There’s a conundrum for small business; looking to the bigger enterprises can be both inspirational and aspirational, but also dispiriting in terms of the resources divide.
With the Dell Enterprise Forum rolling into Melbourne this week – an annual meet and greet event for enterprise to learn about what’s new in technology – innovation, efficiency and productivity were key themes.
For small business, the central element of these themes essentially boils down to the spend.
Ian Hodge, Managing Director, Dell Software – ANZ, said technology wise, doing more with less, reducing utility costs, and generally optimising efficiency comes back to a single solution: the cloud.
“If you want entrepreneurs to be able to grow their business, they need the right information technology to support them. If they can’t get access to the same technology that’s available to larger organisations – they won’t be able to grow to that position,” Hodge told Dynamic Business.
The question then, is one of how to make the technology that’s available to the larger organisations, available to small business. And it comes down to cloud computing.
“You don’t want to be good in information technology, you want to be good in what your small business does. You want to be able to just press a switch which deploys access to specific systems. And that’s what cloud computing does really well,” Hodge said.
There’s been a great deal of industry chatter and interest around cloud, and this is something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by Dell. In recent years the company has expanded beyond its traditional domains of hardware and storage, to make a foray into cloud services in a range of areas.
Hodge believes the key selling point lies within communicating the sheer return on the investment to the business owner.
“If I’m a small business, I’ll recognise that well delivered and well used IT can help me differentiate. But for example, if I’m trying to put my own billing system in place, i have to get my own servers, find some software that’s cheap enough, and find some people to help me do it, and it’s going to cost a fortune relative to the size of my business. And the results are a little uncertain.”
“But if I can just go ‘switch’ – turn it on, and get a world-class application available to me through the cloud, then I’ve got as good a software as the large organisations, on a dime, and I can turn it off if I don’t like it. It’s not a capital commitment, it’s an operating commitment and very simple to turn on and off,” Hodge said.
