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About 2180 days ago Business Software

CRM: Software as a Customer Service

Every business needs some form of customer relationship management (CRM) system, argues Brian Donaghy, vice president of product strategy with Smart Online Inc., a provider of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for businesses in Durham, N.C. That’s true even if the system is an amalgamation of Post-It notes, spreadsheets, and the like. Of course, this is not always effective. That’s where software comes in. “A CRM application is a better way to manage so that you can be more organized and do more with less,” Donaghy says. An effective CRM application provides an organized, comprehensive view of a company’s customers and prospects, and employees’ interactions with them. Once a large-business luxury, CRM software packages have come down in price and scale as they have migrated to hosted applications or SaaS solutions, making CRM available to a growing number of small and mid-size businesses. Spending on SaaS will climb by 25 percent annually through 2010, according to a May 2007 report by Saugatuck Technology Inc., of Westport, Conn., “Three Waves of Change: SaaS Beyond the Tipping Point.” Hosted versus licensed CRM SaaS solutions for CRM usually require a lower upfront investment, as no software needs to be purchased and installed. Upgrades can be done over the Internet, rather than by loading disks onto each computer. And, employees can access the program with just an Internet connection. Gerry Czarnecki, chair and chief executive officer with The Deltennium Group, Inc., a consulting firm based in Boca Raton, Fla., tried out a half dozen different applications, checking how easy it was to enter and access data and create reports, before zeroing in an SaaS solution from Infusion Software, an on-demand CRM provider from Gilbert, Ariz. Czarnecki’s goals in implementing a CRM solution were to better manage relationships and leads, and automate the company’s marketing efforts. While the system has only been in place for several months, “I have no doubt that I’ll be able to do more with less,” Czarnecki says. “I can use my staff to focus on expanding.” While security often is mentioned as a concern with hosted solutions, most providers continually invest in updated security features, 24/7 monitoring, and multiple backups and redundancies. As a result, their security often trumps the protection a small business owner can afford. However, it’s not unheard of for the server hosting an application to go down. Until that server is back up, the data in the system is inaccessible, says Doc Pratt, president of Pratt Computing Technologies, Inc., of Knoxville, Tenn. And the costs of hosted solutions can add up. Some providers charge a set-up fee of several thousand dollars or more. Ongoing monthly fees can range from $20 to $150 per user. In addition, the provider may charge more for additional services, such as delivering a tape backup. SaaS also can be more difficult to customize. Licensed solutions typically start at several hundred dollars per user license, and go up from there. Some also charge a maintenance fee of about 20 percent of the initial cost. According to Ted Harding, general manager of Legrand Software, a San Franciso-based CRM provider, some of the benefits of licensed CRM include that the application runs on your computers, and data is stored in your file server. It’s also not off-site, and you’re not dependent on an Internet connection to access the programs. Interfacing the application to third-party applications tends to go faster and has fewer constraints. Finally, the user interface may be richer. Lisa and Michael Lujan, co-founders of Mentoring Minds LP, a Tyler, Texas-based provider of educational products to schools, opted for a licensed CRM product that to track and follow up on prospects and sales calls. In early 2006, the Lujans implemented a CRM solution from LeGrand. Now, they electronically tag different mailings. When an order arrives, the Lujans can easily match the order with the materials that were sent to that school or district. And, salespeople can enter information on the schools they’ve visited, enabling the Lujans to quickly see which visits are leading to sales. “We can track and see what was successful. Before, it was hit or miss,” Lisa Lujan says. Features to look for in CRM Whether hosted or licensed, these are some common features you’ll want to look for in a CRM solution for your business: Application Programming Interface (API): This allows the CRM solution to link with other systems, eliminating the need to enter information multiple times, says Clate Mask, president and chief executive officer with Infusion Software. Multiple contact information: Users should be able to organize and access information by a person’s name, as well as his or her company, says Harding. That makes it possible to view all the interactions that have occurred with a particular person, as well as with multiple individuals within a single company. Dashboards: The system should provide a summary view of the sales opportunities underway across a company’s customer base and the employees working on them. With this, promising opportunities are less likely to fall through the cracks, says Harding. Delegation: Employees should be able to use the system to electronically delegate tasks to their colleagues. Information entry and access: Employees also should be able to enter and access information from anywhere within the system, says Donaghy of SmartOnline. For example, if they’ve talked with a client on the phone, they should be able to enter details of the call under the person’s name. Once in the system, that information should be accessible through both the individual’s and the company’s name.

