While in London recently, I began reading some essays by Sir Francis Bacon. An English philosopher, Bacon wrote an essay in 1625 about expenses. A seemingly mundane topic, it reminded me that smart owners have choices to make in managing their businesses. Bacon said, “A man had need, if he be plentiful in some kind of expense, to be as saving again in some other... for he that is plentiful in expenses of all kinds will hardly be preserved from decay.” Long story short... making tough decisions about what you can and can’t afford was obviously on the minds of philosophers in the 17th century as it is on the minds of business people in the 21st.
The top three technology trends for U.S. small and medium businesses are safety, cost reduction and communications competition. These trends recognize businesses are making tough business decisions in 2010. Matching costs to benefits is critical and only doing projects that are critical is a mantra for this first year of a new decade.
Trend 1: Safety. Businesses have spent 18 months retrenching in response to a global economic meltdown. There’s a lot of introspection still going on. With limited growth opportunities, owners are doing things to protect existing revenue streams. Safety, security, risk reduction — these are words which typify decision making at enterprises today. As a high school physics teacher once told me, “I don’t like taking risks. I’m wearing a belt and suspenders.”
We’re going to see the birth of business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) for smaller-sized businesses. Don’t expect to see BC/DR RFPs solicited by SMBs. Expect to find SMB owners asking their channel partners for ways to make their businesses less risky with things like physical surveillance, data storage, UTM, VPN connectivity and early-stage mobile data security.
Safety and security-related technology is like an insurance policy. It protects SMBs from disasters in the worst of times and is completely transparent when not needed.
Trend 2: Cost reduction. I’ve written numerous times over the past 18 months about technology solutions to reduce overall costs. SMBs must pick new technology solutions to replace older technology solutions, but only if those newer solutions lower overall SMB costs and provide at least as much functionality as the older solutions. Switching solutions can be scary for SMBs so the payback period needs to be less than six months, the upfront implementation expense relatively negligible and the learning curve quite shallow.
