Small Business Computer Consulting

On Monday, computer business Lenovo Group, Ltd. decided to accept a multi-year deal to become the National Basketball Association’s personal computer partner.  Lenovo was chosen after other computer business Dell Inc. decided to terminate its partnership with the NBA.

Lenovo purchased IBM Corp.’s personal computer business last year and intends to offer technology at all 30 NBA arenas in the U.S. to allow referees enhanced abilities to review calls and give statisticians the ability to record game data and put it online.

The computer business also plans to increase fan involvement by providing a statistics tool that coaches can also use to figure out which players perform best during specific games and seasons.

The NBA has long been looking for a globally-known technology partner to help increase NBA’s brand recognition throughout the world, according to NBA Commissioner David Stern.  Computer business Lenovo, having had control over personal computer sales in Asia though not quite there in the U.S. yet has faced challenges when trying to increase brand recognition.  This relationship with the NBA presents the computer business with an excellent opportunity to improve awareness of its products and services.

Because Lenovo has been unable to afford national ad campaigns, it has turned to sponsorship of sports events.  The NBA relationship will present the first opportunity to get exposure regularly, every season.

The partnership will allow computer business Lenovo to work with NBA coaches to improve work with players and help them use technology to enhance their competitive edge.  

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

IT marketing takes perseverance to work effectively.  Chances are you will see results from IT marketing efforts about three to six months into the life of your business.  But when will you really see some good profits?

IT Marketing Involves a System

You’ve joined the chamber, are ready to attend an event this week and have been involved with venture capital groups related to the IT industry.  You have been handing out business cards at regional trade shows and throughout the community, but nothing is happening.  You may wonder if there is a problem.

There is not necessarily a problem; you just need to give your work time.  You can’t get instant results from doing your IT marketing activities.  Don’t start to worry until you have been working steadily and actively participating in groups for six months.  At this point, you should try another organization.

IT Marketing:  Personal Relationships are Necessities

You can’t just go to a few meetings and get yourself a $25,000 account.  Maybe sometimes you’ll get lucky, but most of the time you need trust from people in order to really make progress.

In order to succeed, you have to be likeable and enjoy working with people, because the IT industry is people-centric.  You can’t be reclusive!

First impressions are very important.  You have to dress well and create a good feeling with people you meet.  Chemistry is critical to long-term relationships.  Send business to you contacts if you meet someone else that needs what they offer, and don’t hide out!  Circulate in the community, and you will find that your IT marketing pays off faster.

Blogged By:  Computer Consulting Kit

On Friday, software company Xythos Software announced a new product for IT consultants, licensed by SAP.  The Xythos Drive will be renamed the Portal Drive in order to market integration between the Windows desktop and NetWeaver Portal from SAP.  The Portal Drive offers simplified access to the NetWeaver Portal from all types of Windows applications, helping IT consultants and users better manage content publishing.  The product will also improve collaboration between workers.  Content through SAP Netweaver Portal using the new Portal Drive can be seen as standard Windows files and folders.  The new item offers secure Web access.  Users can manage the NetWeaver Portal content when not online as well using advanced synchronization features.

IT consultants and regular SAP customers that have already used the new portal say that it allows for easy and direct opening, editing and saving of files, treating them like they are already living on local computers.  This new union of Xythos and SAP products lets users work in their preferred applications while also using new ones.

IT consultants say this product will help users and enterprises with which they work make systems easier by allowing for a platform and set of software services that can allow for integration and support specific workplace environments.

Xythos is one of the foremost developers of basic content services software for enterprise companies and has been enjoying a greater presence in the software developer community as the result of increased demand for integrated content management services.  SAP, based in Germany, has been a leading resource for IT consultants for years.  

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101

Part of IT sales is clear expression of benefits to prospects, along with persistently building a relationship with your clients.

There are no such things as instant IT sales; you need to put in significant time and effort.  Showing your clients how beneficial your services can be to them will help develop relationships and help IT sales efforts.