About 2180 days ago Computer Security

Time to Consolidate Your Data Center

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More and more small-and medium-sized businesses are thinking about consolidating their data centers, as a result of having grown haphazardly or through many mergers and acquisitions. According to a 2006 report by tech research firm IDC, 80 percent of U.S. IT organizations are consolidating and in 2009 global spending on IT consolidation should hit $25 billion. “Most of these things aren’t planned and then executives wonder how in the world they’ve grown to the number of servers they’ve got,” says Cal Braunstein, chairman and CEO of research at the Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn. IT consulting firm. “They need to add another application, and somehow before they know it, each of these applications are on different servers.” And, oftentimes those different servers can be in different rooms, on different floors, and even in different cities. M&A activity sparks consolidation One big driver of data center consolidation is the rash of mergers and acquisitions that leave the new entities with IT systems that are often incompatible, sometimes burdening even forward-looking companies with outdated systems from a company being acquired. “CIOs are telling their CEOs, ‘Could you please buy a company with the same IT platform and infrastructure?’” says James F. O’Grady, the director of technology value solution for Hewlett-Packard Financial Services. Why consolidate when it’s an expensive undertaking? Let’s start with those systems that are the product of mergers and acquisitions. All the little band-aid fixes to make these systems work together may be costing your company money — not to mention resources — that could be better spent elsewhere. Even without mergers, small and medium-sized businesses tend to be sitting on a lot of older servers being kept around in order to save money on costs of new equipment. However, since many of these machines have poor utilization rates, they aren’t necessarily the best use of money. Braunstein estimates various utilization rates of different systems as follows: mainframes (75-90 percent), Unix (10-20 percent although some achieve up to 60 percent), and Windows-Intel systems (5-12 percent). High maintenance and licensing fees On top of having all this old equipment around, there are high maintenance costs and licensing fees, not to mention the issues of power and cooling for all your machines. “Two years ago no one cared about power and cooling,” says Braunstein. But now that energy costs have skyrocketed, businesses are starting to be more aware. Costs for power and cooling could run 40 percent of your run rate for operational components for your data center. Consolidation can mean lower power output, says HP’s O’Grady. If you have five data centers all over the country and you really only need three, not only will consolidation save on power costs but will also save on labor costs. Those are big numbers that could be made smaller through consolidation. On average, says Braunstein, hardware costs tend to be 15 percent of overall costs. What it means to consolidate Consolidation can mean different things to different businesses. For some, it’s reducing the number of data location center locations and moving equipment to places that have lower operating costs, according a March 2007 report by HP, titled “Data center consolidation: Financing options address more than just cost.” Two spaces in midtown Manhattan dedicated to holding IT are more expensive to maintain, than say, combining them both into a new one in northern New Jersey. With telecommunications advances, it’s more feasible to locate the data centers away from your office. Another approach is to consolidate at the current site by putting in a converged voice-and-data network. Or you can save space by installing racks. With a vertical rack, instead of buying servers, you buy components that altogether look a little like an entertainment system. Blade servers work on the same concept as a rack but are even more condensed. A blade comes in a smaller box, so it slides in vertically. You can get a number of these going across a couple of rows, giving you a tremendous amount of capacity in a small space. And, then there’s the virtual approach. Companies can virtualize their servers by running many systems in a single box. Not only can that save space but it can also up performance; instead of running at about 10 percent utilization, it can be at least 40 percent. Paying for it No matter how you undertake it, consolidating your data center is going to cost money. According to HP, often you’ll have to keep the old data center running as you’re setting up your new one. Or, you can set up a temporary facility — using the same type of old equipment — as you’re taking apart the old center and setting up the new one. So, you could potentially have up to three data centers running at the same time before you get everything sorted out. Companies, like HP, and IBM, and to lesser extent, Sun, who are all in the data center consolidation business provide financing options, including leasing, short-term equipment rental, and help with the recovering of money from asset sales. They also work with the customer to apply some of the costs to covering the purchasing of new equipment. Another approach, says Braunstein, that may make sense, is putting the new data center inside one of your current spaces. “You could consolidate it piecemeal so you don’t have to go beyond the bounds of existing data center,” he says. “It takes longer this way, however, it’s a good approach because you get to see what works as you go along.”

