`The Price of the Business Editions of Software is Really High’

Matrixsoft is an India-based company legally founded in 2011. The company provides website domains, web hosting services and in-box and custom software solutions to individuals and SMEs with 24×7 technical support. We have an interaction with the company's App Architect, Ramesh Kumar:

(1) What kind of IT issues have you encountered as an SME?

The availability of high-speed Internet: A major problem for us is the availability of high speed Internet given that we are located in a small town. So let's say if 10 of our employees are consuming high bandwidth for working then it hampers the productivity of other employees. Further, during bad weather, the connection goes awry and it causes interruption in our business. We have nowhere to go in that case because of lack of choices.

Advancements in hardware: Hardware is advancing rapidly and it is very hard to keep up to date. Though the cost of the unit decreases over time, it leads to additional intermediate investments which are required to be made in order to keep pace with the latest technology.

Software costs: The price of the business editions of software is really high. It puts financial pressure on an SME as well as hampers the business.

Security breaches: It is a major problem faced by SMEs as once the security is breached, it becomes really hard to

recover from the blow as the recovering tools are costly.

(2) Which IT product or solution do you consider to be the most essential to run your day-to-day business?

Though everything has its own importance and together it helps to run business, the most important (for us) is operating systems and their development tools. It's like the relationship between the soul and the body. They (development tools) form our bread and butter and hence are very important for us.

(3) Anything in your wish list which you consider to be desirable but is not currently available in the market?

Unified communication for business is required that integrates chat, voicemail, e-mail, SMS, audio/video call, fax and interactive white boards in a unified interface across all major platforms. Though a few products are available that meet many of these requirements, nothing is found to comprise an all-in-one solution because most of them are inter-dependent on other products.



(4) Can you share some case studies about how you overcome challenging IT issues?

Virtualization has become a standard practice for how companies consolidate and better optimize performance, and in late 2012 we wanted to reduce the down-time, power consumption, storage space requirements and the cost of new physical servers by OEMs. To overcome these issues, we upgraded our web hosting servers to a new virtualized environment powered by Windows Server 2012 Datacenter, which includes an updated version of Hyper-V that met all these requirements. Besides, the support for native disk access enables recovering of a volume of any size to any virtual machine in less than 10 seconds.