Business Technology Roundtable

When you're a start-up company or a small business, you enjoy a key freedom: You don't have any legacy equipment and you can make sure your IT dollars drive innovation. But over time -- as your staff, network and application infrastructure grows -- you'll wind up spending more and more IT budget on maintenance rather than innovation. According to various estimates, mature businesses spend anywhere from 80 percent to 90 percent of their IT dollars maintaining systems they already have in place. That's pathetic. And it's also impractical. Small businesses must either innovate or die. So, how can a small business remain focused on innovative IT solutions ? I've found the answer in my own company. Generally speaking, we outsource just about every piece of IT possible. Here's how we do it: 1. Get Predictable: We seek managed service providers, web hosting companies, developers and other partners who can handle day-to-day maintenance issues at a reasonable, predi...

I was interviewed today by a journalist from one of the CIO-oriented pubs who surprised me by asking a series of questions which came back to many of the same fundamental misconceptions about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) which I thought I had dispelled in a BusinessWeek commentary I published in 2006. The first misconception the journalist had was that SaaS solutions are not robust enough to satisfy large-scale enterprises, as well as small- and mid-size businesses (SMBs). I pointed out to him that large-scale enterprises have been leveraging SaaS solutions for a long time, but have only recently begun to talk about their successful experiences. One of the most recent announcements of a major deployment of SaaS by a large-scale enterprises was by Flextronics who is adopting Workday's on-demand human resource management (HRM) solution to support its 200,000 employees. Real Total Cost of Ownership The second misconception the journalist revealed was the old "buy vs. lease...