About 2180 days ago E-Commerce

Web of Lawyers

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Ah, technology. It has brought vast seas of information to our fingertips, lowered the cost of doing business, created services unimagined a decade ago, and placed any company’s products a mouse click away from customers around the world. Well, here’s one more of technology’s fruits, and one that’s often overlooked: It has made it much easier for you to insult, frustrate, cross, infringe upon, transgress against, or just plain piss off individuals, businesses, and governments anywhere on the planet. In other words, new technology sets you up to be sued by almost anyone. Thanks to the simple act of putting up a website, you and your actionable offenses are just a Google search away. That’s what Shane McKenzie, a.k.a. the Sunglass Man Online, found out last year when the legal eagles at fashion apparel company Burberry dropped him a line. McKenzie, who operates an online sunglass retailer and two other merchandising websites out of Sarasota, Florida, sells both genuine top-name sunglasses, including models from Burberry, and logoless, perfectly legal replica glasses in similar styles. After finding McKenzie’s site via Google, Burberry demanded, for starters, that he turn over his stock of the replica Burberry glasses, as well as the name of his supplier. “I called them and tried to reason with them, but they wouldn’t back down,” says McKenzie. He eventually hired a lawyer to put an end to the threats and agreed to no longer use the Burberrian term “check print.” Similarly, when MNSpeak.com, an independent, quirky website that covers goings-on in Minnesota, offered T-shirts parodying Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion radio show, Keillor turned out to be a good deal less appreciative of parody than one might have expected. His lawyers fired off a threatening letter and wouldn’t relent even after the website informed them that its inventory consisted of about 10 T-shirts. Have your employees launched blogs to give customers and others a window onto the company? Eric Goldman, director of Santa Clara University’s High Tech Law Institute, notes that the contents of the dinky informal blog put up by Mel in shipping could end up being read back to you as evidence in a courtroom, especially if it includes negative comments about a person, business, or product. Or if the blog drops references to information that you later try to protect as a trade secret or with a patent. Or if customers decide your product or service is in any way less than implied on the blog. “Your liability can be the same as if you had taken out an ad with the same information,” says Goldman. And if you’re thinking about getting in on the social networking craze by encouraging people outside the company to post information to your website or blog, bear in mind that many website owners have been sued over defamatory comments posted by third parties. MySpace has been sued over the contents of its members’ pages, and last year a Pittsburgh man sued the operators of DontDateHimGirl.com, a dating website for women, after users posted comments suggesting that he is gay and has a sexually transmitted disease. Indeed, you might be surprised at the trouble your website can get you into. Posting photos on it can get you up close and personal with a threatening lawyer, even when you’ve paid for the photos. That’s because the fine print in photography rights often excludes permission to post them online, and don’t think the photographers won’t notice: They frequently embed searchable code in the images that makes it a snap to police for improper usage. If you want to play it safe, it’s tempting to skip all content and offer nothing on your website but links to other webpages. Unfortunately, even that won’t do it. Google itself has been sued more than once by companies that don’t like the idea that Google makes money by providing access to their pages. And if you pay Google to display paid listings on searches of keyword phrases, you’d better make sure no one else has any claims on those phrases; that could be trademark infringement. You also can be sued simply for doing business on the Web under your own name. Country music star Keith Urban went after a visual artist named Keith Urban for selling his paintings at KeithUrban.com, a website the artist Urban had set up long before the singer Urban became well known. Here are a few other Web-related activities that have led to lawsuits or threats thereof: blocking pop-up ads; misusing intellectual-property protection software; and posting a review of a software product from a company that prohibits product reviews in the fine print of its contracts. If you’re doing business in multiple states–and it’s hard not to when you’re on the Web–you’d better study up on each state’s wildly varying privacy laws, lest you get slapped for failing to store customer information in encrypted form, printing a customer’s full credit card number on a receipt, e-mailing a customer who doesn’t want to be e-mailed, or failing to notify customers that a hacker may have gotten a peek into your computers–all transgressions that have led to legal action. And if you think you’ve got the U.S. and state regulations satisfied, get ready to be sued by European government agencies, which enforce far stricter regulations, including a prohibition on comparing your product to that of a competitor. You don’t need to put up a website for the Web to bring out the worst in someone else’s lawyers. Employees with Internet access can do it for you. We all know that an employee who openly surfs pornography sites can get a company sued for sexual harassment. Less commonly known is that getting rid of an employee who ignores warnings to stop viewing sexually explicit material on the Web may be an even better way to get sued. IBM learned that in February when it was hit with a $5 million lawsuit by a dismissed employee who claimed the company should have instead offered him treatment for being addicted to Internet sex. And forget the sex–just being addicted to plain old Web surfing will soon become the stuff of a new wave of employee lawsuits, predicts Gayle Porter, an associate professor at Rutgers Business School. “Many employees are becoming consumed with technology to the detriment of the rest of their lives,” Porter says. “And some of them are going to turn around and say they have psychological or health problems because of it, and then they’re going to look for someone to blame.” Suing employers for enabling their harmful overattachment to computers, she says, is no more improbable than suing a tobacco company for promoting smoking or suing a fast-food company for encouraging unhealthful eating. If all that has you thinking you might want to monitor employees’ Web-surfing habits to watch for signs of addiction, make sure you don’t extend the policy to any employees in Canada and Europe, where you can be slammed by regulations that limit electronically peering over an employee’s shoulder. If you do end up firing an employee, try to get his or her name off your website in short order–failure to do so got a Connecticut business sued in 2005. And avoid giving employees the bad news over a cell phone while they’re driving, given that at least a dozen companies have been sued over blabbing-while-driving accidents. What can you do to lower your legal exposure in this lawsuit-happy world? A good start would be to run your website and Web-related employee policies past a lawyer who specializes in Internet law. Unfortunately, most lawyers aren’t yet up to speed on this stuff. That’s what Bob Reno, who chronicles the misadventures of athletes at his website BadJocks.com, discovered when he received an eight-page contract from a large corporation that wanted to buy a domain name from him. “My lawyer just shook his head and said he had no idea what to make of it,” recalls Reno, who was ultimately warned off of signing the contract by Clarke Douglas Walton, a Las Vegas-based attorney whose practice is focused entirely on Internet-related law. Walton, who founded the popular casino poker information website AllVegasPoker.com while in law school (he still runs it and has yet to be sued by a casino), notes that many website owners fail to even take the basic step of throwing up a “terms of service” statement that specifies which state’s courts would have jurisdiction over any related lawsuits. But Walton also is fond of pointing out that Web law cuts both ways. “Usually when an entrepreneur first contacts me it’s because he’s received a threatening letter from a larger company,” he says. “But given how fast Internet companies can grow, it’s only a year or two before they’re the ones sending the cease-and-desist letters to a smaller Web company.” That’s paying it forward in the Internet era. Contributing editor David H. Freedman (whatsnext@inc.com) is a Boston-based author of several books about business and technology.

