Tips & Tricks: Opinions

Virtually every IT organisation is feeling the impact of the global downturn. But there is a silver lining. It provides an opportunity to challenge the status quo, eliminate ineffective systems and services, and make changes that management has previously refused to consider.

I hear people talking about selling solutions all the time. What they normally mean is that they want to bundle together as many products as possible to increase the sale to the customer. That to me is NOT a solution sale. It’s a drive for revenue and ultimately not something that is good business.

At just about every meeting, client catch up or industry event I attend these days, people ask me the same basic questions: “How’s business, what’s going to happen next and when/where is it all going to end?”

Small businesses converging voice, video and data traffic sometimes end up with haunted networks, but you can exorcise the demons. Affordable QoS mechanisms are available to oust the goblins that cause delay, jitter, bit-rate errors and dropped packets.

Here's a statistical downer: there will be around 40 trillion inbox-clogging spam e-mail messages delivered this year. Experts know this because there were 30 trillion spam messages last year. With this much hay in the stack, it's hard to find those message needles, and that's why some smart companies are looking beyond public e-mail.

Previous marketing-focused pieces we’ve contributed to ARN have covered managing your marketing on a limited budget and developing your brand strategy. Now it’s time to examine how to take your brand online – an often highly impactful and cost effective, but sometimes misunderstood, discipline.

The term "Project Management" usually brings pained looks to business people because they associate it with Microsoft Project. The tool may make their lives easier, but the software costs hundreds of dollars per user, and worse, the desktop-centric management application of yesterday doesn't fit well with the distributed workforce reality of today. What's more, when you take the plunge, getting up to speed on the methodology takes time before you see results.

Most server customers are more concerned about reliability and uptime than performance. Focus on reliability and proven compatibility of hardware/software components.

There are lots of pitfalls to avoid when making a server play in the SMB space, not least of which involves burdening clients with complexity and gratuitous boxes.