What Benefits Can You Deliver?

If you encounter a problem you can’t solve during an IT sales call, focus on the problems you can solve and the things you can do for a client to help his/her business.  The client should be able to see real benefits and agree they sound really good.

IT Sales:  What is Your Pitch?

You should talk about work you have done with other past clients and the benefits they saw as a result of what you recommended, designed, set up, supported and otherwise.  Your pitch as part of IT sales will better sit with clients if you bring up benefits.

IT Sales:  Relationship Evolution

You may have to wait a couple weeks or months for your prospect to sign.  Be patient, yet persistent with e-mails, faxes, postcards and phone calls.  

That being said, avoid obnoxiousness.  Don’t get to the point that you are calling every day.  Still, if prospects seem to really want to do it in the next few months, you can call once or twice a month to gauge their progress.

Extra Questions

If prospects have questions or issues that come up, you need to know about them.  You should also ask them if they need anything revised from the initial quote or bid.  Even if they say they will get back to you, but are saying that they are really interested, don’t let the discussion be over.  They don’t need to agree to IT sales right away.  The following basic questions can help you understand their interest:

How important is this?

When do you want to get started?

Is this urgent?

Where are you in the process of deciding about this project?

Where are you in the research process?

Is this a good time of year for the project?

Have you budgeted for this project?

Ask these questions in many ways, and don’t let “later” become “no” when you’re pushing IT sales.  

Blogged By:  Joshua Feinberg

Top solution provider CDW Corporation stated on Friday that it had acquired private company Berbee Information Networks Corporation (“Berbee”).  Berbee is one of the nation’s largest independent IT solution providers.  CDW offers tech products and services to businesses with a particular focus on educational institutions and the government.  The original announcement by solution provider CDW to acquire the company came on September 18 of this year.

The total acquisition was made for $184 million, including a working capital adjustment.  This recent merging of two solution providers will increase CDW’s offerings to include more advanced tech products and services for very complex business structures.  This acquisition will also help CDW enhance its clientele and strengthen its work with customers’ IT spending.       

Berbee was founded in 1993 and has headquarters in Madison, WI.  The solution provider has partnered with companies in corporate, healthcare, education and state and local government fields.  The company providers solutions and engineering capabilities in advanced technologies such as Cisco, IBM and Microsoft.  Berbee is a national gold certified partner with Cisco and a premier business partner with IBM, along with having six Microsoft gold certifications.

Added By:  Computer Consulting Kit

Narrowing down leads to uncover prospects can be a difficult task in the computer consulting industry.  Finding your industry focus is an important first step that can help you identify the right market.  In order to target clients you have to stand out from the rest of the computer consulting professionals trying to use the exact advertising to sell the same services.

You can also narrow down your leads and turn more into prospects by focusing on size.  

Computer Consulting:  Three Different Sizes

Micro small businesses with just a handful of PCs are a good place to start in computer consulting.  The mindset of the business owner is more important than the number of PCs he has, but micro-small businesses are not typically looking for very high-level, expensive IT computer consulting services.

The sweet spot small businesses are the next step up, and where most computer consulting professionals do very well. Small business computer consulting involves ten to fifty PC’s.  Many studies have proven that the two-to-one ratio works across industries, so if you are maxing out at a 50-seat LAN, this often means a 90-100-employee company.  Downtime for the sweet spot is very expensive.  To determine downtime expenses, divide by 250 business days a year and eight hours a day and give them the example of how a company doing $4 million a year in annual revenue with 2,000 business hours a year loses about $2,000 per hour when there is downtime.  As a computer consulting professional, you can save them money and time over the long-term.

More than 50 PCs gives you the top of the small business world and the bottom of the medium-sized business world.  At this size, the IT services bills from your company would be similar to a full-time salary for an in-house real IT manager.  This type of business will probably not outsource generalist roles and will most likely hire an on-site person and therefore is not as strong a lead as some of the smaller businesses.  