About 2211 days ago Search Engine Optimization

The Monster Dilemma

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For business owners plagued by a dearth of candidates for key job openings, the Web was supposed to provide an ideal solution. Job-search sites like Monster.com can put postings in front of millions of applicants instantly. And newer business-oriented social networking sites like LinkedIn provide similarly fertile recruiting territory, supplying access to the contacts of thousands of people. On the other hand, anyone who’s actually tried to hire someone through the Web knows the truth: You post an ad and are immediately flooded with hundreds of resumés, many from people whose backgrounds are wildly inappropriate. So much for the Web making things easier. It’s enough to make you long for the days of print newspaper ads and snail mail. But just as technology created the problem, newer technology aims to solve it. A new generation of hiring tools promises to screen out inappropriate applicants, allow the suitable ones to put their best foot forward, and even hunt down good candidates who haven’t applied. As these new services get better at these tasks, they may well change the balance of power in the job-recruiting industry and could even redefine the way we think about jobs. A shot at diverting a river of weak applicants is the chief advantage offered to employers by Protuo, a Woodstock, Georgia-based start-up that launched its service in January. Protuo isn’t only a job-listing site; it also forwards its clients’ listings to some 270 established job-listing sites, including Monster. But applicants can’t respond to a Protuo posting unless they spend seven minutes or so filling out a survey that asks about experience, skills, workstyles, and job preferences. Employers can customize the survey by choosing from a wide field of prepared questions or by adding their own, and they specify which responses get a candidate’s resumé past the screen. Has the candidate managed a technical project? Is he or she willing to move? The approach is modeled, to some extent, on the sort of compatibility gauging one encounters on a matchmaking site like eHarmony, notes Jennifer Gerlach, Protuo’s co-founder and vice president of marketing. Gerlach went through the dating process on eHarmony just to research the technique. “I learned a lot,” she says. “And I met some very, very nice people.” With online job postings sometimes pulling in more than a thousand applicants, the ability to winnow the flood could mean the difference between being able to retain control of the hiring process and having to bring in a professional recruiter–at a typical cost of $30,000 for a midlevel hire. The time and expense of dealing with a huge influx of resumés is all the more frustrating because much of the flow comes from online applicants who indiscriminately bombard hirers with resumés. You can try a keyword search on the resumés to narrow things down, but applicants have learned to load their resumés with them, often by pasting in phrases from the job posting. Even LinkedIn has suffered from inflation, as many users aggressively build networks of people they don’t really know in order to make themselves appear better connected. “There’s no value in a lot of these contacts,” says LinkedIn user Chris Knudsen, who heads business development for podcasting company Podango in Salt Lake City. “It can just be someone whose card you got at a trade show.” (A LinkedIn spokesperson commented via e-mail: “Anyone can join the LinkedIn network; however, the quality of your own personal LinkedIn network is the responsibility of each individual.”) But a well-designed survey, contends Gerlach, allows users to skim the cream. Fred Donovan, who runs Donovan Networks, a seven-employee computer network security firm, has been flooded with applicants responding to previous postings to Monster.com and other online job boards. He is currently conducting a Protuo search and likes what he’s seen so far. “I can specify that I want to see only resumés from people who say they have 10 years’ experience in negotiating sales and are familiar with the software development process,” he says. “I’m seeing a small, better-qualified subset of the applicants.” There must be something to the idea. Other hiring sites, including Market10, Jobster, and Taleo, are introducing their own approaches to automated candidate screening. And Monster is doing the same, making available–for a fee that adds about 20 percent to the cost of posting a job–the ability to direct applicants to a questionnaire designed to rank the suitability of candidates. Sure, candidates can try to game these surveys by being less than truthful. But Gerlach insists that surveys can be designed to stymie such people by asking questions that don’t have an obviously right answer–such as whether the person prefers to work independently or in groups–and by warning candidates that they can be rated as overqualified. Protuo, which costs hirers $44 to $295 a month depending on the number of jobs they’re posting and is currently free to job seekers, also offers applicants a chance to do more than post a resumé. The firm invites users to create online portfolios that can include whatever documents, photos, videos, or other material that best represents that person’s career to date. (Monster is currently testing a similar capability.) ZoomInfo, in Waltham, Massachusetts, takes a different approach. It assembles profiles of potential job candidates from all available online data, whether or not they’re looking for jobs. Starting with the same techniques that Google uses to gather Web data associated with a person’s name, ZoomInfo adds the significant additional step of crunching the results to pull out the most relevant information, weed out data referring to other people of the same name, and assemble a professional profile. ZoomInfo has an R&D team of 35 working on the technology. So far, the company has assembled some 34 million profiles, and as far as I can tell, most of them are fairly informative and accurate. (Check out your own name to put it to the test.) But somebody has to pay for all those scientists, and that somebody is you. The company charges $5,000 a user per year for the ability to dig up personnel profiles by company or industry. It sounds like a lot, but ZoomInfo’s COO, Bryan Burdick, notes that if you get the right candidate for a single vacancy, the price is one-sixth that of using a recruiting firm. The company also offers less expensive, more limited searching capabilities aimed at smaller companies, as well as free access to searches on individuals. Many major executive search firms, along with some 500 other corporations, already use ZoomInfo, claims Burdick. “I can find personal information, professional backgrounds–and, sometimes, damning evidence–on tens of millions of people without having to go through 1.5 million Google hits on each one,” says John Boehmer, managing partner at executive search firm Barlow Group in Norwalk, Connecticut. Boehmer is quick to point out that as ZoomInfo-like services get better, and more companies get comfortable using them, corporate hirers won’t need professional recruiting firms like his to turn up candidates. “It’s commoditizing the front end of what we do,” he says. “Eventually, everyone will know where everyone is and how to get hold of them, so we won’t be able to charge for identifying and contacting candidates.” Search firms will still be valuable for assessing candidates, he contends, though he acknowledges that new e-hiring systems could eventually eat into that end of the business as they get smarter and have more online data to work with. For that matter, it’s easy to imagine the not-all-that-distant day when online tools make it so easy to find people to fill a specific slot that the notion of permanent jobs becomes irrelevant for many positions. Why hire a manager for years when you can find a new one with exactly the skill set needed for the precise tasks at hand? That’s not necessarily bad for employees: Think of an economy where top employees are constantly being sought out and bid over by companies that recognize them from their Web trails as the perfect short-term solution. And talented employees would be just as smart about whom they choose to work for–using similar services to weed out companies that aren’t good matches for them. You’ll want to treat those people well. If you don’t, and they post that fact online, it could haunt you for a long, long time. Contributing editor David H. Freedman (whatsnext@inc.com) is a Boston-based author of several books about business and technology.

