• Why would you increase the overheads in your business?
• Why would you invest your heard earned cash in capital equipment that depreciates instantly?
• Why make things more difficult?

Silly right? Because answering “yes” to any them doesn’t really make sense when related to computers and IT infrastructure. But perhaps the last question is the one that actually costs more than the other two. That is, increasing the hassle factor in your business, adding more complexity not reducing it. And by adopting Cloud based solutions you don’t need to have the costs of any of these.

Our new measure for what you’d save by moving to Cloud Computing is Reduction in Hassle (RIH). It’s like measuring Return on Investment but without having any capital investment. It means getting more from your business applications whilst simultaneously reducing the amount of time and money you spend. So the Reduction in Hassle equates very quickly to a reduction in costs and over time an improvement in productivity.

Consider some of the hassles you may encounter on a daily basis:

• My employees want to connect all their smartphones and they are all different
• We need to access company data anywhere but i want this to be secure
• My IT guy says I need to upgrade my servers, and buy new software
• Last night do I really know if the servers in the office were backed up?
• How can I give my customers a better online service? juts like the one my competitors are offering them?
• I have no idea what my sales forecast is and what impact that’ll have on cash over the next 3 months

In essence, Reduction in Hassle means addressing two items:

• Reduce your IT infrastructure costs by moving it all to the cloud
• Improve your business processes by automating as much as you can using data that is easy to access and manipulate

Our job at Online One is to help you do this. We’ve done this for many businesses over the years and we can help you too. So the equation looks a bit like:

Reduction in Hassle = (Cloud Computing + Process Automation) * Online One Services.

Each of these changes has brought about a lower cost to IT customers and greater availability of computer power to end users. However I think it’s only with the advent of cloud computing that this change has really given users more of what they want. That is removing all the hassles, reducing the costs, allowing payments in a more flexible manner and most importantly having no lock in terms where they are stuck in a contract for 3-5 years. But for us this is only one part of the equation.

Via Ben Kepes twitter feed (@benkepes) and with the consequent Mark Thiel’s blogpost he recommended here it seems we are not alone in these thoughts.

Cloud gives a great cost reduction and Reduction In Hassle (RIH as a new financial metric anyone?) but that’s only one part of the equation. The other part is the ability for organisations to improve their processes. This has always been the case - throughout the past 25 years - and is not reliant on the cloud computing infrastructure to deliver the benefits of automating processes and making life easier for all your customers, employees and suppliers. Sure, cloud takes away the hassle and makes it cheaper and also allows all these processes to be available online wherever you are.

So Cloud computing is another IT industry hype, but this time the hype is delivering greater cost benefits and better services with less lock-in than the past. And less hassle.

But that’s not all you want. You also want to improve your business processes.

So do both. That’s what we believe.

EchoSign (www.echosign.com) is system that allows you to pre-sign documents electronically and then distribute them via email for esignature. Your client reviews the document and then elecronically signs it. The document is stored and archived by echoSign and given an encrypted tracking number ensuring that the document is the equivalent of a legal document. If your client prefers they can print out the doc and sign and fax it back, the fax return number will scan and store the document into echoSign’s vault. AT each stage you’re kept informed as to the progress and what documents need to be actioned. It’s really great when you’re managing multiple opportunities and associated contracts and agreements.

Our sales process involves either having clients sign our quotes, terms and conditions and/or a statement of work for our professional service engagements. Prior to using echoSign this all had to be done using faxes, scanners, printers and the delay and convenience really slowed the wholeprocess down. Now there is no printing or faxing involved and we get responses to signed documents quickly and efficiently. Plus all the documents are archived for us and we can access them really easily if required.

We also installed the Google Apps connection and can therefore use any document we create here, automatically send it to echoSign, add the “for signature box” and email it out. Easy. Fast. Time saving.

There is also an integration to NetSuite so you can process quotes orders etc very easily and seamlessly.

Have a read about it and see if it would suit your business. Feel free to ask any questions and we’ll see if we can help.

The question is… does your IT infrastructure deliver this kind of performance? Of course no one, least of all Google, is perfect and everyone is striving to get to 100%. Still, 99.99% is pretty close to this target and that’s what Google Apps for Business managed to do for the first six months of the year. I think getting to this target with your own IT is well nigh impossible and that having your information in the cloud infrastructure is the best thing to do.

You can read more about this as commented on ZDnet here or go straight to the series of articles Google has produced discussing why businesses are trusting the cloud with their business IT infrastructure at this link

Not quite what I expected from one of the concluding remarks in an Economist article celebrating IBM’s 100 years in business.

The nub of the article is that being a service lead company services far outweighs providing items/hardware/things. IBM - for those of us old enough to remember - almost went bust
“in 1993 before Lou Gerstner realised that the best way to package technology for use by businesses was to focus on services”. Having ideas and helping customers innovate is always a better idea than pushing tin. I remember my time in a large telecom company I worked with where it was drummed into us to think about our customers customers. Thinking in this way changes your perspective on what you provide. Less hardware and more value.

Hvaing said that it’s okay to provide things (eg an Apple iPhone) but it’s about wrapping them with uniqueness and value-add such that it’s the service or the way it’s delivered that makes a difference. The difference between the latest Nokia smartphone compared to Apple’s? It’s certainly not the speed of the chip (hardware) but the way you interact (software/service) with your end-user that brings people back for more.

Seems pretty obvious to me but the article continues to talk about Microsoft. A software company right? So they should be ok?  Apparently not:
“Microsoft (1975) is hugely dependent on Windows, which is its answer to everything. But software for a PC may not be the best choice to run inside a phone or a car. All these firms are wedded to specific products, not deeper philosophies, and are having trouble navigating technological shifts.”