Added By:   Joshua Feinberg

Major company AT&T, Inc. announced on Wednesday it would be releasing a new IT consulting package to add to its company professional services portfolio.  The new IT consulting offering will help SMBs and other similar organizations enhance their network, communications, security and planning techniques.   

The new IT consulting branch of AT&T will offer a suite of services that are usually enjoyed by global enterprise and federal government clients along with educational institutions.  This IT consulting package will be called AT&T Consulting Essentials and will help all SMBs plan, install and release new communications and IT networks and upgrade their current systems.  Besides the aforementioned services, the IT consulting package will emphasize assessment, gap analysis and practical solutions to enable SMBs to follow the best practices of their specific industry for information security.  As part of the consulting services, AT&T will recommend solutions to help customers comply with all necessary regulations.  

This extension of AT&T’s services to small and mid-size organizations will include the following categories of enhanced features:

Network and Information Security

Business Continuity

Network Optimization

Telecommunications Strategy

IPT Readiness

Client Tutorials

For more details about this new offering from AT&T, please visit this IT consulting article.

Added By:  Computer Consulting 101 Professional Kit

Because technology is so advanced, a computer network can actually become too bogged down by useful features without expert help.  The following tips can help make a network more efficient:

New Equipment

A lot of small companies have not updated switches, routers and hubs since before Y2K.  New equipment available is eons beyond that you could buy prior to Y2K and prices have fallen as well.  Investing new equipment can vastly improve network performance, even if you just buy a few key components to work alongside older equipment.

What is the Available Bandwidth and Pricing?

Bandwidth providers might not have increased bandwidth or cut prices, even when it’s available.  T-1 and T-3 lines were expensive a few years ago, but now are completely affordable for many medium-sized and small businesses.

Don’t Skimp on Storage!

Storage area networks and network-attached storage components can be purchased very inexpensively now and are easy to manage.  Many companies haven’t increased storage since Y2K even though costs have fallen dramatically.  Adding a small storage device can improve the speed and performance of a network immensely and are better than storing items on hard drives.   Companies can actually get five to ten times the storage today for the same exact price as a few years ago.  

Don’t Forget to Protect Your Network

Spyware, Trojans and worms are being developed constantly by hackers through new programs and can help them steal data and do plenty of damage to a network and its performance.  If you don’t update your protection regularly, it is useless and will not be able to protect your network from the latest problems.  Don’t expect a human to handle this task, as it will be prone to errors; set up automatic updates and scans.

Automated Resource Monitoring

This network enhancement can help display network bottlenecks.  Once you identify what is slowing down your network, you can help speed things up.

Follow Users and Managers

You need to be sure your user and manager systems are set up to automatically update important features, but also talk to them about what they deal with regularly when working on the network.  They might have specific issues that automatic monitoring can miss.

What Can You Do to Reduce Data Entry?

You might notice that some information on the network has been entered many times.  Simple software or middleware can make single-time data entry possible.

Using E-Mail Consolidation and Acceleration Tools

E-mail is one of the most responsible parties for slowing down network performance, mostly because so many (70 percent or more) has attachments that take up more than 5MB apiece.  These attachments take up time and space when sent the first time, but take up even more space when they are forwarded multiple times throughout a company.  Because attachments are often not even downloaded, they end up being wasted space on a network.  E-mail consolidation and acceleration tools can allow users to download e-mails but not attachments, unless the user specifically clicks on the attachment.

Wide Area File Services

Wide area file services give better WAN communication because they allow for better compression and communications between senders and users.  This is an up-and-coming technology and is important for the future of network speed.

Data Reduction and Pattern Matching

This feature allows appliances at various points of a WAN to only exchange file changes instead of the entire file.  Unchanged information is stored on the appliance and not the network.  The less data sent over the network, the faster it will run.

Created By:  Computer Consulting 101