Big sales to smaller businesses

Tarzey: Enterprise-class facilities have never been more available to SMEs

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) turn to VARs to help them implement the IT applications on which their businesses depend. Year on year, this becomes more onerous because these applications have moved from being ‘nice to have’ to ‘vital’.

Even a relatively mundane application such as email has become a driver of communication both internally and externally. For many SMEs, their web site is a front window, shop counter, till and customer support desk ­ without it business stops.

How can VARs with limited resources deliver the same quality of service of large firms with big budgets and IT departments? In fact, enterprise-class facilities have never been more accessible to SMEs.

Managed hosting describes services that enable businesses to share enterprise-class IT infrastructure.

To be clear, this is more than the provision of datacentre space, usually referred to as co-location. This is the provision of pre-configured hardware and infrastructure software, managed by the service provider.

In the past, managed hosting has generally been provided on a one hardware server per client basis, but now virtualisation allows wider sharing of infrastructure. This has reduced the cost of services ­ the providers are building their own compute clouds.

Some providers are managed hosting specialists, such as NTT Europe Online and Rackspace. Others are big system integrators, such as IBM and Atos Origin, that do not focus on SMEs.

However, many already have relationships with SMEs as communications providers of managed hosting as an extension, such as Colt, Easynet and Hostway.

Platforms come in two basic varieties ­ Windows or Linux, fully managed, and with well-defined security and service levels. Customers or VARs deploy the applications and manage them from afar. There is little or no need to visit the host datacentre.

Three main benefits
Managed hosting has three major benefits. The first is cost. Charging models are flexible but are generally based around actual use, for example per user or per transaction. You do not need to buy more infrastructure than you want, but if you do suddenly need to it is there for the taking.

Charging is usually per month, so payment is made out of opex rather than requiring big upfront capex investment.

The second advantage is the service-level agreements (SLAs). The datacentres of managed hosting firms are usually truly enterprise-class. Many rent space from co-location providers, but some build their own.

They deliver back-up power supplies, high-speed data connections from multiple providers, spare parts and in-depth expertise.

Most SMEs can only dream of having these things in-house, yet they are essential to secure, reliable application delivery.

The third advantage is accessibility. Most businesses need to share applications with external users ­ including customers, partners, suppliers and contractors.

Applications must be easily available to users wherever they are. By their nature, managed hosters’ services provide this.

Today VARs can work with managed hosters to provide SME customers with IT applications built on infrastructure that equals or exceeds that of enterprises. IT now takes centre stage in most businesses. Make sure the infrastructure it relies on lives up to this.

Bob Tarzey is service director at Quocirca