So perhaps not even being in services is safe and for longevity, we should all think about having “deeper philosphies” about what we do and grow from there.

For the full article click here

When you start a business or you lead a business of any appreciable size your goal is not to go out and invest in IT. IT is a necessary cost to your business that means you have to buy computers and software to equip your people with the tools to do their job. It’s no different to providing a truck driver with a vehicle, a safety vest and a hard hat : all needed to do the job in hand. What’s interesting in this analogy is that the truck - since the business presumably delivers stuff - is a cost to the business but the more efficiently it works (better fuel performance, less servicing etc) then the lower the costs to the business and therefore more profit. ignoring speed limits for a moment, imagine if you could do more with that truck? If it could go faster, have less down time and maintenance, then any one in the haulage business would bite your hand of for this kind of cost saving and increase in efficiency

So it’s about how the business benefits. It’s not about whether the truck is “in the cloud” or “on the highway”. Does the business owner really care.

And that’s my point. Business leaders care about benefits - lowering costs, or increasing efficiency. And that is what cloud computing gets you.

A great example of this in practise is in a Dennis Howelett’s blog I recently read. (link here - Watch the video!) :

Among other things, he (Peter Campbell, CFO Mimecast) said that his company has been able to grow from 14 people to 250 without requiring an increase in IT headcount. Early on, the company decided that it would customize NetSuite for its own purposes ‘because they can.’ The company also took the decision to employ a person dedicated to running and adapting NetSuite. Key takeaways from the conversation:

• The company was able to run with one IT person despite massive growth. They now employ three people running NetSuite and continue to expand its capabilities.
• There were few problems in customizing the system which the company was able to do with minimal help from NetSuite.
• The operational cost of running NetSuite continues to fall while ROI rises.
• Providing local assurance for data protection issues has not been a problem.

Do these points amount to transformational benefit of the kind Phil Wainewright would recognize? I think so because the company has managed to effortlessly expand into new territories while maintaining a standardized system.

And that, my friends, is the real benefit. Scale IT but don’t increase your costs.

The speakers were great as was the venue (did you know that The Ivy has a place that can hold around 800+ people???). Since we already use and provide Google Apps products for our customers it wasn’t so much seeing what was on offer but to see how it was portrayed by Google. From this respect what was most impressive was one tongue in cheek scenario that spoke volumes for the power of the cloud. Let me illustrate….

There were 2 technical/product marketing guys on stage. Whilst one of them - lets call him the user - opened his Macbook Pro, and used Google Apps, to draw a big smiley face on screen, the other - the thief - talked about stealing his colleagues laptop. Of course that’s exactly what happened. The thief nicked his laptop and offered it for sale to the crowd. Much laughter around especially when the avid Microsofty Windows audience member bid down the way, instead of up ...

And then, lo and behold, one of the new Google Chromebooks appeared and was provided to the user, his replacement for the stolen machine. Pretty normal stuff so far. But when he opened and logged on to the Chromebook, lo and behold, the big smiley face that he’d previously been working on appeared on the screen. Using Google Apps everything is saved in the cloud every 4-6 seconds. A very compelling case for someone like myself that has, in the past, been known to work an hour or two on a document, forgot to save it and next thing the whole thing is lost….

Whilst obviously stage managed for effect, the scenario really struck home when Doug Farber - VP of Google Apps - told us later that 10% of laptops in the USA go missing every year - and it would seem predominantly at US airports! Not only is the cost of these laptops expensive it’s more the data going astray that cause the most angst. With Chrome books this wouldn’t happen, as soon as the computer goes missing you can wipe any data (if there was data held locally) and all data and applications reside in the cloud and therefore nothing goes missing.

I think this is a very interesting point and for me the most important part of the whole seminar.  For SME businesses as the price of these laptops/books will be around the $50-$100 a month price point in Australia and will include the necessary software apps in the cloud not only is the cost benefit great the security of information gets better. Think of all the data you have right now in your employees hands on their laptops. What happens if they walk? What happens if the laptop gets stolen? Not good consequences.

And of course we’re pretty excited about getting our hands on one as we can use NetSuite on the Chromebook and it’ll become a real interesting “bundle” for mobile users like sales or service people in the field.

But more on that later…..

NetSuite’s market share in the Australian market grew at 84 percent in the year-over-year period, coupled with a 96 percent growth in Australian revenue. This rapid expansion in the Australian market enabled NetSuite to debut in the number nine position in Gartner’s Top 10 list as measured by revenue.

Although number 9 in the list NetSuite has the fastest growth and is the only one that is a pure Cloud based system. It looks like the Australia is catching on to what we think, that a cloud based system is the one to use and that there are so many efficiencies to be seen by doing so. The numbers are tipping towards cloud based ERP being where it’s at

oneScan™ is currently live and working at Australian Bush Flower Essences (ABFE) at Terry Hills in the northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia. ABFE manufacture and distribute products to unlock your full potential, resolve negative beliefs and create emotional health and well being. These products are physically bottles of essences sold worldwide through distributors and retail outlets in over 30 countries worldwide.

Have a look at our video demo or give us a yell if you’d like more info.

Jim McGeever, the COO of NetSuite, gives some great insights into this here.

Financial management is critical to ecommerce companies. But the tools to manage financial matters vary, and many of them don’t automatically integrate with a merchant’s ecommerce site, making the financial tracking and reporting process even more burdensome

A very interesting view into how NetSuite can help manage all of your ecommerce business.