Guide for Emerging Businesses

Which technologies to be concerned about, how to choose the right products, and what's the best way of deploying them

Whether it's a small organization or a large one, the objective is one-doing better business. The difference is that large organizations have big budgets to invest in technology and hire the best of consultants to achieve this objective. Small and mid-size businesses, on the other hand, may not have such big or dedicated budgets for IT, so they have to be more cautious with where and how to spend. They need to be thoroughly convinced about how technology can help them in their business before investing in it. In most cases, they may not even have manpower to dedicate and manage their deployments.

So how do you as a mid-size business find out about these technologies, and choose the right products to deploy? How do you deploy the products and what are the key technical issues you're likely to face? These are some of the concerns we've addressed in this story, and for the same we've looked at eight areas in IT. These were selected based on feedback from companies we met during a six-city seminar we conducted for mid-size businesses. 

The hot areas that we've covered include security, e-business and workflow, power conditioning, networking, communication, servers and open-source software. Each of these can make an impact on your business, and we've tried to explain how.

There are a lot of products and solutions for each area, making it difficult to determine the best one for your needs. To help you with this task, we've given a list of some popular products in each area along with some vendors who can help you.

Wherever possible, we've also explained the best way to deploy a product, the technological challenges involved, and the most common problems that are likely to be faced. Usually, the process of deploying a product isn't too different from deploying another of the same category. For instance, the way to set up a small UPS from one vendor isn't too different from setting up another vendor's UPS. Wherever it's not possible to explain a product deployment,
we've explained a sample deployment carried out by some other company. 

Lastly, remember that you don't have to go for the latest and greatest technology. Go for what best meets your requirements today, and will last in the years to come. Some of the best implementations we've seen use the most basic technologies. It's just that
the scale of implementation varies depending upon the organization's size. 

Anil Chopra, Ankit Kawatra, Anoop Mangla, Geetaj Channana, Krishna Kumar, Sushil Oswal