About 2331 days ago Wireless Networks

Combining Voice and Data Networks

New couplings of traditional voice networks over more modern data connections have given small and mid-size businesses more choice when investigating telecommunications systems. If you’re just setting up your business or you’re wondering if there’s a better way of getting phone service for less, you should take a look at marrying voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) with an Internet protocol public branch exchange (IP-PBX) system. IP-PBX comes in many forms A traditional PBX system is basically a large box that businesses purchase and place in the datacenter. A PBX switches internal calls and enables internal users to place calls to the outside world via the traditional public switched telephone network (PSTN). An IP-PBX system is different because it relies on your data network — the very same network you use to access the Internet — to let you place phone calls. There are actually several technologies that vendors bill as IP-PBX systems. Nora Freedman, research analyst in enterprise networks at IDC, the Framingham, Mass. research firm, says vendors are crashing the market with many delivery methods for IP-PBX to try to figure out what small and mid-size businesses will find most attractive. For example, you can purchase a hardware-based IP-PBX or a software-based IP-PBX. You can opt to pay a third-party provider for IP-PBX service — or even purchase hardware and let a third party manage it for you. Finally, you can conduct all of your calls purely over the data network or select a hybrid system that uses the network in house, and then translates voice data so it can travel over the PSTN when you make external calls. Cut costs and boost employee productivity Regardless of which IP-PBX solution you choose, the benefits are similar. You can provide users access to IP telephony, the Internet, and the PSTN through one cable per person. And you can expand the ease of three- or four-digit extension dialing beyond the main office. So if you’re in the Connecticut office and you want to call someone in the Pennsylvania office, you simply dial the extension — and avoid paying long-distance charges. “This allows businesses to have, on the exterior, the appearance of being a consolidated whole while they’re actually geographically distributed,” Freedman says. Better yet, that one extension can follow you wherever you go, depending on the IP-PBX solution you choose. When Delta Resources, a small services and consulting company based in Arlington, Va., outgrew its four-line telephone, the company began researching options. Keegan Mills, technology director at Delta Resources, selected a IP-PBX system, which sends voice data over the company’s T-1 LAN connection. This setup alleviates the need to have a receptionist answering the phone at each office; one receptionist in one office can answer the phone and transfer calls to any employee, no matter where they are. “I don’t have a physical phone anymore,” Mills says. “I have a piece of software that runs on my laptop and a Bluetooth headset. So whenever I connect to the Internet, I can attach my laptop to the local network and turn my phone on. If I’m connected to the virtual private network, I’m extension 118 no matter where I am.” As a result, employees are more productive in and out of the office, and the company saves money on phone costs. IP-PBX may be cheaper IP-PBX systems, over time, may be much cheaper than traditional PBX systems. They make the voice network easier to scale and simplify inter-office moves: Just plug an IP handset into its new location, and the extension will follow it. For Mills, a traditional PBX was never even an option. “It’s a no-brainer,” he says. “If you don’t have a PBX, don’t even look at a traditional PBX anymore. It doesn’t make sense.” Market research firm Dell’Oro Group recently noted that the IP-PBX market revenues rose 10 percent in the third quarter of 2006 and will likely surpass revenues of traditional PBXs in 2007. But because the IP-PBX market is still relatively young and offerings are so broad, Freedman says small business owners shouldn’t be afraid to explore their options. “Don’t look at just on-premise equipment versus hosted equipment because sometimes you can leverage your existing provider account to get a better deal by bundling it with an extra service” if your provider also offers VoIP, Freedman says. “Cast your net wide. The vendors are so eager to attract the [small business] end of the market, so they’ll be creative.”

