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Refining your approach to IT? Looking for an IT strategy whitepaper or eBook to guide you? Corporate Technologies can help. We’ve recently released two new resources that can deliver the advice you’re looking for.

Our eBook, “Getting More from IT: How Small and Midsized Companies Can Meet Today’s Leading Challenges,” describes the vicious circle in which many small and midsized businesses find themselves.

Working on a limited budget, smaller companies often hesitate to implement IT innovations. But if they’re trying to grow quickly, these companies also don’t want to stagnate on their current IT configurations. With their hands tied, smaller companies often use up the IT budget by simply adding new servers and storage to their network. This further limits their ability to innovate.

The eBook goes on to describe how you can:

• Overcome six leading IT challenges for small and midsized businesses.
• Assess the impact of IT challenges on your bottom line.
• Use three proven strategies (including virtualization) to get more from your IT investment.

Register to download the eBook now.

Our whitepaper, “Implementing Your IT Strategy: Four Guidelines for SMBs,” takes these concepts one step further. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with the concept of transforming IT to yield a greater return on your investment, you’ll need a blueprint for developing your new approach.

This whitepaper delivers. Read it to find out how you can:

• Make sure your data storage capacity grows along with your company’s needs.
• Find exactly the right time to outsource technical support.
• Identify the IT solutions that are most likely to meet your needs without breaking your budget.
• Get more from your relationship with an IT consulting partner.

Register to download the whitepaper now.

Again, these two resources are designed to help you navigate your IT options, which continue to increase with each year that goes by. We invite you to download them both. Or, if you’d prefer to discuss your next IT project with one of our consultants, just give us a call at 1-888-543-5728.

Nowadays, everyone in IT seems to be talking about the benefits of virtualization. But is anyone talking about the benefits of virtualization for SMB?

Actually, you might be surprised at how many small and midsized businesses have harnessed virtualization technology to save time and money for their companies.

When you stop and think about it, though, it makes sense. In its simplest form, virtualization simply consists of a physical server with a virtual machine monitor installed on it to act as a layer between the hardware and operating system. Even a very small company could probably benefit from running multiple operating systems concurrently on this layer, and running various business applications in each operating system.

It sure beats powering up a whole rack of physical servers.

Is Virtualization for Everyone?

So, can just any company virtualize? Does it make sense to look into virtualization if you haven’t even filled up your one tiny server room? 

That depends. A very small company probably won’t achieve an impressive payback – at least not right away – with virtualization. But don’t let that discourage you. Instead, focus on the incremental improvements your company may be able to make.

For example, could you consolidate three physical servers into one? If so, wouldn’t you reduce your power consumption, cooling costs, maintenance costs, and overall IT workload? Of course you would.

The question then becomes, how much of an initial investment are you comfortable making to achieve these ongoing benefits? And that’s a question only you can answer, based on your company’s unique financial situation.

What’s the Payback?

If you’re leaning towards virtualizing at least parts of your IT infrastructure, know that you’re not alone. According to a 2010 Aberdeen Group report, 76% of mid-market CIOs were either currently implementing or planning virtualization projects at their companies.

What kind of payback are these early and mainstream adopters achieving?

•  A 2008 IDC survey found that virtualization allows companies to reduce hardware costs by 20% and realize average annual cost savings of 23%.
• IDC also found that virtualization can have a profound effect on annual costs per user. Companies that haven’t virtualized spend an average of $18 per user on hardware, compared to $6 for companies that have implemented advanced virtualization.
• According to IBM’s David Vaughn, storage virtualization can help increase disk utilization by up to 30%.

Virtualization for SMB: Finding a Partner

Eager to tap into the benefits of virtualization, many small and midsized businesses are reaching out to IT consulting firms for help in getting started.

This is a smart move – but you have to know what you’re looking for. Rather than give you a laundry list of requirements, we’ll give you a single rule of thumb: look for an IT provider that has a designated virtualization team. By doing so, you’ll be able to tap into the expertise of virtualization specialists – rather than getting “one size fits all” service from IT generalists.

Ready to get your virtualization project started? Give Corporate Technologies a call at 1-888-543-5728.