is software that brings together all your business communications platforms, including email, messaging and calling. The technology then adds presence information so you know where people are, what they are doing and how best to reach them. It means no more date mix-ups, unanswered voice messages or emails into the void.
Collaboration software is the same - where documents can be worked by one or more people at once without creating version control issues and making it possible for people to work together more easily across locations.
* Brett Roberts is Microsoft New Zealand's national technology officer.