About 2392 days ago Computer Security

Why You Need a UPS

It should be apparent to anyone who suffered through the blackout of 2003. And it should be apparent to any business impacted by the brownouts that are increasingly a fact of life during summer months, ice storms that knock out power lines in the winter, and other disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. A power outage can wreak disaster on a business. It can shut a company down for days. It can zap your data. It can disappoint your customers. And, ultimately, it can run you out of business. That’s one reason that businesses need to invest in a device called “uninterruptible power supply” (UPS). This is an intermediary device between a power source and the machinery for which the power is being provided, typically a computer. That device can apply to anything from a battery to a generator. There are three kinds of UPSes — one that’s always on, the most common type, one that’s on standby, going on as soon as power is cut off, and one that’s really a hybrid of the two. A backup power supply Think of a UPS as a backup power supply, says Cal Braunstein, the chairman and CEO of the Robert Frances Group, a Westport, Conn. technology consultancy. That’s the advice he gives to small business owners who are considering UPS. “Some alarm clocks today have the ability for a battery to be plugged in so that when power is lost, your alarm clock continues keeping time,” Braunstein says. “A UPS is just a much bigger version of that for computers. This way if power dies, systems and disk drives don’t crash, which could cause real data corruption or file corruption problems.” On a basic level, the UPS is some energy that provides the user with a few extra minutes of power, in the case of an emergency, so that they can save what they were working on, print it out, and turn all the machines off.  More powerful ones, says Andrea Peiro, the CEO and founder of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit organization that promotes technology usage by small business, can be used to actually continue working for several more hours while the user is waiting for the grid power to return. Tips for buying UPS When buying one or more UPS devices for your business, there are several factors to consider. “The primary factor that influences how many pieces of hardware can be supported by a single UPS and for how long is the capacity of their batteries,” says Peiro, noting that the capacity is measured in Volt-Amperes (VA). “The bigger the number, the better.” Costs for buying a UPS can range from less than one hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars. But in the long run whatever you pay will be small compared with what could happen if one’s data disappears. If cost is a concern, however, consider that today’s prices represent a decrease from where they used to be, and also that laptops usually do not need a UPS, since they can operate on their own internal battery in case of power failure. However, no matter what the price is, a UPS should be part of any small business office, says Peiro, who considers them a very important investment, especially when they are connected to the company’s networking equipment.  “UPSes are a critical element for the reliability of any computing environment, allowing for non-disruptive shut down of workstations, servers and peripherals.”

About 2392 days ago Wireless Networks

Should Some Computers Be Off the Network?

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Is there a magic bullet to make your business computers secure? “The most secure computer in the world is one that can’t be used by anybody,” says Paul Stamp, senior analyst at Forrester Research, of Cambridge, Mass. That’s a nice sentiment, but he admits that it’s not really practical these days, unless you are running a computer museum. More realistically, today’s small business owners should concern themselves with balancing the need for security with access. And, at every step of the way they have to make the risk tradeoff. Just by being on the Internet will invite attempts, says Toby Weir-Jones, the director of product management of BT Counterpane, of Mountain View, Calif., which provides managed security services. And attempts are the definition of risk. And that could be a cost. “If a machine doesn’t need to be online it should be,” Weir-Jones says. Networking depends on the PC’s function Whether you have a computer that should be kept off network, says Cal Braunstein, the chairman and CEO of the Robert Frances Group, a business technology consultancy in Westport, Conn., will also depend on the company and the type of function being performed. For example, you may have multiple networks at a company, rather than one. You may have a mini-network in research and development (R&D) and may not want any of those machines linked to the outside world in order to better protect your company secrets. Many R&D facilities, Braunstein says, have multiple PCs per user there. Some are for the R&D network or standalone boxes and others are linked to the rest of the company. “Not all of these machines should be linked together into a single network,” he says. “There needs to be someone who understands the security issues for the company who is looking at all these assets and deciding their networking rights.” Besides security, says Andrea Peiro, the CEO and founder of the Small Business Technology Institute, a non-profit devoted to encouraging technology adoption among small business, another reason to consider putting a machine off the network, is that if it “performs a very specialized task – such as direct e-mail marketing distribution – and may be faster if directly connected to non-shared Internet access.” Hidden costs of off-network computers Having a computer that is not attached to the network can protect sensitive data and provide one less avenue for malware, but it can also be an inconvenience. It’s a cost from a time perspective. It takes a lot longer to go over to another PC and burn the information onto a CD or put it on a USB drive than to e-mail it over the network or allow the computer user to download it from the Internet or an intranet. On the other hand, says Stamp, it takes a lot of time to wipe spyware off a PC, or worse. “In business, you have got to make the call,” he says. If keeping certain PCs off the network is too much of a hassle, Peiro suggests that a small company can configure its firewall and gateways differently and assign different levels of access to different users. “Sometimes a simple repositioning of the network firewall and the Internet gateway,” she says, “creating multiple sub-networks with different levels of access to resources, may elegantly address the concerns and maintain the benefits of the network for everybody.”

About 2423 days ago Business Software

Alphabet Soup: What is CRM?

