The New Computer Age
and the Enterprise
So, here’s the
critical question – ‘Can I really save large amounts of cash swapping PCs
and local networking for budget tablet computers and the cloud?’
Let’s face it reliable tablet devices can cost as little as £70
and printer/scanners can be had for as little as £40. That’s a low overhead and
if you can get away with minimising expenditure to that level why doesn’t
everyone jump on the bandwagon?
In fact that does appear to be the trend, -
‘Windows-based PCs have fallen from a 95% market share a decade ago to 90%
today, according to Morningstar. That's thanks to the rise of mobile devices
and software from competitors like Apple (AAPL, Tech30) and Google (GOOGL, Tech30).’ - http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/21/technology/microsoft-earnings/index.html
Computer experts and advisors will caution that any start-up
business should factor in capacity for expansion, redundancy to cover equipment
failure and a whole host of additional features, all of which add costs. And
cost, as we know, have a habit of mounting up.
It’s that well intentioned cautionary advice that holds many
back from taking full advantage of the latest in computerisation and making
huge savings into the bargain.
What we can do here is examine a number of scenarios,
comparing the latest innovations in business computing to the older more
expensive options.
Enterprise Scenario.
The enterprise approach.
Many large corporate entities have made successful
enterprise wide migrations from internal LAN and WAN architecture to cloud or
hybrid (part cloud, part LAN) architecture. However, such projects require
massive effort in user training and data transfer. This often results in a good
degree of business disruption. For this reason, I would recommend a ‘small
steps’ approach, taking one function, or one department, at a time.
In this case we will take a sales back-office function
employing 15 users whose job it is to manage the workflow of a large sales team
in the field. This team all have desktop PCs and all are equipped with Office
2016.
The decisions on change of hardware and software will depend
here on the corporate IT hardware purchasing and enterprise licencing that is
in place.
There are many options to choose from regarding swapping out
the hard ware for lower priced alternatives. Many PCs are supplied with huge
amounts of local storage as standard and this resource is not used as files are
stored on a network resource, Such PCs can be replaced by low cost tablets with
solid state disk drive, connected to full sized monitor, keyboard and mouse.
This lowers cost, desktop footprint and power consumption and also delivers
improved reliability.
If the company enterprise licencing agreement delivers low
cost Office 2016, it may be worthwhile purchasing a lower level of Office365
licence, moving down from E3 (£176.40 per user per annum) to E1 (£60 per user
per annum). In addition, in many cases there will be workers who do not require
the full functionality of Office 2016. In such instances Office 365 licencing
can also be reduced from E3 to E1, or even Kiosk licence (£30 per user per
annum).
E3 licencing delivers the full Office 2016 suite for up to
five devices per user, where E1 licence and Kiosk licence deliver the
functionality of Office on-line. This is a browser based version of Word,
Excel, PowerPoint and One Note for the creation and editing of Office files.
Other constraints, such as access to and use of corporate
business systems will influence the directions of hardware and software
decisions for any team similar to this one.
Let us suppose then that the workflow for this team is to
take sales leads, validate the leads with a telephone call, annotate the leads
according to the result and forwards likely positives to the appropriate
salesperson in the field.
Feedback from the field team to the back-office is added to
the lead detail and processed into lead follow-up and, or sales order.
Using SharePoint on-line list in O365 really starts to come
into its own in this scenario. The validated leads are imported into SharePoint
lists which are owned by particular field sales staff. This means that
immediately the data is validated it becomes a live lead and has an ‘action by’
date. Tasks, visible in SharePoint and in Outlook can also be automatically
generated for the sales team and sales managers to ensure that individual leads
are not lost or go beyond the ‘action by’ date. This type of work flow can be
setup simply and easily in-house without the need for the purchase of further
business systems.
The great thing about O365 cloud storage is that the data
becomes available on all registered devices immediately it is saved on any one
device.
The result is a net cash saving, increased working day productivity
and, as a bonus, more free time
Security is also enhanced as data can be stored both on the
device(s)and in the cloud. Nothing is
lost in the event of loss or damage to any local device. Mobile Device
Management can be used to ensure that data on lost or stolen devices cannot be
accessed by anyone unauthorized
The Office 365 trend -
‘Office 365
First-quarter 2016: Sales of consumer products and cloud services climbed
6% and subscriber base grew to 22.2 million.
Office continues to be a steady driver of sales for Microsoft. In the past
three months, Microsoft has benefited from growth in subscribers and higher
sales for each Office 365 license.’ - http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/21/technology/microsoft-earnings/index.html
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