Large IT Support Vendors are Reluctant to Provide Support for a Small Number of Systems

1. Please brief us about Extentia as an SME.

We set up our shop in 1998. So while we have been around for a long ti me, growth has accelerated especially during the last 3 years owing to the industry-wide focus on mobility, cloud, social, content management and content publishing. Slightly earlier, we were more into usability, web applicati ons, Internet-based soluti ons, etc. Sti ll earlier, the focus was on multi -ti er soluti ons, RDBMS, etc. Right now we have a headcount of about 250.

2. What is the biggest IT challenge you face as an SME?

For an SME, IT problems can be very signifi cant as they can interrupt day-to-day business if no alternati ve system is in place. Large vendors are reluctant to provide support for your issues unless you have a sizable number of systems. So, at a ti me when you are just coming to terms with your startup and every single resource such as fi nance, manpower, space, etc is in short supply, there comes an added burden of support. I think that if SMEs make use of the cloud, the outsourced support relieves much of the headache of managing the infrastructure.

3. Which IT product/service would you consider to be the most critical to your business?

As the single most important, it has to be email. We use Exchange for that. In additi on to the obvious communicati on needs, we also use email internally for archival purposes, for discussion forums/mailing lists among groups of employees and also for knowledge sharing.

4. Is there some IT solution which you feel should have been there in the market but is not available currently ?

There are 3 disti nct soluti ons which are defi nitely available today in the market and each are built for a specifi c purpose: Thin clients, Virtualizati on and Fat clients, but what I would prefer to have is the best of all three: The small footprint of a thin client, the convenience and cost-eff ecti veness of virtualizati on as well as the end-user responsiveness and power of a fat client. I cannot fi nd such a soluti on.

5. Any success story that you would like to share with us?

We migrated much of our business operati ons to the cloud some ti me ago. While doing the migrati on, we were able to do so without any downti me or customer impact. We had factored in security into our migrati on plans, so that eliminated the biggest concern any organizati on would have in migrati ng to the cloud.

6. To make an IT purchase, which are the factors that influence your decision the most?

The most important would be TCO. The next one would be value. By value, I do not mean to refer to RoI directly or to the cost alone but in terms of a non- numerical but concrete benefit that it can bring to my business. The third would be determining a balance between the cheapest solution available and the best available, as per the needs on a case-to-case basis. This is definitely easier said than done and always needs compromises based on the available resources at that point of time. Next would be predicting the needs. When I consider purchasing hardware, I need to predict that it will be sufficient to run my business for the foreseeable future without requiring additional intermediate investments.