If you’ve ever interacted with a call center to place or check an order, you’ve been on the receiving end of customer relationship management (CRM). That’s because a software program was tracking your case history, your billing history, and in some cases even your birthday, favorite sports teams, and Web-browsing preferences. Such software isn’t CRM, but rather a tool — the primary one — to let a company facilitate CRM. The idea is that a company offers a unified front to customers, so that sales rep A isn’t saying one thing to a prospect and sales rep B another. “It gives you a way to have a company mindset so that everyone is talking as one salesperson selling one way,” says Steven Jacobiowitz, CEO of Saga Solutions, a Shelton, Conn., CRM software provider. “It gives you the capability of going to a client record and seeing who has talked and what conversations have occurred.” The difference between CRM and CRM software The reason CRM is lumped in with CRM software is that the two emerged at the same time, the early 1990s. CRM came out of database marketing, the practice of retrieving data about customers, and added an interactive twist. Using information compiled from database marketing, some firms began to offer perks like frequent flyer programs and bonus points on credit cards to entice them to send in information about themselves. The growth of call centers in the late 1980s and early 1990s led to mass adoption of CRM software, says Sharon Mertz, research director for CRM software markets worldwide for Gartner Inc., a Stamford, Conn. tech research firm. “With call routing and call handling, a lot more organizations started taking advantage of it,” she says, noting that credit card companies and stock brokerages were particularly enthusiastic early adopters. The strong adoption curve for CRM software continued until 2000 or so when the economy went sour. After that, Mertz says, most companies focused on technologies that fostered cost-optimization. After 2004, though, CRM began to bounce back as the focus switched back to maximizing share of wallet. By this time, CRM had gotten much more sophisticated. Software could now use information from previous purchases, demographics, and Web-surfing histories to suggest an upsell. How CRM is used by small and mid-size firms In today’s world, CRM is considered anything that engages the target customer. Some small and mid-size firms have found that revenue increases when customers are paid more TLC. Mark Daconto, vice president of Connecticut Basement Sysetms, a waterproofing contracting firm in Seymour, Conn., says CRM software contributed to a jump in sales over the last five years. Daconto bought a CRM software package in 1999 at $350 per user for a 25-employee site license. His firm pays about $100 per user in annual maintenance fees. The investment in CRM lets the company keep a history of each client and has prompted the company to send reminders every 11 months or so to customers to get the waterproofing inspected. “The business has just grown over the last few years and I would attribute some of that to the way we keep in touch with our customers,” Daconto says. New fixtures on the Web like online social networking communities and video have opened up new CRM opportunities for small businesses. Many small businesses have started blogs as one way of keeping customers informed. Video how-tos on a website are also considered a way to better service customers. But software has been key to giving businesses more information about the customer that they can use to track sales calls, complaints, and determine the success of programs. One of the biggest CRM trends over the past couple of years has been the explosion of “vertical CRM” software designed for industries like telecom and financial services and for “micro verticals” for industries that were previously considered too small to go after, like real estate. That means small and mid-sized firms can now share in the benefits from CRM when dealing with their customers, so they know when customers have called in the past, who they’ve spoken to and what was discussed. Loyalty programs and frequent-buyer plans may not be far behind. It seems the CRM software industry has learned from its clients and is offering much more personalized services these days.

About 2453 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Health Hazards? A Look at Cell Phone Safety

The cell phone has become an essential business tool, but it’s gotten a bad rap as far as health is concerned. In September, the California legislature sent a bill to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to outlaw the use of cell phones in automobiles, unless drivers use “hands-free” technology — such as headsets or earpieces that keep their hands on the steering wheel. The state would join the ranks of New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Washington, D.C., which have all criminalized this essential business tool. Proponents point to a body of research, including a California Highway Patrol study from 2004 which found that drivers using cell phones pressed against their ears caused accidents 25 times more than drivers using hands-free gear. But driving is not the only concern about cell phones. In March, a study by the Swedish National Institute for Working Life found that prolonged cell phone use — it defined heavy use as 2,000 hours or more in a lifetime — may put people at increased risk of brain tumors. The Swedish study, which disputed some earlier studies, is the biggest study yet to cover long-term mobile phone usage, involving 2,200 cancer patients and the same number of healthy individuals. The news might cause you to consider urging employees not to make cell calls from behind the wheel. Or, at the very least, you may want to issue employees head-sets or earpieces when purchasing cell phones for their business use. There has been a lot of ink spent on looking at cell phone dangers — from brain cancer to interfering with medical devices to causing accidents. Here is the fact versus the fiction about these claims: CLAIM: Cell phones cause brain tumors. FACT: Cell phones pass along information via airwaves, similar to the way music stations transmit their signals from a giant radio antenna. The difference is that instead of sending those signals to a radio, they are being directed toward your ear. Some scientists, such as the Swedish researchers, have found constant exposure can create cancerous brain cells. But other research has found little or no impact on tumor rates. In January, the London-based Institute of Cancer Research and several universities in Britain reported their results from a four-year study involving 966 people with brain tumors and 1,716 healthy respondents. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2003 found that radio frequency, or RF, waves sent by cell phones are different from other, more powerful currents. “Very high levels of electromagnetic energy, such as is found in X-rays and gamma rays, can ionize biological tissues,” said the report. “The energy levels associated with radio frequency energy, including both radio waves and microwaves, are not great enough to cause the ionization of atoms and molecules.” So where does the truth lie? Researchers are still in the labs determining the answers. In the meantime, more neutral experts recommend using a headset to minimize exposure to RF waves. And one universal warning is to avoid so-called “electromagnetic energy blocking” products, many of which haven’t been proven to work at blocking electromagnetic energy at all. In 2002, the Federal Trade Commission charged two companies, Stock Value 1 of Boca Raton, FL, and Comstar Communications of Sacramento, CA, of making false claims that their EEB products could shield people from potentially dangerous waves. The products were called “SafeTShield,” “NoDanger,” “WaveShield,” “WaveShield 1000,” and “WaveShield 2000,” which you place on your cell phone’s ear or mouthpiece to allegedly keep the radio waves away from your head. CLAIM: Cell phones interfere with medical devices. FACT: RF energy from wireless phones can interact with some electronic devices. The FDA has developed a method to test the levels of electromagnetic interference from mobile phones with cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators. It’s now considered a standard test by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation, a trade group, and manufacturers use this as a guide to make sure that these medical devices are safe from wireless phone interference. In addition, the FDA has conducted tests on hearing aids for interference levels from cell phones. The agency helped develop a voluntary standard with the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers that includes testing methods and performance requirements for hearing aides and wireless phones to ensure no interference between “compatible” phones and hearing aids. CLAIM: Cell phones cause traffic accidents. FACT: A New England Journal of Medicine study from 2001 found that drivers using cell phones were four times more likely to get into accidents than non-cell phone users. A 2005 study by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) found that six percent of drivers actively used hand-held phones — roughly one million people. A different group, making up four percent, used a hands-free phone. Another recent study, published in the journal Human Factors, found that cell phone users were more likely to get into an accident than individuals who were legally drunk. Hands-free units, now being built into higher-end cars, are universally considered safer than handheld phones. In fact, like California, a growing number of states including are banning handheld cell phone use while driving. The American Automobile Association (AAA) advises drivers to: avoid talking while behind the wheel, let voice mail pick up calls, and pull over to a safe spot if you absolutely have to take the call. Whatever the research eventually shows, business leaders may take note of a recent study at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., of business people in all different types of professions that found strong evidence that use of headsets can — at a minimum — reduce neck, shoulder and upper back muscle tension as much as 41 percent.

About 2453 days ago Servers and Routers

What are Routers and Switches?

While setting up a network is far simpler today than it was just 10 years ago, it’;s still a complex world with an obscure nomenclature developed by engineers who have spent decades huddled in server closets. But the worldwide market for routers and switches are forecast to grow through 2010 based in part on continued strength in the small business sector, according to research by the Dell’Oro Group, a Redwood Shores, Calif. market research firm specializing in networking and telecommunications. The market for routers is expected to exceed $5 billion this year, while the switches sales are expected to grow to $18 billion by 2010. This growth is largely thanks to the ever-increasing role of computers in businesses of all sorts along with the continual need for them to stay connected. Given the unlimited value of a computer network to today’s small and medium-sized enterprises, and the security implications of connecting your company’s infrastructure to something as wild and untamed as the Internet, it&’s important to understand how a network works. Two important components of a network are: routers and switches. These devices are essential because they enable individual computers and whole networks to talk to each other efficiently. What is a switch? A network switch, or bridge, is a specialized device that connects multiple network segments. It’s a more modern and efficient form of the ubiquitous (and outdated) network hub. A hub, also known as a repeater, is a simple device that has been used for years to connect all nodes, or computers, on a network to a central location. Each node on a network has a unique hardware address called a MAC address. A hub is known as a repeater because when a packet of data, or frame, is sent through the hub, it is repeated to each and every computer on the network. This means that if a 1 GB video is sent to one computer through the hub, the file will also be sent to all of the other computers on the hub. This is very inefficient for bandwidth management. “Hubs have two major drawbacks,” says Ben deGonzague, a deployment engineer with TopCoder Software, a Glastonbury, Conn.-based software engineering firm. “First, network bandwidth is consumed as each and every frame is sent to all devices on a network. Second, your network is only as fast as the slowest device. Hubs have become obsolete with switching-based networks.” A switch-based network is one that utilizes switches instead of hubs. A switch is a major upgrade to a hub. Instead of sending all network data to each and every network node, the switch will analyze the MAC address and determine where to send the data. Network bandwidth is not wasted by sending every frame to every port. So when a switch receives data for a file, if it was addressed to one computer it will only be sent there. The other computers on the network wouldn’t know about it. This means that the network is now much more efficient, but it’s also a step toward being more secure: “Since switches can segregate traffic from different nodes,” says deGonzague, “this makes it more difficult for anyone to capture packets on your network.” What is a router? While switches connect multiple computers, a router is required to connect multiple networks, like your LAN to the Internet. Routers work by storing large tables of networks and addresses, then using algorithms to determine the shortest routes to individual addresses within those networks. In this way efficient routers not only facilitate intra-network communications, but also play a role in overall network performance. delivering the information faster. While many consumers are familiar with small routers from companies like Linksys, which can be purchased for less than $50 at computer hardware stores, they shouldn’t be confused with a proper router for business. “A typical router at home will connect your cable modem or DSL network to your internal network. This is just connecting two different networks. Routers for businesses on the other hand might have to connect several different networks,” says deGonzague. Small business routers from vendors like Cisco often include management software, enabling IT staff to better manage network stability and, ultimately, performance.